{ "episodeId": "SLP692", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga": { "name": "Anant Tapadia & Federico Tenga", "role": "guest", "tag": "ANANT" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:10", "start": 9.73, "text": "Hi everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about RGB and some of the new stuff happening there. So rejoining me on the show is Anant, listeners you might know him from Keeper, but this time he's also joining to talk from a Bitcoin Tribe product lead perspective, and of course, long time listeners you know Federico. As well, Federico is head of R&D over at Bitfinex and of course, very involved in what's going on with RGB. So, yeah, guys, first of all, welcome back. Thank you for having us. Thanks, thanks for having us, Stefan. Yeah, so I guess what spurred this was, as I know, there's been some updates in the world of RGB, and I guess very, I guess super quick overview for people who aren't really familiar, RGB is this way of doing, let's say, smart contracting in Bitcoin. But it's not like, you know, a side chain or a-- it's kind of like on top of Bitcoin. We're gonna get into kind of the detail a little bit of how that works. And the other way I'm understanding it is you can do assets on top of RGB. So right, in kind of crypto and shitcoin land, it's really popular now to talk about RWA, real world assets. And so I guess this is kind of one way to do that in Bitcoin. And of course, the other big news is Tether, and I guess Federico can" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:30", "start": 90.02, "text": "Tether coming to RGB. So I guess that's kind of, in my mind, that's a bit of the overview, but can you guys give us your take on this, in terms of the new updates with RGB?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "01:41", "start": 100.83, "text": "Maybe, maybe should I go first or like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:43", "start": 102.79, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "01:43", "start": 102.95, "text": "yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:43", "start": 103.29, "text": "go on, Federico. Go" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "01:44", "start": 104.39, "text": "on. Yeah, so like, yeah, RGB like in, just in, in, in few words is like this protocol for, tokenization on top of, Bitcoin that has also a little bit of smart contract capabilities, but being on top of Bitcoin and On top of Bitcoin, not with some like side chain or like a federation or some like, like something that introduce, introduce trust trade-offs. So directly on top of Bitcoin and, is also compatible with, any Bitcoin, scalability solution, such as, yeah, nowadays like Lightning Network is the, the only one that is truly working in production, so RGB is compatible with the Lightning Network, but is in principle compatible also with other, scalability solution, such as ARC or State Chain or, yeah, any- That may come, in the future. So it's, it's a way to, yeah, have asset tokenization on top of Bitcoin and then, yeah, later on we can also look at the use cases and, yeah, what we are excited about regarding this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:43", "start": 162.83, "text": "Yeah. And Anant, an update" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "02:44", "start": 164.15, "text": "on" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:44", "start": 164.25, "text": "your side?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "02:45", "start": 165.05, "text": "So, so you see, RGB and the reason we've been like, like focusing really hard on RGB is because, like Federico said, RGB is essentially," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "02:57", "start": 176.96, "text": "the, the Sats On the block, Bitcoin blockchain, we have these UTXOs which are nothing but the envelopes that carry Sats, right? In normal terms, that is what I tell, when, you know, a new team member, joins us, how to, how, how I explain RGB. And we are using these envelopes for, you know, additional purposes. So basically RGB is doing more with Bitcoin, Bitcoin without changing anything on Bitcoin, right? So every, everything lives off-chain, the issuance, the, you know, transfer The validation, everything lives of, of chain, but essentially at the end of it, you write, you know, a hash on, on that particular envelope and like send it across. So that is, that is essentially what RGB is, we have, RGB has gone live on mainnet. That is the big update and that is one of the reasons we have been talking about it, like you mentioned, USDT has reaffirmed their commitment towards RGB. We have done a small pilot with, a test token called the USDT, which went very well, which, which is, which is like on the main net, so that was tested, you know, by a lot, lot of people across the world. So yeah, that is basically, and a lot of new products and features are like, coming up in the ecosystem, in the RGB landscape. So that's essentially, a brief update for you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:20", "start": 260.48, "text": "Yeah. Okay. And look, I guess, you know, obvious question that most people wanna-- will want to ask, they'll be like, \"Why aren't we all Bitcoin Maxi's? Why do we even need non-Bitcoin assets?\" How would you guys answer that question?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "04:33", "start": 273.03, "text": "I think, like, yeah, there are two answers. One is that, yeah, there are some people that, are also interested in other assets, but they still want to, leverage the, the, the, the, all the guarantees that Bitcoin has to offer to them of, of security. But also scalability, technicality, network and, yeah, other scalability solutions. Also, personally, the use case I'm most excited about is the stablecoin use case with USDT. And in the end, Bitcoin is the biggest, asset in the, like you say, in the crypto industry, but still people that want to trade the Bitcoin against, USDT in, That access it up, they end up using like a raw Bitcoin, like a centralized, version of Bitcoin that i-it's really not ideal. I mean, that nobody want to, if people could avoid it, they, they would like to avoid it. So there have been all this attempt to bring, Bitcoin to other chain with this centralized Rob Bitcoin, but it's much easier to bring, it makes much more sense to bring USDT to Bitcoin because USDT is anyway already a centralized asset with a centralized issuer, so then people can trade USDT directly against native Bitcoin. Or potentially also other assets, I guess Bitcoin, but against real Bitcoin, not against some, wrapped version of Bitcoin. Gotcha. I see. And so as I'm" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:50", "start": 349.6, "text": "understanding, in like crypto land, now, I'm not as familiar with that land, I mean, maybe you guys are a little more closer to that, or at least, at least understanding what they're doing there, but they've got things like, they might have some staking pool thing or some thing where they wanna put some asset in and borrow against that and get stablecoin against that, and for that reason, that's Like this now, and potentially, yes, we are seeing some of this kind of thing in, you know, Bitcoin land as well, like Bitcoin collateralized lending startups, as an example, and I guess some forms of asset trading inside of, you know, Bitcoin land. But I guess the idea is RGB is gonna allow more forms of that to happen in Bitcoin as opposed to people having to go into altcoin, ecosystems for those things. Yeah, and" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "06:40", "start": 399.59, "text": "listen, listen, I mean, like also Bitcoin, other Bitcoin exchanges Most Bitcoin maximalists in the end, they still may need to manage their exposure against with the US dollar. Some of this, yeah, we all want to be ninety-nine percent. First of all, not everyone is so aggressive to be ninety-nine percent allocated, but even if you want to be ninety-nine percent allocated to Bitcoin, you still have that one percent that you need to, to manage a bit. Either you do it through like, well, either you do it directly to Cash, which is, but yeah, it's not always the best way, not for everyone is the best way, or you do it through like a KYC exchange, or if you want to do it like in a decentralized manner, yeah, nowadays you need to go to, to Alcoin, to Sheikcoin, that you may not want to touch or you may not even know, like, you don't want to go through MetaMask and deal with, with all of the stuff. So if you can have" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "07:31", "start": 450.77, "text": "The dollar will go to zero eventually, but you still need to, to have a bit of dollar exposure, right now. So, it's, it's great tool also for pure Bitcoin maximalist people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:40", "start": 459.9, "text": "Yeah. And let's just talk through, just because, you know, a lot of listeners may not have played around with RGB themselves, can you just walk through like, what does it actually look like for the end user, right? Like, if I'm just an everyday, let's say I'm a Bitcoin guy, but I want some Tether, I want some RGB Tether" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:01", "start": 480.93, "text": "Well, like, can you just walk me through, just to give listeners a sense of what that looks like?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:05", "start": 484.8, "text": "Yeah, so, it's very important to understand that, one of the first things is because RGB is built on the Bitcoin blockchain, Sats are essentially, essentially the fuels for, fuel for your assets. So anything, it's like, it's like if you want to send or receive or issue, you can do all that, but you're using underlying Sats for, like, a gas. So I have to do an on-chain transfer," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:33", "start": 512.77, "text": "let's say I wanna do an on-chain transfer, so let's say I wanna receive some RGB Tether from you, do I show you an address and then you send some Tether to me using RGB and it's an on-chain transfer to achieve that? Or talk me through that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "08:45", "start": 525.42, "text": "Pretty much, pretty much, pretty much. So basically, once you have some Sats, you can, you know, you can do these transactions, but the way these transactions work is, is as, as you would do in any other, situation. Lightning and we make it more efficient. But if you just consider a normal on-chain one, you show me an invoice, I send RGB on, a token on it, an asset on it, and you receive it, that's it. There is a bit of interaction, but that is all handled behind the scene, for a sender and receiver. You shows, show a QR code, I scan the QR, I send it, you receive it, that's it. So it is an on-chain transaction, when you are, you, when you are not using Lightning, but When you are using Lightning, you don't even have to commit it on chain. You can have that UTXO, the envelope that we, I was talking about, where you are going to write the asset anchor, you can keep it off chain all the time, unless you actually, you know, close the channel or commit it on chain. So that's, that's how it works." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:50", "start": 590.21, "text": "And so in the RGB Lightning context, then I presume it's-- we get similar guarantees like in Lightning, it's instant, instant payment and lower fees. Is that the main kind of thing we're dealing With there, when we're talking about RGB Lightning or what, what's the difference?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "10:04", "start": 603.61, "text": "This is the same trade-off that you have, normally with Lightning. The, the only difference is that the channel is denominated in RGB asset instead of being denominated in Bitcoin. But, for UX point of view and security point of view, it's all the same." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:16", "start": 616.38, "text": "Okay, so just to be clear then, when we do an RGB Lightning channel, it's asset specific. So let's say it's a Tether RGB Lightning channel, let's say I open that Lightning channel with you, Feder RGB tether over that RGB lightning channel, that's how it would work?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "10:34", "start": 634.11, "text": "Yeah, yeah, correct." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:35", "start": 635.45, "text": "Okay, and then I presume you're gonna have some kind of swap provider, maybe this is where like the Collider swap example is useful, because many everyday users, like the end user, he doesn't really wanna do all the channel management, whatever. I, I presume you're going to have like swaps in the background, so then the end user can just have like a simple app experience, but actually in the background there's swaps going on. Is that lo-roughly what's happening or can you explain? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "11:00", "start": 660.47, "text": "I mean, that, that also the, I mean, the, the ex-ex-experience depends also a little bit of, of the application developers how they want to, to offer it to their users. But yeah, having swaps on the fly is definitely, an option," }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "11:17", "start": 676.6, "text": "or, or you can Yeah, they take care of managing your, channel liquidity also for USDT or whichever asset you, you, you want to use and have, to channel denominated, denominated like a network of channels that, that are denominated in that specific RGB asset. So, I mean, there are trade-offs involved, rather like if you want to, if it's easier to bootstrap, enough liquidity for that specific asset or to have like swaps on the fly. so, yeah, I think for popular asset like, USDT, it's It makes more sense to just have like an entire lightning network bootstrap like, channel liquidity in the domain of the asset. For less popular asset, maybe swaps is, swaps on the fly is a better solution, but that's, something more for, app developer than, protocol related constraints. Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:07", "start": 727.05, "text": "And then speaking of developers, let's talk, let's hear from your perspective, Anant, because you're building Tribe, a Bitcoin Tribe, which is an RGB wallet. Can you talk us through like your approach there? What has it been like for Building an RGB wallet, yeah, just explain a bit about that for us." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:23", "start": 742.86, "text": "Yeah, sure. So, so like Federico was explaining, the, the Lightning Network itself has a liquidity of that particular asset, right? So for example, if I'm sending you USDT, I don't actually-- and you are okay to receive in USDT, I don't actually need to do a swap. Because underlying it's sats, but the sats are carrying the same USDT which you will get and you will just, you are happy to receive USDT. So that's, that's a given. And many of the transfers happen that way. Now, if you want to abstract it further, you can introduce swaps where I'm seeing I'm actually going to send you a Swiss franc stablecoin and you want to receive USDT. That is when the swap might come into picture. Gotcha. Okay. Or you want to onboard yourself with first like swap- Swapping Sats for USDT and then using it, or let's say there are Apple shares on top of, top of RGP, then Swap might come into picture where you're swapping USDT for RGP asset, that particular RGP asset, and then you're receiving. So Swap may not necessarily come into picture for when you're sending and receiving if, if you want both on the same asset, let's say USDT, but otherwise Swap is a good corollary, function to have a-around in- The ecosystem, and that is the way we are approaching it in Tribe. Tribe currently focuses, on really developing the core of RGB. So if you use Tribe, you would realize that we have, we have, really abstracted the, you know, the SATS concept completely away. So yes, you can see your SATS balance, but you don't have to worry about it. And recently we even launched something called a Witness Script, which what that means is that you can get started with RGB even if you don't have SATS. So let's say You, you know, you have downloaded Tribe wallet and you wanna start, receiving something. So there is something called witness script where I can send you, let's, let's say, five dollars, and you can receive it without having Sats. So, we are focusing on those core concepts where a single asset or a single, you know, transfer can happen with least amount of friction and with, most effective use of Sats. Once that is done, transitioning it to Lightning Would be super easy. And if you look at the, you know, players in the RGB ecosystem, actually everyone is trying to cover different niches so that, you know, you have a holistic solution. And yes, at the end of it, you should just be able to send and receive any asset," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:58", "start": 898.33, "text": "Yeah, and I guess fees are low right now on-chain, so, I guess for now, people are just gonna start on-chain because it's cheap, right? Yeah, I mean," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "15:10", "start": 909.82, "text": "like, absolutely." }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "15:12", "start": 911.98, "text": "I think, like, yeah, I don't know, like, what, that's, like, same situation that you have with, with Bitcoin, rather like, if it won't be, use Bitcoin on chain or on Lightning. But I think that there are use cases of using, RGB on Lightning also, not only because of the fees, but also, because of the, lower latencies, and that's particularly interesting when you do, trading on, on, Between, between, USD and Bitcoin, and this can be used, yeah, either in the payment use case as we just described, but also for the trading use case that people that want to trade, and for trading to have like- Short term finality is, is quite important, and you mean you don't want to do a trade and then it's, ends there like for, for thirty minutes because it's waiting for confirmation. So it's not a fee problem, but it's also like a, that, latency on the settlement problem. and, and then like Lightning is perfect because you, you can have like instant finality, of the trade, instant, as instant as Lightning can be, of the, of the trade, and you can have I frequency trading, I mean, I frequency is still used for like, yeah, nanoseconds, but you can go as low as a millisecond with Lightning if you have a direct channel with the counterparty and there is no, no, no problems or you have very good routing in principle. So- Yeah. I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:39", "start": 998.74, "text": "see. So I guess that's like a business model there for someone that if they wanna set up like an RGB exchange where people can trade in and out quickly, that may be, maybe that's like a business model there. And yeah, so maybe if you could, if you guys could just talk us through what it looks like when you wanna create an RGB asset and transfer that asset and then delete that asset, like what does it look like for someone who wants to, you know, make an asset in RGB?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "17:07", "start": 1027.35, "text": "Yes. So first, first step really in RGB is obviously to issue an asset. We call it issuing an asset, which is basically creating an asset. And in RGB, it's a peer-to-peer system, anyone can create an asset. the, the, the The short form of it is that creating an asset is defining an asset, what is the asset, putting it in a specific schema that has been defined, and then keeping it off-chain and putting the hash of it on, you know, in one of the UTXOs. So you don't have to disclose anything about the asset, its value, how many they are, none of it. So you have the, as far as the Bitcoin blockchain goes, it doesn't know anything about the asset, it just knows that a single one-time UTXO has been used for sale. Something which is like a normal transaction, but when I send it to you, Stephan, or any other receiver, that is basically the second step, I send it to you. So when I send it to you, you can, I also have to send you, you know, the details of that asset. So I send you a UTXO on chain, but basically, you, you know, parallelly, I'll also have to send you what is that asset and every detail about it. Now, you can completely verify it. Off-chain, like do all the, you know, looking up and verifying, okay, I was supposed to receive five USDT, is it five USDT and everything, everything is in line or not, you can verify it, and then you can check on-chain that, okay, what this guy is saying, actually he has committed to it, he actually has ten USDT and he's sending me five of them. So that is how sending, receiving, and verification on the receiver side works. It's actually pretty simple. Just the key point here is, again, that it's completely client-side. So particular transaction to your address or your UTXO, and then I send you separately that, by the way, this is the contract, whose hash is committed on that UTXO. So that is why, you know, it is a bit more sophisticated on the client side, on the wallet development side, but, but for the user, it is pretty straightforward." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:12", "start": 1152.15, "text": "I see. And then I guess the other interesting thing is that it's very, it's more chain efficient in a way, right? Compared to like, you know, kind of shitcoin land, but like BRC20, people were getting really annoyed, and, you know, I, I viewed that as spam because it was like just spamming the UTXO set, whereas this is like a very-- It's a different kind of asset protocol where, as you said, it's client-side validated. It's a different paradigm. so can you explain a little bit, like, what You know, from an asset perspective, what does it look like?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "19:47", "start": 1186.7, "text": "like the way RGB works is that, basically, it, it use, off-chain data to give, to assign asset to Bitcoin, UTXO. So there is a Bitcoin, UTXO, it contains some assets, and, and we say, okay, now it doesn't only contain assets, but it also contains some assets. And when you want to move this to a new UTXO, you basically create a transaction that is spending that UTXO, so" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "20:12", "start": 1211.71, "text": "Create a new message to say okay, the, these, assets that were in UTXO A, from now on will be in UTXO B. This message is, ash, to simplify ash, and committed into, inside the same transaction. And, this is, can, like, RGB supports two commitment method, one is through operator and one is through, taproot, commitments. So the, the, the trade-off is operator is a bit, like, i-is, simpler, on the imple Implementation side for wallet developers and also it doesn't risk overlapping with other meta protocols on top of, Taproot that may emerge in the future. while Taproot is, even more efficient because the, the commitment, you don't even have the operator component, it's just inside the Taproot, output itself. So from the, on-chain perspective, you either have this extra forty bytes with the operator or you have this extra zero bytes with the Taproot commitment, but the- but yeah, i-it's, it's very compressed because then this forty bytes can also, be the commitment for several transfer that we're going out of that, UTXO or that, group of UTXO if you are having like multiple inputs. Oh, that's interesting. So, so just, so just so I understand you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:26", "start": 1286.27, "text": "there, you're saying one RGB tran- one on-chain transfer can actually relate to multiple RGB asset transfers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the point you're, you're saying. I think" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "21:36", "start": 1295.62, "text": "I can like, for, I can either like, pay out, hundred of thousand of people, at the same time, that it can be the use case of, an exchange in operating withdrawals or stuff like that. Or, yeah, I can even, yeah, aggregate, yeah, multiple inputs for, like, yeah, for, At the same time, the thing is like, each transaction will have only one commitment, and then this commitment is actually a, a Merkle tree that commits to all the different, individual RGB transfer that, are happening." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:10", "start": 1330.14, "text": "I see. Yeah, so it is way, way more efficient in that way. So yeah, it's, let's say it's," }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "22:15", "start": 1334.99, "text": "slightly more efficient for the, simple case of one to one transfer, but it's, massively more efficient for transfers that are paying to, multiple people and that are," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:28", "start": 1348.3, "text": "I see. So I guess as an example, then, if you're doing like some kind of RGB Dex or something like this, when you're doing a payout, you could be doing like one on-chain transaction that relates to like, you know, thousands of payouts, right?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "22:40", "start": 1360.17, "text": "Yeah, yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:41", "start": 1360.86, "text": "yeah." }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "22:42", "start": 1361.74, "text": "So yeah, like the, the scalability on, on the batching side is, is very, is basically, yeah, you have this fixed amount of byte and then whatever you're doing, like, with the transfer, it can all go there, so the scalability is very, very good." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:57", "start": 1377.43, "text": "Yeah, interesting. Yeah, it's interesting just to kind of understand the different paradigms of like, okay, yeah, like the efficiency side of it. okay, now in terms of uses, as we-- I think most of our discussion here has been around, let's say, stablecoins. I guess y-you've touched on, in some cases maybe people wanna do tokenized- Equity or maybe tokenized debt could be examples in the future. so are you seeing this as mainly, at least for now, is it mainly a stablecoin story? Like, is that the main reason you see or what you're interested in? But maybe other people are interested in other things. Maybe you guys just can comment on that. I guess the question is, is it mostly a stablecoin story with RGB? I," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:39", "start": 1418.79, "text": "the, the way I would put it, it's, it's, stablecoin is huge. any digital like token asset in- In, in the crypto space is basically Bitcoin or essentially stablecoin. So stablecoin is huge and stablecoin is obviously going to be a big part of what RGB is. But theoretically, or if you sta-take a step back, you could have any real world asset, and stablecoin is a huge example within that, and it's a proven example and ever-growing example, so it's like the big thing. But, you can have any asset, we, you know, within the team we play around with it, we issue some- simple memorabilia and trinkets and, you ca-you can pretty much do anything. See the point is that Bitcoin is like the valuable asset we all know, but there is value outside of Bitcoin as well. Which are called for lack of a better term, real world assets. Basically, there is equity in company, I like the equity in my company, I might, I might like gold, I might like something else. Now, these values exist outside of the Bitcoin space. What RGB or some other such protocols are trying to do is, how do we use the already existing- This train network, this, this network of, you know, sending and receiving and wallets and custodians, how do we use this powerful network for value that's all, that also sits outside of Bitcoin? So in theory, you could have gold, you could have, you know, equities, bonds, like you said, but we know that, you know, stablecoin is a proven story, so it's going to be a big part of the RGB story as well. That's the way I see it. But no one is stopping, some people have already issued like, you know, some, some memes and, digital stuff that they play around with it, like it's, it's completely peer-to-peer, so RGB There's nothing to stop from anyone from doing it." }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "25:38", "start": 1537.57, "text": "Yeah, I mean, in the end, like the, the proven, like product market fit in this industry, like, yeah, you have of course like Bitcoin, that is from where everything started, yep, stablecoins that, have been proven to have a product market fit, and then you have all these like, casino, shitcoin, mincoin, whatever. Those are the three things that have product market fit. I, I, I'm not so interested into shitcoin, mincoins, even if, We, will do that. I think yes, stablecoin on Bitcoin is, i-i-is gonna be, yeah, very powerful. and, yeah, real world assets, yeah, I mean, if they take off, of course, like it's better to have an, have them on Bitcoin rather than, other chains, but I think they still need to be, to prove themselves to be something that the, the, the market," }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "26:28", "start": 1587.9, "text": "re-really values. So I think it's, a lot of So yeah, if they actually become, a big thing, of course, let, they can use leverage FIB as well, but, yeah, personally I'm more excited on, on the stablecoins case, also because it can be great for, For Bitcoin itself, because, stablecoins can, stablecoins on Lightning can bring more volume to Lightning, both through payment in USDT, but also through trading, because trading volumes are much, much, much bigger compared to payment volumes. Once we have volumes on Lightning, it means that, like, people that are working on Lightning, they, they start to, to, to, to make, to collect better fees, so to make more money. More money means that, can build better products or better Lightning for everyone, also for the people that, only care about Bitcoin, they They don't care about the stablecoin by themselves. So I think this is, can be the, the catalyst for the flywheel to, to make, Lightning truly take off. Then, yeah, more, more of your Lightning is also you start having the liquidity provider to try to, to collect, yield. So, I'm very excited about this, not just for RGB itself, but also for, Lightning in general." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:37", "start": 1657.32, "text": "Gotcha. can you talk to us a little bit about the RGB ecosystem right now? I understand obviously it's not just you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:45", "start": 1665.49, "text": "Can you give us just a bit of an overview, what are some of, at least today as we speak, October 2025, who, who are some of the big other players or software or parts of the, you know, RGB ecosystem just for people who wanna get an overview?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "28:03", "start": 1682.75, "text": "Yeah, well, maybe I can just, like, yeah, mention a few of them. I mean, I hope, like, I'm not gonna offend anyone that, that, that I would fail to mention. but yeah, like, yeah, Tribe is, yeah, I think it's the, the, the most popular, RGB wallet. I mean, it's like, it's, they, they, they, they, they really like, work to, to build a, a Basically, in, in the, in the, in the background, it's, run in the same library as, as Tribe, so the difference between the two is mostly on the, on the frontend side. They did a much better work in, building a, a good UX for sure. then there is Kaleido. I, I," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "28:50", "start": 1729.53, "text": "I must Sorry, I must add that, it was also because of a lot of the heavy lifting was done by you guys. So," }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "28:58", "start": 1738.46, "text": "yeah. Then, like Scaledo's app, is, is working on the, on the dApps, and it's, yes, like it's this dApp product, on top of Lightning. then, yeah, Thunderstack, is, like a voltage-like product to, to help, like integration for, with, RGB and, Satoshi is also, building his X2B wallet, but this is more, browser based. Then, there are a few other wallets that are more focused on the Asian market, and, Yeah, for sure I, I forgot that. Well, LFI is an exchange that, integrated with R3, and, and, yeah, many, many others also that are like, in the back, background of integrating R3, as we speak, so, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:46", "start": 1786.24, "text": "Gotcha. Okay. so now let's talk a little bit about RGB in comparison with other-- Now, I guess the way I'm understanding it is, there's, let's say, competition from, let's say, inside the family of Bitcoin world, like you've got things like Liquid, and you've got things like Taproot Assets, kind of in, you know, inside of Bitcoin or Bitcoin adjacent world, and then you've got like, you know, Shitcoin world, where, you know, some of these, whatever, they're, they're doing their own chains, they How does RGB compare to some of these other ways of doing RWA and assets? Like at least maybe starting, let's say, in the, in the family, in the Bitcoin family, you know, RGB compared with, let's say, liquid or taproot assets, how would you compare?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "30:32", "start": 1832.03, "text": "So I can start off and Prithik, please do add. so, so you have clearly, you know, very well described the problem statement basically, there is the Bitcoin space and other space. So clearly Bitcoin is, the most secure chain and very well anchored and all that, so it trumps, you know, RWAs or stable coins issued on other chains, right? yeah, they have network effect, but hopefully not for long. So now we come to the Bitcoin space and like, like you said, there is liquid, there's Taproot This passage, this arc. There are, there are good solutions, there are decent solutions with different trade-offs, but we believe that RGB has, a fully matured RGB has, way more, way better trade-offs, as compared to most of the other chain. Liquid, for example, is more, more federated than peer-to-peer, right? You do have to trust, federation and, and Liquid itself. In terms of, how they deploy liquid and all that. when it comes to Taproot assets, a very close competitor, very similar structure, but they do, as far as I understand, they don't need, you know, centralized indexes because, some of, some of their state is global and, that is why, you know, there are some benefits of it, but then there is like the centralization around indexes where in RGB it's completely, completely, peer-to-peer. So there are differences and from an efficiency point of view, we know that, you know, how many number of assets or transfers you want to do, it really doesn't matter, it's just like one hash or Merkel, a hash of a Merkel root, right? So it is way more efficient and it is Net positive for Bitcoin, and for the user, it's, it's quite private and quite, quite sovereign. So that's, that's how I look at RGP in compe-comparison to other options available out there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:29", "start": 1948.86, "text": "Federico?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "32:30", "start": 1950.0, "text": "Yeah, I agree. In the end, like most of the alternatives, they introduce trade-offs, like either like through financial erosion or like through some, like other kind of trust trade-off, like with staging, et cetera. And, I mean, those, I mean, they can be valid trade-offs for some users, maybe they're the right trade-off, but they don't allow you to, to fully leverage the, the, to, to use it without introducing extra trust assumption compared to the simple one that we have on Bitcoin, that yeah. Like there isn't, no miners that control, all the network. so I think that this is very powerful for R3 that it puts in, in itself, like, you know, at the, you have the spectrum between you want to maximize security or you want to maximize efficiency. And when you are so somewhere in between, then you, it's, it's hard to differentiate yourself from, from the one right, right, left, like right on the left side or on the right side on the spectrum. So it's also harder to, like- The social scalability side to, to, to, to get like, some, good, network effect and so long term to convince the users to stick around long term. So RGP put itself to the, like, maximizing security for like no extra trust assumption to com-compared to Bitcoin, if you're good with the Bitcoin trust assumption, RGP doesn't add the, a-anything else. The, the one that is closer to it is for sure Taproot, Taproot, because the design is, is, is very, very similar, but still, A few advantages in terms of, of, of privacy and, in, and, yes, terms of ability to, to, to do, batching. So there's a few advantages here and there. and then, yeah, of course, there are implementation differences, so, people may prefer, the one implementation compe- compared to the other, but yeah, the, the trade-off there is, is more similar, so the, the difference is more on the, on the implementation and distribution side." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:24", "start": 2063.89, "text": "And just while we're here, before This episode is brought to you by CoinKite, the makers of my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, the Coldcard Q. Now, some people think self-custody is too hard, but it's really about taking responsibility for your Bitcoin wealth and understanding that self-custody gives you a true feeling of liberty. The Coldcard Q has a full keyboard and big screen. It's got two secure elements and a true air gap, allowing you to go fully air-gapped using QR codes from seed generation to transaction signing. You can power the device using three triple-A batteries, so you don't even have to plug Wallet for PC or Nunchok on mobile, and you can dial it into the right level of security and complexity that you choose. If you want a simple setup, just use twelve words and single signature. If you want passphrase, it's easy. If you want to add multi-sig or co-signing features, you've got those too. So go to coinkite dot com, use code livera to get ten percent off on your cold card or other devices and level up your self custody today. I mean, you guys tell me if I'm missing something or how you see it. But as an example, in the Taproot assets concept, the idea is they're leveraging the already existing Lightning network, and then they may have some kind of Lightning swap provider who's like a special swap provider at the end who's helping do a swap function for the user. But the idea is the end user just sees a Lightning invoice, and he just pays the Lightning invoice, and then actually at the end of the day, the merchant gets paid. Let's say that merchant wants to receive Taproot assets tether, as an Right? That's an example of get, that gets facilitated that way. If I think about that in like a liquid context, that might be like, you know, BOLTs dot exchange is providing the swap in the background so that the end user can kind of, so maybe the end user who's paying, he can pay with Lightning or something else, and then the merchant can receive what he wants. Maybe he wants Liquid Tether or whatever, Liquid Bitcoin, and he can later swap that into Tether if he wants. So how are you, how would that work in an RGB context? Do you see Like RGB payment processors or like something similar to a Bots Dot Exchange, who helps facilitate that? Is that a Collider Swap thing? Like maybe just walk me through that, just so I understand if you're a merchant who wants to use RGB Tether, what, what does it look like?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "36:37", "start": 2196.76, "text": "Oh yes, so so like those are differences that are not related to the protocol itself, but more of like the first implementation, the study to, to work on it. So I had a few discussion also with the Latin Labs team regarding this. I don't think that the model that they propose, which is like not a constraint of the protocol, it's just the way they decided to, to, to implement it, i-is, it can work that well at scale because it's the fact that you need to like swap twice on the fly for every payment to leverage Bitcoin liquidity instead of strapping like the, the asset specific liquidity, sounds good in theory, but in practice means that every time you do, you do a payment, you need to negotiate two swaps, so two exchange rate with two providers in different part of the network, they make, you need to pay twice the spread, and this adds a lot of latency, a lot of risk of failure of the payments, and potentially a lot of cost. So, I think it's a better model to have channel c-dominated in, in the asset, because then you, you don't add all of this complexity and all of this, extra cost. Of course, it's a bit more painful because you need to bootstrap liquidity in the subset, but in general, like Lightning is gonna work well for popular assets. If an asset is not popular enough to bootstrap, channel liquidity, probably also the exchange rate of this raw provider isn't gonna be the greatest, so it's also, not, not gonna be a great experience anyway. I mean, these aren't things related to the protocol. I mean, both, both, Argentaprotected could, could work with, can work with both models, so it's more related to the implementation. Yeah. The way they, they decided to approach it, I don't feel is, is the best, but, yeah, maybe I will be proven wrong." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "38:19", "start": 2299.34, "text": "Yeah. Anant, anything to add on your side there?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:22", "start": 2301.82, "text": "No, no, I think that's, that's, that's really the implementation difference. here it's asset-specific" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "38:34", "start": 2314.17, "text": "There are assets which have huge network effects and you really don't really have to switch it around. and we've also seen that, you know, changing the asset twice, even if, let's say, I want to send USDT to you want to receive USDT, you will still have two swaps. That's like almost unnecessary, right? So for most of the people who are going to probably, let's say seventy percent, I'm being conservative, but seventy percent of people would just probably trade in USDT. The swaps are com-completely unnecessary, right? I see. So then maybe Extra swap" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:04", "start": 2343.79, "text": "fees and maybe it's less efficient that way. I, I mean, who knows, right? I'm speculating, I don't know. it's, it's, it's interesting to see. It's" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "39:11", "start": 2350.63, "text": "costlier. It is less efficient and it will fail more often. You might not find a swap partner, you might not have the right, you know, swap connection at the right time. So I, I completely feel that, you know, asset specific liquidity is a harder initial problem, but once it is there, then like, there is no" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:33", "start": 2373.29, "text": "To get that snowball rolling down the hill or the flywheel example, but once it's rolling, then it's a bit easier to like, kind of keep that asset network growing and using it. Absolutely, absolutely. And I guess you are also leveraging, obviously, Tether is the biggest, is the world's biggest stablecoin with a lot of, like, hundreds of millions of users, so I guess you're trying to tap into that market of hundreds of millions of users who might want, who might want to do it this way, maybe." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "39:57", "start": 2397.1, "text": "Just to your history. So see, one of the- So, sorry, just last thing I wanted to complete is, see, one of the things is that asset issuers want their assets to succeed, so they would like to provide, the infrastructure and liquidity of that particular asset, and they would like, you know, bootstrap that piece. Now, once that is bootstrapped, so the, basically the, the, the, the friction, is more on the issuer side than the user side. That's one way to look at it, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:29", "start": 2428.75, "text": "I see, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "40:29", "start": 2429.43, "text": "Federico, anything you wanted" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:30", "start": 2430.37, "text": "to add there?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "40:31", "start": 2431.45, "text": "Well, assets that aren't that popular, yeah, like I think, you will, we will end up with the issuer like being like this, hub node that everyone connects to and, they can go do routing through that. Assets that are more popular, like USDT, they will have a more, I don't think, more distributed, network. I mean, potentially USDT, like I think there are more people doing payment with USDT than with Bitcoin right now. I mean, period of time, we have a Lightning network that is bigger on USDT than it is on Bitcoin. So, yeah, why trying to leverage Bitcoin liquidity when, you can create, like a, a new liquidity?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:10", "start": 2469.76, "text": "Gotcha. Okay, so we've spoken a bit about RGB compared, you know, in the family of Bitcoin, let's say. Now, if we compare RGB with kind of shitcoin land, right? Like Ethereum, Solana, and Tron, 'cause the-- that's what a lot of people are using nowadays for stablecoin transfers or for some other forms of" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "41:28", "start": 2488.49, "text": "Yeah, the, the, the, is, is like how com- Bitcoin compares to those. So you have all the differences that you have, between Bitcoin and those other layer ones, security, decentralization liability, of the, of the network, long term sustainability. You have all of these reasons why, you, you, Bitcoin is a better layer one to build on rather than, these others. And then, yeah, I would like to, the, the, the one, the, the other thing that we already mentioned is that with RGB, you have native Bitcoin, you have the real Bitcoin that you can, swap with, work with. With the others, you, you, you need to, to deal with this centralized, centralized, centralized, centralized, centralized Reason, to, to, to, to use, RGB, rather than, than these others. Plus, you don't need to deal with their like, native token, yeah. Plus, you can, yeah, leverage the, the, lightning network, yeah, that, that can, can, can perform better than some of, some of these layer ones, in, in some cases." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:31", "start": 2551.13, "text": "So I'm reading it there as mainly not having to wrap, right? So as an example, WBTC, which is like, I think That's basically a wrapped form of Bitcoin that exists on, I think, Ethereum and maybe Tron or I don't know, whatever. But the point is, people are wrapping their Bitcoin to use it on some of these shitcoin layers, whereas in RGB world, it's just like you're just already using Bitcoin, so you don't need to kind of wrap it. So I guess that's the interesting comparison there. now, one other angle, and this could be a line of criticism that I've seen amongst some, let's say, more developer and technical types in the Bitcoin world, their criticism" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:10", "start": 2589.66, "text": "Large assets come to live, quote unquote, on Bitcoin, right? Whether that's RGB or Taproot assets or something else, and could that mean the asset issuer could come to influence Bitcoin soft forks and Bitcoin contentious changes? I guess theoretically, the idea would be, okay, what if the government goes to Tether and says, \"Hey, Mr. Tether, you need to go with our chosen fork,\" this kind of thing. Do you see that as a risk, or is it just like a matter of how big the asset gets, or, you know, Bitcoin remains decentralized anyway? Do you see This go, no, what do you think?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "43:42", "start": 2622.34, "text": "So actually this, this, segue is very well from the previous point you mentioned, and, one of the things we touched on the previous point is that there is some kind of a, smart contract that has been put on the chain to be able to deal with, with it. In RGB, there is no smart contract on chain, so there's no management of smart contract. Obviously you rely on the issuer, but other than the issuer, you don't have to rely on the credibility or, you know, the continuity of the smart contract being there. So obviously the trust assumptions are very clear. You trust the issuer, yes? That's it, that's the only trust you have, and, you know, everything is peer to peer. I send it to you, I trust you, you have to trust me. So, so if you carry that line of thinking forward into this question where it is about, what if there's a big- Big asset that is, you know, used on RGP, does it impact, the forking or reorganization or rollbacks of, Bitcoin? I think theoretically it is possible, but one, number one, the asset will have to be super big, right, to really, incentivize the miners to roll back roll back the whole thing, to, to roll back blocks. They can't just choose, choose a particular transaction and take it out because they don't have the private keys, they can't do anything about it. While in case of smart contracts, they might do something with the smart contracts, right? the other thing is, in case of RGB, when you see a transaction, you can't Make out on the Bitcoin blockchain that, this isn't RGB transaction, it has an asset. So it will, which are-- which block, which transaction are you going to rollback? Which block are you going to rollback? And what are you going to do? So it will need way more coordination. You will have to actually, you know, collude with, the sender, figure out which one it is, then put in enough money to roll it back, and then still make sure that, you know, someone else doesn't go forward to it. So unless it's like a Single transaction, there, there is absolutely no incentive. Theoretically it's possible, but there will be very less incentive for that. And, yeah, that's, that's how I'll put it." }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "45:56", "start": 2755.86, "text": "I think like, yeah, there are like two angles to this. One is the, incentive for, like, yeah, let's say, yeah, you have this massive, like, USDT transactions, and then there is an incentive for the miners maybe to, like, rollback some transaction if, if there, there is enough bribing from the other side. but that is the same problem that you have already with the big, big, big, big Bitcoin transaction. If I make, like, a Bitcoin transaction that is moving one million dollars of Bitcoin mining rewards, so there is already there a big incentive for bribing the market, the, the, the miner to try to, reorder the chain. So it doesn't really introduce a new, vector, of attack, a new vulnerability. It's already the same dynamic or, or, or already with Bitcoin transaction, Bitcoin transaction can already have multiple times the value of the, the mining rewards. So yeah, that's, some dynamic, that is already a stake that is solved by waiting for more confirmations. So, I, Anything there. While on the idea that, yeah, the government, like, your city is very popular on Bitcoin, everyone is using it, and the government goes to Tether, say, okay, now you need to use my, KYC fork of Bitcoin, and Tether, agrees, okay, so what? Okay, Tether will move to the KYC fork of Bitcoin? Bitcoinists keep using, the Bitcoin blockchain. which one is bigger, who cares? I mean, like the important thing is that Bitcoin, as it is intended to work, keeps, being able to serve the user. So then if there, there is another, like, KOC fork of Bitcoin that, is used for USD T, who cares? I mean, it's there, you don't need to use it if, if you only care about Bitcoin. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:38", "start": 2858.2, "text": "Yeah, okay. And so, did you have a final comment there, Anant?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:42", "start": 2862.28, "text": "No, no, I'm saying that's a very good way to put it, Federico, because what we are saying is that there is no additional trust or additional attack vector that RGB is introducing into Bitcoin, and that's actually very, very important to underscore. So everything that RGB is doing is trying to keep it completely off-chain, no additional trust requirements, no additional attack vectors it introduces. Users either to Bitcoin or users. That's essentially, why RGB is, much more powerful and, you know, you know, kind of, it doesn't really impact Bitcoin, it, it is only net positive for Bitcoin if anything." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:19", "start": 2898.59, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. So I think I'm with you guys on that, on the decentralization side of things. maybe the challenge then is just, how do you get users, right? Like just getting product market fit, right? So where do you guys see that coming from? you know, if, you know, because it More secure and more decentralized, but users maybe don't care, you know? So what, what's gonna make users care and make users decide, yeah, I wanna use RGB Tether or RGB Tribe, RGB, to do- operations, whether that's your RWA or stablecoin stuff, what do you guys think? Well, to," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "48:55", "start": 2935.28, "text": "to be honest, users wouldn't care. Users wouldn't come to a solution or they wouldn't come to Tribe because it's RGB. To be honest, they would want a faster, more reliable, and cheaper, more effective solution. So, so no one comes for, you know, because it is this particular technology, I'm going to use it, right? They come for what they are getting out of it, and that is what, you know, people, in the product team like ours are trying to solve without telling our users because we are good and we are Bitcoin and we are RGB. That is why you use us, maybe ten people will use you, only like- Like people who want to try it out, but when you want really, you know, mass adoption, then that you have to provide real value. So RGB, we have established here on this call that RGB does have real value in terms of, security, in terms of efficiency, everything. Now it is our job of how th-those benefits of RGB get translated To the, to the benefits that the user gets without user having to worry about if it is RGB, it should be cheaper, it should be faster, it should always be available, right? If we can crack these three, which RGB kind of promises, we need to translate it and get to the users, and that is what essentially we are working on. When they, they find a solution where they see, see, initially probably USDT might have, it was on Omni, but it was very difficult, it didn't move on, and then it did move on. So if we are able to There's a lot of community support for it, then, we believe that adoption should come with it. I" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "50:28", "start": 3028.14, "text": "think like, yeah, as, as I say, the, the adoption doesn't come from the technology, but comes from a good product that being built. So like, the builders are gonna, are gonna create the adoption, not, like the protocol being amazing and being a good tech. But I think like, so the, the, then the question is, how can R3 attract builders? I think, yeah, there are all these benefits of the" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "50:53", "start": 3052.96, "text": "To, bring, their users to someone else's playground. And all other layers one's are always, or, or other like, solution that introduce a trust credo, they're always someone else's playground, because there is like, someone that bootstrap in that layer one that created the chain, that like is benefiting from the, to- token going up, the, the layer one token going up, or that is, as, controlling the chain. So actually, position itself as this neutral playground where you can go there, Like Bitcoin rules, you are not under someone else rules, and so it rewards on the social scalability side. So you don't need to introduce trust or like some-- or having like a good business relationship to the party that is managing the other, chain or, the other solution. So I think this is something that can attract big, big use case, big liquidity, and then in the end, big, like good builders, and in the end, it can create the network effect. To, to have, to have a, a good adoption for, and good experience for all the users." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:59", "start": 3119.06, "text": "Excellent. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's, interesting, just to see the compe-the competition and kind of what is, let's say, what are the unique things about RGB? So as I'm reading it, as I'm understanding it, it's like this idea, okay, so again, the client side validated paradigm, it's a different paradigm, but that allows certain things in terms of maybe low fees, easiness of use, That may attract, like you said, Federico, certain builders to the ecosystem, which into-- who build certain products, and then obviously those products are what hopefully appeals to the end users who wanna actually use the, the wallets and the swaps services and the decentralized exchanges and so on. So, I guess we'll leave it there. Any last comment? And where people-- where can people find you online and, you know, learn more about either what you're building or just RGB in general?" }, { "speaker": "anant_tapadia_federico_tenga", "time": "52:48", "start": 3168.14, "text": "I'm sure you guys, people can find me on, on, on Twitter, it's just my name And to learn more about RGB, there is, yeah, we have this, this website that, a lot of people are, are contributing to maintain. It's called RGB Info, where you have, you, you can find access to all the information, but educational, but also developers tools and, and, various resources. So, yeah, I recommend people to go to rgb dot info to, to learn more about RGB." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:13", "start": 3193.01, "text": "So, yeah, you can definitely find me on, on X, anant underscore tap. But more importantly, I would request you to" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:23", "start": 3202.88, "text": "Subscribe in your app stores or follow Bitcoin Tribunex and, you know, use it, see the power of RGB, give us feedback, and, that's how you can get involved and get in touch." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:35", "start": 3214.81, "text": "Fantastic. Alright, well, we'll leave it there, Federico and Anant, thank you for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:39", "start": 3219.0, "text": "Thanks," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:39", "start": 3219.28, "text": "Stephen." } ] }