Hugh Karp joins this episode to discuss onchain insurance, protecting Defi against hacks and what it means for the insurance companies of the future.

About this episode

Hugh Karp joins this episode to discuss onchain insurance, protecting Defi against hacks and what it means for the insurance companies of the future.

Hugh Karp is the Founder of Nexus Mutual, an automated discretionary mutual running on Ethereum. He is an insurance professional and actuary with over 15 years of experience in the insurance industry. He has held a variety of roles in both primary and reinsurance companies including as CFO for a global reinsurers’ Life operations in the UK.

Hugh's Links

Linkedin | Twitter | Medium

Nexus Mutual

Where to find the show

iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | Youtube | RSS Feed

What to listen forWhy insurance is one of the massive verticals in the real-world financial economy and why it is now being built on-chain in the DeFi economy.Why insurance came about as a community method of sharing risk between people.How their decentralized protocol prices risk on-chain and how they developed their crypto risk pricing framework.What the recent bZx hack and Black Thursday taught Nexus about their smart contract cover and why they need to look at creating complete coverage to meet the needs of the evolving DeFi space.Why Nexus can provide any insurance product on-chain so long as its members vote on it and the staking around the risks being covered.Why Hugh thinks their risk pricing framework could be applied to exotic products like digital art or tokenized assets in the future.As a huge privacy proponent, Hugh is worried about going too far too fast in the pursuit of privacy in DeFi and the perceived political risk to the ecosystem from regulatory/political clampdown as a result.Why Hugh loves experimentation, but maybe we should do this without putting massive amounts of funds at risk.Why sometimes we are running before we can walk in DeFi.SUPPORT THE SHOW

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Hello and welcome to the end of the chain. I am your host Samuel McCulloch in this episode. I’m joined by Hugh Karp from Nexus Mutual. We jump right into discussing the interactions of on-chain insurance and also the evolution of how the industry has been growing, especially after the multitude of hacks that have happened over the past few months. If you haven’t already, make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to it and to follow me on twitter, so that wraps everything up, let’s hop into the episode now:

Samuel: [00:00:45] Hugh, welcome, you are the founder of Nexus Mutual, an on-chain insurance protocol for Ethereum, which I think people took less seriously a couple of months ago before the bZx hacks and before the attack on Maker  How would you say that insurance has changed in the Ethereum landscape in late 2019/2020?

Hugh: [00:01:15] Yeah.  I think insurance is one of these massive verticals of the financial ecosystem that kind of needs to be built. I think if we’re building a parallel financial ecosystem or just a parallel economy on Ethereum, then it needs to happen. I guess it’s also a lot more complex to build than some other financial products, so it does make sense that it comes a bit later than some of the other stuff. We were the kind of one of the first main ones to get out there, covering crypto-native risks if you want to call it that. There’ve been a few other kinds of alternative approaches coming out more recently. We are definitely still at the experimental stage, but, everyone’s got to start somewhere and, you know, we’re starting small, and I guess hoping to grow and hoping to protect people getting involved in this new economy.

Samuel: [00:02:09] But why does it need to be on-chain? I mean, what are the reasons for it needing to be trustless and decentralized when most insurance has underwriters, and it’s done through a per-claim basis?

Hugh: [00:02:22] Yeah, the main benefits of actually doing this on-chain, they kind of come back to why you actually regulate insurance companies in the first place. I mean, the crux of why you regulate insurance companies is because in essence, they’re looking after customers’ money on their behalf, and then at some point, they will pay it back as claims. They take fees along the way to, you know, to pay expenses and profit, etc. but essentially they have to do the right things by that money and protect it. Invest that appropriately, you know, make sure it’s there to meet those potential liabilities. So you have all of these controls, laws and regulations around why and how you should do that.

The other main reason why you’d want to regulate insurance companies is to ensure this kind of asymmetry of information between the customer and the insurance company. That’s kind of basically done through reporting, financial accounts and that type of stuff.  This means you can be confident that they hold the money and are well-capitalized.  Those two things are actually done really well on-chain. If you can specify the rules about how the money can be used and it can only be used in these circumstances, then you’ve effectively taken away that agency risk that is the primary reason for regulating. Then the second reason is about transparency, about how much money is there.  That it is all there and open which is by definition on Ethereum, that is the reason for the regulation; it’s just dealing with it in a different way.

[00:03:50]That means it can all flow back to benefit the people who were buying, cover insurance and they can benefit from it. When it comes down to it, the insurance came from community-based methods where people got together and shared risk together.  Then it morphed into shareholder-based companies because, that was a more effective way of getting capital to the customers, connecting the capital to the risk that people wanted. Butt now we can cut out that entire value chain and connect the people and the capital together in a one really easy way.  In theory, this allows us to do non-custodial ways of holding funds and defining those particular rules. To me, it fits very naturally with a decentralized framework, and it can strip out massive costs compared to the regular insurance industry, and it can hand those kinds of benefits back to the people involved in the protocol.

[00:04:47]Obviously we’re really small and all the rest of it. The insurance vertical in the regular financial world is huge, but we have to start somewhere and, I think it’s a really natural fit for a decentralized network.

Samuel: [00:05:00] What was the name of a group of people that would get together and implement insurance for retirement? A tontine.

Hugh: [00:05:15] A Tontine, it is like a type of life insurance or the opposite of life insurance in some ways. Basically, in the extreme version of the tontine, which you’ve may have seen on the Simpsons where the last surviving person receives the whole pot of money. Everyone puts in an equal amount of money, and then the last person gets it.  Apart from the obvious social issues about incentivizing murder or something like that, if you can actually work around those things, this is actually a very useful financial construct. I think they abandoned it in a few places, but they’re actually useful in particular for managing longevity risk or paying pension liabilities and those types of things, even though they’re not widely used anymore.

Samuel: [00:05:59] How do you do pricing for these on-chain assets? The risk of a certain event happening is typically decided by underwriters, by insurance companies. How does it actually get done with a decentralized protocol or through Nexus Mutual?

Hugh: [00:06:21] The way underwriting and pricing work in the regular financial world is you have a combination of these underwriters with specific risk knowledge, and also actuarial tables based on historical data and those types of things. Right now, especially with the crypto risks where I’m covering the risk of smart contracts failing as an example, then you don’t necessarily have enough data to construct that. The way we’ve got around that problem is constructing a staking mechanism, and it works in a similar fashion to a prediction market where the more you stake on a particular risk, the lower the price. Ours is more structured than a prediction market as it has some other factors and frameworks in it as well, but essentially it is like a prediction with built-in staking on the risk to lower the price.

Samuel: [00:07:03] How has the response been to some of the bigger events that have happened? I guess the two that I mentioned before the bZx attack. It was not really even a hack, there was just too much congestion within the market at that moment, and people couldn’t get their transactions through. Somebody took advantage of that and made little bits for these liquidated CDPs.

Hugh: [00:07:44] Our product that Nexus offers right now is called smart contract cover. It covers the risk of smart contracts failing. It came from events like DAO hack or the Parody multisig quality issues which we observed actually happening. This is a risk, but in theory, it needs to be dealt with if it’s going to be successful.

I think the first BCX hack is actually a good example because it was a complicated transaction with a flash loan and a whole bunch of different protocols. Quite a lot going on. It took a while for people to realize that. The initial reaction was that it was an oracle manipulation that you change the price on UniSwap, and then you take money out, et cetera. That’s what we initially thought it was kind of a large part of what the transaction is doing, but it also turned out that there was a check in the bZx smart contracts that were intended to be triggered that would prevent an under-collateralized position, but it was bypassed and as part of that the flash loan transaction. Our community members and people voted on the claims, and we agreed to pay out the claims related to bZx hack.

That was a really good test to have a system. It proved it pays claims. It was really quite an important moment for us then I guess. A few weeks ago with the black Thursday events with Maker as you described that that was more outside of the smart contracts cover with congestion and a few other bits and pieces kind of coming together which meant that some people got fully liquidated, even though the smart contracts did operate as designed and intended.

I think there was quite a lot of discussion on discord because claims got submitted to Nexus. They were all declined because it didn’t meet the definition of what we were doing.  I think we’ve got some good learnings from that, to be honest. We started with a narrow product because it was our first attempt at things. My opinion is that the claims should have been declined because they were outside the terms; however, it’s not necessarily where we want to get to. There are a lot of risk people are taking on interacting with DeFi. We want to provide complete coverage so they can feel safe with that type of thing. We’re definitely looking at ways to expand the coverage and change the terms so a wider variety of things can be covered in the future. It’s a bit more tricky, but we’re definitely looking at doing that.

Samuel: [00:10:11]  Especially with all of these, DeFi is nascent, right? It’s only four years old now with 65 projects came out in 2016, found establishment in 2019 with the launch of most of the interest-bearing contracts. I think is what got most of the interest, but there’s a bunch of other projects which have released over the past 18 months, a lot of those contracts (I mean this is what Nexus is designed for) may have critical issues which could cost a growing amount of money that the amount of money locked in DeFi is recovering, but at the same time, there are still risks. I remember even before the BZX hack, they had come out and talked about the emergency shutdown with Major, where someone with enough of MKR could come along and trigger an emergency shutdown and drain the Ether that was in or was being used as collateral for the major contract. Do these problems ever go away, do you think? Or is it just the longevity of the contracts that play out and then in addition to that you have insurance protocols like Nexus that support any losses?

Hugh: [00:11:40] I mean that’s the way I view it. These are new systems, but also they’re also complicated systems. They are system with many moving parts, and, you know, we were getting better at coding more securely, but we still have issues, so several years in after tooling has improved massively. Now we’re looking at economic attacks and, you know, flash loans didn’t actually change the potential attacks, it just made some of them a lot easier to access. We have a lot of people working on governance type stuff, so there will be covenant attacks and network congestion that no one ever really thought about. It’s kind of like when things go bad, multiple things tend to go bad at the same time, and it’s really hard to think about all those potential scenarios when you’re designing a system, and you only get to learn about them through experience.

When it comes down to it, there’s kind of marginal benefit of testing and analyzing absolutely every combination of everything you can think of, and you may even miss stuff cause you just don’t know what it is, and that’s kind of where insurance comes in. It helps when the marginal benefit is just not worth it and, to me, if there’s always going to be some use for it, just like there is in the regular world. I mean, you don’t really do anything in the regular world without insurance, even for example airline safety, right? It’s one of the most secure things that a lot of people are looking at it and all the rest of it, and everyone does what they can, but, you know, planes still do have issues. I kind of consider it to be a similar situation to that.

Samuel: [00:13:13] insurance, it varies by industry and by the ability of the insurance companies to create a cartel essentially to control prices for the insurance. Do you think that can happen on Ethereum where a group of insurance providers could dictate or create a monopoly on providing insurance? I know that any smart contract can be replicated and that the idea of providing insurance could also be replicated, but if there’s enough liquidity that’s funnelled into certain companies such as yours, right? Let’s say that you gain significant market share and really could dictate prices at that point. Is there a potential threat of monopolization cartelization that we should be looking out for?

Hugh: [00:14:08] Potentially, I mean, I’m not quite sure actually how much that happens in the regular insurance world. In any big enough market, we’ll have a few big players that you’re going to get some competitiveness, and you know the same thing’s going to happen here. I think one of the benefits with what we’re doing is that everything is completely out in the open and transparent. Any behaviour like that will become quite obvious rather than hidden away for a while, and people can’t necessarily connect the dots.

Samuel: [00:14:42] I guess the answer would be that in a non-regulated industry, right, because you guys are not regulated.

Hugh: [00:14:51] Yeah, that’s correct. We not regulate.

Samuel: [00:14:53] Okay. Exactly so in a non-regulated industry, there are no barriers to competition for other people entering the market, so for health insurance, for example, it’s a highly regulated noncompetitive market where you have a bunch of big players who are able to use their size and ability to navigate the legal system and the obtuse regulatory system that exists to ensure that they can maintain their margins. Right. But in a competitive environment where anyone can take a smart contract or a design out their own type of insurance protocol, the margins really shouldn’t be quite competitive, and they shouldn’t be healthy, I guess, in that people could really drive down the cost of providing insurance to these on-chain protocols or smart contracts.

Hugh: [00:15:52] I totally agree. It’s going to come down because everything’s completely open, transparent, low barriers to entry. It’s going to come down to things like, liquidity, how much capital you have. Things that a bit harder to kind of just copy-paste ’em or fork. It’s definitely gonna be much more competitive in the future than regulated industries.

Samuel: [00:16:16] Can you bridge the gap? Are you guys planning to bridge the gap between being a non-regulated purely on-chain company and maybe a hybrid on-chain/off-chain insurance provider?

Hugh: [00:16:29] We’re kind of a hybrid right now, to be honest. Nexus is actually a company in the UK. When you join the Dow or the Mutual, you actually become a member of a UK company. It’s what’s called a discretionary mutual, so it doesn’t actually provide the contractor insurance. It provides discretionary cover and so that’s a specific setup in the UK and a few other jurisdictions that allow you to provide coverage on a non-regulated basis. So it exists right now in a non-blockchain world, and it works, and people benefit from it. We’re using something that’s known and exists.

I think more to your point is, does it make sense to do a hybrid in the regulated industry? It’s a good question. I think there are massive benefits of not. I think the principles of what we’re trying to do actually deal with the reasons you regulate in a different way going back to what I was talking about at the start, so I don’t necessarily think there’s a massive consumer issue by doing it this way. We should be much more competitive. One of the challenges with insurance regulation is that it is regulated in every jurisdiction in a different way, and you need a license in every state in the US. That is in a lot of conflict with something that’s supposed to be open and borderless, and allow anyone to join. Those two things don’t fit well together. The things that the insurance industry can obviously bring, in if you can manage to get them in somehow, is obviously a lot of existing capital, which is needed to provide more coverage to more people. I am not saying no to anything right now, but ideally, you keep this fully on-chain.

Samuel: [00:18:12] Yeah. No, I mean it would make more sense, especially, but I’m wondering about once hybridized assets come on that have both an on-chain token and then an off-chain counterpart, how that would be covered through insurance. Can you provide some sort of hybrid insurance both to token holders and then the asset holder at the same time, or would that need to be done through two different companies?

Hugh: [00:18:42] You can provide any product in an on-chain world. As long as you can get the member, like in our model, the members of the mutual vote on claims essentially, there’s a staking process and, and the terms and conditions of what’s covered and what’s not are actually a PDF document, it’s just two pages long. They interpret them based on the information that they have to hand as long as that process works for whatever risk you’re talking about, you can cover anything. I can see that there would be challenges working out if any particular individual has gone into hospital for health insurance or something like that cause that’s very localized specific knowledge, but there are a whole bunch of other products that you can do that don’t actually require that localized specific knowledge that is a bit more general or the information’s readily available in the public domain, and then you can construct products around those quite easily, and that can bridge into the real work or, you know, the non-blockchain world quite easily.

Samuel: [00:19:41] Interesting. How do you think it evolves from here over the next couple of years?

Hugh: [00:19:46] I think the crypto-native space is definitely where our home is for the next couple of years. I just see risks everywhere. We’re doing a whole bunch of new stuff. Everyone’s experimenting with everything, and the new risks are popping up all over the place.  Most people are, in the space now. You know, generally happily gambling a little bit, but if we were to attract the kind of next wave of users, they’re going to want more safety nets in place, and hopefully, we’re kind of part of that.

But also the regular insurance industry doesn’t provide much cover if very limited cover for crypto businesses or risks right now, and it’s very hard to get standard cover, even just normal insurance for a business that operates in the crypto sphere. It’s very hard to get cover, for no particular additional reason, just because they don’t really understand what’s going on. There’s a bit of a niche there for us to be able to grow into and get some scale. Once that happens, then you have a bit more choice about what you do next, and what kind of products you offer. You can start with a whole bunch of different things, but you could, once you’ve got some scale, you can start getting into the more usual products that people are used to.

Samuel: [00:21:00] What about (insurance) for exotic products like on-chain digital art or other things which may have a stranger means of pricing?

Hugh: [00:21:14] Yeah, to be honest, that’s probably the type of thing that I’d be really interesting to us. The pricing approach that we have is very flexible in that it can be applied to a whole bunch of different risks, especially ones without any data, but ones where there’s like a community of people that understand it, that can bring that knowledge to bear and through the staking process kind of discover the price, and those niche communities where they have something that needs to be covered that they just can’t get covered elsewhere, that’s where a mutual does work really well. Especially if that’s crypto-related, then that’s definitely something to be looking at. I personally have no real knowledge of that type stuff, but that’s the type of product that’s really fascinating that we could be offering.

Samuel: [00:22:00] Yeah. I mean that’s probably the case. It helps if it’s fully on-chain.

Hugh: [00:22:06] Yeah, exactly. Then you can verify if something happens, and you can verify that there’s a claim payment due. So, those are two things that are really helpful.

Samuel: [00:22:20] Is there any need for you guys to branch away from Ethereum onto somewhere else? Do you think that you’ll continue to stay here?

Hugh: [00:22:32] We will continue to stay here. There were a couple of reasons why we built on Ethereum, but it was the only real choice when we started building.

Samuel: [00:22:41] Yeah. For DeFi, it’s still really the only choice to be anywhere. You can’t really go anywhere else and get the same services that you’re getting on Ethereum.

Hugh: [00:22:52] Yeah, exactly. I think one interesting thing is that we can cover smart contracts risks on any crypto-chain from Ethereum so basically everything can run on Ethereum, but the claims look at the email chain or the Pocono powertrain or whatever it is, and if something happens there, they can use that to report back essentially, because we have people that bridge the information across (chains).

Samuel: [00:23:21] Right, right. Okay. I mean, that’s pretty cool. I guess you can continue to rely on Ethereum. I don’t think DeFi really works or will work anywhere else. There’s no liquidity, and DeFi needs liquidity to exist if you’re going to have these synthetic dollar debt protocols and then all the cool stuff built on top of it, you need to have liquidity backing it, and if the money isn’t there, then there’s not really going to be a DeFi ecosystem. My prevailing thoughts for the next decade is that unless Ethereum loses its top spot for providing smart contract-based transactions, then it will continue to be the only place where DeFi really exists in a usable and workable form.

Hugh: [00:24:16] Yeah, I totally agree with that. It’s obviously still really early days, but I think it is up to Ethereum to lose it rather than anything else.  If it keeps sucking in assets, like stable coins and soon to be BTC, in whatever form, then it becomes where the liquidity is, as you said, and that’s where the capital is, and you need that. Once you have all the interoperability, devs love putting stuff together, and when they have more things to be able to put together, there are more options and it kind of builds on each other. It’s a fantastic playground right now, and that’s being used to its advantage.

Samuel: [00:24:56] I agree with you. It is a playground, and there’s nowhere else or no other blockchain that has this playground. While Bitcoin may have its liquidity, I saw a chart about how the transaction value on Ethereum has surpassed Bitcoin this month, and more value is being transacted on the Ethereum blockchain because all of the stable coins are in theory now, mainly Tether and USBC.  I think the most incredible stat that I’ve seen in a while.

Hugh: [00:25:38] Yeah, I mean, it’s the usage. It’s actually being used for something really useful, and it’s not just a bunch of gamblers gambling with each other. There’s actually kind of real usage behind this stuff, and to me, that’s just going to keep going. I mean, especially when I think I’m getting Bitcoin on Ethereum in whatever form, I don’t know what the most trustless way of doing it is, but someone else will work it out. To me, that’s massive social liquidity that can enable a whole bunch of other things.

Samuel: [00:26:11] Sure, but nobody’s going to build it on Bitcoin, or at least if they do build it, it’s going to take twice as long to build as they would on Ethereum.

Hugh: [00:26:23] Oh, yeah, for sure. I’m talking about like TBTC or whatever, so like a tokenized representation of a Bitcoin on Ethereum, and then all of a sudden you’ve got something like atomic loans or something where you can effectively you don’t port the BTC across, but you can take out a loan on Ethereum. It’s just massive. As you said before, it just massively increases liquidity, and that’s a catalyst for everything to work.

Samuel: [00:26:50] Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about what’s going to happen in the next few years that may cut against the grain or kind of set you apart from some of the other people in the Ethereum system or just in crypto in general?

Hugh: [00:27:12] In terms of Nexus?

Samuel: [00:27:14] Well, no, I mean in general about how things develop, right?  Myself personally, I think that most of the development and the cool stuff is released on Ethereum. I have some thoughts about volatility, which I don’t think ever goes away. But one thing that is really being hammered and crystallize for me over the past couple of years is the stable coin usage on Ethereum and how that is only going to grow, or maybe not even Ethereum but right across all the platforms is that the stable current usage and the dollar demand is incredible and I don’t think that goes away. I think that keeps growing.

Hugh: [00:28:00] I might have a slightly different view to others on is the privacy side of things. I’m a heavy privacy proponent. I think it’s critical and ends on a level of the zero-knowledge proofs in confidential transactions and stuff. So that’s been worked on. The thing that worries me is if we actually enable that stuff on a widespread basis too early, we may not be big enough. It’s basically picking a fight, and we may have started picking the fight with the regular world a bit too early. They may be able to basically shut down and close all the on-ramps, and that would be a big setback. I have a feeling that goes across the line. Like other stuff is kind of borderline and all the rest of it, but they can say it’s helping people here. It could here be specifically detrimental to control money laundering and terrorist stuff and all that type of thing. It could push regulators to act much harder and much faster than the ecosystem could potentially handle. I don’t know if that’s true, obviously, but that’s one wary point of pushing too hard, too fast on that stuff.

Samuel: [00:29:26] I just talked to Alex from Beam weeks ago, and I’m a firm believer in the need for transactional privacy. Even if all the wallets and everything else stays public, you still need to have transactional privacy. So if I send you money, you can’t see my wallet balance on the other side. I think that’s if, if we can have transactional privacy, but still have auditable accounts, which I think Beam is doing, I think that’s the kind of fine line where you can exist with existing regulations and make sure that you’re not crossing too many lines when you have too much privacy, and I think that’s when the regulators and law enforcement starts taking a harder look at what you’re doing. Monero or Grant or anything else. Having spoken with a few people who are involved in this type of transactional tracking and analysis, most of the good information that’s gathered is at the service level. So the exchanges themselves or other places where you have to give identifying documents to that company and which they then can use to track and trace you.

It’s somewhat easy to find out that you’ve taken cash, moved it into Bitcoin, you’ve done a transaction into Z cash, you make a couple of transactions, and then you try to cash it out. That usually can be found out. Stuff that stays purely on-chain is much harder to actually figure out who’s using.  If you took your Ether, put it into tornado cash and then took it out while later, and then converted it all to DAI and then used the DAI for your daily payments,  by sending DAI to somebody’s other wallet, that would have high transit privacy. But even though everything is public, that in itself would be private because they wouldn’t have the ability to associate an identity with that wallet. Once you break the chain of identities, then privacy becomes an easier feature to keep.

Hugh: [00:31:59] Yeah. I totally agree. To me it’s not necessarily what you actually can do, it’s perhaps the perceived political risk of how that could be misused, and so you can potentially become a target, even though it may not actually be warranted, but it could just raise the ire of law enforcement, regulators and politicians, et cetera.

Samuel: [00:32:26] Remember, nobody buys crypto to pay people with crypto. They buy crypto hopefully with the speculative belief that the price will increase and then they can sell it back to dollars. I’d say 98/99% of the time; there’s always a real-world connection that law enforcement or other investigative services can find to trace a person’s identity to their crypto wallets. Whether it’s going in or out, and then once those Fiat on-ramps are the easiest place to control the money flows. You can’t do anything on-chain, but you can stop it at the service level.

Hugh: [00:33:15] Yeah, exactly. And then to me, that’s the worry. If you get clamped down there, then the ecosystem struggles to get more and more adoption. That’s the thing I’m worried about that you get the clampdown at the on-ramp and off-ramps.

Samuel: [00:33:30] It’s not something I’m worried about. I do care about privacy, but I think it’s a nuanced question of trying to identify what exactly needs to be private and what needs to be public and what needs to be associative with your identity.

Hugh: [00:33:49] Yeah, and I think there’s a lot of nuance in it. I think they can get lost somewhere, to be honest, that’s where I get a bit more worried, but you know hopefully I’m wrong on that front, and then we can progress on that just as fast as everything else. That’s probably a one-way area where I’m a little bit different to others.

Samuel: [00:34:08] Is there enough support? I mean, or is there good support for Ethereum development in London?

Hugh: [00:34:15] Yeah, it’s pretty popular in the spotlight of a whole bunch of teams. It’s probably not as well connected as somewhere like Berlin, where everyone knows each other, and they’re all really close to each other, but there’s a lot of stuff going on in London.

Samuel: [00:34:31] Nice. What are some of the other teams out there?

Hugh: [00:34:34] Colony, Acropolis, Modeling. There’s a whole bunch of different teams out there.

Samuel: [00:34:41] Yeah, no, I know all of those. We’re doing some work with Monolith, and I know the Acropolis people, so it’s a good team. I think that covers pretty much everything. Is there anything that I’ve missed?

Hugh: [00:34:56] No, I don’t think so. I guess there’s a whole bunch of risks out there and, hopefully, Nexus can help with that type of stuff for it. We’re all doing some new things and experimenting. I love it but sometimes… I guess my word of caution would be that sometimes we’re running before we can walk. We go out there with an audited protocol, put millions in it and say what? Maybe we should slow down a touch. I love the experimentation, but maybe we can do it without putting absolute massive amounts of funds at risk.

[00:35:27] There are multiple ways of doing that. Insurance is one, but there are other ways of doing it. It’s funny that we can build something and experiment with large sums of money really, really quickly. We’ve never really had that ability before.  It’s a double-edged sword a bit, but it’s one of the massive benefits.

Samuel: [00:35:47] Yeah. Well, cool. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

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