Nikola: 0:00

Why shouldn't you be able to run a blockchain by yourself or you're independent from anyone else?

Joeri: 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really excited to be joined by Nikola. Hi Nikola, how are you doing?

Nikola: 0:19

Hello, I am doing incredibly well. Thank you for having me and that we finally were able to make it happen.

Joeri: 0:27

Yes, guys, if you're wondering who is Nikola Stojanov, he's a blockchain expert and the co-founder of Aeternity and the chairman of Aeternity Foundation. I met him some time ago, but now we finally are on the podcast together. But now we finally are on the podcast together. So, Nikola, tell us a bit about yourself, because I want to learn about your journey from co-founding Aeternity to the spearheading of the revival, I would say, through HyperChains.

Nikola: 0:59

I think I have to go a little bit more back than co-founding of Aeternity, because it's a little bit of a longer story, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible. Now. I actually come from a pharmaceutical background, so I worked for one of the largest generic pharmaceutical companies very early on, having the idea to create something similar to Mark Cuban's drug company, where people would be able to acquire drug prescription drugs in, let's say, an affordable matter. I joined a pharmaceutical company, had a very steep career there, but after a couple of years I realized that in such a large corporation there's it's incredibly hard to innovate and more complicated and political to navigate the entire setup. It gave me and I'm proud to say this, actually it gave me a lot of skills and a lot of knowledge that I am using even in today's time because I was lucky enough to have an incredible mentor called Michael Devon there back then when I was working in Serbia, because I was stationed in Moscow and Serbia and Hong Kong and Germany, and he was actually the person that taught me how to work Excel tables that I was not before that able to do, thought I was, but in reality didn't have At some point of time, that journey in the pharmaceutical industry took an abrupt end and I became an entrepreneur and went to the one place that no entrepreneur has ever gone in their life before in history Berlin place that no entrepreneur has ever gone in their life before in history Berlin. We did a cool health tech startup where we were able to combine healthcare professionals with people that would come out directly from like harder and more complicated surgeries, so that they would be able to be caregivers to people, and it was actually going quite well. So that they would be able to be caregivers to people and it was actually going quite well.

Nikola: 2:46

But during that time and during my time in the pharmaceutical company, I had a really good friend from my childhood called Yanis Lavmavov, and he was a developer, super cool, chill guy who would always end up coming to wherever I was in the world with a backpack, super relaxed, no stress, working on his laptop, building everything. And at some point of time I was like what do you actually do? He was like I am in blockchain, I build steps, I build wallet extensions, I work on a lot of different things. That's like 2013 or something and, to be honest with you, I had no idea what that means. So that journey continued. He was in Serbia with me. Then he came to Hong Kong and he would always travel the world and I was like, why am I stuck in an office actually working 15, 16, 20 hours a day? And I was just enjoying life. And then he was also the one that actually gave me my first Bitcoin, which I'm incredibly thankful for.

Nikola: 3:43

Very early on, and when I was in Berlin at some point of time, he called me up. He was like hey, listen, whatever you're doing, let's meet up and I can guarantee you're going to drop it afterwards. So we met up. We had a couple of beers told me about the idea of Aeternity and how this would be able to change the world. Unfortunately, it was a couple of too many beers, at least for me. So, honestly speaking, I had some issues remembering the majority, because it was incredibly technical At this stage. I am in blockchain and tech in general because it's a very different skill set, but there was something stuck in it, something about being able to cater to the entire world's transaction volume, being able to have peer-to-peer transactions, and stuff that I have thought about, but not in enough depth. And the next day I called him up and I was like man. In all honesty, I do not remember the majority of things, but a couple of things actually were quite interesting. So let's meet up again, let's leave the beers aside, let's take coffee and tell me again. So we met up. He told me the entire vision of Aeternity, which back then was to be able to provide transactional freedom and scalability to the entire world, then pretty much make Visa look like child's play Back in 2016, I think that is, and that got me incredibly excited, because there were things that you have in your daily life that you are stuck with, that you're accepting, but that there might be a solution to it.

Nikola: 5:16

So I literally went ahead. I dropped the other project, left all the equity and everything. Said farewell to my previous co-founders. They understood because I explained to them what had happened. Project left all the equity and everything. Said farewell to my previous co-founders. They understood because I explained to them what had happened. And then, a very short while later, we were with Aeternity. We co-founded Aeternity, we traveled the world. We were lucky enough to be in a time where blockchain was so hyped around token sales and everything else that we also got funded well through a contribution campaign that was built back in 2000, beginning of 2017, and then we went on the journey to build one of, if not the first, european blockchain unicorn. That I think in 2018, was about 1.25 billion in market capitalization, so top 20 coin market cap. We're on that.

Nikola: 6:15

But that is also the moment when things become incredibly complicated, because you have different skill sets, you have different characters and a lot of things don't go as planned, because it's, honestly speaking, overwhelming when you build a product from an idea stage which is such a large scale, and it turns into a unicorn in a matter of months. It's overwhelming. Where do you find the talent? How do you operate it, how do you market it? How do you compete with the other chains? Because back then it was crazy EOS, cardano, everything was popping up left and right and at some point of time, it just became too much, because we launched one of the first acceleration programs in the blockchain space called Starfleet, which we ran, I think, on four continents.

Nikola: 7:00

It was an incredibly incredible experience, but ultimately, that was the moment when I was like you know what? I should maybe go a little bit more into the venture capital or company building space, because I thought we had done well with Aeternity, honestly speaking. So I did that. I did a fund with the European Union in Bulgaria and amazing partners. We invested in a lot of projects in the early stage space, so it was general funding. I did a lot of investments and advisories on the side with blockchain, because that was my strong suit, still is, and it went on and on until, I think, end of last year, q4, where we got together with my co-founder again and we were like you know what? Things didn't go as planned. I wish, or we wish, we would still be like up there, but unfortunately we were down here. I don't know if this is visible, but the screen is like even lower. So when we got together at the end of last year, like this idea and this urge and this itch actually came up where it was. You know what? Is it actually possible to take a blockchain technology like Aeternity, which I cannot underline this enough.

Nikola: 8:16

Aeternity was written and coded mostly by senior, experienced professionals that previously worked for Sony Ericsson, that invented Erlang, like heavyweights, people that are really good developers with decades of experience, and we were lucky enough to be able to work with those people. So what they created was an industrial-grade blockchain. So everybody who looked at Aeternity and the code and everything was like, wow, why have I not heard about this? So TickSide, solid, absolutely solid.

Nikola: 8:51

And that's when this idea came around. I was like, hey, you know what? Let's see if we can turn this around, because this is something that has not been done before. Nobody has been able to achieve this. We have the opportunity to be the first product that classical was successful, went to pretty much nothing and now could be on the way back. My co-founder got incredibly excited about it and that is when we decided to move things a little bit around. I took over the foundation and pretty much the entire development went into the foundation, the ecosystem, and that is when we started our work. This is also the beginning of why we're at this podcast today. But enough about me.

Joeri: 9:35

Yeah, I know it's really a good story because it's inspiring for people to hear stories that you see how it evolved, so I will remember it, Nikola. So actually, when we were talking at the WebS ummit, you indeed said to me yeah, this has never been done like running a debt chain and then to make the revival. So, yeah, continue your story. I'd love to hear what happens next.

Nikola: 10:00

What happened next was that you're left with so many different puzzle pieces. If you imagine a puzzle and you take it out of the box and then you put them all on the table, that was not the case. Like the puzzle piece were all over the room, hidden under the chair, like behind the fridge, a bunch of the things, absolutely chaotic. So it took really a moment to understand where we are at and what the greater idea would be in order to get back to, let's say, a viable position, and then what would be the next steps in order to continue developing and driving this innovative thing forward. And here is where I was fortunate enough to. When I told the story to my friends, like the other founders of different protocols, they were like you're crazy. My friends, like the other founders of different protocols, they were like you're crazy, change the name, change something else, rebranded, launch it and I'll do it again. But I was like no, like I don't want to do this. This is something that I have personal like connection to. This is also something where I'm connected to this project. I was there from the get-go, like we did this together. I don't want to change the name, change the color or change the name of the call, what a lot of other people have done. It's easy, you know. Like you just change it. Yeah, give it a little bit of a different story, and it is.

Nikola: 11:25

I wanted that people understand that what we built back then, or what the amazing developer team that we were able to or still are able to work with, are building, and then all pieces starting coming together because, again, being fortunate enough to be able to ask other l1 founders what they're doing, how they're doing and what they messed up, what went very well, and to have that exchange of information, was very useful. Because if you have one idea what this would look like, this re-engagement, re-ignition of Aeternity it changed a thousand times in that time. It took a couple of months, but then we figured out what would be needed for an ecosystem to be satisfactory for a community and, in parallel, we had this amazing technology called HyperChains that we had been working on, or that Aeternity had been working on for years, but that was somehow. There were certain things and aspects that made it so complicated to finish the product, at least for 1.0 version. That was just ongoing and ongoing and never saw the light of day. So I was like you know what. It's not enough to actually reignite an entire community around an L1 blockchain. I am also going to find a way how to actually bring this product to light so that together, like around around that, all the basic things that you would need, like a bridge, a dex, um, meme coins, nfts, whatever you can think of, like all those really important things a good dev studio, incredible ease of access for the developers, good documentation remember the puzzle pieces that I mentioned Like getting all that documentation together in one place. It's a hell of a job, to be honest with you. It's incredibly complicated and exhausting, but all those things now, after taking such a long time, I can say with confidence and also I'm happy to be able to say this we got this done in a year, which is incredible.

Nikola: 13:35

And again, being somehow lucky enough to be able to call people and be like listen, guys, I need the best product guy. I need the guy that, without me having to tell him something, he's going to look at me and he's going to understand what I need. I need the best communications person. I need what I need. I need the best communications person. I need the best project. I need the best business and somehow it started forming together. I needed the best foundational admin who would be able to take care of all the legal stuff when it comes to the brands, and all those things fell in place somehow.

Nikola: 14:07

It took a little bit of effort and a little bit of time, but there was a even though you had pressure to be able to deliver, obviously, because if you don't, why are you doing this? But you still had a little bit of the luxury of time to make sure that you find the right people and until this moment, I think I can say that I was able to do this, and the people that I am able to work with in and around the foundation are incredible and just really simple communication. It's very direct and, with this uptrend which is happening now, I can feel the excitement again coming in. Like the community is picking up again. There's questions, there's discussions, the dev side is starting to talk more with the product side, which somehow didn't happen before. So, like, how are you guys now communicating?

Nikola: 14:54

The middleware is also involved somewhere. The SDKs are coming up the testing team. They're like hey, we have something to test now. All those things. Now we're somehow starting to move and this giant engine, if you want to call it like this, and it's starting to fire. There's a lot of misfires, honestly speaking, if I can take that illustration, but now it's starting to fire. There's a lot of misfires, honestly speaking, if I can take that illustration, but now it's starting to move.

Joeri: 16:27

Yeah, the ball is rolling like a snowball. It's hard to get it rolling, but once it starts rolling it will accelerate.

Nikola: 16:33

I wouldn't use the example of a snowball because of other examples, because again one thing I'm incredibly yeah.

Joeri: 16:42

I'm just like I understand what you're meaning. So it's starting to move, but sometimes you need to get started right and it's always difficult to get started moving. And now, once you start moving and you get the team on board, like as an entrepreneur, we are always really positive. But when you have a team, everyone needs to be motivated and see. And now, with the climate, that started to be more positive everywhere you go.

Nikola: 17:06

But it's such a devil's work. How do you motivate people that have been around for so long? It's complicated. There's so many facets to it. There's so many things that you need to think. I but like you need to look into the future thing. Not not saying that I can see the future, but you need to predict certain things and you have to think about multiple thousands of scenarios in order to figure out how different things are going to work together.

Nikola: 17:37

Like it was so important to also have the community's feedback, because I went into it was like what do you want? You are the community, I feedback, because I went into it. It was like what do you want? You are the community. I have a little bit of a tunnel at some point Cause there's just so many things. Some point of time, there were 83 different items on my list, 83 different items and each one of them was big. There was nothing like go and brush your teeth, like each one of those items was actually something big. So that community feedback, that was amazing because reengaging that community and the community building up that trust level again. So you know what something is happening.

Nikola: 18:17

I'm actually going to spend some time on this. I am going to give feedback, I am going to throw in my ideas, I am going to give some pointers and then we can distill this down to the important parts and really take this feedback also into account. This is why, for the last hard fork that we did like I guess it's a community thing the core has worked on that hard for for a very long time. You can vote on it. If you don't vote for it, it's not there. So we went out in the community, went ahead and voted heavily for it, which I'm thankful for, because that would have made things incredibly complicated otherwise.

Nikola: 18:53

Like also that technological potential. You have all those beautiful things like state channels, oracles, discontent mechanism, the naming system that we have, all those things that you're not, we have not been able to showcase yet. So putting that also into products, realizing it and showing what the technology can do, this is something that I'm super excited about and I'm genuinely excited about, and that is something that I really, really I'm happy to say that the foundation has worked on heavily for the last 12, 13 months yeah, yeah, you're working on these top notch things, and I'm also curious about hyperchains, how it is different from the traditional blockchain and the unique value that offers.

Nikola: 19:42

HyperChain is quite interesting. My co-founder came up with the idea where he said why shouldn't you be able to run a blockchain by yourself? Were you independent from anyone else? Again, Aeternity provides the tech stack, Aeternity provides the middleware, dashboards, et cetera, but in this case it would be the Uri chain, for example, or the Nikola chain. It is its own chain that you can run. It's incredibly customizable.

Nikola: 20:12

So, because they, in our opinion, is not a one size fits them all kind of chain, and the coolest thing that we said was that it's going to be scalable enough to be able to compete with any other chain out there. So I think in version 1.2, it's planned to be as scalable as anything out there to be able to make sure that the world's transaction volumes daily would be covered for a product. So this is something that also was hard, because the last test that we're running, because we said that we're going to launch it before Christmas and, if I remember correctly, we're launching it on the 23rd, so a day before Christmas. It was huge, actually. And the last test that we're running, I get calls from one of my dev lab guys They'd be using. I don't know what to do because the scalability that we have with that first version is breaking the testing environment like it's scaling more than we would expect. So I was like, is that a bad thing? Typically that's a good thing. Let's adapt to testing, let's adapt the environments and see where this is going to take us. But coolest thing for me always was that it eliminates the need for L2 scaling solutions, because an L2 ultimately always is dependent on the underlying L1. So if you take I don't know Polygon, polygon now is moving into being its own L1. But if you take the basic assumption of Polygon, which was an L2 for Ethereum, the moment that Ethereum would stop working if there was a congestion or an under-fees or anything else, polygon would actually have severe issues because of this dependency with hyperchains. You don't have that, because what you have is you have pretty much two layer one blockchains that are just communicating with each other.

Nikola: 22:07

So in that example that I mentioned, the Uri chain would be its own chain just proven stake chain, if you want it to be and underneath that you would have, for example, Aeternity, which is a proven work chain. Or you would have Bitcoin as an example, where UriChain would be periodically syncing to make sure that everything is okay with that underlying L1. But what that means on the other side when it comes to security, that somebody is actually has an intent and wants to attack Uri for some reason, they would have to first be able to successfully attack Aeternity or bitcoin or any other l1 that you choose in this case, and good luck with that. So that was really cool and out of that entire discussion, what we had like cost efficiency. You would be able to utilize the entire moving infrastructure of technology. That has not been built last year, but it has been built for almost a decade now and in itself, it still remains its standalone product. It just utilizes the best things about Aeternity and you would be able to. Each hyperchain would be able to then also trade its tokens on the DEX, which then, through bridges, again becomes interoperable with any other chain. But the cool thing that we also figured out was it actually creates an incredibly cool industrial use case, because everybody should be able to spin up their own chain.

Nikola: 23:41

So this includes you and me.

Nikola: 23:43

This includes I'm a woman, dad. This includes also any large corporation, any large enterprise, because one of the biggest issues that you have still in today's time is that there is such a huge misconception and also almost people, like companies, are still I would go as fast as not trusting or almost scared to use a public chain because you're dependent on technology that you have not built or that you cannot control. So with hyperchains, don it's not an issue anymore. You spin up your own chain. You have company XYZ. You spin up company XYZ chain and you decide how big are the staking rewards. Is it pink, is it green? Do you want it to be fast? Do you want it to be slow? Is it open? Is it public? Is it not All those things? It's modular and it's fully customizable. So if you're an enterprise, you don't have that compliance and risk issue anymore because you run that chain in the house, in your own premises, which solves, in my opinion at least, a huge issue that we have not been able to solve from this until this point.

Joeri: 25:01

Wow, yeah, you know, I love how you explain all of that and it feels okay now. This is really the solution. I want my own chain for the next thing coming up, that's what.

Nikola: 25:12

Go ahead and spin up I actually dare you the first version that we're launching. It's a 0.9 version, if you want to call it like this version that we're launching. It's a 0.9 version, if you want to call it like this. And the idea of this is exactly that I we have built something. Those incredible developers have built something that works for them, that has enough merit for them to be able to be their own product, but that does not mean that it's absolutely fully perfect and ready for the world. So I actually in I would love to see everyone spin up a hyper chain, see how it goes.

Nikola: 25:48

Don't put too much value on that version part no, 0.9, it's not for that, and there's going to be explained results for that. Don't be one of the largest companies and spin up your own chain and put I don't know a gazillion dollars into the value of it. Play around with it, test it, see how it actually works and then feel free to feedback us, because all this now bringing it out to the world, we're incredibly and very much relying on that feedback from the first people that are going to be able to spin up their trades, and that is also going to fit the entire core development here, product team and everybody to actually be able to move the product, and then, in the version 1.0, we'll have this beautiful web interface and everything else. Things are going to be looking very different. So again, I am asking everybody to actually spin up a trade. I'm looking forward to see your trade actually.

Joeri: 26:39

That's amazing. So, nikola, if people now they are interested they are listening to this podcast episode and they are interested in doing that how can they reach out to you? Where can they find information?

Nikola: 26:53

There will be releases around the launch of Hyperchains and or they are depending on when this podcast actually launches to the world for this episode actually, but they will be able to find on Aeternity hyperchains. They will be able to find all the information they need. They can come into the telegram, they can come into any kind of channel that we have. The forum, the Aeternity Forum, is actually, in my opinion, still one of the best ways because, number one, you don't have the issue of, for example, telegram, where there's a lot of messages. It's harder to focus on something, but you do have a blog text which you can focus on and which you can actually properly reply to.

Nikola: 27:36

So for me, the forum has always been an incredibly strong attribute and in the daily life of the Aeternity foundation, it's beautiful. So everybody can go there. You'll read everything. There's going to be explainers how to actually do that, because in the 0.9 version still going to be a little bit more deft, so you'll have a command line to work with, simply because the idea is to keep it simple, put a 0.1 version in order to get the feedback, before having that like commercial, if I can call it, like this applicational version.

Joeri: 28:10

Like every time Nikola Derach show notes, there is a blog article linked to this podcast episode. It will be released early 2025. So we will know how the reactions are coming in from people to this podcast episode. It will be released early 2025. So we will know how the reactions are coming in from people. Thank you so much. It was really a real pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, see you guys. What an amazing episode with a lot of value. Be sure to share the episode with other people around you, because I think they will be grateful for that. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. If you haven't given me a review yet, please do that, because it helps me get a deeper, bigger reach. And yeah, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care.