Autor Cointelegraph By Andrew Fenton

Crypto is currently languishing like the internet did in 1996 with slow speeds and few practical use cases, says Steve Newcomb, chief product officer of Matter Labs.

But a major increase in bandwidth and security soon after saw the internet become a crucial part of daily life across the globe — and we’re right on the cusp of that happening for crypto in the next few months.

“Nobody trusted their credit card on it and everybody thought it was a fad and there weren’t any use cases for it,” Newcomb explains. 

“And then we had 10x moments in bandwidth and then SSL came, and HTPS where you got that lock — that was a 10x moment in trust. Suddenly in 2005 ecommerce just went through the roof.”

Crypto’s ‘10x’ moment could finally be here, with zkSync’s Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible mainnet launching on October 28. EVM is essentially the operating system for Ethereum and enabling it to work using zero knowledge rollups means everything running on Ethereum can seamlessly port over to experience a huge jump in speed and lower costs. 

They’re not the only ones attacking the problem: Polygon launched its testnet for its own zkEVM this week with Aave, Uniswap and Lens all committing to deploy on it. Scroll launched its “Pre Alpha testnet” in July while StarkWare’s zk solution has been ploughing through millions of transactions a month. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin says ZK rollups mean crypto can finally be used for payments again. (Andrew Fenton)

These solutions are all well funded, with Scroll raising $30M, Starkware raising $150M and Polygon raising $450M. Newcomb hints that zkSync’s own funding round is in the same ballpark as Polygon’s, but it’s yet to be officially announced.  

StarkWare is way out ahead of the pack, having launched its own zk rollup solution nine months ago and it turned on recursive scaling in August. But it also made the risky decision to use a custom programming language called Cairo in order to scale more efficiently. This could see adoption by the big protocols move to the path of least resistance on the EVM compatible solutions.

All of the solutions are also working on recursive scaling and/or ‘Layer 3’ implementations which will see Ethereum transactions potentially become thousands of times faster, remove the need for interchain bridges, and allow crypto to finally realize its true potential.

What is a zero knowledge thingamy?

ZK rollups are among the biggest buzzwords in blockchain today. The technology allows for thousands of transactions to be computed away from the achingly slow Ethereum blockchain, with a tiny “validity proof” verifying that all the transactions were carried out correctly. So you can “roll up” 10,000 transactions carried out elsewhere into a single ETH transaction. This is a big deal because even after the Merge Ethereum limps along at 15 transactions per second.

ZK rollups have been used for NFTs and financial transactions for some time now on platforms like Loopring, dyDx and others. But as co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out during ETH Seoul in August: 

“In general, I think we’ve learned that people don’t just want like a scalable money thing, they want a scalable EVM.”

It’s one of what Newcomb calls “five magic elements” for ZK rollups. In his view a ZK rollup solution should be general purpose, EVM Compatible and support Ethereum’s programming language Solidity. It should also be open source to fit with crypto’s founding ethos, and it should have a token distribution that decentralizes the protocol rather than concentrates wealth among the team.

By curious coincidence, zkSync has achieved all five of these self imposed metrics. (Newcomb says he can’t detail the exact token distribution, but says around 30% for insiders seems to be the “consensus.”)

The checklist is something of a veiled criticism of competitor StarkWare which is set to give 49.9% of its StarkNet token supply to investors and core contributors. It’s also not open source, although it plans to give control of the IP to its community. 

Co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson explains that the only way to take full advantage of the scaling afforded by ZK rollups is to use a custom language like Cairo.

“I’m very confident people will realise once they turn on proofs that the goal is not to simulate EVM. The goal is to reach scalability. To put 10,000, 100,000, one million transactions and have their proof fitted inside a single block of Ethereum,” he says.

“I’m willing to bet that you won’t see a full blown ZK EVM that can put a million transactions inside a single proof on Ethereum. As we can easily do today and have been doing for months and years.”

Eli Ben-Sasson says its solution is faster and better than kludgy EVMs. (Andrew Fenton)

Scaling versus compatibility

StarkWare’s Odin-Free explained on Twitter there are complicated mathematical reasons behind the need for a custom language because “proof systems like Stark are based on polynomials over finite fields, giving a much more effective polynomial equation.” OK, let’s take his word for it.

For Ben-Sasson, trying to soup up the EVM is just dumb:

“If you wanted to solve transportation, you could take a big truck and put it inside a plane and have the plane deliver it,” he says.“There are planes that can fit a truck inside, but that’s a very inefficient way of doing it. Far better way is just taking things and putting them directly in the plane.”

That said, the ecosystem does have a transpiler called Warp that turns Solidity code into Cairo code and which has just been used to port over a fork of Uniswap to StarkNet.

So essentially with zk rollups there is a choice to be made between total compatibility with the EVM and scaling. Total compatibility enables DApps and protocols to seamlessly port over and everything just works exactly like on Ethereum for devs and users, but in scaling terms, faster is obviously better.

Newcomb admits StarkWare’s solution will produce scale better, but says sacrificing accessibility means it is more suited to bespoke enterprise applications than being a fundamental part of Ethereum due to “adoption friction.”

“They’re not EVM compatible, so it’s really hard to port to them. We’ve seen projects that take seven months to port to them.”

Compatible but less elegant

There’s no agreed upon definition, but ‘EVM equivalent’ usually means “exactly the same as EVM” so you can just deploy the existing smart contract on the solution without any changes.

Scroll is widely agreed to be equivalent, but it’s also not on a proper testnet yet and is many months behind the others with a comparatively small budget. Polygon’s zkEVM solution claims to be equivalent (however this is contested.) zkSync meanwhile, will be EVM compatible – which means it’s almost identical but a few things may not work due to some design choices to make the solution work better.

Steve Newcomb is passionate about why he believes zkSync has all five ingredients required for success. (Interview screenshot)

Polygon launched its zkEVM Public Testnet on Monday claiming “Polygon is the first project ever to deliver a full-featured, open source implementation of zkEVM; a groundbreaking milestone, not just for Polygon, but for the whole industry.” Polygon says the testnet “includes a completely open-sourced zk-Prover — the first of its kind to be released publicly.”

Co-founder Mihailo Bjelic tells Magazine early tests show that “Polygon’s zkEVM can reduce Ethereum’s network fees by approximately 90% and increase the network’s throughput by several orders of magnitude.”

He says that open sourcing the technology “proves our alignment with the ethos of the industry and increases security of the solution since anyone can review it and point out potential bugs. This is not the case with StarkNet or zkSync, which keep critical parts of their implementations closed source, at least for now.”

Technical bit

According to Scroll’s Luozhu Zhang there are three potential types of zkEVMs: bytecode level, language level and consensus level. zkSync and StarkWare are at the language level and require a compiler or transpiler step, while Scroll and Polygon are bytecode level approaches. The human readable form of bytecode is called an opcode.

Bjelic says that Polygon’s solution is designed to be EVM equivalent whereas:

“Projects like StarkNet and zkSync are taking a different route — they have their own custom virtual machines, and then they try to transpile Solidity, the most popular language built on top of EVM to the languages these virtual machines can interpret,” he says.

“There are two major challenges with this approach: (i) it is hard to build a transpiler that will support 100% of Solidity smart contracts and (ii) even if you have the transpiler you still can not leverage all the developer and end user tools like Polygon zkEVM can.”

Newcomb says there is bad information circulating. “We do not transpile, we compile,” he says. And he takes a shot back at Polygon saying that from looking at the project’s Github that they are yet to develop a working general purpose prover integrated with a working sequencer.  

“If this is the case then it means they have an undefinable amount of work to be done. The last 10% of any complex system is always the most difficult. This looks similar to where we were or even behind where we were when we launched testnet. And then after that it took us nine months.”

Polygon’s Mihailo Bjelic says its solution is 100% EVM equivalent. (Twitter)

Mostly compatible

zkSync meanwhile is compatible with all but three of Ethereum’s 141 Opcodes — one of which has been deprecated, another is being deprecated and the third one is used by  less than 1/10th of 1% of projects according to Newcomb.

“So what did we get for not being fully equivalent? We got two things, our cost for performance is way better than any solution going after equivalence. We’re way faster, way cheaper. And the second thing we got is we were able to stick an LLVM compiler inside of our chain which you can’t do if you’re doing equivalent. And what an LLVM compiler does is we’re already looking at layer three.”

The LLVM would let a Python, Rust or C++ developer code on their solution, which then compiles down to work the same way with Solidity. 

“That is huge for adoption. So where this project that took seven months over here in Cairo that same ecosystem project ported to us in seven days. That’s compatibility.”

He concedes it would take just one day to port over if zkSync had total equivalence but would miss the LLVM and the increased scaling. So he says it’s a trade off worth making.

Layer 3 and recursive scaling

The coolest thing about being able to compress a large number of transactions into a single validity proof, is that the technology allows you to compress numerous other proofs into a single proof as well. 

It’s called recursive scaling and Declan Fox, product manager for rollups at Consensys, believes it’s so powerful that in theory the entire global financial system could run on Ethereum. “We have the technology to achieve that kind of throughput necessary,” he says. “With recursive rollups and proofs, we theoretically can infinitely scale.”

Also read: Ethereum is eating the world: — ‘You only need one internet’ 

StarkWare turned on recursive scaling back in August and has processed more than 30 million transactions since using the tech.

“Recursion has already, at this early stage, increased the number of transactions in a single proof by approximately 8x,” explains Ben-Sasson. “What is more, it’s proving so efficient, soon after it went into production there’s a reduction of around 40% to our own cloud cost for proof generation.

“These aren’t predictions or numbers we hope to see, but rather numbers from what’s in production today. And I stress: this is just the start, and changes we’ll make will mean these numbers will get more and more impressive.

The Starkware ecosystem is growing. (ZK Daily Twitter)

Polygon is about to implement its Plonky2 solution according to Bjelic. It’s an open source zk-SNARK solution. “This recursive SNARK can be used to verify transactions orders of magnitudes faster than existing alternatives. Plonky2 is also natively compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, which allowed Polygon to develop the zkEVM.”

And the testnet for ZK Sync’s Layer 3 will be released soon, in time to take advantage of an Ethereum upgrade called Proto-Danksharding early next year designed specifically to give rollups the space on Ethereum to blossom. Newcomb expects Layer 3 to be in production within a year. They’re calling it Pathfinder, an ecosystem of ‘fractal hyperchains.’

‘We could probably go on for hours engineering wise, but functionally the further up the recursive chain you get away from Etherium the cheaper the data costs get and it’s a 10x, 10x, 10x, 10x, as you recurse off up with data costs, and that’s unique to zk.”

“That’s where we get to 100,000 TPS and a million TPS,” he says. Visa chugs along at around 4000 TPS on a normal day, spiking up to around 65,000 TPS at peak times like Chrismats.

“ZK is the only way to get to like 100,000 TPS so that you can get to the levels where something like Visa replaces its underlying protocol with a blockchain. And when you do that, that’s your mass adoption moment.”

Another astonishing development according to Newcomb is that Layer 3 can get rid of the requirement for interchain bridges, which is where all more than $2 billion of hacks have occurred this year alone.

“One of the other things that we’ve already achieved up in Layer 3, we get rid of all bridges. And when you can have one prover doing the circuit for all of the hyperchains up in L3, any communication from one blockchain to another now is native. That’s the other reason why Vitalik said this is the end game because there are no more bridges.”

‘If you make it faster, cheaper by orders of magnitude, if you make it easier to use and more welcoming to a broader audience of developers by having more languages available, and then you make people trust it because you get rid of bridges. That’s what I always say is a star cluster of 10x moments up in L3 and that’s where the game is going to be had.”

The demo launch was successful, and now our goal is to get our project on the path of regular updates. @zksync is scheduled to launch on October 28th, and you’ll soon see the release of @zkSync compatible version of Homespace Metaverse.?Get ready, it’s going to be hot! pic.twitter.com/O6sRm3tryz— Homespace.is (@HomespaceNFT) September 29, 2022

Not fixed yet 

So that’s it? With the arrival of ZK rollups and EVM compatible scaling solutions everything has been solved?

Unfortunately not. ZK rollups are currently very good at taking computation off of Ethereum, but they still need to write enough data back to the main chain so that if the rollup stopped working or it taken over by bad guys, then some other outfit could step into the breach and work out who owes what to who.

It’s called the data availability problem and a considerable amount of Ethereum’s roadmap with proto danksharding and full danksharding aims to solve it and allow for more data to be included. There are a couple of ways around this at present including storing data on Validiums, which are cheaper but less secure. 

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“So the way we describe it is if you have a baseball card collection, and many of these cards don’t cost a lot and you’ve saved them in Valdium but then one rare card that is worth a lot of money you will probably save on Layer 1,” says Ben-Sasson.

Polygon is working on a number of solutions to this same problem including Avail “a blockchain where information is available to everyone at any time, was designed specifically for this purpose,” Bjelic says. zkSync’s Pathfinder will enable devs to choose from three options for data availability, a Validium, zkPorter (mixing on chain and off chain) and ZKRollup (full security).

zkSync is already on the road. (Pexels)

Don’t expect a big bang from zkSync’s mainnet launch on October 28. It will be kind of underwhelming at first, with a couple of months of just Matter Labs testing and offering users bounties to try to hack it or exploit it. Then DApps will be allowed to port over, and start building and testing security.

“And then when we feel like we got everything done, we do what’s called lift in the gate. And then all the users can come into the system simultaneously and it’s called a fair release program. So we don’t favor any project over another.” He says that 150 projects will launch at that point and there will no longer be any reason a project would wait around for Polygon’s solution to be finished..

“It’s like they’re going to a racetrack and they’re showing up with the chassis of a car that doesn’t have any wheels, no steering wheel and absolutely no engine,” he says.

“And we have the whole product done. You know we have the Ferrari and we’re ready to go.”

Andrew Fenton
Based in Melbourne, Andrew Fenton is a journalist and editor covering cryptocurrency and blockchain. He has worked as a national entertainment writer for News Corp Australia, on SA Weekend as a film journalist, and at The Melbourne Weekly.

Follow the author @andrewfenton

The sustainability movement has emerged as a 21st century megatrend, and it shows no signs of abating. Record heat in Europe, wildfires in the U.S. West, floods in Pakistan, drought in China, and accelerating ice cap melt in Greenland and Antarctica have driven home to many the looming threat of climate change.  Meanwhile, the New York Times declared in December “the sustainable industrial revolution is just getting started,” and even heavy industries like shipping, steel, and plastics are beginning to grasp the importance of an ecologically sustainable future — developing products like “green steel,” which is a fossil-free steelmaking process. But hurdles remain, including questions about transparency, accountability, traceability, trust, data integrity, and even greenwashing (making false or insincere environmental claims.) Or as the Times asked: “Can some of history’s highest-polluting industries be trusted?” in spite of their professed good intentions.This is where blockchain technology could make a difference. Like the sustainability movement itself, blockchain tech is global, 21st century, and mostly unformed though likely to be shaped soon by new laws and rules. Blockchains can simplify and lower costs of ESG (environmental, social and governance) reporting, build trust in “collected” data, develop new eco-related trading markets, and suggest new sources of innovation.Blockchain can prove that green energy is really green. (Source: Pexels)In March, for instance, automaker Volkswagen announced that it was using blockchain technology to help ensure that electric vehicle (EV) charging stations were using sustainable sources to recharge their electric cars. This move is aimed at consumers who want validation that the energy being used to recharge their vehicles isn’t coming from brown coal-powered electric companies or the like. BMW is said to be developing something similar.Elsewhere, energy giant Shell announced in June the launch of Avelia, a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) solution for business travel.  The project uses a public blockchain to promote and validate SAF, which can reduce lifecycle emissions by up to 80% compared to conventional jet fuel.Many now foresee a blossoming partnership between environmentalists and blockchain developers, especially as Ethereum with its big Merge, as well as other networks, move closer to carbon zero and even carbon negative platforms.“I continue to believe that putting Paris Agreement carbon markets on Ethereum and connecting the national carbon accounts of the world, is blockchain’s killer app,” Joseph Pallant, climate innovation director at Ecotrust Canada and founder and executive director of the Blockchain for Climate Foundation, tells Magazine.But if this promise of a blockchain/ESG alliance is to reach fruition, some questions need to be resolved, including:Are public permissionless blockchains sufficiently scalable to handle the sheer amount of data to be tracked for sustainability use cases? Looking off-chain, do blockchain-based sustainability-related projects face an oracle problem? Who is going to attest, for example, that carbon offset credits entered on the blockchain are legitimate — and that they are really doing something beneficial for the environment?Finally, blockchain technology might be a useful tool in the quest to develop a global sustainable future, but is it a necessary one? Does the sustainability movement really need public blockchains to succeed?We are pleased announce the launch of the “Pilot Project on Peer to Peer (#P2P) Trading of Rooftop #Solar Power on #Blockchain” in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh ~The first of its kind project in #SouthAsia and #IndiaTags: @rejipillai @UPPCLLKO @PowerLedger_io pic.twitter.com/iydmQz9cm1— India Smart Grid Forum (@IndiaSmartGridF) December 17, 2020Tokenizing for more efficient marketsMany think that blockchain tech can make ESG-related markets more efficient, including the rapidly growing Voluntary Carbon Market, or VCM, where parties voluntarily buy and sell carbon credits that represent certified carbon removals or reductions of greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Corporations can purchase carbon credits to meet their carbon neutrality commitments. “A significant proportion of carbon credits issued this year have been minted on-chain,” Charlie Moore, head of Carbon and ESG Solutions at Chainlink Labs, tells Magazine, adding:“The carbon credit market has historically been manual, slow, opaque, and inefficient. By moving carbon credit markets on-chain, the market inherently becomes automated, fast, transparent, and highly efficient.”Globally, carbon dioxide (CO2) permits grew to $851 billion in 2021, a gain of 164% compared with the previous year, according to Refinitiv, with most trading taking place within the European Union.  But multiple challenges remain in scaling Web3 carbon markets, adds Moore, including the lack of market standards. “In addition, there are hundreds of layer-1 blockchains with little interoperability between them.”The blockchain trilemma looms, too. In building networks, it’s commonly believed that developers must choose among three key benefits — decentralization, scalability and security. They can have two but not three. So a project can have decentralization and security, but not scalability. Or scalability and security, but not decentralization, etc. John Bulich, Technical Director and co-founder of Powerledger, along with Dr Jemma Green, Executive Chairman and co-founder.Powerledger, for example, is an Australian company that uses blockchain technology to enable neighbors in India’s Uttar Pradesh state to trade solar energy on a P2P basis. Its secure network is able to process an impressive 50,000-plus transactions per second, the project’s founder and CEO Jemma Green tells Magazine. But Powerledger uses a permissioned network — not a public, decentralized one.By comparison, Nori, an innovative carbon removal marketplace, has expanded using secure, decentralized platforms like Ethereum and more recently Polygon through creating and selling NRT tokens, each one representing one tonne of removed CO2 stored. The idea is that farmers are paid for adopting regenerative agricultural techniques — while other stakeholders, including consumers, can purchase tokens to reduce their carbon footprint. Scaling up is still a challenge, however. “We can scale up the amount of supply/inventory that we have by further partnering with agriculture companies who can source large numbers of farmers for us,” Nori CEO Paul Gambill says, though “we’re sold out at the moment [in mid August] because the demand for carbon removal has outpaced the new supply enrollment.” Projects like these may take time to reach a global scale.Beyond carbon removalCarbon removal isn’t the only sustainability use case, of course. Indeed, a system like Nori’s which uses two assets—an NRT as a reference token, and NORI as medium of exchange token — could arguably be used in other ecological contexts, like ocean plastic recycling in the developing world. Can blockchain help alleviate the effects of drought? (Source: Pexels)“Yes, I would love to see this two-asset model adopted in other social impact areas,” Gambill says. “Another intractable problem is wildfires that grow to such huge sizes because of low brush and debris on the ground that acts as kindling. It should be possible to incentivize removal of that in a similar manner. Ocean plastic is also applicable.”Blockchain technology can also help to alleviate a water shortage in parts of the U.S., where water is being diverted away from lakes, reservoirs, and rivers at unsustainable rates, says January Walker, a U.S. Congressional candidate in Utah. “Often there is no accountability as to where it goes,” she tells Magazine:“Blockchain distributed ledger technology can be combined with IoT water parameter monitoring to track where the water is going, who is using the most, and provide a means of collaboration across state lines to drastically reduce water usage.”“The sustainability movement needs to harness the power of frontier technologies like blockchain to help reach its goals in a faster and more efficient way,” Amna Usman Chaudhry, a founding member of the Oxford Blockchain Foundation tells Magazine. Blockchain offers various advantages such as increased transparency, security, immutability, and decentralization which can be utilized to find new innovative solutions to age old problems, including plastic pollution, particularly in oceans. “Similarly Blockchain offers immense potential for sustainability for smart cities, such as is the case with Dubai, which through its implementation of the Dubai Blockchain Strategy aims to save USD $3 billion in operational costs, 398 million printed documents per annum and 77 million work hours annually,” Chaudhry adds.The Dubai Blockchain Strategy aims to save $3 billion in operational costs. (Source: Pexels)Volkswagen’s EV pilot: Pick your energy sourceThen there’s Volkswagen’s smart-charging electric vehicle (EV) pilot project which enables car owners to specify their favored source of energy. Drivers pulling into charging stations can “select to charge using wind and solar resources, from energy assets within a 10 km radius […] with an accurate breakdown of their session’s carbon footprint,” says project partner Jesse Morris, CEO at Energy Web, a firm that claims to have built first enterprise-grade, public blockchain tailored to the energy sector.  An algorithm determines the optimal charging schedule to maximize usage of clean, locally sourced electricity, while a smart-contract deployed on Energy Web’s network issues to the EV owner after charging an ERC1888 NFT, a fractionalized renewable energy certificate that proves the provenance and volume of clean electricity generated and consumed. VW’s innovation group is now working out how to roll this out at production scale.A ‘huge catalyst’ for renewal energySolutions like these can help solve the sustainability movement’s greenwashing problem. “Some are skeptical that EVs are really carbon neutral given that they require recharging from electric sources that as far as they know could be generated by brown coal,” Anthony Day, global head of ecosystem stewardship at Parity Technologies, commented in a recent LinkedIn post. This is consistent with Web3 project designs that, generally speaking, seek to make owners out of users and users out of owners. The EV is generating information all the time for the grid — temperature, traffic conditions, and so on, Day tells Magazine. “Your vehicle becomes an oracle. It could be identifying potholes on the road.”  Solutions like VW’s will also be of interest to businesses that own fleets of cars and need to document the carbon footprint of their vehicles, especially in Europe. “If you can show that your vehicles are topped up on fully renewable energy, that’s a major contribution” toward reducing a business’s carbon footprint, Day adds. A boost from U.S. legislation?The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), signed into law in August, has earmarked $370 billion for the fight against climate change. Could the legislation indirectly spur blockchain adoption? “Blockchain technology will provide an immense boost to the impact of climate-related investments embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act,” Pallant tells Magazine. On-chain carbon pricing tools can help ensure that the most capital efficient climate solutions are selected in future projects, as well as providing the “needed transparency for verifying the ultimate impacts of this third of a trillion dollar spend.” Not all agree, however, that the U.S. legislation will do much for blockchain adoption. “Having read through the IRA, I believe that it is unlikely to boost the utilization of blockchain as it does not make specific suggestions to lean into the technology,” says Walker.To make a difference, blockchain would need a “champion” on every project being funded. “The only portion of the bill that I think would even help is the $4 billion for a water project. That however will go mostly to research and replacing a few 90-year-old pipes across the nation instead of innovating water technology and tracking,” adds Walker. There’s only one planet so there are no alternatives. (Source: Pexels)Is it really helping the planet?It needs to be remembered, too, that blockchain technology has inherent limitations, and by itself “blockchain won’t save the world,” according to Day, who has a podcast by that title. Before ESG-related projects can be tokenized, someone or group needs to verify that the projects exist, they are useful for the environment and that they wouldn’t have happened without tokenized funds — they must have ‘additionality,’ in other words. The human factor can’t be finessed. “The sad fact of life is that the more manual you make that verification, the less scalable the system is,” says Day.Verification in carbon markets is typically done by third parties based on standards developed by offset registries like Verra and Gold Standard. Recent efforts to meld blockchain with the registry process hasn’t gone smoothly. Earlier this year, for instance, crypto firms Toucan Protocol and KlimaDAO were criticized for promoting “cheap, low-quality carbon credits that don’t actually help the environment,” according to Bloomberg.Indeed, a recent analysis by non-profit research organization CarbonPlan found that over 99.9% of Toucan’s BCT reference token came from CORSIA-ineligible credits, “i.e., the low-quality end of the carbon market,” Danny Cullenward, policy director at CarbonPlan, tells Magazine, including “zombie projects” like Dayingjiang-3, a Chinese hydropower dam project that has been operating since 2006. Credits from existing dams don’t do much to help the environment, many people argue. “Even if the registries are the most culpable actors,” Cullenward continues, “Toucan, Klima, and other tokenization efforts point to registry standards as proof of quality. Anyone who is professionally engaged in these areas either knows or should know about the underlying quality control problems that remain, so I don’t have any patience for what effectively amounts to passing the buck.”In response to the Bloomberg story that raised similar concerns, KlimaDAO published in April a letter-to-the-editor response, which acknowledged the problem on the “supply side” regarding the “quality and integrity” of carbon credits in the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM), but it also noted that “the article fails to consider the widely accepted need to scale up the VCM to meet the emissions reduction targets prescribed by the Paris Climate Accord.”To avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to the Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, “the volume of the VCM will need to grow by up to 15 times by 2030,” wrote Natacha Rousseau.Other veterans of carbon markets like Pallant stand by Toucan and KlimaDAO, even after their BCT and KLIMA tokens plunged in price this year — KlimaDAO’s by 99% — and Verra announced that it was prohibiting the practice of creating tokens based on retired carbon credits. “Klima’s price collapse mirrored […] the crash in crypto prices” generally, Pallant tells Magazine. “I think the actual story is how crazy it was that KlimaDAO’s price got so high, rather than that it has gone low. I don’t think anyone at KLIMA expected the price to go to $3,000 plus.” Shortly after its October 2021 launch, Klima soared over $3,600. It was trading at $3.84 in early September, according to CoinGecko.Klima DAO soared and then crashed. (Source: Pexels)Toucan, for its part, acknowledges that “many of the criticisms around the tokenization of dormant credits were valid,” John Hoopes IV, strategy and ecosystem at Toucan Protocol, tells Magazine, while Toucan is developing technologies to improve the quality and integrity of the VCM, including “a system to store the digital monitoring, reporting and verification [dMRV] data that will underpin many credit types.” As for the problem of dormant credits:“We also introduced a rule to prevent carbon credits issued more than 10 years after emission reductions have taken place from using our technology and be converted into a carbon-backed token.” Day isn’t giving up on tokenizing carbon credits, either. “I think it has a significant potential to be one of the largest blockchain use cases. “Global climate initiatives often struggle because of local regulation. What is accepted in Argentina may be different from what is accepted in France,” says Day. With a standardized token anybody can participate in that system —  purchase, trade, invest. “You can get liquidity into that system. That’s very powerful if those token standards are recognized.”As with many new technologies, a certain amount of patience may be required.  “Both crypto and carbon are pretty complex and difficult — and when you put them together, it’s like difficulty squared,” Ollie Gough, strategy lead for the carbon-rating startup Sylvera, tells Time. “Mistakes have been made—and we’re waiting to see how it pans out.” Is blockchain tech a ‘must have’?Is blockchain technology really essential for the sustainability movement, though? “We see blockchain as something akin to using barcodes in supermarkets,” Powerledger’s Green says. “Barcodes and scanners are now integral to a supermarket. […] they facilitate supermarkets operating at high volumes and low margins.”“Could supermarkets have taken off without barcode technology?” continues Green. “The answer is ‘probably,’ but at a much slower pace, because the high volume, low margin [success] is hard to achieve with just a manual input of prices into a till.” The best of blockchain, every TuesdaySubscribe for thoughtful explorations and leisurely reads from Magazine. By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy PolicyNew areas may emerge. “ESG investing is yet to embrace smart contracts at any real scale,” says Chainlink’s Moore. “There is enormous potential for smart contracts and blockchains to transform areas such as green bonds through tamper-proof automation.” With the European Council and European Parliament’s recently agreed-upon rules for corporate sustainability reporting, nearly 50,000 EU companies in coming years will have to report ESG data, up from a mere 11,600 firms at present, according to EY.  Blockchain technology could potentially make those filings more accessible, transparent, and credible for citizens, consumers and investors, many believe.  “I’m generally very bullish on future blockchain use cases, especially in the sustainability space,” Nori’s Gambill tells Magazine, while Pallant adds that “We’ve seen an absolute flood of new minds, talent and capital flow into the ReFi [regenerative finance] space over the last year. Well thought out, successful projects in that space will deliver profound value to climate, nature, forests, and seas by leveraging blockchain to deliver credible environmental assets.”

There’s a version of the future that’s tantalizingly possible in which Ethereum becomes the base layer for pretty much everything.Recent advances in a technology called zero-knowledge Rollups — from StarkWare, Polygon and zkSync — enable the blockchain to move from fewer than 20 transactions per second to… well, an infinite number of TPS.In theory, it would allow the entire world’s financial system to run on Ethereum.“I think it’s theoretically possible,” explains Declan Fox, product manager for rollups at Consensys, which provides Ethereum infrastructure and apps like MetaMask. “We have the technology to achieve that kind of throughput necessary.”“With recursive rollups and proofs, we theoretically can infinitely scale.”He adds it obviously hasn’t been proven in production yet, “so that’d be the next step.”The tech is so new and so promising that soon after it became viable, Ethereum rearranged its entire roadmap to take advantage of it. This week’s Merge is arguably the least interesting bit of the coming changes.Ethereum is eating the world — metaphorically that is.One of the pioneers of zero-knowledge proofs — or validity proofs as he prefers to call them — is StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson. He worked on the problem for two decades, helping nurture it from an abstract theoretical concept — “something that is completely galactic and impossible, not enough atoms in the solar system to record even one such proof” — down to something that can efficiently be generated on a laptop.At its most basic, the process employs high-level mathematics to generate a tiny validity proof that verifies that a whole bunch of other transactions has been carried out correctly. Instead of putting all the transactions on the slow and creaky blockchain, you just record one proof in a transaction.“This technology lets you send a very succinct proof that asserts that a computation was done correctly — even when you weren’t watching, which I think is the most magical aspect,” he explains.“What validity proofs deliver, they deliver integrity; they let me know that the right thing was done by others — that someone processed 10,000 transactions, even when I wasn’t watching, and they didn’t steal my money. That’s what they deliver.”Tens of thousands of transactions being compressed into a single transaction on Ethereum is impressive enough, but the magic doesn’t stop there.Validity proofs work a little bit like fractals — the closer you look, the further into the distance they stretch. You can take 10 validity proofs — each representing 10,000 transactions — and generate an entirely new validity proof verifying that those other 10 proofs are correct.Suddenly you have 100,000 transactions rolled up into one. This is called a “recursive proof,” and you can just keep doing it over and over again.“It is a proof of proving. And so, you can further compound the savings because each time you generate a proof, you’ve compressed the process of verifying computation. So, basically, you can compress again and again.”StarkWare co-founder Eli Ben-Sasson and Magazine’s Andrew Fenton.Our interview is held the same week that StarkWare puts recursive proofs into production. The zkSync project, which uses the slightly different zkSNARKS instead of zkSTARKS starks, has implemented its own version of recursive proofs.StarkWare has already rolled up as many as 600,000 NFT mints into a single transaction on ImmutableX, and Ben-Sasson says they’ll be able to cram 6 million NFTs into a single transaction soon and then “60 million with more engineering and tweaking.”While there are still some problems to overcome, this type of scaling capability puts crypto back in the game for everyday payments and microtransactions — such as paying a few cents to read a paywalled article rather than being forced to take out a monthly subscription. Long hampered by high fees and 10-minute wait times for payments to go through, crypto finally has the opportunity to fulfill Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision of becoming peer-to-peer cash.Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin told attendees at last month’s Korea Blockchain Week that scaling meant payments were back on the table:“It’s a vision that has been, I think, forgotten a little bit, and I think one of the reasons why it has been forgotten is basically because it got priced out of the market.”Do you even need another blockchain, bro?Infinite scaling on Ethereum means some people — mostly Ethereum people, to be fair — can no longer see the justification for competing layer-1 blockchains like Solana or Cardano. Delphi Digital calls this the “Monolithic” view of crypto’s future as opposed to a “multichain” view.It doesn’t necessarily mean there won’t be any competitors, just that it’s likely that there will be far fewer of them as the space coalesces around a single general-purpose execution environment. (For the record, Delphi Digital Labs is throwing its research efforts into the Cosmos ecosystem, not Ethereum.)Chatting downstairs at ETH Seoul, I ask Ben-Sasson if he can see any need for any blockchain other than Ethereum in the future.His bespectacled face breaks into a grin. “I can argue both sides because one side says: ‘Is there a need for more than one internet?’ And we know the answer is ‘Hell no.’ It would be a completely stupid idea to have two internets.”“One side of me says that that is the case. The other one says that maybe because this has all kinds of macroeconomic considerations, maybe it’s a little bit more like fiat currencies, where in that aspect, you probably want more experimentation.”Sergej Kunz, co-founder of 1inch.Sergej Kunz, co-founder of DeFi aggregator 1inch Network is less circumspect. He sees Ethereum dominating the entire space, with layer-2 — and layer-3 recursive-proof — solutions running on top of it and benefiting from its decentralization and security.“I don’t think any layer 1 apart from Ethereum will get a huge share on the market,” he says.“Yeah, I see layer-2 solutions on top of Ethereum (because) Ethereum is kind of a safe haven and super decentralized after proof-of-stake.” He adds:“I love also that the Ethereum guys tried to keep it as simple as possible, the main chain. Other layer 2s above it can be very complex, providing proofs to the ‘safe’ chain that everything’s fine.”Kunz says 1inch is eagerly awaiting the launch of zkSync’s mainnet by the end of the year and is even toying with running its own layer 3 for 1inch Pro. “What I heard is possible; the plan in the future is that it would be possible to have a layer 3 above the layer 2,” he says.“We’re thinking about spinning up our own network for 1inch to manage because of our centralized entity in Switzerland… kind of only allow specific addresses to interact in this compliant DeFi environment. And it makes sense to spin up our own network and all those who can pass KYC/AML can participate in this network.”“And we can use zkSync technology for layer 2… In our layer 3, we would have also… our throughput would be affected by the throughput of layer 2.”Polygon also has a variety of zk-Rollup solutions in development but was, unfortunately, unable to put forward an interviewee in time for this piece.Stay tuned ?Documentation is coming.#Bitcoin and #STARK proofs in action. pic.twitter.com/BoLW4lex3i— Abdel#1559 a.k.a The StarkPiller ✨ ? (@dimahledba) September 1, 2022The original P2P cash: BitcoinObviously, Bitcoiners will be getting extremely annoyed reading about Ethereum eating the world with zk-Rollups, but here’s the thing: Bitcoin could also scale massively using zk-Rollups, and StarkWare and various others have been researching that possibility.Although it lags behind in smart contract capability, Bitcoin may be able to underpin the world’s financial system if it fully embraces rollups, too.But there is a major problem: Ben-Sasson says it’d require a fork to allow a Stark verifier. The block size wars of 2017 and the jealous guarding of the original code and principles by Bitcoiners to ensure its integrity suggest the community may be unwilling to embrace change.Ben-Sasson says he was orange-pilled way back at the San Jose Bitcoin conference in 2013 and that former Bitcoin core devs Greg Maxwell and Mike Hearn had expressed strong interest in exploring ZK tech. He adds: “It’s not a technological problem. It’s only a political problem. But it’s a big political problem.”In fact, zk-Rollups can theoretically scale any blockchain out there, but having no capacity constraints anymore undermines the primary appeal of competing layer 1s, which is that they are either faster or cheaper than Ethereum.There are major advantages to using the most decentralized and secure chain available. And if Bitcoin is out of the picture, Ethereum’s slow and cautious development could be about to pay off.Co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlines the post-Merge plans for Ethereum at Korea Blockchain Week.As Ethereum stans are fond of pointing out, it’s easy enough to scale blockchains if you cut corners on reliability (like Solana, which has been knocked offline half a dozen times in recent months) or just require all the nodes to spend millions buying super fancy computers to run the network (like Internet Computer).The embrace of proof-of-stake in the Merge has been carefully designed so that a poor farmer in Ecuador running an ancient secondhand laptop can easily validate transactions on the network. (No one knows why and how a poor farmer would get the 32 ETH required to join the network with an old laptop, but it is possible.) But anyone can join a decentralized pool with a mere 0.1 ETH.In theory, this should make it more decentralized and secure than any other smart contract chain (although not everyone agrees). Ethereum already has 420,000 validators and encouraging network effects, in terms of users, developers and apps, than any other blockchain.So, why deploy on a competing layer 1, when it’s instead possible to use a layer 2 (or layer 3) solution with infinite scaling on Ethereum and spin it up as fast as you need while still inheriting Ethereum’s underlying decentralization and security?We are not quite at that point yet, however, and while zk-Rollups are a key component of scaling, they don’t solve all of Ethereum’s problems by themselves.“Starknet solves the problem of computation. It doesn’t solve the problem with data availability,” Ben-Sasson explains.To simplify this to very broad brushstrokes: Basically, a zk-Rollup still has to verifiably publish enough data on-chain about the transactions it performed off-chain so that if the rollup stopped working or fell into the hands of super villains or something, then another group could step into the gap and figure out who owed what to who — i.e., recreate the “state.” This is an important part of what makes blockchains decentralized and trustless.While they only publish a very small amount of data on-chain, blockchains like Ethereum are extremely limited in the amount of data they can include in each block.Warning: TechnobabbleThere are a few different plans to deal with the data availability bottleneck. There’s Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4488, which reduces the cost of posting data on chains with the aim of supercharging rollups. There’s proto-danksharding, which introduces blobs of data and makes data availability cheaper again, and then there’s actual danksharding (named after Ethereum dev Dankrad Feist), which will allow a bunch of chains to work in parallel and enable data availability sampling (which allows blockchain nodes to verify that data for a proposed block is available without having to download the entire block). The best of blockchain, every TuesdaySubscribe for thoughtful explorations and leisurely reads from Magazine. By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy PolicyIf you’re not a hardcore dev and that sounds like a bunch of technobabble, the important thing to note is that Ethereum blocks currently carry 50–100kB of data, which will increase to around 1MB when proto-danksharding is enabled (sometime next year), and 16MB under full danksharding (sometime in the future). Or to put it another way, expect a 10x increase in the current capability within a year, and 160x in a couple of years.The upgrades are designed to move Ethereum from a monolithic and slow blockchain, where every validator computes every transaction and stores the history of the chain, to something more like a peer-to-peer style torrenting model where the work is dispersed rather than duplicated.(Note that the above is not a comprehensive breakdown of the many upgrades coming to Ethereum, in the hope of keeping this story vaguely coherent.).@VitalikButerin claims that #Ethereum will be able to to process “100,000 transactions per second”, following the completion of 5 key phases:• The Merge• The Surge• The Verge• The Purge• The SplurgeA quick breakdown of what each stage means for $ETH. ? pic.twitter.com/FnaWww8mHZ— Miles Deutscher (@milesdeutscher) July 22, 2022Hold on, when did this all happen?While hardcore Ethereans are across the plans, loads of crypto traders and enthusiasts are only vaguely aware that a lot of this is even happening. As Professor Jason Potts from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Blockchain Innovation Hub told Magazine in our piece about crypto critics:“This is such a fast-moving experimental space where just the knowledge gap between the frontiers and what we knew before is so vast that unless you‘re actually involved in the space and building, it‘s really easy just to fundamentally misunderstand what’s going on.”It’s a full-time job to keep up with everything going on, and Ethereum keeps dynamically adapting its roadmap as new technology is invented and various people propose bright ideas. An earlier Ethereum layer-2 scaling tech was called Plasma, but it proved too difficult to work with for more complicated applications. Then the roadmap for a long time was the transition to the mythical promised land of Eth2, which incorporated the Merge and scaled the blockchain with the OG version of sharding, which was like spinning up 64 Ethereum blockchains all working in unison.Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin had a simple message to the devs at ETH Seoul: “Build ZK apps!”Buterin ditched that plan when Optimistic Rollups and zk-Rollups began to look viable, and he published the new “rollup centric roadmap” in October 2020. The name Eth2 has been quietly retired ahead of the Merge, possibly because everyday users won’t actually notice enough difference post-Merge to justify calling it something new. It’s not going to be much faster or cheaper as a result.During a weird virtual press conference at ETH Seoul, where he answered prescreened questions, Buterin noted that while his ideas about what needs to be done for scaling haven’t changed over the years, the tech has:“Today, they take advantage of a lot of technological discoveries that we have now that we did not have 10 years ago. So, like, data availability sampling… did not exist before 2017 — 2017 was when I published my first work on it. Optimistic and zk-Rollups did not exist, like, really before around 2019.”He described that his vision is to get Ethereum into tip-top shape as the base layer blockchain and then stop mucking around with it, with much of the scaling and experimentation to happen using layer-2 solutions.“This concept of a roll-up-centric roadmap, that’s a new idea that only became possible because of the technology. Just zkSNARKS becoming a reality and becoming simpler and simpler, I think contributed a lot to that.”The moment of truth for cryptoProper scaling, of course, will be the moment of truth for blockchain technology. Until now, most of crypto has been about hopes and dreams and speculation about what the technology will be able to do in the far-off future. That’s all about to change.“In the next 10 years, pretty much crypto has to transform into something that is, like, not based on promises of being useful in the future, but is actually useful. And I expect scaling to be the trigger for that,” Buterin said. “If an application fails, after we have scaling and after we have proof-of-stake and even after we have zero-knowledge proofs, then chances are that application probably just doesn’t make sense for a blockchain at all.”

The story of how a Bitcoin OG set up a Libertarian crypto community and commune for digital nomads on beautiful islands in Thailand three times — and why he hasn’t yet given up on the dream.It’s a wild tale involving “unchecked merrymaking,” crypto-influencers, police grillings, seasteading, a reported $20,000-a-month burn rate, rumors about shamans and drugs — and a major collision between idealism and reality. It was also, by all accounts, a whole lot of fun.Cryptopia became the House of DAO, and a new version is planned.The spectacular Cape Residences in Phuket, Thailand are a world away from the bohemian backpackers and Full Moon parties of Koh Pha-ngan where I’ve spent the past few weeks researching Part 1 about crypto digital nomads living in paradise.If you’ve ever imagined how a Bitcoin OG lives, Kyle Chasse’s villa probably fits in the bill, nestled in between residences housing members of the Royal Family of Dubai and early Apple investors.There are four cars in the driveway, including an electric BMW charging up. Chasse is a big friendly bear of a man who greets me warmly and takes me on a tour of the seven-bedroom mansion where many of the 85-strong Master Ventures team does business, from social media videos to planning investments and Paid Network launch pad projects.The beds are so large you could get lost; there’s an indoor golf driving range; and as we take a look at the outdoor entertaining area, Chasse flips a switch, and a waterfall starts pouring from a great height into the pool. “This is my favorite thing,” he says.“This place is like a hub. Everyone comes here, they have lunch, eat and talk and hang out, play basketball. We have movie nights and dinner and stuff like that.”This is the latest — and most scaled-back — version of his dream to create a crypto commune for like-minded Libertarian dreamers. He’s tried twice before on Koh Pha-ngan, once on Coconut Island, and dabbled with setting it up as part of the ill-fated viral Cryptoland project the internet mercilessly destroyed.The first and, so far, most successful version saw Chasse and friends take over the Utopia resort on Koh Pha-ngan for eight months. “We had 35 villas and 70 people,” he explains. “We changed it to Cryptopia in 2018.”“I think someone said that it was like 90% of a cult, without all the weird stuff.”Tone Vays, Kyle Chasse and Didi Taihuttu on Koh Pha-ngan.But despite high-profile residents and visitors, including Tone Vays, Willy Woo and Didi Taihuttu of the Bitcoin family, the whole thing fell apart with furious locals, police grillings and a nasty falling out between Chasse and his business partner who saw him fire the entire Master Ventures team at once.The Thai Board of Investments backed the next version, also planned for Koh Pha-ngan called House of DAO, which was promoted with flashy videos and an impressive-looking website before operations moved to the 700-bed Coconut Island resort in Phuket.The big mystery is why he moved out of Koh Pha-ngan — which Chasse has loved since he was a young backpacker — to the more sedate Phuket?Chasse explains that Phuket has a lot more infrastructure and transport links, a less transient population, and is a much better place to conduct business. But he refuses to comment on rumors I’d heard on Koh Pha-ngan that once the local authorities became aware that a bunch of wealthy crypto folk had set up shop, they had started making all too frequent visits.“A year ago, the cops started visiting frequently, asking for ‘donations for covid relief,’” a former Utopia resident tells me. The potential for this to escalate scared the House of DAO away from Koh Pha-ngan: “Whereas Phuket is a rich area, so they don’t stand out as much.”Willy Woo and Tone Vays featured in promotional images.Kyle Chasse’s storyChasse grew up in Ventura County in California and never wanted to live a conventional life. Instead of college, he spent months backpacking around Europe before a friend started emailing about how amazing Thailand was.“I just had massive FOMO. I came over here in 2004 and started in Bangkok,” he says. “And then to Koh Pha-ngan for the Full Moon Party, and then just ended up island hopping for five weeks.”He spent nine months in Thailand on that trip and returned numerous times before making it his home in 2018.In between, he discovered Bitcoin via media coverage of the legendary Silk Road. A regular on the Bitcointalk forum, he started up his own Bitcoin lottery in 2013, and by 2016, he had become a wealthy man. “Bitcoin hit 1,000 bucks each and, in my mind, like, ‘Okay, now I’m good. I’m never gonna have to work again in my life,’” he says.“At that point, I kind of took a bit of a step back from hustling, and I became very obsessed with just adoption.”People in the real world were not that eager to listen to Chasse extol the virtues of Bitcoin adoption, however. “I always felt very, very isolated. I was only able to talk to people online,” he says. The exception was at crypto conferences where everyone was on the same page:“All of a sudden, you step into a conference or even the city where it’s being held, and now suddenly, you feel immersed in crypto, and it’s a really amazing experience and feeling.”He became addicted to the optimism and energy of crypto conferences and would literally fly out to attend them in various locales every three to five days. “That was super unsustainable,” he says. So, then I decided that I really wanted to be able to have that environment (at home).”Instead of going to crypto conferences, why not bring the crypto community to him? He dreamed of creating a crypto commune that digital nomads could work from, where projects could be nurtured and incubated, and everybody could live and breathe crypto all day every day.It would be a “mecca on the planet for crypto entrepreneurs to come to and that just propagates throughout the cryptoverse,” he says.“I figured that if I felt this way, there must be other people out there that feel this way, too. And so, I looked all over Koh Pha-ngan for a good place to set up.”The gang took over Utopia resort and renamed it Cryptopia.The concept of the Crypto Utopia recalls the mystical Beach from Alex Garland’s novel of the same name — a mystical place that everyone wants to find, but once they find it, everything starts to fall apart. Fittingly, the inspiration for the novel is said to be one of the beaches on Koh Pha-ngan.Chasse has long been a fan of seasteading. That’s where you create a permanent home base in international waters with like-minded folk where you can do what you like and create your own little sovereign state. Libertarian Bitcoiners, in particular, love the concept and keep making attempts to realize it, including an abandoned attempt to turn a cruise ship into the MS Satoshi, and a Bitcoiner couple who set up a floating home 15 miles off the coast of Thailand and declared their independence — only to get hauled in by the navy and charged with violating Thai sovereignty.Jessica Gonzales, who is Chasse’s partner and chief marketing officer of Master Ventures, explains:“The ultimate goal of House of Dao is we’re going to be a small nation. We’re going to be our own nation. That’s where it’s going: micronation. And that’s our alliance with the Seasteading Institute.”Chasse clarifies it’s not a formal alliance but says the guys behind the institute have agreed to mentor them.Given how difficult it is to make seasteading work in reality — and who wants to live on an oil rig anyway — the island of Koh Pha-ngan that’s only accessible by ferry seemed the next best option. A bohemian wonderland of days-long parties, magic mushrooms and yoga enthused “spiritual egoists,” the normal rules don’t apply here. At Full Moon Parties, they soak chains in petrol and set them alight to use them as giant skipping ropes for drink and drug-affected tourists to burn themselves on. So, it’s a whole heap of fun, but you can get yourself into serious trouble.“Koh Pha-ngan, it’s a bit more of the wild west than it is here,” he says from the comfort of his Phuket villa. “You don’t really ask for permission for anything. You just always assume that there’s gonna be some type of fee you have to pay to somebody.”The view from CryptopiaChasse looked at every single resort and available piece of land on the island. “If you’re thinking about starting a new government structure and having room to experiment with what that looks like… would need privacy. And so, that was really important to me.”“And finally, Utopia (resort) is where I decided to do it because it’s really amazing. We called it Cryptopia at the time. You travel up this steep hill for a while and then you’re in a kind of beautiful serene place.”Perched atop the hill at Haad Thong Lang Bay with fantastic views of the Gulf of Thailand, he made a deal to buy the resort for 17 million baht (about $510,000 at the time), and took over 35 villas, paying for everything himself.Reality bitesUnfortunately, of course, Chasse admits he had no idea how to manage a resort. On the day all the responsibilities for the staff, utilities and everything became his, the water went out.“The water came from a waterfall nearby, and sometimes, an animal or something knocks the pipe out of the stream. And suddenly, there was no water. So, it was an interesting first day.”Available at all good book stores, and plenty of bad ones too.Around 30%–40% of the Cryptopia residents were on the Master Ventures payroll, but word spread far and wide, attracting high-profile visitors, such as Bitcoiner Tone Vays, on-chain analyst Willy Woo and Carl the Moon Runefelt.There were people from China who ran the George Bush family fund, and not to mention “The King of Viral Media,” Dose media founder Emerson Spartz. Didi and the Bitcoin family, who stayed for months, he agrees to speak with me about it but then ghosts me for some reason.“Just incredible people came through. A lot of people invited their families to come out, too, which was kind of what I wanted.”One resident was author and occasional Magazine contributor Ethan Lou, who described a very similar sounding commune on a Thai island — but doesn’t actually name Cryptopia — in his book Once a Bitcoin Miner. So, it was probably a totally different one.“I lounged by the penis shaped pool… During the incubator’s crazier days, people used to have orgies in the water, I was told. The big boss who funded everything was an early Bitcoiner and had made a fortune, but he had little experience — or perhaps even the will or desire — to run an incubator. People had come and gone, staying for free, indulging in unchecked merrymaking. At least once, they had allegedly brought over a shaman. The ‘burn rate,’ what was needed to maintain the facilities alone, was $20,000 per month.”Lou writes that he had planned to write off his residency as a business expense for tax purposes but later realized he couldn’t point to a “single business matter that arose from that trip.”“The longer I stayed, there the longer I had no idea what I was doing on that island.”Hard Forking founder Sean Stella stayed for months at Cryptopia and made a short documentary about his time there.“Didi gave me a call when I was living in Singapore and said, ‘Check this out.’ So, I jumped on the plane the next day, met Tone Vays and Willy Woo at the airport, and we all jumped in a taxi together and went up there and hung out. I made friendships and connections through Kyle and what he was doing that have lasted to this day.”“I was there for three or four months, and it was fantastic. It was some of the most interesting months of my life. He basically took over a whole resort and financed the whole thing. I didn’t have to put my hand in my pocket.”Does this pool look penis-shaped to you?Stella reports that plenty of work was actually completed and scotches the idea that it was some sort of non-stop party.“There was certainly fun to be had, but no, it wasn’t,” he says. “The funny thing with a lot of the crowd was they weren’t drinkers. Very intellectual.”Is that a euphemism for “everyone was microdosing LSD,” I ask him?“Oh, I have no idea,” he says with a grin. “Drugs are illegal.”Lou’s recollection of life at the resort was more candid, and he writes of looking out at the incredible sea view one day in wonder and how “the remnants of Ecstasy, speed, mushrooms and LSD coursed through my system as I welcomed the dawn.”“I will never forget how, for a few fleeting moments that day, the world looked like perfection.”Cointelegraph Magazine contributor Elias Ahonen was also a resident while writing his book Blockland. He suggests that the dosing that “may or may not have occurred was probably more macro than micro.”Of course, any drug use by visitors was entirely incidental to the point of the Cryptopia — it was more just part of life on Koh Pha-ngan. As described in Part 1, the island is the kind of place where people go out for one drink and then wake up four days later in a field with a headache pounding in time to a hardcore psychedelic trance.It’s fun until its not: one digital nomad who lived elsewhere on the island told us of a good friend and colleague who ended up getting so immersed in the non stop partying lifestyle that he had a psychotic break, and they had to rush him off for treatment before he was deported. Another digital nomad said they were leaving the island, in part due to the negative aspects of the drug culture.Chasse says that while he doesn’t condone that aspect of life on Koh Phangan, he believes everyone has the right to do what they like with their own bodies.“Like, I’m not going to judge you for that as long as you get your work done,” he says. “Looking back, I think whether we maybe we turned a blind eye to it, I think maybe we would have been, some of the team members might have been more productive out of that environment. Because, you know, maybe they were hungover at work or something like that.”“I mean, definitely on Cryptopia 1.0, that was a huge problem.”Ahonen, who managed business operations for a short time, says he found the team generally hardworking and ambitious but says that the utopian dreams of new forms of governance seemed more trippy than anything else.“There were appeals to a fantastical utopian future that wasn’t entirely grounded in reality, which is perhaps very true to the ‘crypto’ brand.”“Kyle had a vision of using blockchain, decentralization and Libertarianism to transform the world’s basic organizational structures — he once seemed to suggest that I could perhaps rule over a ‘private country’ one day, when the new order came.”The ideals of the crypto-Libertarian vision brought some political tensions, as the vision of a community-run enterprise conflicted with the fact Chasse was in charge, and many of the residents were either his staff or projects he was funding and helping.“I think part of it was my fault for misleading people in the way that things would be governed there, I think, maybe alluded a little bit too much toward the fact that, like, I wanted to convert this into a DAO,” he says.“I think a lot of people who went there with the idea that, like, they would have significant say in what would happen, but I wanted people to work on the things that we had to work on. So, this is why some people left and some people stayed”A nice drone shot from the House of DAO video.How it endedThere are a few different accounts of how Cryptopia fell apart. Stella thinks market conditions and a disagreement over the resort’s ownership were to blame. Foreigners can’t directly own Thai real estate for one thing except in a complicated setup through a company sponsored by the Board of Investments.“It was crypto winter. The price of Bitcoin plummeted, while I was living there, and you’ll have to ask Kyle, but my understanding was he wanted to buy the resort, and it seemed to boil down to a negotiation over the purchase of it.”Chasse says the “miscommunication with the owner… wasn’t handled in a civil way.”“He was clearly wrong in trying to sell me property he couldn’t sell me. But he was able to have the police set up in front of Utopia and eventually come up and get me and take me to the station and question me and try to get me to sign a confession for something I didn’t do.”“It didn’t shake me too much. I don’t really get too scared. But some people left after that event happened; some people just left Master Ventures altogether — they were terrified. And some of our core team were also pretty freaked out about it.”He also had a nasty falling out with a “really terrible” business partner that led to the end of not just Cryptopia but that incarnation of Master Ventures, too, in early 2019.“I fired the entire team, like, a month before I left Utopia. My partner was horrible and tried to take over the whole thing in a coup d’état, and so, I just told Lex, the guy who was helping me on the ground, to kick everyone out.”Jessica Gonzales and Kyle Chasse Source: TwitterHouse of DAOSix months later, he met Gonzales on a dating site in the United States. She was attracted by his life’s purpose.“It’s quite unconventional, right?” she says over drinks in their impressive living room, a world away from Koh Pha-ngan.“He wanted to transform the world with cryptocurrency as the way, and I’ve always known my whole life, my parents instilled this into me since I was a little girl basically brainwashed me believing that I had a huge role to play in helping transform the world.”They resurrected Master Ventures, launched Paid Network (which grew from a dispute resolution service to also encompass a crypto launch pad) and rebranded the crypto commune as the House of DAO.The “blockchain smart village” had an expensive-looking website and slick video ads promoting “Asia’s premier blockchain hub” where:“Blockchain startups from around the world come together under one roof to accelerate their decentralized visions uniting the world’s best advisors to turn startup visions into reality.”The House of DAO was all set to launch at The Cabin Resort in Haad Rin — the same location of Leela Beach where Chasse had stayed for his first Full Moon Party all those years ago. But at the last minute, they pivoted to Coconut Island off the coast of Phuket. All the websites and marketing materials still said Koh Pha-ngan (which is how I stumbled across this whole story) perhaps in an attempt to fly more under the radar at their new home.“There were several events that led to, ultimately, the desire to escape from KP for a while,” says Chasse.Our Crypto Community keeps growing at House of DAO. What a great family dinner celebration we had last night! The familia keeps growing. @kyle_chasse @jesa_4thePeople @master_ventures @MMcrypto @TheMoonCarl @FelixMago_Dash @HappySasha18 pic.twitter.com/calDVPAh08— House of DAO (@HoDThailand) August 29, 2020The authorities apparently weren’t too enamored with their ads featuring jet skis, attractive women and digital nomads working hard and partying harder as they conflicted with the official COVID-safe narrative of the time. And after trekking to every resort on Koh Pha-ngan, Chasse also thought none of them offered enough privacy. That wasn’t a problem on Coconut Island, which has just one resort, a couple of restaurants and a small village.[embedded content]While it seemed like a great idea at the time, having just 20 people from Master Ventures take over a deserted 700-bed resort, with little chance of attracting new residents due to the pandemic, wasn’t ideal.“At first, it started out really great. Like, it was a beautiful location — perfect for what we wanted to do.”“There were a few times when family and friends were there it felt like it was supposed to feel when it was more sociable and more full. We looked at each other and thought this would be amazing and it felt right. It was super encouraging to carry on.”At the time, they thought the pandemic was just about over, and Thailand was about to reopen to the world. They were wrong.“It was just quite lonely there and quiet. If you had 400 people, and they’re all in crypto, it would have been fine,” he says. “It led to a lot of people feeling really down because they felt super isolated.”The second, or third, iteration of Cryptopia/House of DAO shut down around September last year.House of DAO Family Dinner Night! @kyle_chasse @jesa_4thePeople @master_ventures @MV_CEA @TheMoonCarl @MMcrypto and some amazing new member additions @FelixMago_Dash @HappySasha18, thanks for joining! #DAO #Bitcoin https://t.co/uNG9fe9ORG pic.twitter.com/2q01GmNXwL— House of DAO (@HoDThailand) August 19, 2020Cryptoland’s House of DAO v1Meanwhile, Chasse had been sent an early cut of a promotional video for the Cryptoland project that Max Olivier and Helena Lopez had been working on for three years. Their idea was to crowdfund the purchase of a Fijian island to set up a crypto community by selling NFT plots of land. Impressed with their vision for a 600-acre complex, which they’d negotiated to include the next House of DAO, Chasse bought the first plot of land.“We get the House of DAO infrastructure included in it, and it solves a lot of our problems,” he says. “We’d still be on a private island but next door having a poppin’-like crazy resort with tons of entertainment and things to do.”Unfortunately, Web3 Is Going Great’s Molly White got hold of the promo video in January, and it went viral for all the wrong reasons. It has a talking Bitcoin, groan-inducing references to memes like shitcoin casinos, cutlery-based jokes, such as “I’m not a fan of forks,” and there’s even an ill-advised musical number.The internet tore it apart.[embedded content]“People say any press is good press, but this was really, really bad,” he says, adding that the founders were defamed as scammers despite having the noblest of intentions.“They never took a dollar from anyone. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen happen to such nice people,” he says. “It’s amazing how much effort they put into this thing,” he says. “And then all of a sudden, when they decide to reveal themselves vulnerable, they just get smashed down.”After it went viral, the Fijian government reportedly contacted the project via their lawyers and discouraged them from proceeding.Chasse says he’s still a big supporter of Cryptoland, which is now looking at different locations from the Bahamas to Dubai.The House of Dao website pays tribute to “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”Let’s do it in the metaverseChasse’s plan, for the time being, is to watch how decentralized governance models experiment and iterate in DAOs and the metaverse before trying again in the real world.“I’m really excited about the whole idea of DAOs and metaverse and these things hypothesizing and delivering and failing and succeeding. And so, this is going to expedite the whole process of trying to physically do it with real people and real families.”The twist in the tale is that now that Chasse and Gonzales have stopped trying so hard to construct a crypto community, one has grown around the Master Ventures hub anyway. Around 40 staff and their family members orbit around the villa now.“I think that in building a community, there’s an element of it that has to happen organically,” Chasse explains. Chief technical officer Ben Stahlhood’s wife and kids have joined; Gonzales brought out her parents and four sisters; and Chasse’s mom has visited and is now thinking of selling her beach house back in Ventura to move over permanently.“It’s interesting because ever since v2 shut down Coconut Island and we all kind of found our own places, people started to bring their families, flying in their kids, the communities continue to grow, maybe not under this official flag anymore,” he says.Gonzales agrees:“What I think we’ve realized is that we are the House of DAO. Our team, we’re the heart anyway. Like, it’s our team members. It’s their families.”Read Part One here:Thailand’s crypto islands: Working in paradise, Part 1

Walking into Remote and Digital’s La Casa co-working space on the tropical island of Koh Pha-ngan, you wonder how anybody gets any work done. I sip a cocktail and wait for my burrito as James Brown plays in the background.There’s a real palm tree growing at the edge of the cafe, and behind it sits shallow crystal blue water stretching off for miles, with Koh Samui’s jungle-covered mountains jutting up in the distance. Adding to the ambiance, kite surfers are getting massive air off small waves, before gently floating back to earth.30-year-old Belgian blockchain developer Jérôme Van Vlierbergen is one of the regulars at this Ban Tai co-working space and runs his Equinox Launchpad here. He explains Koh Pha-ngan (or Koh Phangan) has a thriving crypto scene, mostly populated by digital nomads like himself.“There are a bunch of people here that own crypto or they’re doing something with crypto — because when you have money, you like to be somewhere where it’s a nice place to live.”Ironically, of course, you need very little money to live here. You can rent a desk at La Casa for less than $3 a day, rent a scooter to get around for under $4 a day, and rent a whole house for $500 a month. With beautiful food, postcard-style views and half a dozen other coworking spaces with gigabit internet, it’s no wonder Koh Pha-ngan has become something of a mecca for crypto digital nomads.It’s remarkably easy to join the crypto community in Thailand.“There’s this crypto island vibe — you can find a lot of workshops, a lot of people that work with crypto, and most of them are in the market,” says Van Vlierbergen. Crypto social media groups based on the island suggest hundreds of residents are deep into the scene.Crypto islandKnown for its legendary Full Moon Party, Koh Pha-ngan’s 12,000-strong population doubles or triples at times with American, European and Russian backpackers drawn by the endless parties, yoga scene and general chilled out vibe. It’s probably one of the last bohemian island hideouts left in Asia, with package tourists seemingly unwilling to take the ferry ride over from neighboring Koh Samui.“There’s no airport here,” says Edwin de Lepper, who runs the crypto-friendly Buddha Cafe. “So, it is a journey to get here with the boat, which makes it kind of exciting…”Belgian blockchain developer Jérôme Van Vlierbergen at the office.Since the end of the pandemic, he’s noticed an uptick in crypto digital nomads mostly concentrated around the co-working spaces of Tropicana, Sunset Hill Resort, Signature Restaurant and High Life Resort.De Lepper explains recent visitors include big influencers such as MMCrypto (948,000 Twitter followers) and James Crypto Guru (74,000 YouTube subscribers).“There is a tremendous amount of people that come here, and they talk to me and they say, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m building a new DEX, or I’m building a new crypto project,’” he says.“I would say there are crypto whales here. The people that are here that I might suspect that they have a lot of money, they don’t talk about it. You don’t want to scream it from the rooftops I guess.”Koh Pha-ngan isn’t the only place in the region attracting crypto digital nomads, with a growing scene in the Thai island of Phuket, another in Chiang Mai in the north of the country, as well as other locales in Southeast Asia, including Bali.Guy Allison, founder of Blockchain Careers, says that many in the crypto scene flit between Koh Pha-ngan and Chiang Mai.“A lot of people do six months in Koh Pha-ngan and six months in Chiang Mai because the weather can get quite rainy here in October–November, then they go back to Chiang Mai. And then they come back here in February March for the smoky season.”That’s when farmers burn their fields and biowaste during the dry season to prepare the land for the next year’s crops, which helps create a thick fog of air pollution around Chiang Mai for months.Buddha Cafe owner Edwin de LepperWork from home, but move homePaid Network and Master Ventures founder Kyle Chasse called the island home for some time, though he can now be found in the more upscale villas of Phuket. He says people realized during the pandemic that if you could do your job from home, you could pretty much work from anywhere.“Hello, you’re working from your house, you have the freedom,” he says, pointing out that Thailand is also super cheap compared to the United States.“You have amazing infrastructure; your cost of living is gonna go down — your transportation, your food, your utilities, your cell phone — everything’s cheaper.”Chasse moved to Koh Pha-ngan in 2018 after hearing of a budding Bitcoin community on the island. “I went and checked it out and fell in love with it,” he says, adding it’s so safe due to the influence of Buddhism that there have been numerous times he’s left his phone or wallet behind only to have someone return it to him.“One of the things I love the most is the people. And of course, it’s truly like paradise,” he says.Koh Phan-ngan’s legendary Full Moon Party. Source: fullmoonparty-thailand.comThe safety of Thailand was a big plus for Vlierbergen, who started off his digital nomad days traveling through the decidedly less friendly Central America and Mexico four years ago while working as a web designer. Having taught himself Solidity, he then graduated to the much better-paid blockchain industry. Good pay thanks to the deficit of qualified devs and a decentralized workforce make crypto the perfect industry for travelers.When the pandemic struck in March 2020, he was already in Asia and headed to Koh Pha-ngan to ride out the storm. But despite enthusing about island life, he admits there’s a darker side that social media influencers don’t want to show.“Most of the time, it is fake. They want to show the best side of it,” he says about digital nomad influencers.“I don’t really want to party anymore or take drugs or drink alcohol, you know? And when you travel mostly what they want to do is to get fucked up. So, I think one of the many negative sides of it it’s how you can feel like, sometimes lonely and hard to connect with people.”Three days laterIf you do enjoy partying of course, then being on a tropical island surrounded by beautiful people with a new party to go to every day means it’s not always easy to find the motivation to get any work done.Allison laughs about that one.“It’s quite a party place. It’s difficult to concentrate solely just on work. And I might see someone in the street on a bike who was going to a party, and next thing you know, three days have passed. So, that’s the issue,” he laughs.Allison explains there are three “scenes” in Koh Pha-ngan: the party scene (drugs), the bar scene in Thong Sala (booze) and the yoga scene (spirituality). Yoga retreats are a big appeal for some — the sorts of places people go on juice cleansing diets for two weeks. In a sad coincidence while I’m on the island, Australian cricketing legend Shane Warne dies of a heart attack after a two-week juice diet fast a few kilometers away on neighboring Koh Samui.“All of them [the different scenes] seem to be quite focused on, you know, not doing that much work,” he says.It’s hard to take a bad picture on Koh Pha-ngan.Van Vlierbergen watched one of his digital nomad friends have a complete breakdown after partying too hard for too long.“He was partying, doing a lot of drugs hardcore and microdosing as well [at work during the day] and then he had this, how you call it when your brain just switches off…”“So, this guy went crazy. We had to help him, had to get him to go to a hospital before he got deported back to the U.S.”How practical is it?Living and working in Thailand requires a visa, of course, and there are a variety of options — from hard-to-get special tourist visas that allow you to stay nine months a year through to elite visas that cost 600,000 Thai baht ($17,300) but enable you to stay for five years.You can also get an education visa as long as you spend a few days a week learning Muay Thai kickboxing or studying the language. Most new digital nomads simply get a 30-day tourist visa, extend it for another 30, then take a quick weekend trip to a neighboring country to start the process all over again. Technically, you’re not supposed to actually work on any of these visas, but as long as you’re not taking work away from locals, the government reportedly doesn’t seem too fussed.The holy grail though is the forthcoming digital nomad visa costing just 10,000 baht ($290), which the Thai government has announced… but hasn’t yet been implemented.Hardforking founder Sean Stella, left. Source: FacebookBlockchain media company HardForking founder Sean Stella says it’s been on the cards for a while.“Things don’t typically happen quickly in Thailand,” he explains. “But every country is wrestling with how to attract people to their countries and make it easy, so I would hope a digital nomad visa to visit Thailand becomes a reality in the near future.”Stella has been a digital nomad since long before the term even existed. “It’s a lifestyle choice,” he says. “For me, I’ve been doing it for 20 years. I can’t envisage any other way of living.”“Crypto is an enabler. The phenomenon of being a digital nomad has been around before crypto. But crypto is facilitating the ability for anybody to make a lifestyle choice to go and live wherever the hell they want.”Koh Pha-ngan’s crypto scene in 2016Originally from New Zealand, Stella moved to Asia in 2005 and has spent most of his time between Singapore and Thailand, with Koh Pha-ngan a favorite locale over the past seven years. He fell in love with the place at the same time he discovered crypto in 2016 while filming a documentary called Living the Dream about expats who had moved to paradise.“The middle of that process, crypto crossed my path and slapped me in the face. I went, ‘Holy shit, this is amazing.’” He fell deep down the rabbit hole, socializing with a group of crypto fans every Monday at a bar with mining rigs in the toilets.“You’d go in there and take a pee standing next to a Bitcoin mining rig,” he laughs.“Fast forward a couple of months. Here’s me paying my bar bills in Bitcoin. We created a little economy amongst ourselves. So, I literally went from using Thai baht to everything I did, to paying for hotels, paying my bar tabs, paying for a meal within this little ecosystem on Koh Pha-ngan and Koh Samui, I just operated in crypto.”That ecosystem has mostly disappeared, however, says de Lepper, who bemoans the fact Koh Pha-ngan doesn’t live up to its “Crypto Island” reputation.“What does that mean, Crypto Island? That means that everybody can go here to the shops and pay in Bitcoin or Dash or whatever it may be. But we’re not there yet.” De Lepper does his best by providing free education for business owners on how to accept crypto and which coins to accept.Stella estimates there were around 50–60 crypto fans on the island in 2016 when he arrived, and numbers took off in 2017. But Paid Network’s Chasse says that when he arrived in 2018, interest had tailed off due to the effects of crypto winter.[embedded content]Numbers picked up once again in 2019 with the arrival of large numbers of Russian crypto hippies. “There was a lot of idealism, people that understood that the financial infrastructure that we blindly followed was broken,” says Stella.Chasse helped revitalize the local scene when he took over the Utopia resort to create his Cryptopia crypto community, which later rebranded as House of DAO (more about that in part two).Stella lived at Utopia resort for months and filmed a short documentary (above) about the experience featuring his good friend Didi from the Bitcoin family, and guest stars the on-chain analyst Willy Woo and Bitcoin influencer and occasional insurrectionist Tone Vays.Stella created his media brand HardForking to help educate people about crypto. It’s now incorporated in Panama and has set up what Stella calls a “legal DAO,” where participants create content and are rewarded in both stablecoins and with equity tokens in the DAO.“Effectively, I want 1,000s of content creators who are digital nomads living all over the planet to create content for HardForking. And they are rewarded for their efforts.”“Our intention is to build the first legal Dao in crypto media, or media in general.”Heart of the communityThe beating heart of the crypto community on Koh Pha-ngan these days is de Lepper, who runs the Buddha Cafe in Haad Salad. Originally from the Netherlands, de Lepper moved to the island three years ago and later rented the former cafe as a place to live.But when people kept turning up asking for coffee, he reopened it and started running weekly talks called “Living Library” on interesting topics. Researching one of these about crypto, he became obsessed, and the weekly talks became “Crypto Cafe” each Wednesday morning with regular guests from various projects.De Lepper has made it his mission to help educate residents and visitors to the island about crypto.There’s a bank of computers in an alcove at the back for learning how to trade, stake or set up wallets, and he’s running “Cryptocation” sessions to teach tourists about the space.“This island is special because it does have a different energy,” he explains. “I feel at home and feel free here. And it’s a beautiful community that is big enough that you don’t see each other every day, but you see each other every week.”De Lepper says crypto offers everyone the chance to go live in paradise.“If you know those opportunities, and you start collecting the right projects, the right tokens, over time, you can build up enough money that you can live off the interest.”He estimates there are about 300–400 people on the island who work in crypto in some fashion.One of those is Allison, who runs his Blockchain Careers business from co-working spaces or his home office. We meet for a Korean meal and beers at an open-air restaurant in Thong Sala. He explains that he’s been in Thailand since 2011, starting in hospitality recruitment in Bangkok and then moving to Koh Pha-ngan just as COVID-19 struck. On an education visa, he learns the Thai language three days a week, online between work. “I probably need to do it every day, but I’m sort of getting nearly there.”He fell into crypto recruitment after discussing plans with Chasse that didn’t eventuate but led to a gig sourcing talent for Hathor Network. His main client now is Parity Technologies, which developed the Parity Ethereum client, Substrate and Polkadot.“Most of my clients are actually in Europe, a few in South America. I’ve got one in America that I’m speaking to now. But over time, I want to try and get 60% or 70% of the business in Asia because I’m sick of working nights!” he laughs.Crypto to go mainstreamAllison says Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong and now Thailand are becoming hotspots for crypto in the region, citing the Stock Exchange of Thailand’s development of a new digital asset exchange and Siam Commercial Bank’s takeover of the Bitkub crypto exchange in November last year.“I think that’s a sign that crypto will go mainstream in Thailand. It’s the first traditional bank in the world to buy outright a crypto exchange. And they’ve actually come out and said there’s gonna be no tax on crypto profits in Thailand, which is a good thing. They seem to want to adopt.”Guy Allison at a Korean restaurant in Thong Sala. Despite the baffling heat, few restaurants have AC.But personally, Allison’s time in Koh Pha-ngan is coming to an end. When we spoke, he had just got back from a trip scoping out Chiang Mai as his new home.“I’ve been doing it for two years, and I feel like I’ve hit a wall creatively,” he says. “A lot of people are quite extreme here. They’re either escaping addiction or they are addicts themselves. And there doesn’t seem much in between. So, it’s difficult, you know?”“Maybe I just need somewhere a bit more normal. It is nice here, but a lot of people are very transient, so you’ll make a good friend, and they’ll be gone next week. Whereas Chiang Mai and Phuket a lot of people do live there, and it’s stable.”In Chiang Mai, he was particularly impressed with the Yellow co-working space, which also offers a business incubator and VC funding. He says that’s the sort of infrastructure Koh Pha-ngan is lacking right now.“I’m a startup as well, and they said they can help with potential loans in the future. So, for me anyhow, it seemed more serious for work. So, I will try it out probably for six months and see how it goes. And then I can always come back here if I don’t like it.”