# Welcome, Survivors — Lazar Travica | Curvy Protocol - Channel: [ETH Belgrade Community](https://streameth.org/eth-belgrade-community) - Date: 2026-10-06 - Duration: 24:22 - Topics: People & Blogs - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-771nuw2nHss - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=771nuw2nHss ## Transcript Uh so yeah, this talk began as an opening talk for this year's uh Web3 camp, our boot camp for all things Web 3 that we organized yearly for talented students from Serbia and the region. But I thought it was a good refresher just to talk about why we're here and uh what kept us surviving for all the winter so long. So the original name of the talk was not welcome survivors, but why crypto? Why So let's begin uh the talk with shells. So why shells are important? Because a couple of thousand couple of thousands of years ago uh in the Pacific islands when people didn't have commerce, didn't know how to navigate between these islands. They still had small island-based economies where they needed to exchange value for goods and services and to make that value portable and easily accessible. say uh island man would love to purchase bud, he would use an euro coin in our society, exchange it for some other tasks that he conducts and get compensated in the same currency as the rest of the economy. So it was simple, but these guys didn't have foundaries. These guys didn't have mints. They needed to settle with something else. Enter sea shells, the oldest form of currency that we know from the Pacific Islands. And there's a reason why I'm focusing on Pacific Islands. They exchanged shells in exchange for burk in exchange for mowing the their lawns for doing other kind of tasks. So what's uh important to note here is the quality of that currency that it is recognizable. Everybody's willing to trade their sea shells for another unit of work or goods provided. But not all sea shells are the same. Some are larger, some are smaller, some are opened up, cracked up. It doesn't matter. where everybody settled on the fact that a sea shell is a sea shell, a unit of value. Doesn't matter what kind of a sea shell you trade, it always exchanges in the proper product, good or services. So, uh John Maynard Kanes, one of the uh biggest minds in economics of the 20th century, uh recognized around eight qualities of currencies that they need to hold in order to be be true currencies. What we covered just now are the three most important ones which is scarcity, fungeability and recognizability. The ability for the sea shell not to be exploding in supply all the time. Fungeibility. Sea shell being completely interchangeable with other sea shells no matter their size or look. And recognizability the willingness of the entire society to exchange goods and services for burk for seashells. So John Maynard Kanes uh uh made this made this uh uh uh list of qualities that currency needs to fulfill. He also made a very sobering and uh uh dark statement about global economics and incentives that drive us which is in the long run we are all dead. We'll get back to that part a bit later. Pun intended. So, uh, many unbearable hours later on this Pacific island, what happened is that they figured out that they're not the only island in the ocean. So, another island popped up. It had a lot more sea shells than the original one. The economy was booming, but suddenly the islanders had a huge problem. What do we do with all these seashells? What happens if the sea shells suddenly become so abundant that we cannot properly uh drive our economy and exchange uh it for goods and services because even if we have more sea shells, we only have that much amount of time in a day where we can mo mow the lawns. We have only that much meat for burk. We have only that much resources on the island. This brings me to a story uh uh when I was riding a train uh a couple of weeks back. Uh and a train conductor came my way and uh uh uh he he stopped by some kids uh on the train who entered the train after me and he asked them to to buy uh whether they bought the tickets already or not. They said, "No, we already bought. You already checked us out. We just moved in the train." And later he came to me and I bought the ticket. Right? So I was thinking these rascals thought they bit beat the system and in reality they did but uh butterfly effect started unraveling in my mind which is the train conductor is selling less tickets. The economist at the railways compiling the quarterly report. Let's hope that that exists but let's pretend that exists. [sighs] uh they compiling the the quarterly report they observe that tickets have less sales than previous quarters ticket prices need to increase because of unit economics and suddenly next year I'll pay a higher ticket price solely because of the fact that these kids did not want to pay for the pay for the ticket. So they probably won't even next year. Which brings us uh to to to a more sadder and far-reaching examples of this butterfly effect that we have uh which are wars, which is famine, uh which is unjustly uh uh seizure of land for uh irresponsible investments, etc., etc. All of the things that we are very familiar with. So let's put my train story on a bigger canvas. Let's talk about irresponsible investment policies. Let's talk about errors. Every state does. And let's talk about how they get out of those errors. So they make errors which make a budget deficit. Their budget management is poor and the country is in a problem. So the first thing that needs to happen is that the domestic claims must be settled. You must be able to pay the local suppliers of goods, of electricity, of services so that the entire economy can continue to operate even if you don't have the funds to do so. The solution is pretty simple. The state just prints more money, puts it into into the economy. It tells the electricity delivery uh uh uh corporation, "Hey, you're settled. Here's money. The bills are paid. Don't turn off electricity. Continue production. We're all good. So, problem is solved. Printing more money settles domestic claims issues. The bigger problem is foreign claims because why would a a person who borrowed you or who is being owed in a foreign currency care about the amount of local currency that you're printing and giving to them. So, this is a problem. You cannot print foreign currency. That's one of the definitions o of the same thing. And there are two widely adopted strategies that countries take in settling this issue. The first one is if the state is strong, it simply enters a war, tries to kill two birds with one stone, which is settling domestic claims through an economic uh growth driven by the war industry. And second is seizing foreign currency from somebody else in simpler simple terms. Well, if it is not strong, something that is much closer uh to my heart and my place of birth, uh what we usually do is we sell off uh state assets at discounted prices and do massive concessions for foreign investors so that they are able to get the money back in their local foreign currencies. which is a sad story about how these images come into being. Well, every eat Belgrade I've been to so far, this is the fourth one, had this slide verbatim on the on the uh on the presentation. And I feel that's very important. Not because we want to cry about how things were in Yugoslavia, how we have it very hard here in Serbia today or yesterday or whatever. No, we are we are more resilient than that. The point is there's something tying inflation to all which I spoke about so far and the technology that we are all gathered around here. So in simple terms, inflation is uh the slope telling you how much your funds that just stay in a basket devalue over time in simple terms which uh uh are important to all of us. So how this how this uh influences our habits as ai civilization as a society is that we all like to save money because we want to buy new shiny things and to buy new shiny things or to have enough funds to pay for uh the the darker days to pay for uncertain expenses. Well, we need to save that money up. And with inflation, the saving is completely uh is a completely stupid thing to do because the only way your money loses value is by sitting and not being utilized in any manner. So, we might say, okay, but there's so many investment vessels today. There's so many financial products that we can put the money in. It's it's a bit worse than that. Uh this entire concept of saving being con in conflict with the economy that we live in as a planet brings us to the problem of consumerism. You are a fool if you save money. You are smarter if you spend that money. And not only individuals think that way but entire corporations, mine included, thinks that way. You get funded. You get funds from a venture capital firm. You're expected to spend those funds as efficiently and as smart as possible in the shortest amount of time so that you can generate exponential growth. That's cool. We all want to do that. But the problem is that every year people rush to their malls, their uh online stores and buy the newest version of the iPhone that has two more cameras that has a pen or the last the last year's flagship didn't have a pen, etc., etc. The necessity of consumerism lies in the fact that these companies need to be hyperproducing things in order to stay competent and to stay afloat because if they just earned the money and kept it somewhere safe, they would be going out of business pretty soon. Uh the only problem with with with this thing is that uh there's this island, a much bigger island that has a very limited amount of lithium, seashells, copper, and all these other things. And we are constantly pretending that it's infinitely abundant in these resources. So the point is this is not something that I made up. This is a very important uh uh argument about the lack of extraterrestrial civilizations that uh one of the biggest filters in uh civilizations maturing as we theoretically uh uh imagine them is the ability to realize that resources are not infinitely abundant. And as John Kaine said, in the long run that we're all dead and to think about what we are leaving uh behind us after that. So I'm done with the doomer part of this presentation and uh I want to talk about okay what is this crazy guy talking about? What does it have to do with crypto at all? Well, I would argue that it has all to do with crypto. So the first notion of crypto as we know it was the Bitcoin Genesis block sent a clear message. They could have put whatever they wanted into the genesis block. Probably if we did it today, we would put a my lady profile picture or something stupid like that. But no, this this guy wanted to put a strong message talking about the why of the entire technology that he built. The why was simply a headline from the times from that uh from a specific date in 2009 that essentially uh covered two two two uh things. First, chancellor being on the brink of second bailout for banks, printing more money to save the economy, to put us all into uh uh uh to buy more time by killing the economy long-term for the smaller people, not for banks and not for bigger uh obligators. But also, you had the war in Gaza. So, it all makes sense from the perspective of the Bitcoin Genesis blocks. So if we take a step back and remember another great guy who also lived in the 20th century, Harold Lazwell, he has one of the nicest definitions of what politics is. Uh he said that politics is simply the answer to the question of who gets what when and how. Very elegant definition of politics. And if we take a look at crypto and what Bitcoin gave us as the as the crypto pioneer is that crypto is a technology that which guarantees that honest actors, honest miners, honest block producers, everyone who investing resources whether it be time, electricity, stake or whatever earn a non-inflationary currency or a predictably inflating currency. This answers the question of who gets something. This answers the question of how do they get it? What do they need to give in return? And what are they getting for the work that they put in? This is why I argue and uh uh I find this very important. We'll see why. that crypto is inherently a political technology and us pretending it isn't is just us wasting our time because politics is about who gets what when and how. And if you're in crypto and you see yourself as a politically oblivious person then pretend better prepare to get very little very rare and badly. So this is part this is the part of the presentation where I wanted to talk about nuts and bolts where I explain why we cannot have non-inflationary currency without crypto. But I guess that since you're all here, you're aware of why Bitcoin is able to deliver that when other when other currencies when other uh political systems couldn't because of the actor nonr irrational actor which is us and just to give a more positive note at the end I want to roast myself a bit by talking about the crypto technology that we built as nuts and bolts. And talking about my career as a long and tedious process of hammering uh nuts and bolts instead of nails because when you hold a hammer everything looks like a nail. Well, turns out crypto is not a nail. It does one thing and does one thing good. First time I heard about crypto was 2014. Uh a couple of guys from the university I attended for a short period of time. uh they made a cryptocurrency that gets mined by uh uh doing motion by walking by doing all these kind of stuff. It made no sense to me. I knew what Bitcoin was. It was magic internet money for buying drugs and uh ordering assassinations online. But these guys did something different and I didn't quite understand. It made no sense to me. And yeah, it was covered on national television here in Serbia in 2012 10. The year is 2015. my second uh my second opportunity to hear more about uh this technology. Bogdan who later uh went on and found it tenderly. He turned his laptop at webcam publana. We were sitting in this cafe called Chuckle. He turned out around his laptop and said, "Look at this. The world computer Ethereum." And I was like, "Oh, this this looks this looks nice. How many how much can it process a second? Does it have like is it a super It must be a supercomput. like it's a world computer. No, it it turned out to be the slowest and uh most expensive computer ever and it made no sense to me. And on the landing page, they asked for money, so I was sure it was a scam. Fast forward 2016, working at Deanna Labs uh with Malisha over there. Uh uh Malisha got an email uh one day which I think is a monumental email for the entire Serbian web 3 industry. He got an email from the founder of Devana, now Kagi, the search engine which preserves your privacy, saying, "Hey, Malisha, you're leading our R&D department. Can you do something with Ethereum and email? I feel like there's potential for disruption there." And we made the most expensive and slowest email ever founded. It was called Lemon Email. It had a very fancy and still modern landing page and it had a web and mobile client, serverless email, storage on IPFS, all of those things. We really hammered a bolt on that one. So, fast forward to 2018, I got out of it. Didn't quite understand all of it, none of it. And uh I got a call one day uh from from friends who were working with Celsius Network, the infamous Celsius Network, which I will be talking about today. I got a call, hey, these guys are doing an ICO. What's an ICO? Oh, it's a big big event, you know, when you gather around and people throw money at you and you only need to guard the server so it doesn't go down because if it goes down, you don't get the money. Okay, easy peasy. Let's go. I I I did a good job at protecting WordPress sites. How can this be any different? It turned out it wasn't. So, we started working on on this entire thing, Celsius. We wanted to make it decentralized. Turned out the institutions who wanted to use Celsius, who would who were lining up to use it didn't really want it decentralized. So I spent the next three years of my career building banking systems in JavaScript which no bank would [laughter] allow. But yeah, that was that was it. I was in blockchain. I was working with web three. But the only thing where I saw at the blockchain were the icons on the wallet that we're we were developing where you had Bitcoin, Ethereum, all those nice and colorful colorful icons. I wanted to jump ship because I wanted to go deeper into the entire thing that we are building. Why blockchain? I I constantly thought about okay, but we we are not building this so that people can just get interest where are they getting the interest from yada yada yada. Ven and I had the opportunity to start a blockchain protocol development studio. It's like you know it's like you were a web developer your entire career and suddenly someone came to you and said hey do you want to design databases or virtual machines for a living. I said yes yes yes I want to do that. I want to get as close to the metal as I can possibly have. And we started working uh with Polygon on Polygon Edge on Polygon supernets. We had this huge notion that it's just that the blockchain is slow. We need to make it faster. Everybody will come. Everybody will use it. It's a superior technology. Well, no. Blockchain is the worst possible database you could imagine. It's the worst possible constraints you can have in a virtual machine and doesn't matter which blockchain. I'm mostly talking about Ethereum, but applies for all it. That's not the point. The point is not it needs to be performant enough but if you're coming to it because of performance you are you are making a lapse in judgment somewhere along the way 2022 uh uh lots of friends who were working at Celsius at the time I think the date was 12th uh 12th of June 2021 Celsius stopped withdrawals they didn't have the money to cover all the debts and obligations and holdings of their users. They essentially deflated from 25 billion deposited assets to 167 million. A lot of friends lost their jobs overnight. A lot more people lost their life savings overnight. And I felt I wasn't uh moving in the right direction. I left Trapzis. I wanted to found Route 3. I wanted to create a software as a service. It's a more traditional way of building businesses, something that's more natural in web two. Uh, if people could spin up their blockchains with two clicks, then everybody would have their own blockchain. We had a very big client. We were having enough profits to stay afloat, but not enough to grow ludicrously. And it carried on for a couple of years until we went down because all of our clients went down in the next bare market. because turns out if you want to launch a blockchain with a few clicks, you definitely don't need a blockchain. Luckily enough, we did one thing right and again I need to thank Malisha for that all the time. We had this research department called 3327 which we constantly funded, constantly gave uh uh uh new ideas for research, constantly got new articles being published and that's when in 2024 end of 23 uh the team published a couple of papers which focused uh uh which gave us the confidence that privacy in blockchains across the board is something that can be solved and something that we are capable more than capable of solving. which is what brought me to uh uh to where I am now where finally after more than 10 years of a web3 career I'm proud to stand behind something and know that I am building something for the better future not for bigger APYs not for anything else but giving privacy to people who are using this technology because without privacy control gets imposed on you quite easily. I wanted to say yeah as a as a closure of this entire presentation is that the point the entire point is to have fun doing all of this. The entire point is to be aware that when and how you're hammering screws, nuts and bolts. A very big point is please don't reinvent gambling. World needs less of it not more of it. and remember why crypto because remembering why crypto kept pushing me through the 10 years where I didn't know the hell what I was doing but in the end curvy was waiting for me at the end of the road with uh uh a promise of fulfill fulfilling the point of the entire career. So yeah, thank you for listening. I hope I didn't kill you kill the mood. So that's it. Any questions? Yeah.