Web3 CMO Stories

The Brave Browser Experience: Enhancing Privacy in the Digital Age – with Luke Mulks | S3 E52

March 19, 2024 Joeri Billast & Luke Mulks Season 3
Web3 CMO Stories
The Brave Browser Experience: Enhancing Privacy in the Digital Age – with Luke Mulks | S3 E52
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Embark on a journey into the heart of digital privacy with Luke Mulks from Brave in our latest podcast episode, where we discuss the seismic shifts occurring in the intersection of privacy, digital advertising, and the nascent Web3. Luke brings his unparalleled expertise to the table, offering a deep dive into how Brave is challenging the status quo with its user-centric model. As we unpack the essence of user empowerment, we reveal how Brave's approach to digital advertising is not just about protecting user data, but also about fundamentally transforming the way content creators and consumers interact in the digital realm.

Dive into the transformative world of cryptocurrency as Luke and I explore the Basic Attention Token (BAT) and its role in redefining the economics of online attention. This episode strips back the layers of complexity surrounding crypto and user-focused revenue sharing, providing you with a clear understanding of how BAT is creating a fairer ecosystem that values user engagement. The conversation also covers the practicalities of crypto adoption, emphasizing the need for seamless experiences that bridge the gap between users, advertisers, and content creators. Discover how Brave is extending its reach to empower internet users of all backgrounds, fueling the expansion of a thriving creator economy.

In our final segments, we tackle the challenges of educating the masses about Web3 and privacy, and the pressing need for platforms to be intuitive to foster growth and compete with tech giants. By taking a page from Brave's playbook, we discuss how the company is successfully onboarding advertisers while keeping the platform open-source and receptive to community feedback. We also contemplate the future of web browsers in light of new policies from tech behemoths like Google, contrasting their approaches with Brave's steadfast commitment to user privacy. Tune in to this enlightening episode to grasp the full impact of these dynamic shifts in technology and learn why the revolution in browser markets might just be the most exciting change to watch.

This episode was recorded through a Podcastle call on February 20, 2024. Read the blog article and show notes here:  https://webdrie.net/the-brave-browser-experience-enhancing-privacy-in-the-digital-age-with-luke-mulks/

Ready to upgrade your Web3 marketing strategy? Don’t miss Consensus 2024  on May 29-31 in Austin, Texas. It is the largest and longest-running event on crypto, blockchain and Web3. Use code CMOSTORIES to get 15% off your pass at www.consensus2024.coindesk.com

Luke:

Our whole MO is that we don't want to know you because if something were to happen, like a government or a breach, like a hacker or whatever, if someone got into our servers, we don't want to have any data about our user that could be used against our users.

Joeri:

Hello and welcome everyone to the Web3 CMO Stories Podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and today I'm really excited to be joined by Luke. Luke, how are you?

Luke:

Doing well. How are you?

Joeri:

I'm excited for this podcast episode, Luke. So, guys, if you don't know Luke, Luke Mulks. He's working at Brave and I'm using Brave already for so many years I cannot remember, so I'm really a fan of Brave, so really happy to have you on the show, Luke. So, guys, if you don't know Luke, he has over 20 years in the experience and digital media, advertising, publishing and startups and he's specializing in transforming businesses with new tech.

Joeri:

Joining the pioneers of Brave in 2016, Luke began applying his experience from working with Google, NFL, and Warner Brothers and Comcast to co-author the basic attention token white paper and develop new Web3 business models. Currently, he's a VP of business operations and core member of the Brave and basic attention token PAT team. Luke continues growing the business of Web3 and educating people on these new technologies as a host of the Brave technologies podcast and a live weekly BAT community call. That's a lot of stuff. A lot of things to talk about, Luke. But just to start with, with your extensive background in digital media advertising technology, how do you see the current state of Web3 shaping the future of digital advertising and user privacy?

Luke:

Yeah, I think right now it's got a pivotal moment with Web3, where we've started to see where this could go with the technology but the usability side of it. We've also learned some tough lessons there and we're seeing some interesting problems around privacy and public blockchains and also are seeing some interesting privacy solutions hitting the market for how we can make all these things work together. That may seem unrelatable or really hard problems, and I would be seeing anonymous while behaving in a Web3 environment, but I think that what we're also starting to see right now are cases where, when the Web3 technology first came about, a lot of the use cases were abstract, where it's like you'll have power over and control over your credentials or over your ability to do, finance or use these services. And what you're starting to see over the past two years are a lot of actions by big tech around that are bringing those abstract scenarios into life, whether it's the truckers protesting in Canada and then having access to their accounts frozen, or with COVID, with people that are having virtual appointments and are sending pics of their kids injured leg or something that they end up getting caught by a false positive on a spam thing and then locking them out of their accounts.

Luke:

These types of things happen and you start to realize how low or limited your control is over your digital presence or persona because of all this gatekeeping that's happening with big tech and with Web3, it starts to apply. How can you make self ownership or how can you make things accessible to where you can actually hold those keys, hold those records and have that power and control so that you aren't locked out of an important thing? How can you build services that plug into that? That's where we are now is. We're starting to see the technology hit the ground, but the usability issues are definitely in an area where many smart people need to work together.

Joeri:

Yeah, that's always the thing with new technologies. Of course we need to have a user-friendly solution to be able to get more people on board, of course. But now what's interesting for me? Of course, you're working at Brave already for so many years. Can you explain a bit? Yeah, brave has been at the forefront of privacy-focused browsing and advertising. Can you share how Brave's approach is transforming the traditional advertising model and what that means for the user and for the advertiser?

Luke:

Yeah, absolutely. We were really early on this, but Brave's whole approach to software and our whole approach as a company, frankly, is to build user-first models. That means that you're always prioritizing based on the best interests of the user, whether that's with a business approach or with just building the products that the user is using. So what does that mean? That means that that piece of software needs to put the user's privacy at the forefront and that user's information does not leave that software unless the user is explicitly saying it's okay to. And so, from a business perspective, we've grown. We're at 67 million monthly active users now and about 25 million daily active users, and when I started here in 2016, we had a couple thousand. What you're starting to see happening is this transition where, when you provide the software that's easy for people to use again takes things out of the abstract.

Luke:

People used to say, oh, there's this privacy paradox, or people don't really care about their privacy, or this next generation, they just put everything online. Why do they care? The reality is they do care, like no one wants to do. They won't let people go into direct messages, their inboxes, or all these people have window shades on their house. And the great thing about what we're doing is that by building software that puts people first, every person that you convert over another person moving with their feet towards having better privacy, better security, having software that people think about the browser. The browser is the web standards, call it a user agent, and that's what's gotten lost over the past 20 years. Is that that sense of user agency, that the browser is basically your kind of guardian to this whole metaverse? The web browser is the gateway to Metaverse. This is all the metaverse.

Luke:

But at some point along the way these big tech companies got in between the user and that agency and it started to be more about prioritizing for them. And it's, within all, nefarious. It was just the rate at which programmatic advertising and marketing and everything proliferated was so quickly, so much more efficiently and at such a great scale that we're dealing with the secondary effects of that where, okay, wait a minute, who has my data? Like, how much of my data is going out there? And so what we started to do was like okay, build software that just immediately stops that third party data collection by default, which means that you're blocking third party ads and tracking. It's just at a starting point, and then start to build business models that can use things like zero knowledge proofs and use things like new ways of doing reporting to solve the accounting problems and segmenting problems and use that data that's locally on the user's browser to match ads to them without having to leak anything to third parties.

Luke:

So we think about how advertising and marketing works on the web. You go to a website and all these calls leave your browser with your information, right? They go to all these companies and then those companies send them to other companies and it's this big hydra and then tree that branches out. Now and I spent years integrating these things and I can't tell you where the data stops. People make copies of it. It goes everywhere.

Luke:

Right, if that's all, because that's the way it's done. Right, if we can, the browser knows what you're doing locally, like you're browsing history using your browser, all this available complete set of information in your browser, because instead of having these models that are in the cloud that make all these decisions around who you are and what you should see, we move them directly into the browser. It's like putting a really smart ad server directly into the device that you're on that doesn't leak your information but can match things to you based on what you're doing. That's really the crux of what we're trying to do is solve those accounting problems that have required users to leak their information, make it, make better ways of doing the accounting and then make better ways of matching ads and marketing and users to useful things with our software. In that show what we've been doing since we launched our ad platform in 2019, but the browser's been out there in 2015 and that's where we're heading in the future.

Joeri:

Yeah, I know, when I switched to Brave, I was looking at the different browsers and I said I want a browser that is focused on privacy but also is fast. Then I just found Brave. If you see the bandwidth that it's just really. It's economic. I don't know what do I talk in English. You save bandwidth. I think that's right to us. Also, the fact that when I'm on a website now and I cannot use Brave or I just see the number of cookies or spies or whatever that is blocked, it's amazing what those websites ask. I'm also a marketer, so I know how this thing works. I think also that I wanted to ask you because I said it in the intro, the white paper that you have written about the basic attention token Can you explain the concept of BAT and how it is designed to create a more equitable and efficient digital advertising ecosystem?

Luke:

Yeah, absolutely, when my background was in ad tech and products and I was one of the co-authors on the white paper. But before we did the white paper, when we came to Brave, we're like, okay, if we're going to block all these third-party trackers? Yes, there's profiling and audience segmenting and all these things that this model has evolved to in the web, but really most of these uses for tracking are accounting problems You're trying to have the publisher doesn't trust the agency reporting, so everybody has different reportings. You might have four or five different companies all reporting a single ad impression from a publisher website and a browser right, because nobody trusts anything. And then in each of these systems be like 10, 15% off, you know, between systems. It's a whole mess. Right, we block all that. If it's a site, if it's a first-party analytics, we don't block that because the user is going to the first-party domain. That's the territory. But the third party stuff we do, and so, because we're protecting privacy, we were creating an accounting problem.

Luke:

And so when Brave initially had Bitcoin integrated in the browser in 2016, where you could put Bitcoin in and as you browse the web, the browser knows where you go, and then the browser you could verify your domain with our system and then users could automatically contribute Bitcoin to you based on how much they go to your site or they can make a direct contribution. Bitcoin had some scaling issues like and there's this whole blockboards thing back in the day where, basically, in a nutshell, you had to put $10 in to be able to donate $5, right or to contribute $5 to publish. That doesn't really scale very well, and the block times for Bitcoin are 10 minutes too right. So it's not really set up for the scale and the velocity that you need for doing something like digital advertising or even for micropayments, right. So what we saw was Ethereum started to do like tokenization of use cases that were in the web and attention was a really good token use case that nobody had tried yet. But if we can make it so that this value flow where users are, we can use verification of what that reporting is saying in the system and put it on chain so that you can have the blockchain basically verifying the information, that the information is accurate, but then also you can see the token distribution and all that and Brave will do with privacy in mind, right, that's where our whole Kool-Aid is right, but it made it for a really great start of a use case around the attention economy.

Luke:

And if you look at crypto, there's like a lot around decentralized finance and all these different NFTs and all this. But back then in 2017, 2016, 2017, it was like white papers were creeping up for everything, right, like all these different web-to-use cases, right, but ours was really. It started with it's for basic attention, right, but it started with how can we use this to help solve the advertising problems that we're dealing with? By trying to bring private advertising model to market. That's competitive, and so that's what we did with the token, first. And the other thing about the token is we wanted users our key player in this attention economy.

Luke:

Right, and people talk about data is like the new oil and all this value, but users really get left out of that value exchange.

Luke:

They get an ad and it supports what they're doing, but if you think about the amount of their information that goes out, they're getting the raw into the deal in that equation, right, and you can see how just inefficient the web has gotten because of these business models.

Luke:

As another proof point of look, there should be a better way of doing this, and so, from our approach, there is no value exchange without the user. So let's set it up so that with the token, we can actually give the user a revenue share for their attention if they want it. They don't have to right, but if they want to, they can participate in this ecosystem and then from that revenue share, they can even automatically contribute that back to the content creators. They can contribute by, like, donating a certain amount or just automatically having it distribute every month, and so that was the original. The original model we put in the market for BAT was okay. This token it can be used to verify and validate reporting, but it also can be used to create a new rev share for a user that wants to participate and then help to fund the creators that they're enjoying, that are creating the content that they enjoy with the web.

Joeri:

Yeah, I love that solution also because it's positive for the creators, positive for the users. It's not the big tech that has everything in their hands. So privacy really important. You guys have an innovative solution, sorry, but also user experience is important. So how do you ensure that you have a seamless and engaging user experience while still maintaining privacy and so on?

Luke:

Yeah, it's a great question because for us, it's a super complicated area. It's not just even users that we're dealing with here. We also have to deal with something. Back in 2017, crypto was really new to people as a concept that, unless you were in it, right, we're in a Bitcoin. But even now, it's still pretty foreign to a lot of companies.

Luke:

So, with our challenge was not only to make this work well for users. It has to be something that, with a few clicks, they can just onboard into and has to be easy for them and if they want to withdraw, they can withdraw. We'll have ways that they can do that legally. That will work and make sure we're not violating any laws or anything like that. But to get in the door, you got to make it super simple, and that's what we ended up doing. We ended up saying, ok, you can just, you know, a couple of clicks, you start to see ads and then you start to see those total tally up and you can automatically contribute that back without having to really do anything. And so that was the approach with users initially, and we scaled it up to over 10 million users. Right, like that, we're passively earning, which is one of the biggest use cases for adoption in crypto.

Luke:

But the other angles on this were interesting too, because we had publishers who and in this was twenty eight, seventeen, twenty eighteen the creator economy was getting talked about, and it was right when you were starting to see bigger YouTubers hitting the scene. There were those really big ones early, but you started to seek us. You keep changing their monetization and a lot of publishers were losing money and audience share to a lot of the new content creators. So what we started to do is, initially our model was around publishers and we had to figure out, ok, what's a way that a publisher could easily onboard into this and that then it evolved until we should really make it so that anybody with a YouTube account can also earn through our system, or a Reddit account or Twitter account or GitHub account for developers, and so we started to add in these other a lot fine in options, right, but you have to make it so that it's easy for them. If it's harder for them than setting a tag on a page like you would do as a website or setting up an account, they're not going to do it, and so we had to figure that part out too.

Luke:

And then it was with the advertisers. It was a little bit different too, because the advertisers aren't earning anything, they're just inputting into the system. So we had to come up with a way where we could create a onboarding flow for them that we knew that they would be able to spend money in, that didn't require them to have to like OK, here's the steps. They're setting up a wallet and getting funds and like how can we capture money in? And then, if they are paying with crypto, great, we'll accept that, or with that, of course, like, we'll accept that. But if they're not like, ok, we will take their dollar denominator payment and we will buy the user revenue share in our tokens and then distribute it that way.

Luke:

There's all these different little challenges, but if you don't solve them correctly, they end up really inhibiting your growth and adoption as a platform, and so we put a lot of time and effort into those areas, initially in order to get them going, and it's been an effort that's evolved with time to where we've been in market with our ad platform since 2019. But right now, like a couple of weeks ago, we actually just launched our own self-serve ads manager with our platform, so everything was done like a managed service, but now you companies can come and launch their own campaigns and they can do that with crypto or with dollars. So there's a lot of pieces in the puzzle, but if you don't start with that user flow of whether they're the user is a publisher or an advertiser or creator or or just a user if you can't get that part solved for them, why would they come work with you? We're not just competing on, like making stuff that's private and making a crypto side work. We have to make something that works, that can go out to millions of people and compete against whatever big tech is doing, which is a big challenge, but it's one that you can use a lot of pieces from what's out there as part of the process, and a lot of our ethos is what allows us to do this right. Like we're open source developers come contribute every by. Myself and several others all the way from the top down in the company are out there talking to our users every day on X, twitter or other platforms. We really rely on users feedback and input, especially those early users, because if we can make it easy for them, they're going and talking to their friends and family. They're going and talking. They're referring friends that own their own businesses to us to do to run ads or to they. We've had over two million content creators sign up to accept that through our platform. But these things grow if you can get the right ingredients together and make it easier for people.

Luke:

And I think a challenge with the Web3 space is that there's so much focus on like infrastructure and on really the end users are tend to be pretty technically, real technical people that can do things like bridging assets or they understand how to do basic things in crypto, but the reality is there's like way too much focus on those people and not enough focus on like how do I get my neighbor to do this? And when the market was really hot, the last bull run I would have. All my friends and family and neighbors were the ones who the previous run they were telling me this was a scam. The next run they were saying, oh, how can we buy crypto again? But one of the things that I heard from them was I really understand. I don't understand a lot of these other use cases, but I really understand.

Luke:

I use the browser, I earn by using the browser. That works for me, and those are the types of simple use cases. They're not. They're boring, they're not the the sexiest use cases out there, but if you can crack them, you can make those things work. That's where the big scale comes in, and that's a lot of the stuff that we focus is on is like how can you demystify a lot of these things, bring it in proximity of other things that people use? And we're working on a. We have a wallet now, a cell custody multi chain wallet that's in every single brain browser. How can we, how can we make that as easy to use? Is what we've done with the ad platform Right? So these are challenges that we have to work on all the time.

Joeri:

Yeah, for me, of course, because I like that, it's easy, it makes sense, even though I'm not using, like we are speaking now, Every aspect that that you, that the brave browser has to offer. But yeah, you talk about millions of people, so you need to educate them. Are there any strategies that you haven't mentioned yet? Yeah, that you that brave that you use to educate people about Web 3, about privacy, about brave?

Luke:

Yeah, I think one is just it's just talking with the users first, because these are really complicated things and the reality is like Education is a huge part of this, but you have to make sure that the education is what people are willing to learn about, right, like, which is complicated because people only have so much time in the day. And If they're going and trying, like I got, I went and downloaded Chrome, right, so we could do this podcast, right, chrome makes it very easy. You download it, it automatically downloads, it automatically launches for you, it says we're off to the races and then it starts there. Only there's no education there, right, it's just making sure that it's turnkey, so there's got to be. That part of it is like super important, right, like you have to just make it so that it's familiar enough to work. And then you also have to listen to those early users and Really listen to what they're saying, listen to the questions and their feedback, but then really try to like piece together what. What's a bigger message here? Like, this user has this specific problem.

Luke:

I heard five other users saying that and we see what the limited data that we do have we do see something that could be related to this, like how do you look at things at that kind of a scale? Oh, okay, maybe if we include a little bit of content about this or a little bit in the Feature discovery about that, we can really start to branch these things out. And a lot of it is like making doing things like I'm launching this podcast that we have like we're we're. It's not all about brave, but it's about educating people on the topics, the broader topics, by having people that are Working in those topics come on and give us a real practical overview, because there's so much noise and in these bubbles online when, oh, people are freaked out about AI and Terminator or whatever, I don't think how dark does it go like? How many times have you seen an article about a doomsday? I've been tied to AI where reality it's no, I'll have a compliance officer or somebody from the government. On the podcast.

Luke:

You're saying I'm really concerned about employment and AI and people accidentally like discriminating huge amounts of the population just by having one parameter on a thing incorrectly said, where it's wow, okay, yeah, get it. These are the practical problems, because you find out a lot about what the technology can do if you have some practical Angles on it, but so much of what's out there is just noise and and clickbait and and all of that right. So a lot of the education side is taking a step back, whether you're listening to users or listening to the space more broadly and saying, okay, cool, if we can provide a service by Showing people what people are actually concerned about, that are working on this stuff, then maybe you can start to see movement there. But it's also really about just making it easy to use and being real with your user base, because it's technology too, like it's good of a job. As we do. Everything's open source. We have like security and privacy reviews on everything.

Luke:

Our whole MO is that we don't want to know you because if something were to happen, like a government or a Breach, like a hacker or whatever, if someone got into our servers, we don't want to have any data about our users that could be used against our users. You put that much care, even though you put that much care into it. Like human beings are making software. Like mistakes happen right, and the more your, the more you go void just owning up to those mistakes when they happen, because they're inevitable, like the more to road your trust more broadly, and a lot of big-time companies are so big that they don't really have to worry about it, because they can either litigate it forever or they're just they could lose 5% and they're still the biggest player by far.

Luke:

So, for a startup coming in, if you're coming in to tackle the hard problems, like we are, you've got to. You got to learn first. Hey, you got to educate yourself from the people using a product which is just so invaluable it can't say it enough. If you're not, if you're building something in this space or marketing to people in this space like the, you you're not and you're not listening to those users, you're missing out on so much valuable insight, intelligence, all this good stuff. But that's really been what we've had to do, basically because of our model, but also because it's just the right thing to do when you're building products.

Joeri:

Absolutely Put the user first. Yeah, Now in Web3, and Brave also. I feel a lot of things are happening. What are you personally the most excited about when you look at what you're doing with Brave, or maybe the browser markets?

Luke:

Yeah, no, it's a great question. The browser markets are really interesting right now because Google just announced, finally they're deprecating third-party cookies, like they're block third-party cookies, which has been kicking the can down the road thing for a long time. At the same time that's happening, they have this like new change coming to Chrome called Manifest v3, which, if you're using an ad blocker right or not, using Brave you're using an extension on a browser. What this does is it changes the way the browser APIs work. It actually means these ad blockers are just lists of filters the filter lists of things to block. This new thing that they're doing is going to limit the amount of things that can go on those lists. So what you're going to end up with is a lot less effective ad blocking, right, and what we've done is changed all that in Braids.

Luke:

Looking at the browser markets, you have these two big things that are happening this year. You have this big change that's going to impact ad blockers on browsers, and then you have this other big change that's happening that's going to affect how monetization works on the biggest browser in the world and also the biggest ad company, right. So those two things are super exciting for us, because our problem has always been that we've been really early to things like earlier, like you see this in Web 3, and you see a lot of talk around zero knowledge and ZK this and ZK that. We had zero knowledge proofs in Brave in 2016 with our Bitcoin based Brave payments proof of concept. You used to anonymize zero knowledge protocols to do the reporting and a lot of the work there, but no one was even thinking about it really in the way that it is now, and so that's been helpful for us in this market though, because we figured out like right now we have forward advertising on Brave. We have big name companies advertising on Brave and our platform is like a Web 3 ad platform, and, whether they're half the team of four knows it or not, they're running ads on a platform where users are actually getting value with their attention, and it has this critical element to it. That's some of the challenges before that we're talking about it, but it's prepared us to be an example in the market when these changes happen around browsing, Because Apple's done a lot, too, around this right with their tracking protection and leaning into marketing, but what Brave and Apple are doing are fundamentally different things, like you're still giving all of your payment information to Apple. Like all your data is going to Apple, they're taking care of it from the cloud. But, like with Brave, what we're trying to do is show that, like all your data should just stay on your device and, if it leaves, it better be encrypted and there better be a two way thing with you and another party so that no one else is getting between that, because that's really like the benefit of it is. And what you're seeing with Web 3, with what's happening with Congress and the regulatory bodies in the US, and it was happening in Europe too.

Luke:

A lot of these crypto and Web 3 cases are boiling down to First Amendment issues around speech protected speech right. If I'm doing something locally on my browser with software that isn't hosted on a server, that's protected speech, right. So this is where these Web 3 models. Really it's not an identity crisis necessarily. The challenge has been with Web 3, we want to make something that's like Web 2.5, where it's as easy to use as a Web 2 service and maybe there's parts of it that are served from the cloud, but then other parts are locally done, whereas on Bitcoin and other end of the spectrum, like from the early days. It's like do everything local on your browser on the client, don't have intermediaries in there, and it's a bit of a confliction point. But also seeing, like, what we can do with the technology right. Can you make things that are hybrid work without getting in regulatory trouble? Because it's so unclear there? And realistically, I think I'm really excited that we're at this moment in time where people are again looking at like peer-to-peer, local client side solutions for things, because we have to. But if you look at the longer timeline on this stuff a pirate bay they always are trying to shut it down, right, the site down, but the peer-to-peer network there is still strong, like peer-to-peer lie, all these torrent-based things are still there. That's like part of the human spirit kind of coming out saying now, when we can, we're going to do it directly and that's great that you have your thing, but we're still going to be over here.

Luke:

I think the power of Web 3 is that you can do that with a whole bunch of other things now. It's all really an upgrade. As much as people call things scams or try to paint it as a scary thing, the reality is this is a huge accounting upgrade. This is a huge transparency upgrade. If we had the transparency that Web 3 brings on public blockchains back in 2007 or 2006, it might not have totally avoided a financial crisis that was global, but it might have caught it earlier. It might have required the actors involved to behave a little bit better and a little bit more responsibly with the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people that were impacted by that crisis.

Luke:

I think that that's a real point that gets overlooked, because you have incoming players that are in interests or supporting them, that might not be aligned with people but that are afraid of this new technology because it solves a lot of problems but, at the same time, it's so empowering for people. That's where I get excited about this stuff is because the more of this we can put in people's hands directly. That's what the web is all about, just like having this forum, having this place to do all your stuff, and you shouldn't have to give up your privacy for that. You shouldn't have to ask permission to a bank to be able to use the money you've earned to buy something. So many things are fundamental, but we're so conditioned in these boxes of oh, I need to make sure that I'm getting all my getting my little stamps of approval from everybody. But the problem is you look into these systems and they're really inefficient and they're really not catching things that you would think that they would catch.

Luke:

And with my podcast, that's one thing I've been doing a lot this season is like getting people on that have financial experience and regulatory experience to help to shine a light on the way you're a bit in the space. Like how is crypto helping people Right? Like how is this helping the space to? How is this good for banks to have this ledger? Nobody likes dealing with compliance issues. Somebody likes dealing with this paperwork or bureaucracy, and one of the strengths that doesn't get talked about enough is how much of that is removed by this stuff.

Luke:

I'm obviously like super excited about where we're at right now, but just the fact that this is becoming usable like when we did the white paper for bad, bitcoin was there, ethereum was there. None of it was scalable at the time and we were hoping, okay, people are talking about things like a plasma and L2s weren't really part of the discussion then, but it was. People are working on solutions and we were hoping, okay, maybe by 2019 or so we'll have something that can do the scale. And now it's 2024, and now I'm super excited because now you actually have things that can do what we want it to do and that hasn't really been available, unfortunately, until now. So super exciting.

Joeri:

I'm excited to look at people that are listening and feel the excitement. That's also what I love about my podcast meeting people like you with this, positive stories, positive energy, explaining all these things. So if people are excited to have, they want to learn more. You also mentioned your podcast. Yeah, where would you like that people go to?

Luke:

Yeah, just go to brave. com there's, I think, brave. com/ podcast is where our podcast is there. And then I'm on X or Twitter whatever people are calling it these days just Luke Mulks. L-u-k-e-m-u-l-k-s is my handle. My DMs are open. I love talking to people. If you hate what we're doing, tell me if you like it. If things are broken, tell us. We want to know everything. But brave is on Twitter too, and the basic attention token is as well. It's a tension token or brave on Twitter too. But, yeah, reach out. I'd love to hear what people have to say. If you like the podcast, awesome too. And thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Joeri:

If you're not yet connected, maybe we are, but I will do this after we finish the recording. Guys, so amazing to talk today with Luke. So, Luke, thank you so much. It was really a pleasure.

Luke:

Yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you having me on.

Joeri:

Guys, you see a lot to learn today in this episode. If you're not using Brave yet, well, check it out. Also, if you think that this podcast episode is really interesting use of for people around you, please share the podcast episode with them. If you're not yet subscribed to the show, this is a really good moment to do this and, of course, I'd like to see you back next time, take care.

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