MrsThreshold (Ashley) 0:04 Niko go ahead and kick us off. And oh, there's Wormhole. Our co host has accepted our invitation. Good morning, everybody. Happy Friday.

Brian Mahoney 0:14 Morning, everyone.

Nico 0:15 Happy Friday, everybody. Oh, good. Yeah, you're sounding good. Brian. sound great. Anthony. Awesome. Gosh, everybody. Welcome, everybody. Happy Friday. It is. It's It's such an honor and a pleasure to to be our host today for this incredible team space. Wow, what a what an amazing group. We are kicking off, you know, just an incredible call today with Wormhole and the Threshold network. And I'm so excited to welcome Matt Luongo MacLane Wilson, Brian Mahoney, and Dan and Anthony from Wormhole. We have just such an incredible group with highly capable people on the call today. And you've all got such an incredible array of blockchain experience, I thought the best way to kick off this call would just be to hand the mic over. And I'd ask you guys to just kind of go around the table real quick and give us a brief introduction.

Brian Mahoney 1:22 Yep, sure. I can start us off. We'll

Nico 1:23 start with you, Matt. Yeah.

Brian Mahoney 1:25 Oh, yeah. I'll go. Hi, everyone. Good to be here. My name is Brian and I lead the growth and business development efforts for tBTC. Excited to be here.

Matt Luongo 1:41 Hey, as Matt Wanko. I was one of the authors of deep sea one and co author for the two. Yeah, really excited to talk about bringing Bitcoin everywhere.

MacLane Wilkison 1:55 Everybody, thanks for joining. I am MacLane Wilkison. I am a contributor to Threshold and one of the cofounders of NuCypher, which was along with Keep one of the parent projects to Threshold.

Anthony Ramirez 2:09 Hey, guys, I'm Anthony. I've been working on Wormhole for two years and pretty much do a lot of stuff across like BD ops, strategy type things. And yeah, super excited to talk talk about all this today.

Dan Reecer 2:24 I guess Dan Reecer, from Wormhole Foundation, work quite a bit on operations as well like Anthony and other sort of growth initiatives. So I've been great working with the Threshold team, and really exciting week and excited to kind of get into the details here.

Nico 2:45 Incredible, welcome. Welcome, everybody to the stage. And for everybody on the call today, I thought it would be nice to just do you know, kind of a brief overview of our two projects that are joining the call today. And you know, Matt, and MacLane, if you could just kind of give us just a brief overview of what is the Threshold network?

Matt Luongo 3:09 Yeah, sure. So Threshold is a it's a, it's a combination of two teams, years of effort and two communities. So originally, it was the Keep network and NuCypher projects, which were both Threshold cryptography projects on Aetherium. And last year, we actually came together and created one sort of like canonical Threshold crypto utility for depths and that's Threshold network. Threshold is the technology behind tBTC as well as condition based decryption and a couple other really cool things that you guys will be hearing coming out over over the coming weeks. And yeah, so so I'm here mostly to rep tBTC and the client can talk a lot more about sort of like the other side of the house

MacLane Wilkison 4:00 yeah, I mean, that was a good overview NuCypher And Keep I think like officially like on chain merged beginning of last year. So if you had new tokens or Keep tokens, you are able to and still are able to upgrade those into T tokens which is the the governance and work token and staking token for Threshold network

Nico 4:25 Excellent, excellent. Dan, and Anthony if you could just kind of walk us through briefly about Wormhole let us know a little bit more about it.

Dan Reecer 4:35 Yeah, this is my wrapping up my fifth week so I'm gonna hand it over to Anthony just to hear how he pitches everyone on on Wormhole

Brian Mahoney 4:46 in the hot seat, Anthony

Anthony Ramirez 4:50 I think Dan's probably been more Twitter spaces in crowd engagement than any of the people in the Twitter space combined. So you know, he's understand going but yeah, so So Wormhole, you know, it's it's been, you know, it's an interoperability protocol it's been around since 2021. And really the, you know, I think it's like actually, like the longest running interoperability protocol at this point. And, and so like, you know, like, the main, the main things to know is that, you know, it's it's kind of like its Northstar is to be the backbone of the internet of value. And that means a lot of different things. But the most important thing that it means to me is that like, it facilitates the interchain connectivity of data of value of everything that you and then builders want to do cross chain. And and I think it's particularly relevant today for this topic, because Bitcoin is a blockchain, but it's a tough one, you can't really connect it in a normal way, like you can with a theory and other EVM chains. Because, you know, but but it's also like a product, you know, so the BTC token is such an important token to so many people and like, folk want to have, be able to use it an on chain DeFi, they want to hold it and they also want to make it productive. And I look at what tBTC is doing is like, you know, just an in such an important primitive to make it like actually decentralized on chain. So people can not rely on something like a W BTC from big go. But they can like hold something that's actually decentralized, and then they can make use of it anywhere. So when we had Wormhole, we're looking like to partner with like, you know, like, like a Bitcoin kind of wrapper provider, I mean, there really was no other option. And we thought these guys are like the best team that's out there, we kind of see the vision for what they're going for. And, you know, we're excited to be be along so we can get into a lot more detail here. But the idea is for something like a tBTC Wormhole wants to be the, you know, like, basically the way that it goes everywhere, and it gets into the hands of everybody in the most secure and just kind of like, Yeah, high, you know, like, like high quality UX, that you can do it so we can get to a lot more detail. But, but that's kind of where we are today.

Nico 6:58 Excellent. No, no, I love that. Just like a high level kickoff, but it really does bring me kind of into our first topic. You know, given that Bitcoin really is the OG chain, it's ultimately kind of what brought I guess, every everyone into really the industry. I kind of wanted to just start off with Matt, you know, you've been a long term, crypto builder. I'm really curious, what is it about Bitcoin that really got you started in crypto kind of inspired you?

Matt Luongo 7:27 Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, you know, I kind of found Bitcoin, the hard way, right, which is I was D platformed. Back in 2013. I was running a small side business, and it involves buying and selling gift cards and volume started increasing and PayPal was like, oh, gift cards? Oh, no, no, that's great finance. And so, you know, the reason I got involved with Bitcoin in the first place, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't because of my like, right leaning economic thinking or anything like that, it was just because everyone else shut me down. And I and so I discovered Bitcoin as a credibly neutral alternative to PayPal at the time. And so you know, even though I actually do buy into a bunch of the economic thinking around Bitcoin, and there's a good discussion there, like really what stuck with me in this space. And the reason that I've kept here is, you know, people should be able to use their property. however they see fit, right. And that's something that we need to defend with math. And that's what I loved about Bitcoin back in 2013. And really, that's what I love about what we're doing with tBTC. And Wormhole today, is we're taking folks who have kind of relegated this like, hugely important technology as like their, like, sort of, like spare change or savings account. And we're gonna give them a chance to actually use it to do things like take out a mortgage, you know, and, and really have it be a lot more impactful in their lives. Credit.

Brian Mahoney 8:58 I'll just jump in with a comment there on the on your story, Matt. The great irony is that Pay Pal now is they just disclose what like billion, or just about a billion in eath and Bitcoin holdings in q1 come full circle. Yep.