Dealflow Podcast
Ep#10 IONET FOUNDER AHMAD SHADID - UNFILTERED
This is not an episode you'll want to miss...
We're proud to have been joined by Ahmad Shadid
- Founder and former-CEO of
$IO.
Hear the truth behind the story, as Ahmad tells all on the founding of Ionet, the reality of crypto-VCs, and Martin Shkreli's accusations from earlier this year...
Timestamps :
00:00 Introduction
02:02 Intro: Amad Shadid and Journey
05:32 Amad's Career Before Ionet
09:26 Entering Crypto & Becoming an Influencer
15:53 Meeting Co-founders and Building the Team
20:39 Fundraising Journey
24:41 Fundraising Challenges and Success
30:42 The Value of VCs and Connections
33:53 Understanding Crypto Market and Valuations
40:49 Addressing Accusations & Rebuilding Trust
54:22 Motives Behind the Attacks?
59:52 Stepping Down as CEO
01:07:25 Introducing O: App Store for AI-Powered Apps
01:13:15 The AI CEO: Transparency & Community Decision-Making
01:19:41 O Bot Resources & Info
01:20:56 Closing Remarks
Show some love on -
Youtube : https://youtube.com/@dealflowpodcast……
Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/6s9tYwNlVkI4hPRh3nthyu………
[Disclaimer: It's important to note that the information provided here does not constitute financial advice. The views and opinions expressed herein are purely personal and do not in any way represent or reflect the official stance or viewpoints of the individuals company]
This is not an episode you'll want to miss...
We're proud to have been joined by Ahmad Shadid
- Founder and former-CEO of
$IO.
Hear the truth behind the story, as Ahmad tells all on the founding of Ionet, the reality of crypto-VCs, and Martin Shkreli's accusations from earlier this year...
Timestamps :
00:00 Introduction
02:02 Intro: Amad Shadid and Journey
05:32 Amad's Career Before Ionet
09:26 Entering Crypto & Becoming an Influencer
15:53 Meeting Co-founders and Building the Team
20:39 Fundraising Journey
24:41 Fundraising Challenges and Success
30:42 The Value of VCs and Connections
33:53 Understanding Crypto Market and Valuations
40:49 Addressing Accusations & Rebuilding Trust
54:22 Motives Behind the Attacks?
59:52 Stepping Down as CEO
01:07:25 Introducing O: App Store for AI-Powered Apps
01:13:15 The AI CEO: Transparency & Community Decision-Making
01:19:41 O Bot Resources & Info
01:20:56 Closing Remarks
Show some love on -
Youtube : https://youtube.com/@dealflowpodcast……
Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/show/6s9tYwNlVkI4hPRh3nthyu………
[Disclaimer: It's important to note that the information provided here does not constitute financial advice. The views and opinions expressed herein are purely personal and do not in any way represent or reflect the official stance or viewpoints of the individuals company]
When I had to step down. It took me 24 hours to make the decision.
Speaker 2:If I'm an.
Speaker 1:AI. Let's say, theoretically, we need to stop the AI. So we bring in the facts as a team, we think we sit as a community or whatever we sit. We bring all the facts. What's the upside, what's the downside? Bring every fact and metric you can bring, then send it to the AI. Take all that in knowledge. What do the downside Bring every fact and metric you can bring, then send it to the AI. Take all that in knowledge. What do you advise? He could say I think I should fire myself right as a founder, maybe really be careful if they actually have good connections or not. And I think the best advice for any founder just talk to three portfolio companies of any VC you want to bring in, if they're a lead or if they're someone important. Talk to three portfolio companies of any vcu that you want to bring in if they're beat or if they're someone important. Talk to three of this portfolio before you choose. Promise you this is the best thing you can do very, very frank.
Speaker 3:Take on on vcs and by the way.
Speaker 1:By the way, I forgot, I'm talking to image ventures.
Speaker 3:One second, one second, you're one of the good guys right mh ventures is one of the best guys like.
Speaker 1:Honestly, from news you guys published like a lot of our articles, news yeah I appreciate the kind words.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask you I hope you fit under the nice criteria.
Speaker 3:Welcome to another episode of the DealFlow podcast. I'm your host, johnny Huang, chief Editor at BSCN. We're extremely excited for our guest today. But before we get onto that, a word to say. Nothing in this podcast is in any way intended to constitute financial advice. Everything is subjective opinions. Everything is designed to be entertaining and educational in nature. So please, please, bear that in mind throughout the podcast. But without further ado, it is my privilege to introduce alongside our regular guest, cam, founder of MH Ventures, the one and only Am amatadid the, the founder and former ceo of one of the hottest projects in the entire ecosystem right now. I'm talking, of course, about ironet ahmed. Why don't you introduce yourself very, very briefly?
Speaker 1:thank you very much. I appreciate the intro um quant systems engineer. Been um in crypto since 2017, 2016, 2016, 2016,. Back when Ethereum was $20 something, I lost a lot of money from crypto, like almost everyone. Then kind of learned the game of two things. You either make money if you are a VC or someone who invests like a VC for long term, or if you have quant systems trading like ultra low latency. You have only two paths to consistently make income from crypto. So I didn't have the funding to be a VC or to invest for the long term, I would say for at least the financial goal I had. So I started quant trading and been an engineer before that, so it was easier to get in and I just fell in love with that. Continued doing that all the way to 2023. To 2023.
Speaker 1:From there, ionet pivoted from a quant trading fund to Ionet itself, using the architecture we're using to scale our machine learning workloads across crypto miners' GPUs to reduce our expenses. And, yeah, as you can see, ionet reached where it is. I have stepped down as CEO officially from Ionet, starting a new journey in a new company called O. Think of it just like not Anton, right? You have the opposite of the coin. So this is going to be O? O coin is going to be something also amazing solves a real problem, a problem that I have been seeing a lot in the last year, but I don't think I had the time to do it and, yeah, I'm more than happy to talk about it during this call.
Speaker 2:Sorry, I just want to jump in. I love the fact that, which we'll get into that you were CEO of Ionet. You've officially stepped down and literally instantly. That entrepreneurial background, that eagerness to build something new, that you've just jumped in like I have this great idea, I want to build something else, which we'll get into as well, and it's good five days where I couldn't hold more than five days.
Speaker 1:It was too much. I, I just like, well, I'm feeding birds here, or something. What should I do, man? You know, like I need to, I retired in a way, but like I, I can't stop and there's no way.
Speaker 2:It's still a long way to go there which I also want to ask that stuff about the CEO. But I can imagine you like, oh, that relief of I'm able to step down from something that's been highly anticipated, um, and get all this free time, but you've given yourself, like you said, five days and then you've jumped into something new. Yeah, yeah, it's just a whole blood. That cannot thank you okay, cool.
Speaker 2:So just to uh which I know johnny will jump in and ask the questions. But um want to build a story from. I know you've kind of done a nice brief intro and you've built this story and it kind of answers a lot of questions, like on a on a quick scale. But if you want to start and start from the beginning and maybe build a story of yourself, um, could you kind of give us a brief overview of your career um before ionet? So one like if you don't mind sharing, you don't have to share this. But yeah, yeah, like, what did you do before crypto and Ionet?
Speaker 1:So back when I was at high school around. Yeah, at high school I was at that time like 16 something. I now I'm 26. So it's around 10 years ago, 11 years ago, something like that, 12 years ago. So, basically, I wanted to play Butterfield Crisis. It's a very high-quality video game that needs the best GPU in the world to play it and I just, you know, my father is like it's a waste of money, you don't need to buy a new GPU. So I was like, okay, I still want to play that game. So I have to find a way for me to play that game Somehow. I'm just like, insisted, this is my target, it's a goal. I want to play that game, high frame rate per second. Just, I want to enjoy the feeling. So I always ask, like, why not, let's try?
Speaker 1:And I kind of dig deep into like how game engines work, how CUDA works, how GPUs work, how they render live rendering on games, how the game engine itself works to render such high-quality games. Why does it take longer? A better GPU? Always, what's going on Like why? So I tried to understand and dig deeper. I overclocked the GPU. I built an algorithm that overclocks a GPU 66 times. What's going on Like why? So I tried to understand and dig deeper. I overclocked the GPU. I built an algorithm that overclocks a GPU 66 times just for me to play that game and burn the GPU, of course, but I mean I managed to do that.
Speaker 1:So then Saudi Arabia took me, the government, to competitions in Switzerland and Malaysia and multiple invention competitions, um research competitions specifically for uh, for for the computer science field, got like gold medals across every competition. I've been to um for this technology and everyone looking at me like you're 16 17, competing with phds, like how did you do that? I was like I don't know, I just wanted to play battlefield man and I had to find a way. Um, so yeah, that's how I started in engineering specifically, and then from game engine development like core game engine, rendering technology development too, I moved out from that to normal game development like C++, normal game development, because once you go so deep, everything becomes so easy. After that I wanted to make a game studio, a triple a game studio. Um, I was at that time like 7 18.
Speaker 1:I went to a vc. I was like hey, I want 50 million funding and they laughed at me. I was like I told them guys, this could make a billion dollar. Like. There's no triple a arabian game in the market. This massive opportunity here. This is a billion dollar game, but no one got. No one understood what I'm saying about. Like game no AAA Arabian game in the market. This massive opportunity here. This is a billion dollar game, but no one understood what I'm saying about it. Game bring us real estate project, bring us this. That's like the mentality where I grew up in Saudi Arabia. So I was like, okay, you have to find something they understand. So I went kind of like less technical. So I built a startup for travel, a mobile app for travel to book experiences, like the one you see which is right now in Airbnb experiences something exactly like Airbnb experiences.
Speaker 2:But that before Airbnb launched that.
Speaker 1:So I saw a trend there's a market, small opportunity, cool, airbnb could come and acquire me. I kind of catch the trend and just build a product for that. I built the product, joined a few accelerators in Slovenia and Malaysia, san Francisco, all around. Like learned so much about, like entrepreneurship, building startups and everything else other than coding. I would say so all the non-engineering part. I would say so all the non-engineering part. Then I went to I met a mentor who currently is the managing partner of IO Ventures and now he's becoming the CFO of IONET.
Speaker 1:After I left when I met him, he has a private equity in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah, and I met him like two, three years behind when I was just at that high school wanting the 50 million funding. So he was like, hey, let me mentor you. So after this travel app, it failed and I just didn't like it anymore. I felt bored doing that. So I said, okay. He said come join me, work with private equity, learn some few stuff. He said come join me, work with private equity, learn some few stuff. So because I code, so I help him. I actually helped him build. They wanted to build a trading system for the US market, for their own strategy, and it's just some code. So I helped there and then I started to learn investment analysis and becoming like an analyst for him helping pre-IPO launches and so on.
Speaker 1:Just got into the finance world also more for him, helping pre-ipo launches and so on. Just got into the finance world also more. And then, um, basically his father-in-law, who's I think I'm 70 years old. He was like do you know?
Speaker 1:about bitcoin. I was like no. So I was like and then I was like, when I knew more about bitcoin at that time that was like 2016 like I felt ashamed, like why he's telling me about Bitcoin. I should be the one who's following up with the latest trends and not like being left behind. So he told me go learn about it. We want to do more things there. So I went to learn more about crypto and regulations, crypto and regulations and my investment analysis request from him was to build like a research on, like what is the expected regulation to come on crypto?
Speaker 2:so.
Speaker 1:I had to like study the regulations.
Speaker 1:Everything's happening all around, so kind of like understood everything and I was like man, this is the future, I swear. I quit immediately and I said this is like me catching the internet in the 90s. What would I do? I want to have a footprint there. Definitely.
Speaker 1:It's so hard to have a footprint in the internet now like Amazon, google, apple compared to if you started back in the 90s. Same like crypto. It's getting harder and harder to have footprint compared to like you have Ethereum, solana, all these guys that started the way behind. It's it's getting harder and harder to have footprint compared like you have ethereum, solana, all these guys that started the way behind. So it's getting harder. It's definitely still possible, but it's much harder. So imagine how hard would it be after 10 years from now. So there's no better time to start a crypto project than now definitely always. So I started in crypto. I started also channel. I became the largest influencer in the Middle East teaching people about crypto how to trade. I already learned I've been learning in this private equity a lot of things and I was like I went to courses and this and that and kind of aggregated knowledge I would say.
Speaker 1:So now I was like, okay, let's trade. So I started to teach people how to trade. I saw there's no content in the Middle East about it, so I saw a trend. If I do that, I could get a lot of follower base, because it's a trend and people can't find good content. There's a problem. So I fixed the problem and became number one in the Middle East for two, three years and then I started multiple things.
Speaker 1:So I started a small fund, kind of like a syndicate from the community, and I started a trading platform, trading analysis platform like TradingView, but that platform is specifically focused on volume-based analysis, like volume profile, vwaps all the specific volume-based only analysis and at the same time so that's like 2018, 2019, same thing. At mid 2019, I moved to build Quant Trading and from there I moved. So Whales Trader project had some issues with my ex partner there which caused the project to be closed. Then I had to start again. So I started the quant fund, specifically quant only um, and just focused on that since 2019, mid 2019 till 2022.
Speaker 1:I mean, I mean till today, but I mean till 2023, sorry, uh, when I moved from this quant fund to focus fully on ironit um, so that's kind of like the story. So I got into the quant world more and more in depth in 2019. And from 2019, because my own funds I have to learn even more than just building some simple stock trading for this private equity or some something like that. I got deeper and deeper. So from there there, we moved from crypto then to stock scaled ml.
Speaker 1:This hype started start to use some model like xg boost and some other like specific ways to uh, to teach models how to trade or how to forecast directions of the market. And then just how can I scale that across like thousands of assets and then, at the same time, also scale it to execute for tens of thousands of users in less than 200 milliseconds? So you're like you have so many different like vectors of scalability, of scalability that you need to monitor. For example, a thousand stock minimum plus each one of the thousand stocks you have to trade for 30,000 accounts when there's a trade, and so imagine all this trading happening in parallel and then for each of this, like one stock that I'm trading, I have to make sure there's no, I'm not moving the market. I have to make sure the latency between all the different accounts for the same trade, for the same stock. They are not affecting each other, all of them are executing at the same price so it's not unfair for others, and so on.
Speaker 1:So doing all that required me to scale out from, you know, simple computing to distributed computing and more and more computing, just like the more I get deeper, the more compute hungry I become. And because I can see how powerful I can and how accurate my results would be, how faster, and so on, because really one millisecond in trading markets makes a lot of difference. And from there Ionet started and now Oho started. That's long story short.
Speaker 2:I don't know if Johnny has a follow-up question, but just to quickly jump absolutely awesome and really appreciate like the in-depth discussion.
Speaker 3:I suppose it gives a lot of color that I think a lot of the audience won't necessarily have. I guess. To move over to, you know, like you said, you almost set the scene to talk about ionet specifically. How did you meet the rest of the ionet team right in terms of co-founders? I think tory green is a good example of that. What was the journey in terms of the? How did the actual collaboration come about?
Speaker 1:uh, we met me and toy green in malaysia. Uh, actually, um, in august. Uh, after I already started raised fund from multi coin, I already started to collect team.
Speaker 1:I was in malaysia in august and then I had a call with Tory you know he has some following on Twitter and after that call he's like man, I love this idea, I'm coming. I was like what? I'm coming? Literally next 24 hours he's in front of me. I was like, okay, this guy's crazy, he really like, likes. Like he not only like he likes the idea, but like he takes decision, he goes what he sees right, Like he just go and execute it right. No boundaries, no, why not? Right, Like let's do it. And that's for me is like so important part to do it. So I was already with Basim, another co-founder and currently chief of staff at Ionet, and me and Basim were working together. And then we met Tory. Tory started to work with us and then from there also we already had like Smiral and other tech VP of engineering who currently works, still work with us. But like we got to know each other from like different platforms, like from social media to like headhunters.
Speaker 1:So like you know multiple things but I guess, most of the team, if not like 70% of the team, was built through headhunters and like, if you find really good headhunters, you know they cost you like 15% of the person's salary a year.
Speaker 1:So like for the first year, so if you pay him like 200K or let's say 100K a year for the employee, they will charge you 15K after a few days when you hire him and then after 90 days, if he's not good, they give you back the money and you fire the guy, which is really good. They brought me man, the world's best talent, like the world's best talent People I would never. Even even if I reach them on LinkedIn, they will never reply, like our VP of engineering, ex-vp for engineering leadership team in Binance. How can I even get to that guy? It's just reaching to him so many security layers because he's at a very sensitive position so he wouldn't reply to emails. It's hard to reach him, he's so busy and so on. But then the headhunter reached to him, him managed to find a way to him and we introduced each other.
Speaker 2:He introduced him to me and you know what?
Speaker 1:you just click and then you meet these people face to face. We have offsites. We need to bring the team and multiple locations across the world to meet and work together so we build these relations together.
Speaker 3:So yeah, this is a cumulative um say work awesome. Yeah, that makes an awful lot of sense. Cam, are you going to ask a question?
Speaker 2:Yeah, just I know we spoke how you met Tory, but how did you know, or what was the click, that you needed, let's say, another co-founder? He could have been an added person to the team. You could have paid him a salary, didn't need any equity. How did you know he? You know he justified to become a co-founder of iona, I mean, um, you know, they proved themselves by actions, by work, by results.
Speaker 1:Um, we, we worked from august to january. Uh, in january I have seen a massive amount of work. He had added, the value he had added to the project from fundraising to operations management and finance management, and so on. I was like you deserve it.
Speaker 1:You are a co-founder. Through this journey, through the last months, yes, I was kind of in a way like let's do compensation for now and then we'll talk, and I agreed on equity and so on, uh and token ownership. But then, like after a few months, I have seen an amazing value. You know, from august to to january, he have done so much for us. So I was like him and bass and, too, I was like you guys. Both of you have been with me for a very long time. You've proven loyalty, proven dedication, proven friendship, proven good energy between us and proven that you are able, if I leave one day, to lead the project or if I die one day, to lead the project. So that's why I really just chose to put both of them as co-founders okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure, and you know, I know that even just this year there's been so many announcements around funding and all the rest of it. But even in market conditions like this, projects do still have trouble. Could you talk to us a little bit about the journey towards onboarding a vc like multi-coin, who I wasn't aware you'd onboarded before you know tory joined the team? Um, but also whether that process got easier over time, whether it started a real uphill battle, just kind of the fundraising journey that you had well fundraising follows the market trend for sure.
Speaker 1:Um, that's 100. The way I raised fund was really nice. I never talked to any VC until today. They always reached to me. Even now when I did the old projects, it's like hey, are you raising money? I was like, maybe not, we'll see, I'm thinking about it, but yeah actually. So here's the trick If you talk to VC, probably you'll never get anything.
Speaker 1:The best way to get to VC to invest in you is for someone who knows a VC, or someone is a VC for another VC, and they are friends and they both want to join them. So then I don't like I'm in Saudi Arabia, like that's my region, middle East, like how I actually I was based in San Francisco, but anyway, like I'm from that region, was based in San Francisco, but anyway I'm from that region. So even in San Francisco I only know engineers. I don't know anyone who's VC. That's not why I'm there. I'm a quant engineer, I have a team of quants, that's what I care about. That's why I'm there.
Speaker 1:But basically I just applied for the Solana Grizzly. I submitted my idea there and I knew that Kyle from Multicoin. They invested in Helium. It's a Deepin project, so it's the same. So Kyle from Multicoin Capital is one of the judges and other, like other VCs that also invested in Deepin and Helium, is moving to Solana. So like, kind of like it's the right place, it's the right room to go right and to to Solana. So like, kind of like it's the right place, it's the right room to go right and to show yourself.
Speaker 1:So I submitted for the hackathon that was like March 2023. Submitted the idea the MVP I built to Solana hackathon and the multi-coin team saw it and, you know, shia and Kyle are like hey, come, let's talk. Due diligence calls. One after one, one after one. I flew to Austin to meet them and then we met Solana Ventures and Render Otoy and we just, like you know, made the deal and they joined Very, very cool. Yeah, that's for, like, the seed round. And so I got the seed round in June. Like, literally like this time last year, our net was $10 million. Now it's $4 billion. Do you imagine the speed of things moving? I can't.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what an incredible 12 months. It's crazy. Yeah, did you see that coming? Or is this will come as a surprise to you, or did you think? Yeah, no, that's fair, it's going to be.
Speaker 1:Honestly, I saw before multi-coin before anyone. So I saw like there is an opportunity considering Deepin Render, helium, like I kind of put all the things together. I was like if there's a project, maybe something simpler than Ionet at that time I didn't see Ionet as it is now but I mean, if there's a project that has like GPU and it's AI and this, this at least should be $14 billion FDV at least. I saw it like in front of me. I was like I would be stupid if I don't take the opportunity. Like I would be so stupid. It's just in front of me and I have the tech and I have everything, just like kind of put things together. It's there. So I was like, okay, I have to do it. And then I was offered to sell the project, by the way, before I get the seed round, uh, and work as a cto for one of the competitors, and I was like no, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 1:This is 14 billion dollar in front of my eyes. Why would I work and cTO and get 500k a month a year if I can't get 20, 12 billion, 14 billion? So I made the decision no, I'm going to risk it. I have nothing to lose, I don't care. I have my money in the background. Who?
Speaker 2:cares, so I jumped in.
Speaker 3:I did it.
Speaker 1:And here you go. Now the second round, though that was bigger, I faced Islamophobia, I have faced racism. I have faced everything, every vector you could think of. Through this race. We raised 40 million when we closed the round in March. You can't imagine how much I was annoyed by VCs from, but like mainly I was mostly like Islamophobia from VCs specifically in like I would say I can't give the city, the people will be angry, but like is that where some? Focus funds that was it.
Speaker 3:They are, yes, like the fund founder.
Speaker 1:Founder is Jewish and I'm Muslim and you can't imagine how much Islamophobia happened through multiple people, not just one, it was really annoying. And even one of the VCs, the investment analyst who was working the deal he quit immediately after that happened. It's like this is Islamophobia. And he, he literally quit. And he told me like one, two, three happened and that's why they, uh like, pulled back their term sheet, that's why they did this or that, and one, two, three happened. I quit because he's also muslim and working for that investment team.
Speaker 1:Uh, so I faced a lot of hardships, at least um to raise, but I would say because also Tory was in the face talking to investors, you know American-looking and so on, he's handsome, so you know, it was easier from the calls that go through him, calls from my side, you know, with a beard a little bit somehow. Okay, this is. I really faced Islamophobia a lot, but anyway, it's not my fight, like I'm not there to fight. You're doing that to me or you're doing that to us.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we ended up raising 40, so who cares? Right, but that happened Before. So until January the fundraising was really hard. From January it just like skyrocketed and we did a trick, if you guys want to know. We said we're not taking a lead. Every VC is waiting, who's your lead? Right, like who's the lead, who's the lead, who's the lead? And they don't invest before you have a lead and I was like you know what? There's no lead and there's no valuation. I'm raising $5 million at $120 million and it's going to be locked. It's first come, first serve. After three days it's fully filled. I'm raising $5 million at $200 million. If you take it or leave it, first come, first serve, three days, it's closed. I'm take it or leave it. First come, first serve, three days is closed. I'm raising, uh, 10 million at 200 375 million. Take it or leave it, I'm closing. I'm just moving and closing, I don't care.
Speaker 1:So the moment it got to 300 million, it went banana like it was crazy. Um, and everyone just like piled in. Because I start to know my value every time I go go to the market. I understand what's going on. I understand the game. I was like why to raise that? Why even Like change the whole VC game and everyone got uncomfortable. But they don't care, like they don't really care about. There's the right structure, there's the lead, there's that. They don't care All. They care about you have a product, it care all what they care about. They have you have a product, it's working and other vcs are investing, that's it, that's all what they care about. So it was hard to get the first vc. Uh, hack vc was the lead in the series around and from like they came in and uh, and that's it. And from hack vc, everything changed. Like we from there, we don't follow the valuation of the lead, there's no valuation of the lead. We changed it, uh, and we kept changing it. The valuation of the lead there's no valuation of the lead. We changed it and we kept changing. It's like a teardown. It keeps changing, changing and there's like first come, first serve.
Speaker 1:And then we reached 500 million, then 1 billion and we were able to raise at 2.5 billion. I was like wait too much, we don't need that. Let's give some space for the coin. If it's listed in the market, let's give some space. If you raise that $2.5 billion, what's left? It would be something like ZK Sync or something. So we don't want that. So we're like enough, we have what we need, we don't need more, let's stop raising. So we stopped raising and, yeah, we wanted to raise $10.
Speaker 1:We ended up raising 40 and um, and honestly I think we actually needed even 25, 30 like, but you just never know how much you really need um. So, whatever you think you need, you just double that. At least. That's like the minimum, um, that's the minimum and always, and learned a lot of vc games and how they, how they play valuations in the market and change things. It was a very interesting journey to go through this, but anyway, I think I learned the game, I learned the tricks they do on founders and I have a different view on the market right now View on VCs, views on just different view, like different mindset, and I think I'm very thankful for many of our VCs who have supported us through really hard times and vouching for us and so on, but of course, not all of them.
Speaker 1:There's those who were so annoying and those who were good those who were never heard of just disappeared. You know they never talked to you. So there's different annoying and those who are good. Those who are never heard of just disappeared. Um, you know they never talk to you. So there's different types of vcs and um at the end um. Yes, they do add a lot of value, but honestly, they only add values and connections.
Speaker 1:Nothing else like I didn't see. I don't feel the value from vcs in advice. I don't see the value from VCs in advice. I don't see the value in VCs in telling you tokenomics design or what to do here, what to do there. I don't see any of that. I only saw VCs trying to experiment on us, tokenomics systems trying to experiment on us. What's the best for their interest to have? The tokenomics looks like that. What's the best in their interest to have the economics looks like that. What's the best in their interest to go in which direction?
Speaker 1:I've seen a lot of such stuff from multiple VCs but generally the only real add value is definitely the money, of course, and the connections, like the people who they connect you to. It just speed up things a lot and I think that that itself like having a connection whenever you really need help and someone like you know, you call, I call multi-coin, hey, like man, they connect you to anyone you want to know, solana, this that everything's so instant, uh, because they have all these connections and people. So, uh, same for hackvc, 6mv and these guys. But generally like not all these connections and people and so on.
Speaker 1:Same for HackVC, 6MV and these guys, but generally not all these VCs have this.
Speaker 1:So, as a founder, maybe really be careful if they actually have good connections or not and I think, the best advice for any founder just talk to three portfolio companies of any VC you want to bring in, if they're leads or if they're someone important. Talk to three of these portfolio before you choose. I promise you this is the best thing you can do. Don't read the internet, don't do anything. Just call three guys who they invested in and just talk to them. That's the best, best advice you can get to choose your lead or VC that already gave you an offer or something see that already gave you an offer or something.
Speaker 3:Okay, um, I think that's a very, very frank.
Speaker 1:Take on on vc, by the way. By the way, I forgot, I'm talking to image ventures. One second, one second. Image ventures is one of the best guys like, honestly, from news. You guys published like a lot of our articles, news when we wanted to push news outside in some hard times or maybe no one want to publish about us, you guys helped us with news. You guys have at least caused us to raise at least 30 percent of our round. I say that probably like 30 percent what was it?
Speaker 3:what did mh do that was was so valuable and helped you raise that.
Speaker 1:Connections, man connections I have no idea what, how they know everyone. It's just like hey, I have this guy who want to invest, I have this guy want to invest, I have this guy invest, and suddenly we filled the round and we next step and next step.
Speaker 2:You remember like we on two variations right, yeah, yeah, because they were in tranches. I remember the tranches and we were like one minute. It was like this valuation and we speak like three days later like, yeah, man, I'm, I'm here. Now I'm like whoa, that's insane, um, um. But yeah, I appreciate the kind words.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask you I hope we fit under the under the the nice criteria but there's a lot to take in and I just want to kind of because I know there's a lot more questions to go through but you know you started Ionet. Someone actually, or a company, was looking to buy you guys out before you even started the seed round, which was insane that you already had that sort of traction. So you know, congratulations and a good move. I'm not. You know, a lot of people would have been like yo, I'm going to get bought out here, I can exit. Amazing, why don't I? But you didn't and you ended up.
Speaker 2:You know, looking where you are today and then you, you know solana foundation, multi-coin doing at the hackathon and then you flying out and closing them.
Speaker 2:So, just talking about vcs, would you say that you would have been as successful if you, uh, wasn't to close multi-coin? Do you think you would have the same success is one and then two. Um, another question, and you know, with everything that's going on in the market now with, you know, valuations and these, what are they calling the high floats and or whatever it is do you think that projects need to raise as much money as they are with high valuations? Or is that extracting too much money from vcs and then, because there's such high valuations. They're just not allowing retail to even buy the token, which doesn't allow real much like price discovery um, and that's why we're seeing, you know, the market's not really moving um. So I know there's a lot to take in there, but just the two questions. Maybe from was a success. Would you have this much success still if you wasn't to have closed Multicoins, you know, really early on?
Speaker 1:would be the first. It did not happen. So I don't know. So I can't answer that. I really don't know. I mean, I was not in the scenario when Multicoin was not there for me to tell you.
Speaker 1:I was not in the scenario when Multicoin was not there for me to tell you, but what I can tell you is Multicoin is a brand and, like other VCs, care about the brand of the VC that invested in you. So just that brand itself brings something. Now, would it have been different if I didn't have Multicoin in? I have no idea. Definitely it could be different in a different direction. Which one I didn't have multi-coin in? I have no idea. Definitely it could be different in a different direction. Which one? I don't know, but I haven't been through that.
Speaker 2:Now I'm going through that.
Speaker 1:I'm not taking investment most probably. So we'll see. Let's see what happens. For the high FDV thing, I think there is a core issue. First of all, Like, the core issue is crypto has massive valuations, Like, in the sense of how to say like, let me tell you this Ubisoft. You know Ubisoft, right?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you know how much it's valued? $7 billion.
Speaker 2:That's too low compared to CryptoStack.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think $7 billion or $14 billion. Let me just double check. Ubisoft market cap $2.7 billion euro. Wow so um ax affinity access. You remember that game? Yeah, yeah, it's a game it's an nft gameplay.
Speaker 1:How much was it valued? 12 billion and reached 20 billion back in the bull market. So what are you comparing with? It's different. It's a different market structure, entirely like a very different market structure. So that's one thing. Now, if Ubisoft comes in and makes an in-game currency and they just If I'm the CEO of Ubisoft, honestly, I'll immediately, immediately, make a coin and put it on every game of Ubisoft. Just doing that, I promise you it will be plus $50 billion coin.
Speaker 2:Minimum.
Speaker 1:There's no way this can be less than $50 billion. In bull market this could reach $100 billion For sure. It's Ubisoft man, the fame, the people who knows it, the community. No joke, why they don't know it, I have no idea now. Would would it go down to 10 billion? Impossible, like if ubisoft type of coin? Would it go from 50 to 10? No way, right. So so you can see the difference. It didn't. It's not going to go to 2 billion. From 50 billion to 2 billion. It will be 50 billion because crypto is hungry for good investments. You have all this money 1.9 trillion dollar in front of you looking for a good investment. Because there's no good investment, they're throwing their money and burning it at meme coins. There's no investment, right. So they're playing with the money, throwing money here and there why not like futures and all this anyway?
Speaker 1:so, same thing excess money. It's sitting there. If there's a good opportunity, the money will go. If there's no good opportunity, money will not go. So, because the amount of opportunities is still limited, like the amount of good projects is very limited, it's really limited.
Speaker 1:Like, how many amazing branding, amazing products, millions of users, product we have in crypto, how many you can't count. Like if I tell you how many, how many cryptocurrency right now, from the oldest 40 000, whatever coin in the market, how many of them have more than 100 000 users, you will filter the whole market. You, you have like 300 coins or something and then, from these 300 coins you have, are they active? Are they paying? Is it earning? Is it like there's nothing? You really are left with very few unlimited choices. Uh, you know the team, investors, history, so many factors. So there is massive money in crypto and that's why I'm in crypto and that's why I love crypto and that's why I think it's the future, because so many people who have a lot of smart money who came to the market, they know this is the future.
Speaker 1:They are looking for somewhere to invest. They don't have anywhere to invest. So then the VC game starts with push the valuations up, change my books values of the company so I can have. So I could say I have invested 50 million somewhere because there's no other way I would invest the money.
Speaker 3:This is no opportunities in certain periods of time, some funds are in the bull market, sure, different.
Speaker 1:But some funds are in the beer market and they send need to fill and say, hey, we have invested the money of the lts, so here's it, but there's nothing to invest in. So you know, let's invest in this and triple its valuation of 10 times its evaluation. So, and I, I saw that game and I was very careful of it, um, I was very, very careful with it.
Speaker 1:I didn't want to fall in that trap, um, because then actually you know they're basically just playing the project and they're using the project as a puppet or kind of tool to get to their whatever vcs.
Speaker 3:vcs are sometimes the bad guy, but not always the bad guy. There's definitely a handful of no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a very huge industry. I mean, it's not one.
Speaker 3:VC.
Speaker 2:It's like different people.
Speaker 1:Every person is different. Every person is unique. Every person has, you know, good things and bad things, and so on.
Speaker 3:But, no, really appreciate the context you've given on yourself on iron net and also, frankly, on the entire crypto landscape as it exists. I think it's going to make for a really, really good episode. But, if it is okay with you, would love to talk, just to round out the episode, about some of those controversial issues and some of the accusations that came out around iron, if that's all right with you and please, if there's anything that's not, just tell me and we'll stop, go ahead if that works.
Speaker 3:So obviously been a really, really hot topic, not just iron it itself but some of that stuff over the last couple of months from the research and just from monitoring it. At the time it really kicked off sort of very, very late april and early may was sort of when it was at its zenith. It's very much petered out since then and, you know, from what I understand it originated with martin gretti and, for context, for those that don't know who that is, he's been described as America's most hated man. He spent seven years in prison for fraud and also famously, or rather infamously, increased the price of a lifesaving drug by 5000 percent for the interest of profit. So just for context, that's where a lot of these accusations have come from and from what I understand they kind of took two avenues.
Speaker 3:One was to attack you, ahmad, personally, so we probably don't really need to go into too much detail with that when it comes to the personal attacks. But the other was around Ionet itself and the idea that potentially the team or whatever the project itself had been spoofing. The number of active GPUs and stuff like this. I don't remember what the figures were exactly, but that was sort of the crux of the attack, so to speak. And the attack, you know, went through social media, went through YouTube, twitter. He really sort of went on a campaign, let's say, to try and besmirch both you and Ionet. Now my first question is did you see this coming? Did you get warning this was going to happen, or was it completely out of the blue?
Speaker 1:you found it in your notification box so let me give you a storyline like over the timeline of the events. Ironet starts the airdrop program. Right, we, when we closed our fundraise, um, we were around. We had like 15,000 GPUs, something normal, 15,000, 10,000. From 8 to 15 goes up and down, so normal growth. Then, once we closed our round, the 40 million round we started the airdrop on Galaxy and all these airdrop campaigns.
Speaker 1:Now from that point the GPU went up from 15,000 all the way. It kept going up every week, every day. You know, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly. In April 18th suddenly we reached 1.7 million GPU in one night, like we were like last night, 700,000. Next day we woke up it's 1.7 million. So first of all, for me to test this infrastructure, I need to pay minimum one hour on every GPU to test it. I cannot go and just test it. I don't have admin privilege to test the way the network is done is. No one runs any workload on any machine without paying for it. So I can't theoretically go test 1.7 million gpus or 700 000 gpus or even 100 000 gpus. It costs like right now it costs three million dollar for a test for one day on the network. If I book the network for a day, it costs like $3-4 million and we are now at $30,000. So imagine we are at like $100,000. It's no way I can test them. It's basically burning the money just to test each one of the GPUs.
Speaker 3:So that's the first thing.
Speaker 1:So we did not really know we were spoofed, because also we got lots of suppliers from east asia, like hong kong specifically who, who are coming to us and they're asking for extra support.
Speaker 1:They have a lot of devices they show us like a thousand, two thousand device, like they have right. But also they have hired hackers that are making for them spoof devices. But when, when they talk to us like, hey, this device is not working, hey, this device is not working, so we trust them. We know that these guys are trusted, so we whitelist them in a way. They come with a real 3,000 device and they have another 14,000 fake device. But how did we know? Here's the thing. So these guys came in to farm the airdrop, earn from the airdrop uh, you know, earn from the order of as much as possible. So we noticed 18th of april, airdrop ends. End of april, launch of tokens 28th of april. Um, so, as of a timeline, 18th of april we announced on twitter hey, we noticed 400 000 fake gpus during the network. We're gonna stop to stop adding more GPUs. So actually, our Explorer showed 700,000. We were actually 1.7 million at that time. Just to stop the craziness that's happening. Because we are very transparent Any device that joins, any GPU that joins, we show it. Whatever comes into the database shows nothing we put in our cell. So 18th of April, that happened and through this whole two months, one and a half months, man, I've been battling, bringing in more engineers, scaling infrastructure to handle million device, talking to the database, talking to the backend, sending APIs, sending requests. Like the amount of scalability I have to go through in the one and a half months since the airdrop started. Crazy, like we literally have the infrastructure to support two million devices right now, two million live running devices smoothly, but we don't have two million now. Like it was all fake, it was sending millions, hundreds of millions of requests, uh, to our apis a day. So 18th of april were announced. Uh, we are noticing a leak.
Speaker 1:People found some way to fake the gpus and make some virtual gpus inside gpus. Whatever way they found it. We, we started the investigation, we found it and we found out the best thing would be to prevent all the different vectors they're trying to spoof. The gpus is one thing run a proof of work job that takes a few minutes to execute. There's no way. If this is just an api faking itself, it will pass immediately, it will just fail, it cannot. And then we make it in a way that, like, each device have like its own proof of work puzzle to solve. So there's no way one device could solve for the other and then send it. So each one device have to solve for himself and we measure how much time it takes. Like, if he says he's an h100, we're expecting an h100 to finish this in 60 seconds, but if he's an a100, we're expecting it to finish in two minutes. If he finishes in three minutes, we know he's not an h100 or a100, he's 49, so he's faking it. So we block the guy. So we did the proof of work. We started to work on it.
Speaker 1:The attack happened on the 18th. Anyway, the team had been busy in Tokyo 2049. We were working from the hotel fixing the problem that was in Dubai. We fixed it. We rolled out the proof of work update on the 26th of April. Once we rolled out the proof of work update, we basically blocked every hacker from the network. If you're faking a GPU, you cannot do it anymore and the airdrop is finishing in like literally a few days. It's not too long until the airdrop finishes. So now the attackers of the Sibyl GPUs who are trying to act like they are real GPUs they know that we catch them and there's no room anymore for them to fake it and they know they're going to be punished and they're not going to earn from there at all. So the moment that happened, we started the proof work.
Speaker 1:One of the suppliers or someone competitor, I don't know just the moment that this happened, immediately what happened. We got hacked. Someone had access to our device metadata. So basically, when you open your GPU, you see the device name. They just had access to that API, like they can change it. We had a leak there, so they changed it and they said Ionet is hacked. Uh, all your data is not safe. So we fixed the leak.
Speaker 1:Now, the moment the leak happened started immediately, uh, shrek started to make all these videos like also like post during the attack. Like you, you were already rebooting the network and fixing the whole problem and we had to like do a full network reboot to fix this issue, security issue. So you know that the network is not working like we literally just announced the security attack, but the community or the people have like wrong. I would say, like you know, fish memory, like now it's not running, but then they see it after three days and it goes viral and they forget that it was the same time of the attack anyway. So, basically, the attack started. The social media fud started at the same time when the security leak happened and you know there's a problem. So I immediately reached out. No, wait a second. So I was like OK, this guy is making this. Who's behind this guy? Like why he's doing this. I traced back all the events. I have everything.
Speaker 1:The moment the security attack happened, we stopped sign up on the platform immediately. So only if you have an user before you could deploy clusters and so on, and other than that you can't have a user. So Shrek didn't even know about us, I guess. So he didn't have a user with us. But who had a user with us? Someone from a competitor. Now that competitor was building the clusters for him, testing seven, eight, nine clusters, and the one that fails fails. He sent it to him. I have the logs in front of me.
Speaker 1:Like seven clusters working, you just send the one that failed. It happened just a few days ago. Like literally seven man three days ago 13 clusters. He only sent one that failed, not seven. 13 clusters and just like the one that failed, he take it, he push it in the media, he. So the guys are so afraid at that time. They think we are going up launching the token 28th of april, so they are so afraid of the market share. I mean, look at iron it now you know they have the right to be fearful. We just started, or they just started. This is just the beginning. I would say so. You know, taking over market, better product, something works. A lot of clients demand community. Everything is just like 10 times better. And they've been doing it for four years and nothing's there right.
Speaker 1:So difference and 50, 60, 10, 100 times more gpus than them. Even after we cleaned all the civil and cleaned all the net numbers, we're still 60 times, 65 times more gpus than them like then, and they are the only competitors in the market that have something that works. And we have 65 times more right now with all these GPUs we've proved for. So imagine when you are like not only 50 times or like a million GPU. That's what they thought they were really fearful, I would guess.
Speaker 1:So anyway, we cleaned the network. We knew where this is coming from. It's just hated and these guys are afraid of the market share. We used them as bug bounty in a way. We didn't have to do any bug bounty hunting. We got all the bugs for free. Thank you so much. We were actually going to pay like 30K for bug bounties or even more. We got it all for free. So, thank you. We fixed everything Because we have a team of 125 people we're not people at home playing with their laptops 125 people working on the project. So we fixed every bug that happened. We addressed each technical issue, at least to make sure we don't have these issues again. We addressed a lot of security issues and attacks, protection from attacks, and we kind of rebuilt the network. We already didn't.
Speaker 1:We could have not chosen to stop the Sybil right, these GPUs. We could have kept them, even if we knew right. We could be still, hey, the IO with 2 million GPUs who would know You're not going to go and deploy 2 million GPUs to test it. So we could still have done that. And we were launching the coin 28th of april and we announced that we have fake gpus 18th of april and we stopped that before the talk launch because we want to start fresh. We wanted to do it right, like, anyway, this is the right thing to do. We're transparent. Our explorer shows numbers that no one shows anywhere. Like you do everything booking clusters, who booked what, who paid what, how, how much earning a day everything is transparent. So we want, and we will always be transparent. So we wanted, to be public of everything. So we stopped it. We delayed the TGE. We could have not stopped it.
Speaker 1:And even if the attack happened, or the security attack that happened which theoretically wouldn't happen because the attackers would still be happy happened which theoretically wouldn't happen because the attackers would still be happy we could have faked it till today and none of anyone will know, but we still chose not to do that. Now, anyway, we continued. We cleared everything, we cleaned everything, we made sure we cleaned all the fake GPUs that came to us through the attack. We started proper proof of work, started fresh again. We started rebuilding the supply one by one, calling all these suppliers and bringing them slowly, and now Blocker Wars is launching. On the 25th of June Today they announced this is going to blow up the supply. I'm telling you we built the right steps to get there, to have continuance, without having to give airdrops right, just like the broker world coming every hour. No airdrops needed anymore. Stable growth of supply and, long story short, that's what really happened.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, we've let you talk there for ages and honestly, I think that is probably the clearest explanation of what actually happened that is available now, like you've cleared stuff up to me in like the purest sense and really, really appreciate you going in there. Cam, was there something you wanted to?
Speaker 2:yeah, just a quick follow-up on that if you don't mind. Um, so we know that the competitor had a motive, which I know who you're talking about. So they had a motive, hence why they were, in a way, you know, just publishing, like you said. They were having 13 clusters but only publishing one. That may have failed. So I understand that. What do you think that Martin's? You know his ex-criminal, ex-convict, who's I don't know how much of a face he had in crypto before what he was doing with Ionet? What was his motive to doing that Like? Was he trying to be this good actor or was he just thought, oh, I can just cause some fun here, why not just have some fun? My life is shit, you know, know, make someone else's life shit it like? Do we know what his motive was, or is that? There's something you just don't know? Why he started what he was doing, like? How did he team up with that competitor?
Speaker 1:I don't know, but you know, I don't know, um, I really I didn't talk to the guy. I asked him to do a space. He never replied back. So that's one thing. I never talked to him in person. I can't speak for him, but what I know is I saw, like his previous podcast he had like 29th of March, where he's host and the CEO of that competitor company is with him in the same thing, so one month before they attacked us. So there is something that was in plan and there's currently in plan and both of them are working together. It's very obvious, I mean. And also we have the evidence, we have the clusters, like literally this guy is deploying in the CEO of the company and then the other guy is publishing it like one minute later, like, come on, it's obvious. And then a few days ago he confessed that this is his clusters publicly. Before he didn't say anything, it was quiet, right, only only shrek was making about us. But now, no, now's too, like they already lose. So now, you know, the lion himself has to come out because his soldier didn't do it for him. So now they're trying together. And also he confessed that this is his clusters, which routes back to the same user ID we have, which proves that all that happened because of them and they tried to manipulate the market.
Speaker 1:We had the opportunity to file lawsuits. We had the opportunity to take them down. Really bad the ripple effect of that would be something really bad for them and generally for the deep end market. But all investors advise to hold on that and stop, and there's no need for that much retaliation. Let's solve it in a way like through back channels and so on and so forth, but honestly, like with the current way they are currently attacking, I mean it's too late. Let them attack whatever they want to attack. They can't change anything. We already have the largest or Ionet is already the largest AI network ever existed, and we have GPUs more than them. And now soon, with the block rewards, we're going gonna have triple the amount of gpus, um, so I'm not really worried about supply anymore and we're already far away from them to even reach where we are. Uh, what we really focused.
Speaker 3:I mean look, our competition is not between us and them.
Speaker 1:This is not the real competition. This is just joke, this playing. This is some guy who thinks he has a monopoly in a small market. It's like literally very tiny market in the crypto market. It's nothing. Yet our real competition is aws. That's the monopoly we want to break. That's the google cloud that we want to break, like we have. Like I wanted me, in my opinion, I wanted to put forces of all web3 projects that are targeting AI together. Let's go bring in the Web2 demand and users to use this product, rather than us competing between each other when both of us are nothing in the market compared to Google.
Speaker 1:It says $6 trillion altogether Google, microsoft and Azure. So that's the real competition there. That's where the money, the Web2 money, is flowing. All the AI startups they are not Web3, they are Web2. So what's the point of us competing in the crypto market? It's nothing. It's literally nothing. Our money is not from the crypto market. Our money from Web2 market.
Speaker 1:That has nothing to do with Shrek. It has nothing to do. They don't even know who's this guy. They don't even know anything. What they care about? Do you have gpus? Does it work? I need to solve my problem. Is it better than aws? What's your offering? That's what they care about.
Speaker 1:So what's the point of wasting any energy here and what's the point of us fighting each other? What's the point? Like this isn't. Well, I'll tell you the point. The point is they built a product. There's nothing to do right now because it doesn't work. They don't know how to build something else and now they're just like acting like the advocates and the saviors of the market. You're literally nothing. I guess the thing is like you're nothing compared to the web two guys. So focus there, put your effort there, your money there, your engineers, your hackers, whoever you want to put them. Put them there, let them bring in people from there, instead of us fighting between each other on a market share that is only by crypto investors, not by real investors. In specific deep end, in specific AI compute, because there's no market yet. It's small, so that's the real competition. That's where we should focus all our energy.
Speaker 2:Okay, appreciate that. And then, just kind of to wrap this part of the um, the questions up, with your uh, process of standing down as ceo. Um, what was like the? You know your initial thought, like what was happening in the background, what was your thought process and why did that actually happen? Um, you know what was the reasoning behind that happening, knowing that, you know, you know these guys were just trying to create some fud.
Speaker 1:Um, and we can see from what they say okay, oh no, no, no, no, no, it's not about them. So, basically the story, there is some post that was shared from within this FUD was shared in the MENA KOL's region region and these guys um kind of created a kind of like, some kind of requests to uh binance like this you know one, two, three happened uh ahmed has uh whatever youtube videos about him, etc. Etc. Which is something so silly. Anyway, as a kvlOL, you tell someone buy something, he lose 20%.
Speaker 1:Now you're more stated. That's how kind of the vibe there. Plus, as I told you, I had this trading analytics platform that went down and failed and that itself some people had some subscriptions in these platforms and it went down in the middle of the subscription period and now they're kind of left. Went down in the middle of the subscription period and now they kind of left out with nothing. Um, and the fund basically just it's public for audit, so you can see it lost minus 95 because of the beer market. That was 2019, so that kind of caused multiple layers of attack on me, like a fund that's. It lost 90, which is normal. That's what happened back in 2019.
Speaker 1:And then you have, um, before I started, the quant fund, and then you have the this was trader platform that went down, so this caused fud and people who hate me to post videos on youtube, uh, about me that I scammed them, though I didn't scam them. It just you know things happen um, and all these people. By the way, they all of them got their money back, like later on in 2022, 2021 and so on, but the video is still there. Like those who put the video, actually I don't even know them or they have even never subscribed the platform. They just like to write stories.
Speaker 1:Uh, there was an attack, like a coordinated attack, just like what's happening right now, coordinating attack on me trying to find like such things. Uh, and that itself, because it remains there, there was big fear from us, uh, uh, that you know, since, also in the media, the kiosk advice like there's this, this, this could cause problems, um, and cause the fud to come back or be same content to be recirculated back again, and which could hurt the Ionet project. As a price, as you know, like one tweet from me pushes price up nine or ten percent with like literally one tweet. So if I don't, and if just one tweet, so what if such content updates so recirculated again? So actually, for the best interest of the project is, remove myself from the front, so there's nothing to talk about. I'm not the ceo anymore.
Speaker 3:Talk whatever you want about me that there's the team right I think that honestly makes sense, yeah, yeah, yeah 100 and all these videos are currently.
Speaker 1:I have already assigned a law firm in Emirates. They are going to fight every single one of them who have these videos properly. I took them. I like let them free. For a few years I didn't care about them because I was focused on building, but it looks like now is the right time. So I'm like going after each one of the single videos outside and taking it down by low action. Now that was the full reason here. So KM was requested. Let's not do that. It will cause FUD to the project and this will cause FUD to the coin. Blah, blah, blah. Go, step out. Long story short. So I said, ok, stepped out out, let's do another project. I always wanted to build this whole thing on top of io. So I said, sure, no, I'm just a contributor in the community, I, I. You can't take founder from me, but you know the ceo. Look, the goal is the hundred billion. You know we're not talking about the whatever ceo or not ceo it's not the game.
Speaker 2:The game is the hundred billion.
Speaker 1:So it doesn't matter who's the ceo, the game is the hundred billion. That's the game, that's the focus, that's where we're going to hit. And now I'm going out to build something for iron that will actually make iron it better, because how can I prove to anyone iron it is good? Right, I have to build something on it that works, like how you know Solano works. You use USDC there, you use swapping, you use radium, you use all these other things. You know it works. So I'm stepping out as an individual contributor. I'm coming to build something on top of the Ionet GPUs. So I'm building this O-Bot. So this O-Network, which is on top of the I-Network, is going to be like something massive use case that will bring massive utilization on the network, and that's what the network needs. It needs more utilization. So I'm going to come in with an army of bots that's going to literally consume every single GPU available on the network, which helps I-Net. But I'm independent, someone who is considering Ionet as a layer one.
Speaker 2:I'm building on top of that layer one. So, shahid, I want to jump into the new project in a second. But just to go on what you just said, I think it totally makes sense why you stood down, because I totally understand the fact that someone's trying to tarnish your name and I can see the passion still that you have for Ionet. I think it was a strategic move for you to step down so that they actually can build without all of the noise. And if someone else is talking about you, it doesn't really matter, because the noise is not reflecting on Ionet itself At a stage of token price and you guys' reputable reputation of partnering with other people etc. Um, kind of wrap things up on all of that. Uh, first you want to say you know I apologize and it's really hurtful to hear that you had like islamophobia when you're trying to raise funds. I really, really apologize that it's not a good reflection in on the web3 space or even the the venture side of things. Um, it's really cool to see that you're an eager entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:The other downside as well is that it's you know if you and this is a horrible side of like tokenizing projects is that the retailer don't understand of. If you build something and then it just fails in web two, like, unfortunately it fails, I have to close down, so sorry, I can't no longer do business. Yeah, and you wind down in crypto. It's like, okay, I invested but it's failed, so now you're a scammer and it just shouldn't work like that. Like if something fails then it's just fail like you made an investment, unfortunately, you know the, the, the founder just didn't find you know product market fit or didn't get the traction or whatever it is, and it had to just wind down. So I think that just boils down to people need to understand that and I think a lot of education and maturity will come with that. Um. But just to wrap things up with that, you know, I think you're super successful, you're super young.
Speaker 2:Um, congratulations on all the, the achievements. Maybe it's a high level of the new project. Oh, what you're building, why this has come about, like why after five days? And and what's your vision there? And how does that sit on top of ionet, and how you're going to look to scale, etc. And now you say you don't know if you're going to fundraise. If you're not going to fundraise, how are you going to scale a team? And so forth.
Speaker 1:The whole project is as simple as solving one big problem. Forget about Ionet for a second. Every conference I went to in the last year and a half, for every 100 AI projects, 99 of them are AI infrastructure and one of them are AI apps like real AI thing. So it's so annoying Like everyone is doing this SaaS whatever SaaS infrastructure service, whatever. No one is building the AI apps.
Speaker 1:Like the amount of people actually building AI models like not infrastructure to support building models or to support hosting models or to support blah, blah, blah, blah, blah just an AI app. It's actually compared to AI infrastructure, it's a massive difference. So, since I'm in the market, I think what we need is more apps, more AI apps, more bots. We call them bots like iBots, so the O-Bot concept of O-Bot is an ocean. It's an O from ocean. I have O here and it's just an ocean of apps, AI-powered apps. That's what I want.
Speaker 1:I want to see a massive number of Apple App Store of AI apps that I can immediately instantly just jump in, use it, jump in, use it. All of them use the same credit. I don't have to subscribe here and subscribe here and subscribe for this service. It's so annoying. So why do I have to hold tens and tens of subscriptions? Let's put everything in one place and that's number one, so that's like the highest on the top.
Speaker 1:Now, the problem here is also is the agent's network. So for me to do this, of course, there's something still missing in the market, which is let's just something a little bit to ease the building of more apps, which I think what's really really critical and important is to have this massive number of like 40, 50, 60,000 models, that all of them are running at the same time and all of them can talk to each other if you want. So you can build a model that talks with other models and all the models are running. None of either the app developer or the owner of the model have to care about deploying the model or whatsoever.
Speaker 1:It's running all the time and it scales by demand, scales down by demand and you have these AI agents that access these models and the owner of the model earns from every inference. The owner of the agent earns from every inference, but also the agent has to pay every model it uses. An agent can talk to other agents and all of them. So it's kind of like agent communication protocol at very core and this agent-to-agent communication protocol has around it a massive number of models deployed on the GPU network and I'm focusing first on confidential computing supported nodes and then scaling differently to other nodes. So I'll have like testnet and mainnet, and mainnet will mainly have only confidential computing chips, like the Apple chips and H100 chips and HGX and other like, only supporting confidential computing chips for, like, sensitivity of the data. And then on the test net I'll have all the GPUs.
Speaker 1:We'll be using all the GPUs for testing and so on, but on the main net it will definitely be only confidential computing chips and that's anyway where the market is going now, that confidential computing with AI agents and models across the whole network, and then on top of that you have the app store.
Speaker 1:That's what I wanted to build, but I could have never built this before building Ionet right, which gives me this thing like this layer. I need this compute layer so I could build this models layer and AI agents network, the O network, so I could build the app store on top of it. So to build the app store, you need it. To build the app store, you need this. To build the models there, you need the compute layer. So there's three layers. So I think all is going to be these two layers on the top, which is the models and the agents and the monetization system between them through the coin, the O coin, and then on top of that you have, of course, the app store, and then on top of that you have, um, of course, the app store, the ease to basically build apps with all the models available in the marketplace because it's kind of like one thing.
Speaker 1:So that's what I want to build right now. I think this is really like next phase. Like I think the market matured for us to go there and iron it also matured for me to choose iron to build on top of such product. Like I think this is the right thing to do. It's just like building the chain and now you're building all the you know dApps on chain.
Speaker 1:I think now I'm building, you know, the dApps system in a way, or dApps. I'm building a few dApps and the dApps itself through one thing called O, so that's O network, or ONETWAT in short. So, or audit bot in short. So how I'm funding this, I cannot answer and wish me good luck. This is going to move very, very fast. The one thing different here is this project is going to be fully transparent, like open source to the core, from code to communication, to treasury management, to everything from day one is open, communication to treasury management, to everything From day one is open source, it's DAO, everything from day one is managed by the community. Now the last thing. I'll close with this. I'm sure not a lot of people reached to here, so I'm going to say it now. I don't want it to spread. The CEO of this project is an ai.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so okay, so that's interesting, right? So like making a decision of hiring or firing or a sort of situation of you know another product come out, how are they gonna like? Are we there with you know of?
Speaker 1:course, of course man, you have. They are able with all these models and agents. So it's able to pay salaries, it's able to pay in crypto. It's able to make transfers, able to trade for you. It's able to read all the linear tasks and jira tasks and know who's performing, who's not performing, analyzing the people performance of the team. It's able to know what's the right way to manage tragedy. It manages everything for you, man. What is left more? It really does a lot.
Speaker 1:Now, adding a protective layer, the AI decides. Just the community has to vote yes, kind of in favor, and then it goes execution. So I added I'm adding this just one layer, just in case it messes up. Uh, but anyway, the ai is the ceo. The community kind of ask the ceo. The ceo says what we do, we do like. If the ceo tells me, hey, you have to launch in one month, I'm gonna make anything to launch in one month. If the ceo tells me, no, wait another three months, considering these variables, I'm gonna wait. If, if the CEO tells me, hire this person, I will hire him.
Speaker 3:If, the CEO says don't hire him, I'm going to man the guy knows everything.
Speaker 1:He has access to hundreds of live immediate articles, blogs, research papers, everything. So whatever you're going to learn outside, he already knows it. So why to worry? Let him decide and let the community, just like, passes the vote. Okay, yes. If community says no, we ask the AI to give us like a better suggestion or fix the problem, and he gives the order and we just take it to execution. It's possible and it's feasible and I'm going to do it, inshallah.
Speaker 3:That gives me so much anxiety, for sure, you know why?
Speaker 1:Because this actually gives an AI so much money, because he controls the treasury and a massive library of 20 or 40 or 50,000 models that is built to do different things, and he can access any of these models. Plus, he has money. So what are you going to do with the money later on? I have no idea. Plus all the models that he can access and the agents he can access. He has money, so what are you going to do with the money later on? I have no idea. Um, plus army, all the models and that he can access and the agents he can access. He have full access to the whole network. So I don't know if this is considered decentralization but then do you know why it scares me?
Speaker 2:I'll tell you why it scares me, it's because what's happened.
Speaker 2:It's really giving me anxiety, because one one thing is that you're giving ownership not ownership, and that's a really bad term but you're giving voting power to the community.
Speaker 2:That scares me a little bit, because I just feel that the retail market in crypto is really immature, um, and I just don't know if the voting system that we have currently in crypto and this is a totally separate subject, but this is my point of view um, it is like at that point of where, like, good decisions are made by the right people and it's hard to gauge when this token holders and investors are the right people to make those those decisions is one.
Speaker 2:Two, when we look at ai models and again I'm like I'm not the the best tech person, but when I think of something, what you're talking about, I see that an ai model, like knows to get to a to z, is just going a straight line to get to a to z, whereas a human would think, okay, I need to go to a to z, but I might need to make a decision on the way, and this may be going up down wherever, and I feel like there's things in place that might make you sway as a human of what is the right decision, because of some small percentage of whatever that may be, and then the AI model just doesn't think like that and that's what's scary for me and I get it, it's a good thing to do and it's a really cool experiment and I'd love like it's a good thing to do and it's a really cool experiment and I'd love to see it and someone needs to do it.
Speaker 2:But me, as like someone who's founded a company and like, or you know, two companies and actually scaling them to put that trust into like an AI would say, was super scary.
Speaker 1:I mean, let me give you an example. I agree with you, but I'll give you some examples. So when I had to step down, it took me 24 hours to make the decision. A bit less If I'm an AI. Let's say, theoretically, we need to stop the AI. Let's say the community says we need to stop the AI, or some situation where we have to stop the AI for this to happen. So we bring in the facts as a team, we think we sit as a community or whatever we sit. We bring all the facts. What's the upside, what's the downside?
Speaker 1:What's bring every fact and metric you can bring and the different scenarios you can bring write it then send it to the AI and tell him look, if you do this, one, two, three could happen. If you do this, one, two, three could happen. Taking consideration, valuation take consideration listing. Take consideration one, two, three. Take consideration timing. Take consideration other coins coming to be listed, you know multiple factors. Take all that in knowledge. What do you advise? He could say I think I should fire myself. Right, he will do that and it will take him how much? As long as it took us to write the paper, that's it. So to write this prompt for him, he will make the decision immediately. So here's the difference between like the emotions and have to make calls and get advices and think back and kind of think and get advice from multiple people. Some of them are emotionally pushing you to a specific direction because that's best for them and that's for their best interest. Some other people are pushing you in another direction because, they like you.
Speaker 1:Some other people they like you, but they don't care about the project there's multiple different voices you'll hear, and that's even causing the decision to be harder and harder. But if it's an AI, no one cares and no one's going to ask him. Just the prompt. Give me the best prompt possible. I'll give you the best decision possible. So, yes, it will make mistakes, but I think it's much faster.
Speaker 2:That makes sense. I'm cool and I'm excited to see it. So maybe tell us, like how do we find out more about it? Where do we find out more about it? When are you looking? Let's say, I know it's early days, but like, when are you looking to launch? How does the community get involved?
Speaker 1:So there's auditbot. You just head to the website auditbot and from there just click on the logo. You go to our. Our Discord is blowing up also so fast. Zero marketing campaign so far, so everyone's just like joining in in Shadeed we trust and so on. Let's see what you guys are doing. So I think the successful launch of IO really made the community very excited for my next project, and I think this is just the beginning. By the way, it just started 24 hours ago, in a way.
Speaker 1:Literally actually 24 hours ago we started our Discord, so it's very fresh and new, and more. 24 hours ago we started our discord, so it's very fresh and new. Um and more information will be released. Right now this is like everything. I can release, nothing else, but of course you will find everything on discord the moment it's released, because the whole project execution is going to be public, so we still didn't start that execution itself. The moment it starts, everything's going to be public. I'm kind of like prepping up, you know my kids.
Speaker 1:So once that's done, everything goes public and you'll see more information um so don't don't miss our discord outside.
Speaker 3:Perfect, thank you, phenomenal and I've got to say, like, what an amazing episode that has been. Like. It started off so cool with you giving just genuine, real insights into the cryptocurrency markets, the venture funding space, and then walking us through what I believe is probably the clearest and most comprehensive series of events, talking about sort of April, may times that probably exists now through to talking about I know that it's the end episode and you don't want to publicize it too much the idea that an AI is actually going to be CEO of your new project. I think it has been absolutely incredible. So an AI is actually going to be CEO of your new project. I think it has been absolutely incredible. So really, really grateful for you joining us.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys for hosting me. I enjoyed the session.
Speaker 3:And we'll have to get you back on to talk about her in the future as well. This will be like an, an iron air focused episode, but we'll, we'll, we'll have a separate one for sure, of course, of course. Amazing. Was there anything either of you two guys want to add, before we wrap it up, any questions, statements, anything like that?
Speaker 2:I just want to say thank you so much, shahid, for coming on. I really really appreciate you for coming on. It's been a great talk in depth on all the subjects that we've touched on. I really hope I've definitely learned stuff and I hope the listeners also can take a lot away from it. You know you're super young. Like you're 26, I I, in a way, you know commend you for all of the achievements that you have, like being a young entrepreneur doing many things. So congratulations, um, but yeah, thank you so much. Bye.