XION is building a walletless blockchain for mainstream users

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have with us burnt Banky founder of Zion protocol burn Banky welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time yeah thank you for having me I'm uh I'm excited for it I know your team has been very busy uh with the recent launch of the protocol and the new Promethean Saga

0:22which I'm excited to dive into I would love to kick it off with a little bit of an update for those who or an overview for those who aren't familiar with Zion and the intricacies how the protocol works and and what differentiates it if we could start with a high level on Zion then we can dive into all the latest details after that absolutely so um and

0:43again thank you for having me and thanks to everyone listening um but Zion is the first and only completely wless L1 blockchain uh at the end of the day the only thing that we're solving for is we understand that crypto honestly sucks and we are trying to make it as seamless and as much of a web to experience as possible so that we can actually onard uh the

1:03next billion users mhm I think that's a great intro because I think people understand that wallets can be complex and they can suck but they don't really know what the alternative is so how can we make a protocol and blockchains and interoperability without a wallet how does that work yeah I mean a lot of it is based off of smart contract accounts uh and so you effectively had this first

1:29version of crypto which was uh EAS which was wallets um and then you know you look at the difference between Bitcoin and ethereum ethereum you can now have Smart contracts running right Deployable code and so allowing the Deployable code to act as uh the account is actually this kind of this first step but you couldn't solve the chicken or the egg without that Evolution um and you're

1:52seeing a lot come out of it and it makes for a super seamless experience and you know honestly I think we're going to look back in the next 5 years and and say well like that was the biggest hurdle to adoption mhm and now that makes sense but to somebody who is just getting involved in in crypto for the first time and the wallet is their hurdle that explanation it doesn't make

2:18it sound easier you know okay smart contracts so so maybe it's easier done than said how does it actually if someone's coming in how do they put in their mind this is easier than a wallet well it's meant for the people who coming in from web too is one of the main ways I would say that like there's of course advanced settings where you could do different privacy features and

2:39Etc uh because we obviously want to stay true to the ethos but you know for us our thesis is we need to meet the endus of where they are and so we're going to mimic a lot of very similar web to things such as sessions and accounts right and there's one half which is friction or sorry which is this like uh like actual friction this technical friction which you go to the Chrome

3:02browser you got to download a wallet but then there's this this like hidden aspect which is much harder to solve for of kind of a knowledge barrier what is a wallet what is a gas fee and and having to learn all of these things is you know functionally you can describe one a lot easier than the other but the only way to really solve it is to just give

3:22people what they're used to and provide the benefits of crypto transparency decentralization crossb payments without having them to really need to know or learn how it is and I think and a great example that I use is you know we're uh we're recording this on Zoom right now um I have no idea where the zoom servers are hosted it could be you know Eternal

3:44it doesn't matter right I don't need to know how the internet works if I want to order something on Uber Eats just want my burger that's a great example and I I appreciate that that backstory and the understanding and from what it looks like many people do see this as an easier outlet and there are a lot of users that are actively doing this on Zion right now and I want to sort of

4:07paint that backstory now when I first saw Zion across uh the web 3 Twitter sphere it was about a year ago and it was in the test net phase prior to launch uh I know now more recently there's been the main net launch as well can you talk about that story getting new users into the the testing phase them trying out uh this new way of managing their their crypto and then the

4:34main net launch and and how much of a success that's been so far absolutely um I mean I know we we spoke about this before but a lot of this required a lot of testing and we have been we probably had about a year of testing and every time we would something breaks right and it always happens that's why you do testing um but you know when you do interoperability things you break things

4:57that you don't even realize are broken because of the scale that we've been doing and I would say that we got very very fortunate because we're trying to solve this situation you know we're trying to solve this this conundrum of uh there's no products because there's no users and there's no users because there's no products and I think we did a very very good job early on by saying

5:16let's let's target a really really strong community of people who believe in what we're doing and start there and then kick off the flywheel that way and I think that is an amazing solution uh that ended up handing really well because I think in our test net we had about 4 million users and about 90 million transactions um and W absolutely incredible and even I was looking at

5:38this today right now we we've been boasting about 60,000 daily active users which puts us in probably the top five of all blockchains right now and we're two days ago just a month after launch wow that's incredible and yeah four four million people trying it out before it's even live obvious there's a a demand there for a change in uh whether whether it's the wallets or the

6:01infrastructure or making something easier in web 3 and and you know more uh nent blockchains that that are faster and more scalable and you know I want to lead that to the next part of of interacting with crypto is okay once you have an account you have crypto you want to interact with applications um I'm guessing there's also being applications being developed on Zion whether it's

6:26decentralized Finance or exchanges nfts like uh that also has to be developed and and make it easy to develop and then so the users can interact with that so how is that part of the protocol going you know it's very funny because first of all amazing um but and I think we have an ecosystem of over 200 projects but you know you said words like Defi and nft and exchanges and this is kind

6:50of the part that I want to talk about where and we'll talk about the Promethean Saga um in a little bit which is just like it's our exploration into the ecosystem but one thing that I wanted to make abundantly clear is you will never see the word nft on there you will never see the word defi on there and and I think that that is indicative of where we want to go like I mean as a

7:10little background for people about three three years ago uh the reason I'm I'm also named burn Banky is uh I bought a Banky art piece uh I lit it on fire and we broke the record at the time for the highest sold uh piece nft and then uh for all of 2021 we're the highest uh average price nft on openc and so but back in that day um you know people needed to learn what an nft was and you

7:34looked at like Saturday Night Live and they did this song remix of you know what the heck is an nft and you know it was frustrating right and it's still you know it would be hypocritical for me to say hey I'm I'm trying to remove all of these uh educational barriers but still using the same jargon as before and so you know whether they're whether they're

7:55points they're points whether it or we call it karma whether it's uh you know nfts they could be considered they could be tickets they could be digital Collectibles and I think that's the maturing of our industry um you know and there's a lot of projects that we work with where you know I'll I'll I'm always the the kind of the last step before it goes live and I come in with my big red

8:15pen and I go we don't need to say connect wallet say login we don't need to say usdc put dollars like and all of these things kind of come together and you just realize that we don't need to be saying this jargon and I think that the ability for us to say log in with your Gmail have familiar language um at your Twitter if you want um pay with credit card feels like a web two

8:39experience but here are the benefits um is probably why I mean I would like to explain as to why you know we have when the top five of daily active uses for all you know all blockchains yeah yeah I think that's um that's a like a sigh of relief because uh I think right now people don't they there's so many uh short names for you know jargon names or

9:04abbreviations for things and it's like traditional Finance everyone's always given this lingo and you're like what what are they talking about you know I feel so left out because I don't understand all these abbreviations all these things that have to be explained you know can we just like dumb it down you know I thought I was smart but I need to dumb this down a little bit and

9:21I feel like that's something that it's so counterintuitive yeah exactly so it this is something that's definitely needed um so I I appreciate that that you know the way that Zion is going about it I appreciate that I mean it's been it's been a lot of time coming and it's been you know it really has been the goal um this entire time even from the the start

9:45of the the Banksy yart burning many many years ago um you know I always wanted I I I think originally the the idea of crypto was you know you you get this Baseline of borderless and you know access to everybody but like if we're only allowing the highly technical to have access then that's not really access to everybody MH and you know most people I find at least before uh meme

10:10coins probably people would get into digital assets through trying to understand Bitcoin maybe owning a little Bitcoin and then logically looking at ethereum seeing smart contracts and applications instead of going from step one to step two and then down into the deep end of of everything do you still see that as the main entrance into web 3 or how do you like flip that on its head

10:34and like get people that they don't even know about Bitcoin but you're you're sort of getting them into web 3 from just the real world without them even realizing it it's funny that you ask that because I would say back in 2021 my original thesis was nfts will be a troan horse to Defi and it ended up proving untrue um and so it's funny that I'm I'm now I'm now very similar to 17 Ico very

11:01similar to 2021 nfts uh very similar to now meme coins I see these same patterns occurring of this will bring in retail and then bring them into crypto users and then every I mean it could I could be wrong but patterns have have kind of shown themselves to say actually that's not really what's going to happen you're going to get a lot of people who get

11:21burned and then come back in probably four years um I think that a lot of these Cycles come because there is capital looking to flow but I think it's looking to flow and then I think a lot of crypto in and of itself is only known to be a speculative use case and I think that the value that we find with the projects that we talk to it's very funny because

11:44once you remove all crypto some of these projects are just like that was the value like that was the whole value right there was that there was crypto um yeah and then you you know but you want to take on Ticket Master and you want to provide a much more efficient way of having tickets it's like yeah you could have a $2 million mcoin or you could have a $2

12:06trillion industry take a pick yeah yeah I know it's um I think meme coins they they definitely got a lot of people interested and they they don't know and and probably Doge in 2025 is going to help with that inadvertently um but I think you're right that you know they get in and they don't really know what they're getting into in the sense that maybe they're just jumping into a casino

12:30that's not web 3 at all and and they lose money and sometimes people people need to lose money to to realize um the potential of of you know that got them in and then later on they're they they see oh web 3 yeah I was in that but now I understand that this is the future and there's actually a lot of fundamentally great things going on um so I I hope it

12:52doesn't have to come to that for everyone to lose money in in gambling for them to understand that web 3 is the future yeah it's interesting though I will say it is interesting because I think that you know I spent um I was called edgy for this take actually um but I spent time on I spent time on crypto Tik Tok because it's like you know I think any builder in this

13:15industry will kind of scoff at you know crypto Tik Tok and you look at the cardos and the people Shilling cardos and the people Shilling xrps and you know all these things and a lot of it is is well it's G to go up to this price right and it's all about trading and speculation and there's not much difference to the stock market right and you know I I think that people think of

13:37crypto as people think of crypto only as trading and I think that there hasn't been a global definition of it yet because you look at like what people are actually building versus what people think is going on in crypto and they are fundamentally different but the issue is who is correct right is the world correct or the small 7,000 crypto developers correct and unfortunately

14:03like my take is that you know the reality is the reality like this is what people think it is and therefore you know it is the cart I guess and and with getting more people into web 3 to to realize the benefits of it without having to understand crypto do you take the approach of partnering with traditional real world companies providing that underlying infrastructure

14:31as you mentioned at the beginning about you know we're using Zoom but we don't really know if it's blockchain or not in the back it doesn't matter as long as we're using it so does would Zion look to partner with traditional companies to provide a kind of web infrastructure for them or are you still looking for that Discovery phase of like people are

14:48thinking they want to get into crypto and they want something easy so they're actually searching out something like Zion I think that it's a great question number one and I I was had a lot of pondering about that a few months back because that's a very big question in crypto um is and I think it was something that was seen as unfortunately a pretty large failure back in 2021 I

15:09believe where you had if if anyone remembers polygon spent I believe 440 $40 million on a Starbucks partnership and it It ultimately didn't come to fruition and I think it speaks to the solutionism of this industry which is saying hey Brand take crypto and it just doesn't work like it's just it's solution isn't you just the value is it crypto you know there's loyalty points

15:32everywhere there's loyalty programs everywhere there's you name it but I think that if we work like our goal is to work with then projects and I'll give an example of a project that we're working with called nnos and these guys want to be uh the web 3 Google AdSense and I love what they're freaking doing they're going to do some really really cool stuff with you know you're going to

15:55be able to I don't know if I'm allowed to say this um like looking at uh you're going to be allowed to log into okay I'm going to I'm going to give a different example than the one that we're actually doing but let's say let's say you have Robin Hood and you have like um E Trade I guess and E Trade what what something that you're going to be able to do is I'm thinking about this on

16:19the spot sorry um what you're gonna be able to do is is is Robin Hood will effectively give you let's say $1,000 if you log into your E Trade account and we can prove that you are are in the top 20% of er Traders um which is a huge unlock in marketing and kind of with the idea of a lot of behind it is ZK TLS is one of these aspects um and effectively

16:43we can prove that you are top 20 user of E Trade without actually showing everything about you right this is where the zero knowledge proof comes in um and so we're working with you know this is a great use case where people who use each are not going to need a crypto wallet they shouldn't need to know anything about crypto but now we've gotten two brand like two huge huge Brands by

17:07providing these tools to the projects who actually provide value to it um and nnos has been experimenting with this uh we've already launch on our test net and it be launching actually very soon Uber Baskin Robbins uh lacost um Sunglass Hut and a lot of very very exciting Brands and Partnerships and the idea that you can like the amount that you can unlock

17:29with that is absolutely insane plus um you know it's it's value it's things that people actually want and it's you know I always used to ask people when when starting a crypto company was why so more expensive slower database where if you aren't using it for the actual right reasons you're using it only for crypto and you're going to fail yeah no that's a great example and

17:53and some great Partnerships and yeah eventually you know you web 3 is a great enabler for realizing value in the real world and you need to you know you can't be one of those crypto Bros that just lives on a mattress trading in the metaverse for your whole life you actually have to live in the real world and and hopefully you can realize some benefits back to that so uh I appreciate

18:15what uh unless you're the guy behind me who's just looking at charts yeah well hopefully he goes home and has a nice life uh outside of crypto uh although the market never sleeps so um and now want to dive back into the Promethean Saga uh campaign that you know the the team has started up recently can you explain more about that and and how that helps people get

18:40involved learn and earn about this Tech yeah absolutely um and so the Promethean Saga is you know I mentioned a little bit earlier but it's our exploration into the into Zion right we've been working as we mentioned for over a year on a bunch of projects and you know we want a to show people the power and the strength right of everything crypto and everything Zion and so rolling out very

19:06slowly all these projects that we've been working on and under like showing people the benefits of crypto um while also completely removing all mention of crypto at the same time and it has been I mean I think yeah it was crazy I think last week we were averaging like 50,000 daily active users and now we're a averaging like or 40 daily daily active users and now we're averaging like 60

19:28something thousand daily active users and it's and the more projects will come on the more exciting it is um RS will be coming soon a real estate platform I mean all these are super super exciting and you know I think for me it's it's really important because it's also the first time that like anything that I've built my family's been able to use and

19:48anyone who tries it it just feels completely like a like a web two platform where you just have fun um and that's the whole goal at the end of the day is to show off the that we've been working on and make it enjoyable and not miserable yeah that's awesome I love that I think you know some people there there's a few you know learn and earn kind of things where

20:08you just answer a few questions and then give you some crypto tokens and and it it's fun for like a minute but like you don't really get into uh applications or sort of understand deeper knowledge of in practice so I feel like this is the next step of like yeah you actually get to do stuff yeah exactly and and there's going to be more and more and you know I

20:28think it's it's funny because I would say that like people don't really know the power of crypto yet in my mind even people in crypto don't know the power of crypto I think there's like legitimately probably five applications which are nft marketplaces uh some exchange some lending platform some yield stable some stable coin um that sh like that and

20:50then different flavors of copying pasting of that so it's and then gaming and then I'm like so I'm very very excited because the ideas that the ideas that actually come from people that see the projects are probably the coolest part that comes out of it which is like like this Eureka moment of oh my God like this is when we were studying crypto back in

21:132017 this is it yeah it's a while to get here yeah definitely it it it's amazing and yeah I I love how you just summed it up in like five use cases and you know there's hundreds of projects that are doing the same thing with you know two letters different in the codee um looking for some way to innovate um and but crypto is early on the the smart contracts and

21:38you know it wasn't until after 2017 when people really started experimenting with uh applica decentralized exchanges you know I remember when that didn't even exist um and and so you know it's only been seven eight years of of trying to figure this out and it it's moving at an accelerating curve especially now that AI is getting involved um and AI agents

22:02and then in in 5 years we'll probably be 10 times the amount that's happened in in the past five years so uh it's all kicking up and I feel like now is a very good time to be paying attention and to be trying to learn all that you can in in things like you know Promethean Saga and getting involved in in early stage projects because you just you you think

22:23it's big but you don't understand how big it actually is going to be MH yeah exactly and it's exciting I mean it's it's it's nice to see everything to come to fruition finally yeah definitely and and there's still a long way to go um so you know I I appreciate your insights on on all of this and if there was like making it as easy as possible to learn more about this and get

22:49involved with the Saga and try out the applications learn more about the new way of of crypto and accounts instead of wallets all this stuff what's the best way to get started on that with Promethean Saga and also just learn more about Zion yeah I mean bt.com uh zurn.com probably the easiest and whether it be Twitter uh whether it be joining the cult that we have um which

23:13is a whole other thing um even trying out the Promethean Saga we have two white papers out um there's a lot and and and like I think the most interesting thing is you know there's there's so many different audiences and if you don't want to read the docs you don't need to read the docs and I think that is that makes our job so much easier just being able to being able to

23:37segment the audiences where if you want to just use something cool and you know you want to use cool products and you want to see what we're doing Promethean Saga if you want to read about how the Zion token Powers all this and how we're able to use credit cards read one of the white papers um same with the docs if you want to follow along with the Twitter um we have a lot of fun there

23:58and we have a very strong cult if anyone wants to join the Discord very cool um looking forward to checking it out and I will leave the links to all the uh in the show notes to the the Promethean Saga the socials the docs uh whatever people choose to start their Journey um so be it I appreciate your time burnt Banky thank you so much all the best with Zion moving forward

24:20and let's definitely follow up in the near future thank you definitely thanks for having me