034. Adaptability and Helping to Build the Decentralized Internet w/ Matthew Spoke

 “There’s lots of evidence today that online and in our digital lives, which is increasingly most of our lives these days, there’s just a whole bunch of things that are broken. Things that we’ve accepted as normal. Things that we’ve come to see as the status quo. And, nobody’s questioned is it ok that I have to make the trade-off of free online services for personal private data.”

Matthew Spoke, Co-Founder of Aion, talks to me about the original intentions of the internet. It started off as a peer to peer and it became centralized. But, blockchain technology is levelling the playing field and anyone can have the opportunity to sell a successful product or service and Matt says we can all collectively can own the next version of the internet.

What does it mean now that the internet can become decentralized? What will it mean when greater financial democracy is accessible around the world. What will it mean for government policy as the technology that crosses borders becomes mainstream?

“Decentralized networks are the future infrastructure of the world.” So where is the world headed?

 “People are asking what’s the killer app of decentralization? It’s not really an app, it’s a social structure. It’s re-evaluating how we make decisions and how we coordinate with people” 

Decentralization is democratizing opportunity.

He says, often we don’t talk about crypto in the right context. Instead of talking about what crypto allows to be built, we too often talk about market caps and speculation. But “crypto is the economic engine that makes these networks possible and if that’s true, than there’s no financial cap”.

So the executive chairman of Cisco valued the internet as worth $19 trillion =, but Matt says that that figure doesn’t factor in the value of what’s being transferred over the internet. So the decentralized internet, the internet of value, web 3.0 will be worth even more.

We also get into how Matt went from being an employee at Deloitte to leading an R+D team focussed on Bitcoin and the underlying technology to leaving and co-founding his own successful and thriving blockchain company, even though he says at the time, taking the leap was “terrifying”.

One of the topics he believes isn’t addressed head on enough in this space is around for-profit crypto companies and their driving motivations. He believes there’s a conflict of interest that’s inherent in having token holders like share holders. For this reason, Aion decided to become the Aion Foundation and focus on serving “the most important stakeholder, which to us was the user of our software” as opposed to optimizing how they do things for shareholders whose expectations are driven by expectations around revenues and profits.”

He goes on to say, “This an industry that is almost exclusively open source software so it’s not necessarily monetizable at the protocol level.”

And it was just one of the fun questions I ask at the end of the interview, but I asked him about what character trait he would recommend someone have who’s starting out. And his answer made me realize that they were qualities he must have to have gotten to where his is from where he was.

He said that these days it’s not about one skill. Now you’ve got to have the desire to constantly be learning and upgrading your skills, so what’s really important is adaptability and to be able to constantly evolve.

https://aion.network/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AionNetwork/

https://twitter.com/MattSpoke

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https://www2.deloitte.com/ca/en/pages/technology/solutions/deloitte-digital-blockchain.html