The amazing innovations in prosthetics

Ric Edelman: It's Friday, March 22^nd. On today's show, ultra bright light, incredible new prosthetics, plus a conversation about Uniswap, the digital asset that's bigger than the New York Stock Exchange. Yeah, this could be the start of what some scientists are calling a technological and scientific revolution. This new tech shouldn't be able to work. It violates the laws of particle physics. It's what they call coherent light. It's created by particles that move together instead of independently. This creates incredibly fast, intense pulses that last a couple of attoseconds, and attosecond is a really short period of time. I mean really short. One thousandth of one millionth of one billionth of a second. Imagine these things are a unit of money. It would take one billion of these times one billion of these to equal one penny; we're talking about something really small, or in this case, something that lasts a really, really short period of time.

At first, scientists were building machines that had tunnels miles in length to produce these ultra bright beams of light. The LINAC coherent light source in the US is nearly two miles long, but now they're working on getting it done in a single room. So what is ultra bright light good for? Well, it can make x-rays and radiotherapy treatments really cheap. It can be used to create the most powerful computer chips ever. And for astronomers, it can reach the dense matter of stars and planets, deepening our understanding of the cosmos. How big a deal is this? Well, it won the Nobel prize in physics last year. So stay tuned for a lot more on this one.

Here's another great innovation, prosthetic limbs. Have you ever seen anybody with an artificial hand? Let me ask you this question: Why does that artificial hand have five fingers and one thumb? Wouldn't our hands be so much more useful if each hand had a thumb on both ends? Well, if we're making an artificial limb, why not make one that's better than the human limb?

Let's think outside the box, people. And that's exactly what designers are starting to do. Limbs with tentacles, spikes, third thumbs. Kelly Knox is a British model. On her left arm, there's nothing below the elbow. From there, she wears a device that has structures that are like vertebrae. Together, they form a long tentacle. The limb is incredibly dexterous. She controls it via sensors in her shoes. The artificial tendons can tighten or loosen, they can reach and grasp, with far greater productivity than a human hand can do.

We're talking about something that they're calling embodiment, how the brain identifies with the body. They're trying to persuade the brain that these prosthetics are part of the body rather than being a foreign object. Just think about having two thumbs on each hand. Just imagine what future humans might look like. Maybe you might even opt for an artificial limb, even if you're not lacking a natural one. And if you don't think that you would ever do that, let me just ask you about eyeglasses or eye surgery.

Coming up next, Uniswap. And to help us talk about what that is and why this is a big deal in technological innovation, I’m happy to bring onto the program Ian Lapham, who is the software engineer at Uniswap Labs.

The tiny DeFi platform that’s bigger than the NYSE

Ric Edelman: You're listening to The Truth About Your Future. There's a big conversation this year about Bitcoin, of course, as it has now reached another all-time high, and it is clearly on the way to even greater heights. I'm firmly in the camp that believes that, and I'm not alone in that viewpoint. And while all the attention is on Bitcoin because of the new Bitcoin ETFs, and even Ethereum, where their application’s in front of the SEC to allow Ethereum ETFs, there's another few coins out there that you may not be familiar with, and one in particular that I think is worth of conversation is Uniswap.

And to help us talk about what that is and why this is a big deal in technological innovation. I'm happy to bring onto the program Ian Lapham. He is the software engineer at Uniswap Labs. Ian, welcome to the program. It's great to have you here.

Ian Lapham: Hey, Rick. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk to you today.

Ric Edelman: Ian, you were one of the first people to join Uniswap Labs when it was founded in 2019. You were employee number what?

Ian Lapham: That's correct. I joined the team in 2019. I was employee number three. So when I joined it as a team of four, company Uniswap was founded by Hayden Adams in 2018. It was initially funded off of a grant from an organization called the Ethereum Foundation. So it started out much more like an experiment. But after some early success, Hayden raised some funds and hired engineers and designers, and we started building on what is Uniswap today.

Ric Edelman: And how many employees are there today?

Ian Lapham: So today at Uniswap, we have over a hundred employees. So it's much larger than it was in 2019.

Ric Edelman: So, okay. You started in 2019. There were four of you. Now there's over a hundred of you. Okay. That's impressive, but let's face it: That's still a small company. Why should anybody really pay a whole lot of attention to this? Well, you sound like a, you know, any successful small business, but small it still is, or at least it would appear based on the number of employees. But there are some other metrics that tell a very different story. So give us some of the other statistics regarding Uniswap.  

Ian Lapham: Yeah. So you're actually touching on one of the interesting things that I find interesting about crypto is that small teams with crypto and blockchain technology can make a huge impact.

So the ratio of what you can accomplish based on a team size, I think is very impressive in crypto compared to maybe traditional finance or other, even other areas of tech. So I think maybe the first thing you can look at is all time volume traded on the Uniswap protocol. We’ve reached over $2 trillion traded all time on the Uniswap protocol. If you look at the monthly stats right now, the Uniswap protocol is seeing tens of billions of dollars. The interfaces that Labs runs, so that's our website and our mobile app you can download on your phone, combined we're seeing billions of dollars a month traded in volume across those surfaces. And if you zoom out a little bit and think about DeFi as a whole, so Uniswap being just one of the protocols that makes up DeFi decentralized finance, there's even more money that's being transacted and the usage numbers are pretty impressive. There are millions of people using these things every day. So a lot of these teams are still startups, they're small, but millions of people are using this and there's a lot of value flowing through these on-chain protocols.

Ric Edelman: So talk about what it is that all of these people are doing with all of this money flowing through this platform.

Ian Lapham: I think one thing that we can talk about first is just DeFi in general. I'm referring to decentralized finance, but that really just is an umbrella term means all of the finance related services that are powered by blockchains. So in the work that I do, a lot of it's related to the Ethereum blockchain, but there are other people doing things with Bitcoin. There's different blockchains that are also popular. And DeFi is the umbrella term for all the different protocols that exist. And people are doing a bunch of different things. People speculating on assets, making trades. Advanced lending markets, borrowing markets, perpetual futures, ways to go long and short assets. And there's a lot of other things too, like DAOs, governance, NFTs.

Rid Edelman: You mentioned DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations. And you mentioned NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and the umbrella for all of these are DeFi, decentralized finance. So a lot of folks don't really understand this; explain the difference between decentralized finance and the more traditional centralized finance that everybody is familiar with, even though they don't know it.

Ian Lapham: Exactly. So I think that's the first thing to look at when you're starting to learn about crypto and what Web3 is. What is the difference between these two worlds? So we refer to it as traditional finance, and that is just the suite of institutions, services, organizations that you interact with in your financial lives today. So that's banks, brokers, lenders, that whole world of finance that you're probably familiar with, that is traditional finance. And DeFi, everything is just code that's executed on a blockchain. So the main difference is that instead of interacting with institutions, middlemen, third parties, or counterparties like you would in traditional finance, when you're using DeFi, you're interacting with code on the blockchain. So there's no middlemen, everything that you're doing is software program that's running on the blockchain that is accomplishing similar things. So if you want a specific example of a service that exists in both traditional and decentralized finance, you can think of exchanges. So, Uniswap is an automated market maker, which means that you can swap assets on chain. I can go from token A to token B on chain. In traditional finance, you'd probably use an exchange like Coinbase, or if you're trading equities, you could think about the New York Stock Exchange. And those typically operate with an order book model where you have orders being matched on a blind sale. So there's a lot of similarities between what you do in CeFi and DeFi. They're just implemented in a little bit of a different way.

Ric Edelman: So for example, the way that we do things in the CeFi world, the centralized finance, centralized, meaning there's a central company. There's a central organization that handles the transactions. So if I want to buy shares of IBM stock, for example, I place an order with my broker or financial advisor. They place the order with the trading desk, which executes the trade at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, which is where IBM shares trade. So, if I'm buying shares of IBM, obviously I'm buying them from somebody who owns them, who is selling. So if I'm buying a hundred shares, on the other side of the trade is somebody selling a hundred shares. And the broker and the brokerage firm and the stock exchange, they're facilitating the exchange of the stocks between buyers and sellers. You have these intermediaries, these middlemen who are in between me, the buyer and the other guy, who's the seller. So these intermediaries, all charge fees for their services. So there are delays in getting the transaction done. For example, under securities laws, that's called T Plus Two, trade plus two days of settlement. So if I buy my shares of IBM today, I don't get my shares for two more days. Because it takes T Plus Two for the trade to settle. And in the interim, the brokerage firm, the custodian, the exchange are all collecting fees on the transaction. You have similar situations for mortgage lending. If I want to get a mortgage, I've got to deal with a mortgage broker who's assisting me between me and the lender. If I'm engaging in any kind of a financial transaction, there are intermediaries that are middlemen. And this explains why the New York Stock Exchange has thousands of employees doing its hundreds of billions of dollars of trading on an annual basis. You guys being decentralized, meaning there is no central function associated with this. There's no company controlling it. You're simply facilitating this through technology that allows the buyer and the seller to interact directly peer to peer. There's no intermediary in between us. And that means that I can deal with the other party instantaneously without the expenses or the delay associated with a CeFi. And so the trading volume you've mentioned and the number of people engaging in it, frankly, dwarfs the New York Stock Exchange. You're bigger and you're faster and you're cheaper than the New York Stock Exchange.

Ian Lapham: Yeah. So that's a good description of it. And that is the key thing to understand is that when you're interacting with DeFi and you want to perform some transaction, when you send that transaction from your crypto wallet, it's settled instantaneously and transparently, because you aren't engaging in this multiparty conversation. It's just you and the code that you're interacting with.

Ric Edelman: And I think a lot of folks don't realize that the whole point to blockchain technology, the invention of Bitcoin and later Ethereum and ultimately Uniswap and other coins is that Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented this blockchain technology, was trying to create a decentralized environment, a way for buyers and sellers to participate together without an intermediary. Coinbase is the largest crypto exchange in the United States, publicly traded. And everybody assumes that since Coinbase trades only crypto, you can't buy IBM stock at Coinbase, you can only buy digital assets, crypto, you know, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Uniswap, et cetera. Everybody assumes that Coinbase is one of those blockchain companies. It's one of those DeFi companies. It's not. Coinbase is more akin to the New York Stock Exchange and Merrill Lynch because Coinbase is a company. It's got a specific location. It has traders. It has thousands of employees, and it's a publicly traded company. That is a totally different environment than CeFi. By you using the code and allowing that technology to facilitate the trading between buyers and sellers, you create market efficiencies, cost savings, and increases in speed and transaction capability that the CeFi platforms simply can't match.

Ian Lapham: Yeah, I think it's true in some ways that crypto, when you zoom out, is a totally new way of performing these types of actions. And self-custody is a very powerful thing. And when I say self-custody, you can think of crypto wallets as having a bank in your pocket. So when you get a crypto wallet on your phone or on your desktop browser, you are truly owning the assets that you have on chain. You're the one who custodies them. No one else can access them. And you can interact with the world of DeFi without using middlemen. So it's really empowering for individuals to have crypto wallets and to be able to access DeFi because they can use all these new services and throughout that entire time, they are the ones in control of their assets. And it's a new paradigm for doing things. Like if you think about just your bank now and all the different services you interact with, you rely on a lot of third parties and institutions to do the things you want to do, but with self-custody, it's a brand-new model. That being said, I do think there is a future overlap between big institutions, traditional finance and blockchains. I think it'll take some time. There's a lot of things to work through, but I think institutions are coming around to the benefits of tokenization. So, it was in the news a lot the other week, but Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock mentioned that he personally believes that real world assets will be tokenized in the future. So things like, real estate, you mentioned earlier, government bonds, different forms of government debt, all these traditional forms of financial assets can be tokenized and there are some benefits to doing that. So we'll see how it plays out. In the long run, I think there will be some overlap and there's just, there's some challenges in the way of the way we build these things, how we build them in the correct way that works.

Ric Edelman: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. JP Morgan invented the Onyx blockchain and they are doing cross border settlements, $2 billion a day for their institutional clients. So that's a perfect example of how CeFi company adopting DeFi technology for the benefit of its customers. And I think we're going to continue to see more and more of this. Clearly we're going to need more regulation and legislation. We're going to need clarity for the protection of investors and consumers and the safety of the global financial system. We want to make sure that these systems are safe from hackers, that there is fairness, that there is disclosure. And so we're going to need to create the rules of the road, because the technology is ahead of the regs right now. We haven't had any legislation on this subject yet. And clearly everybody recognizes that we're going to need it. Just like when Henry Ford started, you know, pushing out model T's out of the factory, there weren't speed limits anywhere in the country, let alone stop signs and traffic signals, or you drive on the right, so you don't crash into me on the left. We're going to have to create the rules of the road for crypto, because this technology is simply too powerful. It offers too many benefits. And the speed with which you're developing it is pretty amazing, to have gone from nothing in 2009 to a cumulative $2 trillion worth of transactions, six years, five years later is really pretty astonishing. Along the way, Uniswap has a digital coin to facilitate these transactions called, Unicoin.

Ian Lapham: This token governs the Uniswap protocol. Community members can vote on proposals using Uni. But I think a clear thing to understand is that the company I work for, Uniswap Labs, does not participate in this governance. It's actually run by the decentralized global community, that is the Uniswap DAO. Governance is completely decentralized. Proposals and activities that drive initiatives are decided by this more broad global community. And if we look back at the timeline of it, the token actually didn't exist when Uniswap was first created, governance was introduced along the way. And it's morphed and matured over the years. The Uniswap foundation is an organization that helps steward and move forward. I just want to make the distinction that Uniswap labs company I worked for, you know, we're focused on building products and services for people to access DeFi and Uniswap protocol and governance is a larger thing.

Ric Edelman: What are the challenges? What do you face next?

Ian Lapham: So there's a lot of challenges in crypto. The biggest thing in my opinion is ease of use. For retail users, it's still very difficult. I think you've probably heard stories of people losing their seed praise or losing millions of dollars or getting hacked and those things do happen. So at the end of the day, we need to make this easier. We need to make it, the time from getting sent a link to start using crypto to being able to do it, less than five minutes. Like you need to be able to create accounts. You need to be able to use iCloud and all the things you're used to for saving passwords. And then you need to do it in a way that, that kind of mirrors Web2, like the old way of using apps. So ease of use is a big one. I think another thing is use cases. I think for some people, crypto is great right now. Speculation is a big use case. Lending, borrowing, even just store of wealth. But I think for some people, that may be not super interested in investing, there's not a lot that's appealing to them about crypto. But as someone who works in crypto, I can say that there are a lot of use cases that are being worked on. A lot of things with social media, consumer goods, and so many more things, NFTs, that are going to be interesting to a lot of people. So when we can make this easier to use, safer to use and more interesting to use, we'll see the growth, and we're making huge progress in every single one of those areas every day.

Ric Edelman: What do you think is the timeline for, I'll say mass adoption where, back in the day, nobody had an iPhone and then it took X amount of time for everybody to have one. Where do you think we are on the timeline of DeFi and the use cases you're describing where it's commonplace for people to have Uniswap or something like it?

Ian Lapham: So it's always hard to make predictions like this, but I think my general feeling is that within the next five years, it'll be a very, very normal thing to have a crypto wallet. And again, it's hard to make these predictions, but every day with the advancements we're seeing in the technology, the wallets are getting more secure, easier to use. It'll feel like logging in with your email. People are starting to learn what crypto is, and they're not getting hacked. So I do think we're in that medium term timeline when having a crypto self-custody wallet on your phone is something that most people will have. And then I think the other side of this is looking at institutional adoption. For me, it's a bit less related to the work that I do, but you're already seeing institutions getting involved today. And again, I think it's a similar timeline when in five years, we'll look back and say that was probably obvious. And I think at least exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum will be much more accepted in the realms of finance. Even today, it's a pretty normal thing to have exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I think it'll be the same way, but a lot larger within the next three to five years.

Ric Edelman: So talk about it from a consumer perspective or investor perspective. If somebody wanted to engage with DeFi, how do they do that?

Ian Lapham: DeFi is definitely a scary thing to a lot of people. And so is crypto in general. So I think the first one is understand the basics. If you don't really know what Bitcoin is yet or Ethereum, definitely look that up. There's so much content out today and your podcast and so many other good resources, you can learn that very quickly. Once you get over that initial chunk of education, there's a couple of things you can do. One, I'm biased, but I think the Uniswap app is a good way to start. It's a good introduction to the ecosystem of DeFi. So it's an app you can get on your phone that we've released last year. We just announced our browser extension. So that's another thing you can download that'll look and feel a lot like the app on your phone. And when you download this app, you can start to fund it with money, and then you can purchase tokens on Ethereum and different networks. You can send them to people, you know, you can browse assets. You can look at other people's wallets. You can do a bunch of different things and we've made it in a way that is user friendly and we believe it's easy to understand. There's plenty of other wallets too, as well. Coinbase has their own wallet, so you could get set up with Coinbase and their wallet. But I think just downloading one of these apps, and starting to poke around and learn how they work is a good way to get started. And I think one thing to realize is that, these apps are secure and they're made in a very good way. The quality of the engineering is at a really high tier right now. So, don't be scared, download them and try them out and just see what interests you.

Ric Edelman: And there's no cost to downloading the app?

Ian Lapham: That's correct. All these apps are free. And then from there, you can listen to podcasts, do research online to get into the world of DeFi. And you'll start learning about other tokens that you might find interesting, other projects that are doing cool things. And, you'll be able to engage with them and use them. So yeah, these apps are free to download. They're easy to get profiles set up. And then from there you can just learn more and start using this stuff.

Ric Edelman: So go back for me... personally, Ian, when did you first learn about crypto and blockchain technology and what made you interested in it?

Ian Lapham: Yeah. So I've been doing this now for over almost eight years. I was probably 21. I remember the first thing that interested me was Ethereum. You can write software programs that can be used on Ethereum, whereas Bitcoin is just a token. So for me, someone with a background in engineering and computer science, that was really interesting to me, that anyone could write these pieces of software and deploy them and then have them be accessible by the entire world. And back then, DeFi didn't really exist. Uniswap didn't exist. There wasn't a lot you could do on chain, but I just fell in love with it. I thought the technology was just so interesting. And also the culture in the community is just a lot of smart people that were trying to make a good impact on the world. And they were really trying to reimagine what finance and ownership looked like. And I just, I thought that was so interesting.

Ric Edelman: And you've been with Uniswap ever since. And any plans, aspirations?

Ian Lapham: People ask me that a lot. There's so much more to do. There's so many things that we're working on at Uniswap right now. In the last week, we've announced two new products, our browser extension, and a feature where you can do limit orders, which people have been waiting for forever. But there's a lot of other things that we're working on. And, I think Uniswap is one of the best teams in crypto and I love working with my team. And I think the plan is just to keep going. We're going to make it easier for people to use this stuff. More safe, more secure, and more fun.

Ric Edelman: What would you recommend to others who are interested in a career in crypto?

Ian Lapham: The beauty of getting interested in this now is that there's such a range of different skills that can be used within crypto. I'd say ten or eight years ago, you probably would have needed a background in either finance or engineering because that was the bulk of the work was a lot of building out protocols, engineering on new ways to do things; but now crypto has turned into a booming industry and there are thousands of companies with real users in a very similar way to Web2. So the same types of employees that you'd need at a Facebook or a Shopify or these big tech companies, you'll need them at crypto companies. So, you know, if you have backgrounds in communications or marketing, you can now apply that to these companies that have customers, design, and the big ones are obviously engineering. You know, there's a lot of software being written, so software is a big one. And I think maybe the last thing is a lot of the best workers I've seen in crypto have come from the world of traditional finance. They've taken what they've learned and they're applying it to this new field. I have coworkers from the Fed, I have coworkers from investment banks, all types of firms. So. I think just have an open mind, if you're smart and you're interested in this stuff, there's probably work that you can do.

Ric Edelman: That's Ian Lapham, who is software engineer at Uniswap Labs. And we've got a link to their website and the new products that they have made available, worthy of your taking a look at that as you journey down the rabbit hole into crypto and decentralized finance, DeFi. Ian, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Ian Lapham: Thanks All right. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

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