theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers | Robert Drost, Eigen Foundation

Clips
More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

Executive Director

Eigen Foundation

play_circle_outline Evolution of technology from internet to blockchain

play_circle_outline Importance of decentralization in blockchain protocols

play_circle_outline Comparing Ethereum's Proof of Work and Proof of Stake: Impact on Community Governance and Potential Forking

play_circle_outline Vision for fixing internet and open source funding

play_circle_outline The Evolution of Software: AI Infrastructure, Capitalism, Democracy, and Open Source in Society

play_circle_outline Need for trustworthiness and unstoppable AI agents in technology

play_circle_outline Lessons learned from crypto waves and reducing volatility in financial systems

Info

Robert Drost, Eigen Foundation

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

Executive Director Eigen Foundation

search

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here on day two of our Crypto Trailblazers series of two-day virtual event where all the experts come in, share their stories, talk about what's happening, where the innovation is, where the opportunities are, and of course, entrepreneurs, investors, people making impact. It's all happening right here, part of theCUBE and the NYSE Wired community, an open network revolving around content. Robert Drost is here, CEO and Executive Director of the EigenLayer Foundation. Robert, thanks for coming in to theCUBE. We could have kept the cameras rolling before we came on, but we were going to roll there. Welcome to theCUBE.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, that's great. Thank you very much for having me. I love this format and I love the work you guys have done.

>> I really appreciate that. We love doing what we do. Getting the knowledge out there really changes things. This market is interesting because I mean, it's a movement. Stories are feeding in. Hopefully more stories are coming out this week as Ethereum comes to the Bay Area, Stanford and Cal Meetups, a lot of the concentration of talent in the market is here, but we were talking before we came on about the old school web, early days of the internet, web 1.0, web 2.0. The game is still the same, but the infrastructure and how the formation evolved in every wave, you see that. You saw it with the internet and the web. You saw it with mobile. You're seeing with cloud. Now, you've got blockchain and crypto apps. Here, it's got backend, frontends. You've got two things happening. What's your vision on this? Because I know you've invested a lot into key protocols with Ethereum. There's a big... If you get it right, the benefits downstream are huge.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> And so connect the dots on this wave, how it compares and contrasts, but what's the upside?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Absolutely. That's a great question and lead in. I like talking about this because technology moves very fast. History doesn't fully repeat. The saying is it rhymes and I see that all over the place. Just going back, I started my career off just before the internet and I was at a place where the guys invented the first encryption, Diffie-Hellman encryption, Eric Schmidt, who became CEO of Google. They were all my first mentors and people that I was working with at the first company I was at, big OG Silicon Valley company. So things like Java and the internet finally moved from email and these other things. But in the beginning, the dream was we were going to have a global renaissance of information, of sharing data. We had a lot of static pages, we had MySpace, things that you just put stuff out there. There wasn't a business model to it and there also wasn't a financial basis. We moved packets around, but there was actually no money. The first internet was based on the conventional corporate investment cycle, public markets that had been around for hundreds of years. And corporations have been a great coordination mechanism. But with new technology, it was interesting. We didn't have the ability to do anything. There were attempts at digital money at the time, but they all still had the centralized element. And if you go back to the history, the belief is one or more of the Nakamoto group, I think it probably was a group, that's my personal opinion.

>> It was a big group.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That they were heavily involved and they learned from the mistakes of earlier. And they finally had that invention of proof of work, which is the underpinning of not being able to stop decentralized money from Bitcoin. So that first one, it was during time we had the open source revolution, Linux and all of that happened. And in web 2, as it's called, when Google and Facebook figured out the advertising model, they now figured out how to have a profitable monetary business. And that's when the internet really took off together with Steve Jobs inventing a mobile internet platform, the iPhone, and they found a new market fit for investors. And I always go back to the VCs and the investors drive the industry because the best new ideas come from them. If they are good to invest in, easy to invest in, if they go to public markets, get large returns, these exponentials come from winning that part of the market. And I was very happy at that time. The US was really behind being leading in that. One of the things I'm very happy in 2025, we're back to a winning AI, winning crypto, winning technology mindset in the US, which I think is dramatically important. We have very open society, very forward thought. That's good. So I want us to win that. I don't want it to be won by closed societies. But the challenge was this new model involved, data is the new oil and data and withholding data was a problem and owning people's identity and then trying to monetize attention in ways that aren't really great for us.

>> And monetizing the users themselves.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> And monetizing the users. The user is the product, and they're selling to the other-

>> Where's my token?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, exactly. So we saw all of these things happening. So when I learned about finally crypto and I learned about the technology, I came in on the Ethereum side because to me, combining together the idea of money in a special purpose blockchain like Bitcoin together with technology people, we know a database and a computer or virtual machine, the Ethereum virtual machine, putting those two together on the blockchain with money meant that we had a settlement on the financial side, but also settlement on information. A lot of people don't realize this, but when you're managing your identity online, there are critical things you have to do like rotating your keys, other stuff which are exactly like money. If you double spend, when you make that change, you have a question mark of which one is the real identity? So you have these things that require and also data ownership there. All of these transactions are just as important in money. And I would argue losing your identity is losing your entire future reputation and possibly way more money than just losing a couple of thousand dollars from a hack or something.

>> That reputation piece is critical because now we're operating in connected systems groups. Some call it graphs. I call it just networks and networks of networks forming. We're merging theCUBE with the crypto and blockchain network. We've got Wall Street with NYSE, with theCUBE, with the tech, and that's just the base. It's almost like a L1 network. And there are higher level things that go on, like ad hoc trust networks, trust networks allow people to talk to each other. So you're seeing in Ethereum community that I like is that it's almost like they're telegraphing to each, signaling to each other, build. There's a builder mindset in Ethereum that I like and that's why I'm okay with this L1, L2 roll-up concept because to make developers compose apps, you got to build stuff so you can have all the benefits of an L1, like in Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the L1s. Let the better product win as long as you're getting the benefits of tokens.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Which is not present in say cloud or say the social nets or even old school games like League of Legends and other things. But now social gaming's hot in crypto developers. This is low hanging fruit, but this is a tell sign for business coming on board. I find it funny, I was just at a conference where they're talking about saving democracy, saving journalism and news, local news and of course social freedoms and all these things, and they all go to the old paradigms and try to retrofit them when there's solutions right there. I mean, if you look at what you were just talking about saying, "Hey, if you put people together, you can have innovation and do that." Democratization is inherently the word. Democracy and democratization.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right. That's right. Spreading it out to the people, decentralizing among people is democratization.

>> Collective intelligence is an AI concept that's been around, go back to when you were breaking into the industry. I remember when I was in college in the '80s, AI concepts were out there, but there was no compute power, there's no super computing. Those neural networks have been around for how long?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Actually, touring and the original people that created the concept of math as programmatic steps, which is computer science, they all thought, I mean a lot of them were very optimistic. They thought they'd have AI in 1960.

>> When I was in college, ended up being lisp, but that was a whole nother discussion. I don't want to go there.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Oh, lisp is beautiful.

>> I don't want to go off the rails on that one. But let's get back into some of the work you're doing because I think we were talking before you came on camera, you've been working with Ethereum Foundation and the community. You've been on some projects where you've had input, you've moved the needle on some things. There is a replenishing of talent coming in. There are people working on things like performance, scale, value, creation, those pillars. They're not mutually exclusive. They have interplay. Share your vision on how the magic of these, the core principles of Ethereum.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Okay, okay, that sounds good. And I'll put it in context to understand Ethereum, I think it's helpful to understand in terms of a linear optimization. On one end there is absolutely pure decentralization where you are, it's called maximal decentralization, where you give up potentially a tremendous amount of performance, but you have this incredible ability to just say, look, this is going to stay there and stick there. To me, the thing that is most positive about something like Bitcoin is that the community there has agreed the protocol essentially never changes. That means though, as we know in technology, it's not going to have performance improvements very minimal because the use case it wants to do, which is this representation of an outside money similar to gold and storing that value is well served by it. And then proof of work, mining, is also fully permissionless. Anybody with power can do it. I mean even though you buy special ASICs now, you can still do it on a laptop. It may not make you money versus the cost, but it's still possible to do. So that's one end. The other end is where web 2 is right now and it's centralized. Now, it's not centralized architecturally. I mean, do you think Google runs on one computer? Obviously not. These applications run on tens of thousands of computers. So they are decentralized in the technology, but who controls the computer and who basically makes money from the computer that is running Google or Twitter or TikTok or YouTube? That is the centralized part. So you have these two either end of the spectrum. And so Ethereum moved away from Bitcoin by being programmable money and programmable money with the idea, when they launched the protocol, they said, we're going to move to this thing called proof of stake. Proof of stake for people who are just coming to crypto space, it's like where the money represents proof of work, Bitcoin, you buy these a hundred thousand dollars mining hardware and you run it. In Ethereum, when you do something wrong in the protocol as if you went and your data center of hardware was burned, just completely destroyed. That's what it means because in proof of stake, you lose actual money when you do the wrong thing. So Ethereum, but proof of stake until cryptography, I am hopeful, I think in about five to 10 years proof of stake will actually be more decentralized in proof of work. That's actually a very radical statement. I go into panels and argue that with other people, but that's my view.

>> What's their argument on the other side?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> The argument on the other side is that proof of work in some ways, but simpler things are more robust. This is just a fundamental law of nature. It's a corollary of Occam's razor. And so proof of work, in order to do it, we'll actually combine together probably 30 plus complicated cryptographic and crypto economic techniques to get there. So it's very hard to fine-tune and do. I think by the time it's all done, you'll actually be able to formally prove it mathematically that it is more decentralized. But that's the argument. And right now I don't think I'd win that argument. There's a lot of things that I know that you give up from proof of work in proof of stake, but you get a lot for it. But anyway, it moves away from that goalpost because it's more centralized. And then the other thing in Ethereum, Ethereum didn't have for your havings, Ethereum had community sided decreases of the block reward. It didn't commit to having full scarcity where it had a fixed terminal supply of 21 million, I believe in Bitcoin. In Ethereum it can grow for a long time. More recently, it introduced inflation deflation economics. So it's basically doesn't grow the supply anymore, but still it's variable. And then in Ethereum they had this road map to basically keep modifying the protocol until they have what's called hit, what's called an end game. The end game is when the Ethereum protocol essentially stops changing and you just freeze the code at that point. So Ethereum is much more like a web 2 company where you keep iterating the product, but that introduces for a lot of people, "Hey, what happens?" That means something could change. I'm comfortable with that because the community is not going to do things that move too far away from decentralization. Plus in a Bitcoin, the ultimate control of the community is forking the chain. Because Bitcoin and Ethereum and every blockchain has fully public data, it's completely different. You can't get your data out of Twitter. You can't get your data out of these web 2 companies. Your data is fully on the web. We need to improve privacy because that actually has some problems, but as a result of that, you can and will. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have had very large forks in the past. People aren't aware of that anymore, but the protocol split into two sides and in some cases it takes a year or two for society to decide which is the valid chain. That could happen again. And that's like you call it in technology and nuclear option. When you have the threat of doing that, then man, the other side knows it doesn't have ultimate power. And as we know, ultimate power does the ultimate corruption. So when you don't have that, you get-

>> Checks and balances. We have that on the other side, the potential fork.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> And so if I was from maximal Bitcoin type decentralization to, we now have some very centralized chains that cannot viably fork and they don't viably actually have even the community running them. They have certain, I would say LARPing or cosplaying, they look like it, but if you get down at the very deep level, they're not. And I don't like to actually talk negative about things because they're still helping the space through competition, better UX. So they're there. So they're very close to centralize. Ethereum is very close to Bitcoin and it's a very good in my mind.

>> And where have you been doing some work lately? Where have you been putting your energy?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> So lately about a year, almost a year and a half ago, I used to head up R&D Labs for Joe Lubin at ConsenSys. I think he's been on your program as well.

>> He has, yep.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> He's a philosopher.

>> He's awesome.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, he's one of the GOATs of the industry. So I headed up R&D Labs and I also worked with him. He had a lot of investment activity. I was a research partner with him, and then he also allowed us to moonlight. So out of ConsenSys, I was a heavy participant in DAOs as well as part-time running a foundation a couple of years ago. But in the last year and a half I joined a protocol called EigenLayer, CEO, and executive director of the foundation. I helped to essentially launch that and build a team and we took about half the token supply, which at various times tokens vary, but it has been at sometimes multiple-

>> And the goal there was to do what?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> So the goal there, I think in my mind, all of the protocols from an open source perspective, there's articles written about the digital roads and bridges of the internet and a famous meme where you see this whole stack of Legos and at the very bottom is something that's as thin as a pencil and it's like, oh, this is that critical open source project that has no funding. And we've seen that with things like the Heartbleed attack and hack, that there's no one really funding that. So there's a couple of things that I wanted-

>> So critical pieces of the stack or critical protocols that need to be shored up.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So our protocol is a very technological protocol. Maybe we'll go into some of the high level pictures of it, but I will say our protocol is a component. We're going to do it together with a lot of other companies that are in crypto, but our goal is to really fix the internet and fix all of the problems that are attached to it. And especially now with AI and AGI and agents coming in, fixing that part. It's a very strong statement to say, but I like saying it because right now, or anytime I talk with people, if they tell me anything that they think is wrong, I will methodically go through how it can be solved. And it includes things that are non-technical, like I'll actually say this allows us to fix the alignment of the companies that are invested in by VCs to make them much better for society when they go public. And in crypto you go public with an initial coin offering and in the regular markets you go to the stock market through an IPO, but this is fixing it and improving it. I think actually we need to make sure, and I think there's very easy ways to make investing for VCs better in the crypto and the web 3 market. I think it's better for founders. I have a strong view and vision. I've talked about it, that we actually can fix open source and make open source have much more funding, much more tension and open up even more competition to it. And we will actually all benefit from much stronger infrastructure.

>> I mean, think about open source. First of all, that's a huge point because open source and some of these things are growing so fast. I mean, we were just riffing about when we broke into the business proprietary. I mean, I used to deal software in college like, what? Because it was not free.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yes.

>> Hey, can I get that source code? You got the UNIX source code? Yeah, stole it. It was stolen. So those people, and when companies went out of business, all that software went out of business with them. So we grew up on the first generation open source. Okay, what generation right now? Fifth? Sixth? I mean, but it's still, it's steady state open source. No-brainer. The good that that's done has been great. So how do you retrofit that for the next generation?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Exactly. Exactly.

>> I think with all these shifts, the hottest thing going on for the past two years, certainly from what we've been covering is AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure. By the way, that's not precluding blockchain, not AI initiative, but infrastructure shifts. So distributed computing, we love it, but now it starts to get different based upon what's driving it, which is software.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> You got to run software on systems.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> And operating systems that are open source like Linux have done it before and companies like Red Hat have existed. So you're seeing that now play out in this ecosystem.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Where if you let it be open, you can monetize around it. That's a business model innovation.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's a business model. Absolutely.

>> It's nothing to do with tech other than keeping it open for builders.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Now, standards are huge. If you remember some of the open source standards, the OSI model, if I remember correctly, with the seven-layer stack, not all seven layers were standardized. Only the bottom half. That's all we needed.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> But to me, I see this as a parallel to what's happening now. And so you can pick your approach, but there's still standardization depending on what your philosophy is.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> I mean, that's what we're getting at here. You want Bitcoin? You want gold? Great, no problem. Yeah, they're doing some stuff on it, but it's in chain. There's some pros and cons to that.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> There are.

>> Ethereum, you want to build? So it's apples to oranges. We're not comparing, I mean that's the way. I mean, am I off on this?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> No, you're 100% right. I mean, economics at its core, people just focus on the money and companies making money, but economics is really a philosophy of how societies organize the work that's done and the value produced from it in a way that when it's designed well, benefits everybody who's in that society who opts into it. And so this sort of thing, high-level thinking is really. The open source, I love mentioning OSI models and standardization. They're important. You need to have the frameworks. The framework I would say that's so dramatic on crypto now is in the early internet and generations, you had this entire OSI stack, but there was something missing at the bottom, which was the money and finances. That went out of technology into the corporate world, which started, I think getting created in the 15, 1600s. That's when we first invented LLCs and other things. And they're great. I mean, they've served us incredibly well. Globalization.

>> They're mechanisms.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> They're mechanisms. So now-

>> Put that on quote.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> From my point of view, a lot of people who are in crypto, they have very often different fields thinking, but I actually see crypto as able to build one of the purest versions of capitalism mixed with the ability for economic philosophers to construct new regenerative mechanisms. So just even that one, the value of open source flows back in down to the digital space and accelerates through this wheel versus, I mean I love public markets, but they also have oddities like when VCs who are expecting 50% growth per year in their portfolio, and that means some companies are 10 X-ing a year. When they sell to the public market, we have these multi-trillion dollar companies now that are still growth companies. They're not doing dividends, which actually was the model in the early 1900s. And so we have companies that are massive that are still looking for where they can get 30% growth in revenue and profits every year. And so of course, that drives them to things that are very different than what we might like.

>> Robert, you made a good point. I love how you brought that finance piece in the stack because it's not just one dimension, it's multiple vectors now. I'd also say capitalism for sure throw democracy in there. Why not throw that in there? Because you got tech finance or tech capitalism, tech finance capitalism, and then impact and freedom democracy.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> I mean we are living, at least from my generation, my standpoint, my opinion, you can agree or debate or align, impact and democracy. It's easy to... We're at a nexus.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> So you don't have to get rich and then do philanthropy. Good things.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right. That's right. You can do it.

>> It's all going on at the same time because the impact is the tech and the finance. So if you're already making an impact, it's easy to sidecar other initiatives. So it's about mission alignment. And I think I was just at an event last weekend and all these foundations, it's like a waterfall software project. It's all this, here's the money. Park it. Put five in the market, 5% in the market. They should act like hedge funds. Why aren't they like... Entrepreneurs are making impact. You're making an impact. People are making impact. So why not, if you're going to make an impact, do it together?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> It's not that hard if you're in the community. So what's your reaction to that?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's absolutely right. I mean, I think for a lot of open source developers when they graduate from college start their careers out, they start out actually wanting to do a lot of these ideals. I mean, it's very correct that a lot of much more liberal thinking and just improve society. There's a reason why a lot of revolutions, the French Revolution, I think we've had some in Asian countries as well. I'm not going to name them so that this program doesn't get censored in some of them.

>> I'm sure anyway.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> But when they're leaving school, why do they end up going into these other positions that don't allow that waterfall model to work? And the reason why is they also want to be able to have a life that includes owning a house, getting married-

>> Because they got to live....

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> having a family, everything else, they need to have that success and not only in first world countries, but in a lot of developing countries. So my vision on fixing open source doesn't just include the investor side or the few founders. I actually think the open source community needs to grow to being able to absorb having a total footprint of tens of millions of open source developers around the world that are able to work in this waterfall model and the millions of CF students that are coming out of college every year, they can look and say, sure, I can go to some of these web 2 companies that have this interesting thing. There's two views. One is you can look at the negative side of what they don't do well in terms of how they profit-seeking and everything, but it is also important. Some of my friends have pointed out really well that the other problem with monopolies and these big corporations is they start funneling their money and others to squashing competition that is actually more innovative than them. They want to freeze things with them on top. So actually moving to this waterfall model in the open source means that we as consumers get more options and we get better technology, the innovation goes faster.

>> And you have a community to be an arbiter of that collective intelligence.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Robert, it's been great, fascinating here. And we could probably go for an hour. I'd love to do a follow-up and do a deeper dive. You're at the corner of a lot of things happening around you, which is totally cool. And you got the experience. You're like a historian too. You've been there, done that, and you're doing it. So great to have you on. Final question, what are you most excited about right now? What are you looking at? And this doesn't to be related to what you're working on directly, but zooming out, what's exciting you and what are you looking at?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> The thing that's exciting me, it's actually like, boy had going into tech and everything has always been about AI. Okay. And so I know you probably have everybody say this, but let me tell you the angle of it. I think that during technology revolutions is when you can do the most innovation. It would be incredibly hard to change the web model without AI and to make these types of changes I'm talking about because everything was static and locked in. A joke I used to say with my friends in Silicon Valley, I did a start-up company, but essentially all the companies were going to, you're building a company which hopefully gets bought by a public cloud company or one of the companies doing various social media or search or whatever. Now with AI, we see this that the entire landscape of who's winning has dramatically changed. We had a company that is talking about doing $500 billion raises now. It's absolutely nuts. And so during this time, that is one, the shakeup. But then the second part is that AI has things that it can't do with the existing models. So one of them that I like to say is that there is a need for trustworthiness in AI and there is a need for not being able to stop or censor AIs. That is very paramount to what crypto did with money. And so I refer to as unstoppable, trustworthy AGI or AI agents. It's a great example of them. If I'm going to talk to a therapist, I want to know much more than I care about a lot of other things that I'm having privacy, that I own the data that I can use it the way that I want. And I also don't want someone to turn off the switch on that. We have some great examples where people were really having a great relationship with these combating loneliness. Loneliness is actually one of the biggest problems in the world right now, and social media doesn't make you feel less lonely.

>> It makes you worse.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> It makes you worse off. But a company was just pressured by the jurisdiction they were in to turn off some critical features and people were having serious emotional issues because they lost a friend. So we don't want things like that to be happening and I can't even imagine all use cases. I tried to-

>> Who makes that decisions? How's that decision made? It's all these new issues. Again, new opportunities, but this is the social good piece I was looking at. People can actually have more impact now and not just think about profit. So Robert, great to have you on. Congratulations on all your work and continued success. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE, as always. Trailblazing. I guess one final question, since you made me think of it. As a trailblazer, you plow on the fields. What have you learned? First of all, it's tough to plow the fields because you get less stuff blow back in your face and you learn. What lessons have you learned in this wave that you're going to take forward to the next one?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> I think I'm going to talk about it from the crypto wave perspective because I think that a lot of people who are watching this going to be interested, because I've been through this in my third wave now, which is making me more mature. You learn emotionally through the waves because things go up 30X and they come down five X and things change a whole lot. What I've learned is a lot of those swings have been coming in because retail, typically investors and maybe on this side, institutional investors wash money into a system and with a higher demand for crypto and a relatively fixed supply. Of course, we get this massive price action when we have, whether it's fraud or have some things collapse or political environments change, we go down by five or six X because that money pulls out. So it's like a tide washing in five, washing out. This cycle I think is, we're getting product market fit largely through AI. That's like the point of the sphere into a lot more technology. With that, there's about a 2 trillion, I think it's roughly $2 trillion of the enterprise cent spend on software and hardware. It's I think another 2 trillion on the consumer side.

>> Wow.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> It's these big, big numbers. I don't know how much of that's going to be captured, but I do think that one thing I've learned here is that part of the things that are going to essentially make crypto into more palatable as a monetary system and as financial rails is to remove some of this volatility. Getting in revenue, which is not going to pull out during the bad times, is going to actually act as a ballast on the ship that you could take the investment out. But will you take all of the investment out if there's half a trillion dollars of revenue coming into the crypto space?

>> I mean, profit and opportunity.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah. Absolutely.

>> In any transition, whenever there's moving parts, there's opportunity to reconfigure-

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right....

>> landscape, whether it's leaders, incumbents, and with democratization, anyone can enter. You don't have to be pedigree or go to a special school. You just come right in.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> So in my mind, it's like it's a different model because this one goes up and down. But Gartner has this hype cycle and then the trough. But I do think we are now building on the final end stage.

>> We're out of a trough, for sure.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah.

>> The hurricane headwinds is just a breeze, soon to be tailwind.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right. That's right.

>> All right. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you coming on.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Thank you so much as well.

>> All right, the crypto trailblazers here inside theCUBE, bringing all the data, again, part of theCUBE's series with the NYSE Wired in an open network revolving around content. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

Robert Drost, Eigen Foundation

search

>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE here in the Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here on day two of our Crypto Trailblazers series of two-day virtual event where all the experts come in, share their stories, talk about what's happening, where the innovation is, where the opportunities are, and of course, entrepreneurs, investors, people making impact. It's all happening right here, part of theCUBE and the NYSE Wired community, an open network revolving around content. Robert Drost is here, CEO and Executive Director of the EigenLayer Foundation. Robert, thanks for coming in to theCUBE. We could have kept the cameras rolling before we came on, but we were going to roll there. Welcome to theCUBE.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, that's great. Thank you very much for having me. I love this format and I love the work you guys have done.

>> I really appreciate that. We love doing what we do. Getting the knowledge out there really changes things. This market is interesting because I mean, it's a movement. Stories are feeding in. Hopefully more stories are coming out this week as Ethereum comes to the Bay Area, Stanford and Cal Meetups, a lot of the concentration of talent in the market is here, but we were talking before we came on about the old school web, early days of the internet, web 1.0, web 2.0. The game is still the same, but the infrastructure and how the formation evolved in every wave, you see that. You saw it with the internet and the web. You saw it with mobile. You're seeing with cloud. Now, you've got blockchain and crypto apps. Here, it's got backend, frontends. You've got two things happening. What's your vision on this? Because I know you've invested a lot into key protocols with Ethereum. There's a big... If you get it right, the benefits downstream are huge.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> And so connect the dots on this wave, how it compares and contrasts, but what's the upside?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Absolutely. That's a great question and lead in. I like talking about this because technology moves very fast. History doesn't fully repeat. The saying is it rhymes and I see that all over the place. Just going back, I started my career off just before the internet and I was at a place where the guys invented the first encryption, Diffie-Hellman encryption, Eric Schmidt, who became CEO of Google. They were all my first mentors and people that I was working with at the first company I was at, big OG Silicon Valley company. So things like Java and the internet finally moved from email and these other things. But in the beginning, the dream was we were going to have a global renaissance of information, of sharing data. We had a lot of static pages, we had MySpace, things that you just put stuff out there. There wasn't a business model to it and there also wasn't a financial basis. We moved packets around, but there was actually no money. The first internet was based on the conventional corporate investment cycle, public markets that had been around for hundreds of years. And corporations have been a great coordination mechanism. But with new technology, it was interesting. We didn't have the ability to do anything. There were attempts at digital money at the time, but they all still had the centralized element. And if you go back to the history, the belief is one or more of the Nakamoto group, I think it probably was a group, that's my personal opinion.

>> It was a big group.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That they were heavily involved and they learned from the mistakes of earlier. And they finally had that invention of proof of work, which is the underpinning of not being able to stop decentralized money from Bitcoin. So that first one, it was during time we had the open source revolution, Linux and all of that happened. And in web 2, as it's called, when Google and Facebook figured out the advertising model, they now figured out how to have a profitable monetary business. And that's when the internet really took off together with Steve Jobs inventing a mobile internet platform, the iPhone, and they found a new market fit for investors. And I always go back to the VCs and the investors drive the industry because the best new ideas come from them. If they are good to invest in, easy to invest in, if they go to public markets, get large returns, these exponentials come from winning that part of the market. And I was very happy at that time. The US was really behind being leading in that. One of the things I'm very happy in 2025, we're back to a winning AI, winning crypto, winning technology mindset in the US, which I think is dramatically important. We have very open society, very forward thought. That's good. So I want us to win that. I don't want it to be won by closed societies. But the challenge was this new model involved, data is the new oil and data and withholding data was a problem and owning people's identity and then trying to monetize attention in ways that aren't really great for us.

>> And monetizing the users themselves.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> And monetizing the users. The user is the product, and they're selling to the other-

>> Where's my token?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, exactly. So we saw all of these things happening. So when I learned about finally crypto and I learned about the technology, I came in on the Ethereum side because to me, combining together the idea of money in a special purpose blockchain like Bitcoin together with technology people, we know a database and a computer or virtual machine, the Ethereum virtual machine, putting those two together on the blockchain with money meant that we had a settlement on the financial side, but also settlement on information. A lot of people don't realize this, but when you're managing your identity online, there are critical things you have to do like rotating your keys, other stuff which are exactly like money. If you double spend, when you make that change, you have a question mark of which one is the real identity? So you have these things that require and also data ownership there. All of these transactions are just as important in money. And I would argue losing your identity is losing your entire future reputation and possibly way more money than just losing a couple of thousand dollars from a hack or something.

>> That reputation piece is critical because now we're operating in connected systems groups. Some call it graphs. I call it just networks and networks of networks forming. We're merging theCUBE with the crypto and blockchain network. We've got Wall Street with NYSE, with theCUBE, with the tech, and that's just the base. It's almost like a L1 network. And there are higher level things that go on, like ad hoc trust networks, trust networks allow people to talk to each other. So you're seeing in Ethereum community that I like is that it's almost like they're telegraphing to each, signaling to each other, build. There's a builder mindset in Ethereum that I like and that's why I'm okay with this L1, L2 roll-up concept because to make developers compose apps, you got to build stuff so you can have all the benefits of an L1, like in Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the L1s. Let the better product win as long as you're getting the benefits of tokens.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Which is not present in say cloud or say the social nets or even old school games like League of Legends and other things. But now social gaming's hot in crypto developers. This is low hanging fruit, but this is a tell sign for business coming on board. I find it funny, I was just at a conference where they're talking about saving democracy, saving journalism and news, local news and of course social freedoms and all these things, and they all go to the old paradigms and try to retrofit them when there's solutions right there. I mean, if you look at what you were just talking about saying, "Hey, if you put people together, you can have innovation and do that." Democratization is inherently the word. Democracy and democratization.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right. That's right. Spreading it out to the people, decentralizing among people is democratization.

>> Collective intelligence is an AI concept that's been around, go back to when you were breaking into the industry. I remember when I was in college in the '80s, AI concepts were out there, but there was no compute power, there's no super computing. Those neural networks have been around for how long?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Actually, touring and the original people that created the concept of math as programmatic steps, which is computer science, they all thought, I mean a lot of them were very optimistic. They thought they'd have AI in 1960.

>> When I was in college, ended up being lisp, but that was a whole nother discussion. I don't want to go there.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Oh, lisp is beautiful.

>> I don't want to go off the rails on that one. But let's get back into some of the work you're doing because I think we were talking before you came on camera, you've been working with Ethereum Foundation and the community. You've been on some projects where you've had input, you've moved the needle on some things. There is a replenishing of talent coming in. There are people working on things like performance, scale, value, creation, those pillars. They're not mutually exclusive. They have interplay. Share your vision on how the magic of these, the core principles of Ethereum.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Okay, okay, that sounds good. And I'll put it in context to understand Ethereum, I think it's helpful to understand in terms of a linear optimization. On one end there is absolutely pure decentralization where you are, it's called maximal decentralization, where you give up potentially a tremendous amount of performance, but you have this incredible ability to just say, look, this is going to stay there and stick there. To me, the thing that is most positive about something like Bitcoin is that the community there has agreed the protocol essentially never changes. That means though, as we know in technology, it's not going to have performance improvements very minimal because the use case it wants to do, which is this representation of an outside money similar to gold and storing that value is well served by it. And then proof of work, mining, is also fully permissionless. Anybody with power can do it. I mean even though you buy special ASICs now, you can still do it on a laptop. It may not make you money versus the cost, but it's still possible to do. So that's one end. The other end is where web 2 is right now and it's centralized. Now, it's not centralized architecturally. I mean, do you think Google runs on one computer? Obviously not. These applications run on tens of thousands of computers. So they are decentralized in the technology, but who controls the computer and who basically makes money from the computer that is running Google or Twitter or TikTok or YouTube? That is the centralized part. So you have these two either end of the spectrum. And so Ethereum moved away from Bitcoin by being programmable money and programmable money with the idea, when they launched the protocol, they said, we're going to move to this thing called proof of stake. Proof of stake for people who are just coming to crypto space, it's like where the money represents proof of work, Bitcoin, you buy these a hundred thousand dollars mining hardware and you run it. In Ethereum, when you do something wrong in the protocol as if you went and your data center of hardware was burned, just completely destroyed. That's what it means because in proof of stake, you lose actual money when you do the wrong thing. So Ethereum, but proof of stake until cryptography, I am hopeful, I think in about five to 10 years proof of stake will actually be more decentralized in proof of work. That's actually a very radical statement. I go into panels and argue that with other people, but that's my view.

>> What's their argument on the other side?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> The argument on the other side is that proof of work in some ways, but simpler things are more robust. This is just a fundamental law of nature. It's a corollary of Occam's razor. And so proof of work, in order to do it, we'll actually combine together probably 30 plus complicated cryptographic and crypto economic techniques to get there. So it's very hard to fine-tune and do. I think by the time it's all done, you'll actually be able to formally prove it mathematically that it is more decentralized. But that's the argument. And right now I don't think I'd win that argument. There's a lot of things that I know that you give up from proof of work in proof of stake, but you get a lot for it. But anyway, it moves away from that goalpost because it's more centralized. And then the other thing in Ethereum, Ethereum didn't have for your havings, Ethereum had community sided decreases of the block reward. It didn't commit to having full scarcity where it had a fixed terminal supply of 21 million, I believe in Bitcoin. In Ethereum it can grow for a long time. More recently, it introduced inflation deflation economics. So it's basically doesn't grow the supply anymore, but still it's variable. And then in Ethereum they had this road map to basically keep modifying the protocol until they have what's called hit, what's called an end game. The end game is when the Ethereum protocol essentially stops changing and you just freeze the code at that point. So Ethereum is much more like a web 2 company where you keep iterating the product, but that introduces for a lot of people, "Hey, what happens?" That means something could change. I'm comfortable with that because the community is not going to do things that move too far away from decentralization. Plus in a Bitcoin, the ultimate control of the community is forking the chain. Because Bitcoin and Ethereum and every blockchain has fully public data, it's completely different. You can't get your data out of Twitter. You can't get your data out of these web 2 companies. Your data is fully on the web. We need to improve privacy because that actually has some problems, but as a result of that, you can and will. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum have had very large forks in the past. People aren't aware of that anymore, but the protocol split into two sides and in some cases it takes a year or two for society to decide which is the valid chain. That could happen again. And that's like you call it in technology and nuclear option. When you have the threat of doing that, then man, the other side knows it doesn't have ultimate power. And as we know, ultimate power does the ultimate corruption. So when you don't have that, you get-

>> Checks and balances. We have that on the other side, the potential fork.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> And so if I was from maximal Bitcoin type decentralization to, we now have some very centralized chains that cannot viably fork and they don't viably actually have even the community running them. They have certain, I would say LARPing or cosplaying, they look like it, but if you get down at the very deep level, they're not. And I don't like to actually talk negative about things because they're still helping the space through competition, better UX. So they're there. So they're very close to centralize. Ethereum is very close to Bitcoin and it's a very good in my mind.

>> And where have you been doing some work lately? Where have you been putting your energy?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> So lately about a year, almost a year and a half ago, I used to head up R&D Labs for Joe Lubin at ConsenSys. I think he's been on your program as well.

>> He has, yep.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> He's a philosopher.

>> He's awesome.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, he's one of the GOATs of the industry. So I headed up R&D Labs and I also worked with him. He had a lot of investment activity. I was a research partner with him, and then he also allowed us to moonlight. So out of ConsenSys, I was a heavy participant in DAOs as well as part-time running a foundation a couple of years ago. But in the last year and a half I joined a protocol called EigenLayer, CEO, and executive director of the foundation. I helped to essentially launch that and build a team and we took about half the token supply, which at various times tokens vary, but it has been at sometimes multiple-

>> And the goal there was to do what?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> So the goal there, I think in my mind, all of the protocols from an open source perspective, there's articles written about the digital roads and bridges of the internet and a famous meme where you see this whole stack of Legos and at the very bottom is something that's as thin as a pencil and it's like, oh, this is that critical open source project that has no funding. And we've seen that with things like the Heartbleed attack and hack, that there's no one really funding that. So there's a couple of things that I wanted-

>> So critical pieces of the stack or critical protocols that need to be shored up.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah, yeah, exactly. So our protocol is a very technological protocol. Maybe we'll go into some of the high level pictures of it, but I will say our protocol is a component. We're going to do it together with a lot of other companies that are in crypto, but our goal is to really fix the internet and fix all of the problems that are attached to it. And especially now with AI and AGI and agents coming in, fixing that part. It's a very strong statement to say, but I like saying it because right now, or anytime I talk with people, if they tell me anything that they think is wrong, I will methodically go through how it can be solved. And it includes things that are non-technical, like I'll actually say this allows us to fix the alignment of the companies that are invested in by VCs to make them much better for society when they go public. And in crypto you go public with an initial coin offering and in the regular markets you go to the stock market through an IPO, but this is fixing it and improving it. I think actually we need to make sure, and I think there's very easy ways to make investing for VCs better in the crypto and the web 3 market. I think it's better for founders. I have a strong view and vision. I've talked about it, that we actually can fix open source and make open source have much more funding, much more tension and open up even more competition to it. And we will actually all benefit from much stronger infrastructure.

>> I mean, think about open source. First of all, that's a huge point because open source and some of these things are growing so fast. I mean, we were just riffing about when we broke into the business proprietary. I mean, I used to deal software in college like, what? Because it was not free.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yes.

>> Hey, can I get that source code? You got the UNIX source code? Yeah, stole it. It was stolen. So those people, and when companies went out of business, all that software went out of business with them. So we grew up on the first generation open source. Okay, what generation right now? Fifth? Sixth? I mean, but it's still, it's steady state open source. No-brainer. The good that that's done has been great. So how do you retrofit that for the next generation?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Exactly. Exactly.

>> I think with all these shifts, the hottest thing going on for the past two years, certainly from what we've been covering is AI infrastructure. AI infrastructure. By the way, that's not precluding blockchain, not AI initiative, but infrastructure shifts. So distributed computing, we love it, but now it starts to get different based upon what's driving it, which is software.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> You got to run software on systems.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> And operating systems that are open source like Linux have done it before and companies like Red Hat have existed. So you're seeing that now play out in this ecosystem.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Where if you let it be open, you can monetize around it. That's a business model innovation.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's a business model. Absolutely.

>> It's nothing to do with tech other than keeping it open for builders.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Now, standards are huge. If you remember some of the open source standards, the OSI model, if I remember correctly, with the seven-layer stack, not all seven layers were standardized. Only the bottom half. That's all we needed.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> But to me, I see this as a parallel to what's happening now. And so you can pick your approach, but there's still standardization depending on what your philosophy is.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> I mean, that's what we're getting at here. You want Bitcoin? You want gold? Great, no problem. Yeah, they're doing some stuff on it, but it's in chain. There's some pros and cons to that.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> There are.

>> Ethereum, you want to build? So it's apples to oranges. We're not comparing, I mean that's the way. I mean, am I off on this?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> No, you're 100% right. I mean, economics at its core, people just focus on the money and companies making money, but economics is really a philosophy of how societies organize the work that's done and the value produced from it in a way that when it's designed well, benefits everybody who's in that society who opts into it. And so this sort of thing, high-level thinking is really. The open source, I love mentioning OSI models and standardization. They're important. You need to have the frameworks. The framework I would say that's so dramatic on crypto now is in the early internet and generations, you had this entire OSI stack, but there was something missing at the bottom, which was the money and finances. That went out of technology into the corporate world, which started, I think getting created in the 15, 1600s. That's when we first invented LLCs and other things. And they're great. I mean, they've served us incredibly well. Globalization.

>> They're mechanisms.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> They're mechanisms. So now-

>> Put that on quote.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> From my point of view, a lot of people who are in crypto, they have very often different fields thinking, but I actually see crypto as able to build one of the purest versions of capitalism mixed with the ability for economic philosophers to construct new regenerative mechanisms. So just even that one, the value of open source flows back in down to the digital space and accelerates through this wheel versus, I mean I love public markets, but they also have oddities like when VCs who are expecting 50% growth per year in their portfolio, and that means some companies are 10 X-ing a year. When they sell to the public market, we have these multi-trillion dollar companies now that are still growth companies. They're not doing dividends, which actually was the model in the early 1900s. And so we have companies that are massive that are still looking for where they can get 30% growth in revenue and profits every year. And so of course, that drives them to things that are very different than what we might like.

>> Robert, you made a good point. I love how you brought that finance piece in the stack because it's not just one dimension, it's multiple vectors now. I'd also say capitalism for sure throw democracy in there. Why not throw that in there? Because you got tech finance or tech capitalism, tech finance capitalism, and then impact and freedom democracy.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> I mean we are living, at least from my generation, my standpoint, my opinion, you can agree or debate or align, impact and democracy. It's easy to... We're at a nexus.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> So you don't have to get rich and then do philanthropy. Good things.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right. That's right. You can do it.

>> It's all going on at the same time because the impact is the tech and the finance. So if you're already making an impact, it's easy to sidecar other initiatives. So it's about mission alignment. And I think I was just at an event last weekend and all these foundations, it's like a waterfall software project. It's all this, here's the money. Park it. Put five in the market, 5% in the market. They should act like hedge funds. Why aren't they like... Entrepreneurs are making impact. You're making an impact. People are making impact. So why not, if you're going to make an impact, do it together?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> It's not that hard if you're in the community. So what's your reaction to that?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's absolutely right. I mean, I think for a lot of open source developers when they graduate from college start their careers out, they start out actually wanting to do a lot of these ideals. I mean, it's very correct that a lot of much more liberal thinking and just improve society. There's a reason why a lot of revolutions, the French Revolution, I think we've had some in Asian countries as well. I'm not going to name them so that this program doesn't get censored in some of them.

>> I'm sure anyway.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> But when they're leaving school, why do they end up going into these other positions that don't allow that waterfall model to work? And the reason why is they also want to be able to have a life that includes owning a house, getting married-

>> Because they got to live....

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> having a family, everything else, they need to have that success and not only in first world countries, but in a lot of developing countries. So my vision on fixing open source doesn't just include the investor side or the few founders. I actually think the open source community needs to grow to being able to absorb having a total footprint of tens of millions of open source developers around the world that are able to work in this waterfall model and the millions of CF students that are coming out of college every year, they can look and say, sure, I can go to some of these web 2 companies that have this interesting thing. There's two views. One is you can look at the negative side of what they don't do well in terms of how they profit-seeking and everything, but it is also important. Some of my friends have pointed out really well that the other problem with monopolies and these big corporations is they start funneling their money and others to squashing competition that is actually more innovative than them. They want to freeze things with them on top. So actually moving to this waterfall model in the open source means that we as consumers get more options and we get better technology, the innovation goes faster.

>> And you have a community to be an arbiter of that collective intelligence.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right.

>> Robert, it's been great, fascinating here. And we could probably go for an hour. I'd love to do a follow-up and do a deeper dive. You're at the corner of a lot of things happening around you, which is totally cool. And you got the experience. You're like a historian too. You've been there, done that, and you're doing it. So great to have you on. Final question, what are you most excited about right now? What are you looking at? And this doesn't to be related to what you're working on directly, but zooming out, what's exciting you and what are you looking at?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> The thing that's exciting me, it's actually like, boy had going into tech and everything has always been about AI. Okay. And so I know you probably have everybody say this, but let me tell you the angle of it. I think that during technology revolutions is when you can do the most innovation. It would be incredibly hard to change the web model without AI and to make these types of changes I'm talking about because everything was static and locked in. A joke I used to say with my friends in Silicon Valley, I did a start-up company, but essentially all the companies were going to, you're building a company which hopefully gets bought by a public cloud company or one of the companies doing various social media or search or whatever. Now with AI, we see this that the entire landscape of who's winning has dramatically changed. We had a company that is talking about doing $500 billion raises now. It's absolutely nuts. And so during this time, that is one, the shakeup. But then the second part is that AI has things that it can't do with the existing models. So one of them that I like to say is that there is a need for trustworthiness in AI and there is a need for not being able to stop or censor AIs. That is very paramount to what crypto did with money. And so I refer to as unstoppable, trustworthy AGI or AI agents. It's a great example of them. If I'm going to talk to a therapist, I want to know much more than I care about a lot of other things that I'm having privacy, that I own the data that I can use it the way that I want. And I also don't want someone to turn off the switch on that. We have some great examples where people were really having a great relationship with these combating loneliness. Loneliness is actually one of the biggest problems in the world right now, and social media doesn't make you feel less lonely.

>> It makes you worse.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> It makes you worse off. But a company was just pressured by the jurisdiction they were in to turn off some critical features and people were having serious emotional issues because they lost a friend. So we don't want things like that to be happening and I can't even imagine all use cases. I tried to-

>> Who makes that decisions? How's that decision made? It's all these new issues. Again, new opportunities, but this is the social good piece I was looking at. People can actually have more impact now and not just think about profit. So Robert, great to have you on. Congratulations on all your work and continued success. Appreciate you coming on theCUBE, as always. Trailblazing. I guess one final question, since you made me think of it. As a trailblazer, you plow on the fields. What have you learned? First of all, it's tough to plow the fields because you get less stuff blow back in your face and you learn. What lessons have you learned in this wave that you're going to take forward to the next one?

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> I think I'm going to talk about it from the crypto wave perspective because I think that a lot of people who are watching this going to be interested, because I've been through this in my third wave now, which is making me more mature. You learn emotionally through the waves because things go up 30X and they come down five X and things change a whole lot. What I've learned is a lot of those swings have been coming in because retail, typically investors and maybe on this side, institutional investors wash money into a system and with a higher demand for crypto and a relatively fixed supply. Of course, we get this massive price action when we have, whether it's fraud or have some things collapse or political environments change, we go down by five or six X because that money pulls out. So it's like a tide washing in five, washing out. This cycle I think is, we're getting product market fit largely through AI. That's like the point of the sphere into a lot more technology. With that, there's about a 2 trillion, I think it's roughly $2 trillion of the enterprise cent spend on software and hardware. It's I think another 2 trillion on the consumer side.

>> Wow.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> It's these big, big numbers. I don't know how much of that's going to be captured, but I do think that one thing I've learned here is that part of the things that are going to essentially make crypto into more palatable as a monetary system and as financial rails is to remove some of this volatility. Getting in revenue, which is not going to pull out during the bad times, is going to actually act as a ballast on the ship that you could take the investment out. But will you take all of the investment out if there's half a trillion dollars of revenue coming into the crypto space?

>> I mean, profit and opportunity.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah. Absolutely.

>> In any transition, whenever there's moving parts, there's opportunity to reconfigure-

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right....

>> landscape, whether it's leaders, incumbents, and with democratization, anyone can enter. You don't have to be pedigree or go to a special school. You just come right in.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> So in my mind, it's like it's a different model because this one goes up and down. But Gartner has this hype cycle and then the trough. But I do think we are now building on the final end stage.

>> We're out of a trough, for sure.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Yeah.

>> The hurricane headwinds is just a breeze, soon to be tailwind.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> That's right. That's right.

>> All right. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you coming on.

Robert Drost, Ph.D.

>> Thank you so much as well.

>> All right, the crypto trailblazers here inside theCUBE, bringing all the data, again, part of theCUBE's series with the NYSE Wired in an open network revolving around content. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.