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Linda Xjie

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20
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2018-10-22
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2018-10-22
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1
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  1. “The most recent one, I think Kadena added us to their Angel list page. They haven't done as much press on it yet, but they're going to be talking about a bit more. But Kadena is a smart contracts platform that's created by a former JPMorgan blockchain team. And they're creating a competitor to Ethereum. And this one, I think, is really compelling because they don't have every single node on the network validate every single transaction. They have this concept called chain web where you essentially only have to validate your own transaction and those around you. And so everyone kind of links together in this like web. And so you know that it's secure without having to have every single node verify everything, which is just really inefficient. And the other thing I really like about them is that they have this human readable smart contract language. So you can actually have like lawyers and investors just read this smart contract to see what's actually happening, which I think is really cool and makes things more accessible. And then just the team is just absolutely amazing. And I think are some of the”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Into something, and all of a sudden, this token becomes valuable, you really need it to be necessary for the protocol to work. And so I think that having more conversations with more crypto native kind of people, maybe the people who are earlier in the space, having those conversations and truly understanding what this technology is is going to be really important. So I urge a lot of people to do that kind of research and due diligence.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I actually really like seeing the traditional tech VCs come into this space, but I really think that in the current state, we're seeing just a lot of FOMO from a lot of investors. So they kind of want to just have exposure to crypto for the sake of having exposure to crypto. So they just hear like, okay, these are some of the other VCs that have put money into this crypto project. I might as well put money into. I've heard a number of them say that their LPs are demanding exposure to crypto, and so therefore they feel like they feel like they have to do it. I think that the one thing I really do love about the VCs coming into the space though is because they have experience actually building out teams, building out companies and like actually taking products mainstream. And I think this is absolutely critical for this industry to actually succeed. So I love that these VCs are coming in and able to provide that expertise and advice. The only thing is just I think that they might need to get a little bit more exposed to actually what crypto is and why crypto is important. You just don't tack on a token.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Been a really big barrier for a lot of them to come in from my conversations. And so a number of them have outsourced this to different crypto funds, but in order for them to actually hold their own crypto, we need better custody solutions. Coinbase custody is one that's going to be launched soon. We also have things like Bitco that are creating custody solutions. And then there's a few in stealth modes. So I'm very optimistic that by the end of this year, we're going to have really robust custody solutions.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So, I do think that the institutional capital is already coming in. I've heard of a number of funds that were raising and some of the names that they've raised from is definitely the institutional capital that I was hoping would come in. But in terms of a meaningful way, I think that it's going to be maybe end of this year, early next year. There's a few pieces where we need to wait for this capital to come in. First, just having the regulatory uncertainty clear up a bit. There was some good statements from top ranking SEC official how Ether is not currently a security. And so as we see more statements like this and as we just have things get a little more clarified, I think these institutional investors will be more interested and feel a little safer coming in. And then the second piece is actually having custody solutions. Right now, these institutional investors can't custody their own crypto either legally because they are above a certain AUM or just because they don't want to or don't know how to. And so this is”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “China, in terms of crypto, I actually think that they're going to be a big player in this industry. I think they will really start using this blockchain tech and be building out different tech themselves. I actually think they might even create their own cryptocurrency one day. It's pretty great way of monitoring what people are doing right now.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And it's going to be more of a fully private coin. And so that's kind of one trade off. Dash is another one. It's essentially they use something called master nodes, which are these nodes that are actually making these transactions. So the downside to having a masternode be the one making the transactions rather than the protocol level where everyone's kind of, everything's being mixed, is that these masternodes actually have access to seeing more information. And so there's this thought that maybe law enforcement or bad actors are actually running these masternodes, but some of the pros to dash is that it's actually a lot easier to use and they've actually been going after the marijuana market because marijuana businesses actually have a lot of issue getting banked. And so Dash actually tries to cater to that market, make it really easy to use. So there's a lot of different coins out there. This is just a handful in the end.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Something really inefficient. So only like 13% of the network right now is actually private because they have to opt into using this. And so not everyone on the network is actually using private transactions. And one of the trade-offs to this is that now you have some people that are just openly operating as usual and then a small segment of people that are being private. And so this runs into potential issues because you can kind of deduce a lot of information. It's kind of like a puzzle. You can piece together different puzzles trying to figure out what some of these privacy people are doing. And at the same time, one trade-off is that, you know, when someone opts into privacy, you're kind of in a way painting a target on your back. So it's kind of like, well, why are you opting into privacy? Do you have something to hide? Everyone else is doing something public, so why are you doing this? So I think that's a big trade-off. And Zhash is fully aware of that and they're working towards making the ZKSNARCs more efficient to generate. So over time, I think it's going to start these privacy transactions are going to start increasing.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Bunch of different things, and no one has to look at exactly what's happening, and they can just generate this proof saying, oh, I indeed did do this, you don't have to actually check it. And so this to me is really exciting, but this is also very new cryptography. So some of the trade-offs are that this hasn't been battle tested over a long period of time. So it's unclear in the current state if this is actually viable tech so far there hasn't been major issues. So it seems to be good. And also one trade-off right now is that these CK snarks, these zero knowledge proofs, are actually really memory intensive and time consuming to generate. So it takes almost a minute for these DK snarks to be generated. So that's not very efficient if someone wants to use this as money. You don't necessarily want to wait like a full minute to fend something. And so what ended up happening is that the Zcash shut it up so that you can opt into using this privacy feature. And so what's the case in this current state is that a lot of people don't want to opt into just having”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Currency more than once. In Monero, you can't keep track of it because you don't have this address association with every single transaction. It's all kind of convoluted. And so the way they keep track of it is they have to store some additional information called a key image. And this information that they're storing is a lot of data. And so Monero itself isn't as scalable because it's storing all this additional data. And so Monero might not be something in the current state that can actually be used mainstream quite yet. So they still have to work on some scaling solutions. And then alternatively, Monero is just also maybe not the most user-friendly coin for people to use. And I think that part is just maybe a matter of time. And then you have something like Zcash, which is a newer currency. Zcash uses a new technology called ZK Snarks, which are something called zero knowledge proofs, which means that you can prove that something happened with providing zero knowledge about it, zero information about it. And this is really powerful because people now are able to do”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so there's a lot of different coins out there. Monero and Zcash and Dash probably being the most popular ones that you might have heard of. So Monero itself, the really like privacy kind of community really likes Monero because every single transaction on Monero is private by default. And so there's mandatory privacy on this network. And so because you have every single transaction that's private, it's really hard to kind of like piece together different information. The way Monero kind of does their privacy is through different technologies called ring signatures and ring CT. So they're essentially, you can think of ring signatures. This is a very like high level explanation of it, but essentially mixing a bunch of different transactions on the network that are happening into a batch. And so it's really hard when you actually look at the blockchain to see which transaction belongs to who because they're just all mixed together. So the trade-off with Monero right now is that in order to prevent what's something called a double spend, which is essentially being able to spend the same digital”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In a society where their governments are very corrupt and they want to protect themselves from their own governments, I think that a privacy coin is extremely important. To me, less relevant in the US, this might be something that many people don't actually associate with themselves with, but in a lot of other countries, I've talked to people where they actually understand this notion of why this could be important. And then similarly, like if you're just a company and you're operating, you don't necessarily want your entire history to be shown to the public. You can now have your competitors see exactly what you're doing or bad actors get access to this information and kind of try to do some bad actions with this information. So to me, privacy coins are just very important and kind of parallel what we're already used to.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Privacy, but at the same time, I think that it's also very important that money itself is fungible. So fungible means that all units of the money are treated the same way. They're all worth the same amount. And when you have some coins, like let's say in Bitcoin, where it has a history of tainted transactions, meaning that it was used for maybe some illicit purposes, it might not get accepted on some exchanges or certain merchants or people might not accept it because they fear that this coin now has this association with tainted activity despite you not having been associated with that, but that it has this history of it, it might not get accepted. And therefore the money itself is no longer fungible. And so that's a really core piece to what actually makes money successful. And so when you have something that has this history, I think that that's a big problem in actually getting it to be used as money. And then in general, it's not just people who are using privacy coins for illicit activity. There are a lot of legitimate cases where, let's say that someone lives”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, so privacy coins are essentially just coins that have privacy enhancing features. So when people think of Bitcoin, a lot of people actually think it's an anonymous currency, but it's actually pseudonymous, which means that when you look at the public blockchain, you can see all the transactions that are happening, but it's associated with different addresses. So you don't actually see names attached to it. But over time, as people start revealing their addresses, like let's say that they post it publicly and say, hey, everyone, donate to this address, or you pay a merchant and they now see your address, now people know that that address is associated with you and therefore they can see your balance and entire transaction history. And so for me, this doesn't really make sense because even in our existing financial system, we have this expectation of some financial privacy. Like we don't broadcast our entire bank account statement for the entire world to see. And so therefore, we shouldn't really expect this digital currency to broadcast for the entire world to see. So I think that in itself is very important to just have this like fundamental financial.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Of nowhere. It's just like end of last year, and everyone all of a sudden was interested in it and buying it. And so we need to make sure that we actually don't have a lot of technical debt. And then at the same time, we have the right tools in place to actually scale. So if things are just very inefficient and people are finding their day-to-day to actually be very repetitive and manual labor, then you can actually just automate that away. So having those tools”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Things that you know, if you review and it doesn't seem like something that's going to actually stay around, don't add it to your platform or don't try to get involved in this. So that was a key takeaway as I've started reviewing this space and investing. Another piece was also just how the hypergrowth period might actually take some time to actually get to. So when I first joined in 2014, the price of Bitcoin actually just plummeted. So it went from 600 to 200 and stayed at 200 for a very long time. And then the year of 2015 was where Wall Street was saying, oh, we like blockchain, but we don't like Bitcoin. And so that was really crazy for me to see because it was kind of this period where everyone was able to just build and focus right before hitting that hypergrowth. You don't necessarily know you hit hypergrowth and it happens like overnight. So it's very important to just be prepared for that. And this is where I think it's a little bit more just like any company is just make sure that you don't build up technical debt. So that was an important lesson to me because crypto kind of just like skyrocketed.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, those super interesting times. So there are a few pieces that were like very closely related to crypto. So the first one being, I remember in the early days where there was actually just a bunch of copycats of Bitcoin that came out and there was like just essentially people just took open source code of Bitcoin and copied it, forked it to a brand new coin. So there were a bunch of what they called back then alts altcoins. And I remember just thinking, wow, this is like a huge growth period. And this was back like in the early days when I joined Coinbase. And Brian consistently said no, they focus. We really need to make sure we're being smart and conservative. We can't be adding every single asset out there. And then over time, when we saw this explosion of ICOs and tokens and coins, Brian also remained very focused. And I think that that's an important takeaway that I learned is that these cycles really come and go. And ultimately, you want to build something that lasts throughout this entire period. So by not getting super distracted by”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Just a fun that invests in different tokens and coins that we really believe in. And we also help out teams as well. So we rear ourselves as not just capital too.”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Compliance investigator. So working with law enforcement and regulators and helping to build out the compliance program. And that was really unique insight. And I felt really excited about that kind of work. And then later switched to be product manager of internal tools at Coinbase, so building out the tools for the internal teams. But ultimately my day-to-day wasn't about crypto anymore, especially as Coinbase started getting larger and larger. It was pretty much building out systems for a large fintech company. So I decided to start Scalar because I was trying to think of like what exactly I wanted my data to look like. And that was pretty much researching new crypto assets that were coming along and just really getting closely involved with the teams that are building the space and helping them out. And so that was pretty much investing for me. So decided to leave Coinbase after being there three years and start Scalar. Was looking to have a very technical co-founder. So asked one of the software engineers I worked with really closely if he was interested. He said, yeah. And we launched Scalar, which is”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, so my parents are immigrants from China, and so growing up I saw them send money back home all the time, and it was just really expensive and very inefficient. And then I also heard stories of them when they were children and during the cultural evolution, my family actually had their assets seized. So when I finally came across Bitcoin in 2011, I was really fascinated with this idea of just having an unseizable asset. And I thought the technology was absolutely amazing. But I ended up looking at the community a little bit more and kind of like what were the players around and it was pretty sketch back then. It was Mt. Gox and Silk Road. So I didn't end up wanting to work in the industry. But when Coinbase came along, I thought they were actually the legitimate players in the space. I love that they were actively working with regulators and trying to take Bitcoin mainstream. So I basically left my job at AIG, told Coinbase I would do anything that they needed me to do. And I first joined them as a regulatory”

    2018-10-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source