Cryptonomix

Unleashing the Potential of Bitcoin With Trust Machines

Episode 9: Gina Abrams, Chief of Staff at Trust Machines

In this episode, Mark Eckerle and Gina Abrams, Chief of Staff at Trust Machines, a developer of blockchain technology dedicated to expanding upon the existing bitcoin infrastructure as a web3 platform, discuss the future of Bitcoin, the benefits of building applications on the Bitcoin network over other networks and some exciting products and projects the company is developing. Trust Machines’ mission is to grow the Bitcoin economy – utilizing it as a productive asset, in applications in the internet economy and as a settlement layer for web3.

Transcript:

This podcast was transcribed through a third-party application. Please disregard any misrepresentations.

Mark Eckerle:

Hello, listeners, welcome to this episode of Cryptonomix. Before we jump into today’s discussion, please keep in mind this recording is for general education and is not intended to constitute investment advice. Any opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily represent those of Withum. Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Cryptonomix, brought to you by, Withum. I’m your host, Mark Eckerle. And today I welcome to the show Gina Abrams, Chief of Staff at Trust Machines. Now I’m sure in addition to what your normal day-to-day job is, you’re probably doing a bunch of different projects within Trust Machines. So we’re gonna take a deep dive into what that really is. But welcome to today’s show, Gina.

Gina Abrams:

Thank you so much for having me, Mark.

Mark Eckerle:

Awesome. So I like to start off every episode to understand everyone’s journey into crypto, into digital assets, blockchain tech. Everyone kind of has a different path as to how they got here, and you’ve been in this space for quite some time. So why don’t you give us a little background on yourself and kind of how you got to be at Trust Machines and your crypto journey, if you will.

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So, I have been working in the crypto realm for what’s gonna be six years this summer. And I fell into it, I feel like in a slightly unconventional way, although I don’t think there is a conventional way. You know, I way back in college had a friend who, you know, was buying Bitcoin ended up doing pretty well for themselves and it was something that sort of felt like an experiment, something to play with. Back at that time I had no money, so it wasn’t any significant investing, but I put a little bit of money into Bitcoin and it was mostly because it felt very intuitive. I think growing up in the age of the internet, you’re sort of like, well, obviously we would have something that is, you know, internet native where we can transact with folks across the world, but I wouldn’t say I fully grasped it.

Gina Abrams:

Back then, you know, my early career was in recruitment and I was working with a lot of startups in the New York City area and seeing a lot of adtech and FinTech type of companies and then, you know, I really stumbled upon what was the early stack project way back in the day in 2016, it was actually, and they had this completely different type of company that they were building where they were really trying to make the internet a better place and trying to give, you know, users more control over their identity, over their assets and that just stuck out completely to me. And I spent about the next year just getting really interested, trying to learn more and in 2017 I joined the team and I’ve been working alongside Trust Machine CEO Muneeb Ali for yeah, going on six years.

Mark Eckerle:

So back in, back in 2016, that’s what really sucked you in and you kind of saw the vision of the capabilities of the space and you went full in on the space.

Gina Abrams:

Yeah and even back then the team was building on Bitcoin and we’ll get a little bit more into that I’m sure. But, it really made sense to me to utilize existing infrastructure for the benefits that it offered. You know, why try to reinvent the wheel when you have something that’s amazing here and that can potentially do more. So that idea really stuck out to me too.

Mark Eckerle:

Yeah, and that’s a great segue into kind of, I wanna take a deep dive into Trust Machines itself and understand the mission, the purpose because I think you guys are very uniquely positioned in this space, basically building a programmable Bitcoin network, if you will, to an extent, right? Bringing what I think Ethereum has done to the space, but I’m gonna let you put it in your own words cause I’m sure you could say it much better than I can.

Gina Abrams:

Awesome. Yeah. So at Trust Machines, we are really interested in growing the Bitcoin economy. You know, we want to see Bitcoin utilized as a productive asset and, you know, utilized in applications and sort of in this internet economy and also see it used as a settlement layer for Web3. It’s interesting that it’s almost been this sort of contrarian perspective and contrarian sort of thesis and mission, but I think that, you know, Bitcoin naturally has had the largest community is the most decentralized, durable, and secure asset. It has the largest market cap, and so it just presents this really large opportunity if you’re able to bring some of the experiments that we’ve seen in other Web3 ecosystems, you know, Ethereum, Solana, et cetera. If you’re able to actually bring those things to the main Bitcoin chain and, you know, deploy capital into smart contracts, applications, et cetera, that feels like a pretty massive thing and just potential and possibility and so that’s essentially what we’re focusing on at Trust Machines by creating applications that focus on these novel use cases.

Mark Eckerle:

And it’s interesting that over the last couple years there, there are many platforms popping up, but no one has seemed to come back to Bitcoin, the original chain, right? Everyone’s trying to create their own thing, a new invention of the wheel where as opposed to let’s make the wheel better, which is what exactly what you guys are doing, right?

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, it’s been difficult, you know, I think that it’s tough for developers. It’s also tough for, you know, entrepreneurs that are building this space. Historically, Bitcoin has had limited functionality and that’s really a feature, not a bug, right? That’s what maintains its security and sort of guarantees for the long term. At the same time, I would say that we have seen all of these really incredible experiments come through other applications, you know, DeFi, NFTs, these use cases that really take advantage of decentralized networks and smart contracts and over the years, I would say research and development has been ongoing into how do we build on Bitcoin in a way that doesn’t mess with the main Bitcoin chain because it’s really hard to make changes to Bitcoin. And also how do we sort of bring the scalability and the functionality that we want to see to Bitcoin in a way that is not going to sort of spam that main chain.

Gina Abrams:

And so at Trust Machines, we really are interested in exploring how do we utilize Bitcoin layers to create these applications and this utility for Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin layers include things like liquid for payments stacks for smart contracts. There’s a whole host of them including RSK and liquid. Overall, it feels like an underdeveloped space and that’s why we really want to continue putting resources and exploring at the cutting edge here. You know, that all said, I do think, again, like I mentioned, we’ve been a little bit in this contrarian seat, but we have seen just in the past couple of weeks, ordinals, which are essentially an ability for people to add data to the main Bitcoin chain, you know, through inscriptions. So people are experimenting with like NFTs and, and adding pictures to the main Bitcoin blockchain. I think we’ve seen that there’s actually a lot of excitement for that ability and that there’s also potentially, you know, more value given it’s a scarce sort of block size, et cetera. So I think that there’s a lot of exciting things that are ahead.

Mark Eckerle:

So touching on that, what I’m curious to get your thoughts on what would make it beneficial to the user if in the ordinal situation, right? If I wanted to bring NFTs to Bitcoin as opposed to using it on the already existing ecosystems, like an Ethereum, like a Solana that kind of have made themselves pretty prevalent in the ecosystem over the last, call it 24 months, right? Cause this is kind of a new concept, right, on the Bitcoin network, it hasn’t been established before. So I’m curious, what are some of the benefits of using Bitcoin network versus one of those other two that may be more established?

Gina Abrams:

Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the big things is really knowing that Bitcoin is around for the long term and that it’s not going anywhere. You know, if you’re an artist and you want your art to really be

Mark Eckerle:

Like clap it up for that. Yeah. Gotta preach that a little bit more.

Gina Abrams:

You know, if you’re an artist, you really wanna make sure that your art is going to be around for the long term. That it’s not just going to disappear if a chain decides not to sort of service some component anymore. And so I think when it comes to the financial side as well, people really want that long-term, you know, knowledge that this isn’t going away tomorrow. And even if you look at the history of crypto, you know, there are chains that have sort of come and gone. So it’s not, it’s not nothing. There’s also obviously this large amount of capital and folks that I think are also interested in deploying Bitcoin into productive use cases. If you look at some of the early crypto fundraisers, you know, ICOs, et cetera, you can argue if they’re good or bad, but people were deploying Bitcoin into causes and projects that they were excited about. So I think that there’s gonna be a resurgence of that potentially in the future.

Mark Eckerle:

Yeah, and it’s neat to see because right, Bitcoin was the original use case, and I’m curious now if we’re gonna almost see a transition from a,

Mark Eckerle:

I’ll call it like a store value type use case, where it’s gonna be used as a means of transacting nowadays as there’s more and more avenues to use, more applications to build upon, just more things to do within that ecosystem. It’s not gonna be so much as an investment. Like a lot of people view it today. I think we’re gonna get to a point where it’s just gonna be used and I don’t want to call it a currency, it’s just gonna be a means to an end, right? It’s gonna be a way to transact within the protocol. I think that’s similar to how Ether is used today as gas, right? People transact all the time with it just to get from one point to the other, and that’s why you have all those other tokens that built upon that network. So I’m curious your thoughts, do you expect to see a similar transition within the Bitcoin ecosystem where it’s gonna kind of shy away from a store of value into more of just a means to an end or just a transaction asset?

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting question because it also probably is going to have different phases. You know, if you look at sort of the, the internet Web3 economy, I would say Bitcoin has not had as much of a role as it probably should have as the leading blockchain out there. And, you know, I think the next transition might be people utilizing it in more use cases, potentially interested in really exploring what’s at the forefront of decentralized identities, domains, you know, community management, NFTs, DAOs, et cetera. But long term, I could also see Bitcoin really having this story as this ultimate settlement layer for all of these transactions that are happening in sort of the Web3 space to have that security, to have that sort of providence to be able to go back to in time and also with a number of these Bitcoin layers, Bitcoin L two’s that are coming to life. I think that it could really help the long term security budget for Bitcoin in terms of saying, okay, if we have, you know, thousands of transactions potentially settling in a single Bitcoin transaction, that’s gonna be a high value transaction and so it could, you know, contribute in that regard to the Bitcoin economy as well.

Mark Eckerle:

And you hit the nail on the head in your previous response about talking about decentralization and coming back to Bitcoin. I think that’s the biggest thing to fall back on when you think a lot of these other projects that were created within the last four or five years, especially during that ICO phase, they’re building these protocols, these platforms. You always come back to the ethos, are you truly decentralized? Right. It always comes back to that because if there’s a hiccup in the system, the software, there’s some downtime, whatever it may be, who’s correcting that? And it always comes back to some type of core project, core team, and then you always come back to is it actually decentralized? Whereas Bitcoin, you we’re never really asking ourselves that question. It never comes up.

Gina Abrams:

And that’s the beautiful thing too, is that it’s permissionless, you know, anyone can really experiment and try to build lots of different things on it and don’t need to get approval from anyone to do so. So I think that’s a really beautiful part of it too.

Mark Eckerle:

I saw an interesting stat the other day about the decentralization of mining and basically what’s supporting the Bitcoin network. And it was about, I think it was the combined computing power of AWS and Google’s hosting services didn’t even equate to 1% of what would need to hack the Bitcoin mining network because it’s just so large right now, and the vast volume of transactions that would be needed to do that. It’s too decentralized to the point where it’s impossible to hack almost

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, no, and that’s, that’s honestly one of the bigger benefits to it. And what makes it so valuable too. You know, from our perspective, we’re actually called Trust Machines because we think that this paradigm, this shift in trust, this decentralization of trust is such a major component of, I think it’s gonna have impacts across the board in terms of businesses and applications. You know, the internet really transformed connection and the web transformed access and it’s like, you know, Bitcoin is actually the decentralization of trust and all that that impacts, you know, money transacting, social media, et cetera. There’s so many implications that I think we’re really still in such early days,

Mark Eckerle:

100%. And you could see that just from a regulatory standpoint, right? We’re still in the very early stages. We’re still trying to figure out which is the right path to go, but we don’t have to go down that wormhole. I’m curious to know some of the exciting projects that you guys are working on promoting, developing in some form of capacity. What are some of the exciting things that you guys are working on that you think are gonna be the next big thing, if you will?

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So we have a number of product lines that we are building that we’re really excited about. One is called Zest Protocol. It’s under collateralized Bitcoin lending, really bringing bitcoin capital markets to life. We’re also exploring on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, we’re thinking about what do the future of decentralized identities and community and collaboration look like? So console.xyz is a social sort of Web3 chat application that is also gonna have this modular infrastructure for DAOs and different types of communities to collaborate. And I would say in general, general, in this path of building all of our applications, we’re also contributing to open source software that is really core to some of the groundwork that we need for some of these applications to go live. So to that end, there are a few big developments that we are one of many contributors too. So one of the big things that we’re looking out for later this year is what we call SPDC to go live. It allows for applications to actually write back to the main Bitcoin chain, in a way that is trust minimized and a hundred percent secured by Bitcoin. And so we are really interested in both these applications, but you know, if there’s any prerequisites to those applications, bringing those to life. So it’s gonna be an exciting year.

Mark Eckerle:

There’s a lot of balls in the air, a lot of things just happening right now. So you guys are working on a bunch of different cool projects. One other thing I wanted to kind of pick your brain on is understanding the history of Bitcoin and kind of where it came from and where the whole market of crypto is today. And we’re going through this weird transition I would call it, of everything’s been termed Web3. I don’t know where that came from. I don’t know how it happened, but now everything in the crypto space is Web3, and it’s like, it’s taken over our industry nomenclature. And I’m curious if, in your opinion, if Bitcoin falls within that, or that’s still to our original question, is that the OG and that’s kind of separate and everyone else’s this Web3 terminology trying to build a platform, trying to keep up, or where do you think that fits into here?

Mark Eckerle:

Because I always, me personally, I view Bitcoin as like the top dog, it’s Bitcoin and then it’s basically everything else. So everything’s just trying to follow suit and keep up a lot of these other protocols and missions and platforms have other use cases that are all gonna be important and serve a function. But I just don’t think anything, nothing has come to light as of today that’s gonna compete with the capabilities, the infrastructure that Bitcoin has and continues to play within the ecosystem. But I’m curious to get your thoughts and your take on where you see the industry.

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sure there’s a million ways to answer this question, but I do feel that Web3 has sort of taken off as this term that refers to a lot of the experiments that we’ve seen on other chains like Ethereum, Solana, there’s obviously a ton. And I think what makes Web3 is really this unique ability to either interact with folks across the world and or, you know, control your assets, your digital assets, your digital identity in novel ways. And I think that a lot of this experimentation has been happening outside of Bitcoin given just, you know, the fact that Bitcoin made these different trade offs for security as compared to wanting to add complex smart contract languages that other platforms chose to adopt. And I think Bitcoin ultimately sort of plays a role in this story. And at Trust Machines, we’re really trying to bridge that gap in terms of saying there are these really cool experiments, there’s a lot of development. How do we bring the best of that to the Bitcoin ecosystem? How do we, you know, serve a lot of people that I think are closet bitcoiners, but who have been experimenting with other chains and how to ultimately utilize Bitcoin as this, again, this settlement layer for security. You know, how do we sort of bridge those two and create a really great solution that is not going to hinder or harm the main chain, but where folks are able to get the best of both worlds.

Mark Eckerle:

And as you’re building and expanding upon the current infrastructure, right, and not interrupting anything on the main chain, like you said, you want to enhance upon it. I’m curious of any challenges that you guys foresee or in the roadmap to getting to where you want to go, because right, you see a lot of people that want to expand upon what Bitcoin already has, whether it’s improving block size or transaction speed, and that’s where you have all these derivatives of Bitcoin, where you have Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin SV, there’s a million other derivatives now that never really have seemed to really taken off. So I’m curious if there’s any challenges that you guys expect to come across during this process that you’ve identified and how are you gonna accomplish those, basically? I’m just curious if, if there’s anything that you foresee that could be a hurdle.

Gina Abrams:

Yeah, I mean, I would say definitely the process of research and development and infrastructure even to be able to build the applications that we’re creating at Trust Machines has been a process. None of this project, none of this mission started overnight. You know, Trust Machines at this point is over a year old, and we have lots of learnings from essentially, you know, building on Bitcoin in that period, but these layer twos have been around for longer than that, right? So I think there’s a lot of work it requires outside of the box thinking in terms of, you know, what are some of the solutions. That’s why I was mentioning in terms of this SPDC project and development that’s going to go live later this year. I think in addition to that, there’s also a big hurdle when it comes to just messaging and awareness. There are so many people who I think are excited about Bitcoin and are excited about Web3 but don’t realize that the two can collaborate or that there can be a relationship between the two, right? And so I think that we’re in the early days in terms of, you know, letting these use cases go live, essentially proving their value within the ecosystem and just sort of delivering on some of these really exciting projects for bitcoiners directly. And I think that’s when the aha moments are going to happen.

Mark Eckerle:

Yeah. And it’s it’s gonna be a slow build, right? I mean, it’s, you guys are at the cutting edge, you’re developing brand new technologies for the space. so it’s, it’s tough to use what’s already been established because you guys are creating the next generation of technology and whatever it may be, we might not even know today what that’s gonna look like as we’re continuing to right, put those R&D expenses together, building out projects, and you’re gonna have a complete fork in the road at some point and go a whole new path. So I’m excited to see the future of Trust Machines. I’m excited to see what you and your team are building. I think it’s really cutting edge technology at the forefront. And like I said, I’m sure it’s not promoted enough, but Bitcoin is the OG chain, it’s the way to go. So it’s, it’s always my go-to asset resource, whatever you want to call it. It’s, it’s always at the top. But I wanna say thank you for joining us today. This was a fantastic episode. We learned a ton about Trust Machines. Where can we go to learn more about yourself, the company? What social media platforms are you guys rock and rolling on?

Gina Abrams:

Yeah. Please check us out online. We are at @TrustMachinesCo on Twitter, trustmachines.co online, and yeah, we have a fully new website that just went live actually, so check it out and we’ll have more updates on our products, et cetera, coming out soon.

Mark Eckerle:

Fantastic. And I could definitely attest to the fact that the Twitter account has a ton of great content. I see a lot of awesome threads that are very educational and, and pass a lot of along, a lot of great knowledge. But no, thank you for joining me today. And, yeah, this was today’s episode of Cryptonomix. Thank you.

Gina Abrams:

Thank you, Mark.

Mark Eckerle:

All views expressed in this podcast by Mark Eckerle or his guests are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Withum. This podcast is for informational purposes only.