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Welcome to the affiliate bi podcast today. I'm speaking with Jean-Michel Azopardi He's an advisor and a lot of different companies in fintech blockchain in cyber security And he's also speaking at many conferences on those very topics So, Jean-Michel, I'm going to pass it back to you and tell us more of what you do.

Thank you so much for having me, John. So what do I do? That's always a difficult question to answer. I guess it depends who the audience is. But the sort of short summary of it is I'm an advisor to a few different startups in the FinTech and blockchain space, like you just said, and I help them with things from growth marketing to the technical compliance to cybersecurity preparation to make a range of a range of different things.

It's I, I am lucky to say I, I'm, I'm, I'm privileged enough to be able to work only with companies that Truly align with what it is I want to do as an individual. That means finding customers is always difficult, but it means once you do the fit is usually right.

What is your story? How did you get into Bitcoin and blockchain?

It began when I had a full head of hair and check it 2011 when I was following the Julian Assange story back then so Julian Assange had leaked a video where I had together with Bradley Manning back then now Chelsea Manning who was a employee of the NSA, I want to say, I'm not sure if it was NSA or military but she leaked a video.

Called Collateral Murder, which was published on LiveLeak that no longer exists now. And Collateral Murder was essentially a video of an Apache 64 gunship mowing down a couple of Reuters reporters who were mistakenly taken for soldiers. And following that... This, this, this guy just drives over in his car tries to help these people who've been gunned down by this, by this helicopter and and they light up the car like it's a, like a, like it's a video game.

And there's three kids in the back and obviously, you know. Everyone gets decimated. And I, I, you know, I followed the story and it, it, it, it really hit home to me that, you know, the world doesn't work the way you think it does. You know, and Western media portrays a very different. Image to what what actually happens in reality, right?

Because as soon as this video went live visa just pulled pulled all ties from WikiLeaks. So WikiLeaks was the was the news organization back then, which together with the Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald, if I remember correctly, from either the Huffington Post or the Washington Journal, like I never, I always mix them up they published it via WikiLeaks and Visa just says, Hey, listen, you can't take any more donations.

We're, we're cutting you off completely. And Visa and Wikileaks announced we're taking payment in this thing called Bitcoin. I was like, what the hell is Bitcoin? And it's been a rabbit hole ever since. Let's just say that.

I wasn't quite expecting that story and that answer, but I mean, it's you know, it's an interesting reality.

I mean, that's probably one of the first major instances of people hearing about Bitcoin. I'm sure maybe there's a lot of people that went down that rabbit hole for that reason. And I kind of wish I paid more attention to it back then. I think it was years later. That I started writing articles about casinos accepting Bitcoin and even then I didn't pay attention to it and I just said, eh, it's just another payment method.

I didn't think much of it.

Yeah, I mean, back then it was, I didn't think much of it either, but funnily enough, I mean, In hindsight, like that was the first actual use case for Bitcoin, you know, when it took the world like eight years to realize that, hey, listen, we can use this thing for international payments, but we had the information back then.

It was there. It was clear in front of us. Wikileaks weren't doing anything wrong or doing anything. Illegal per se. It was it was you know, just, just the, the influence of foreign government that, that, that sparked the, the, the change. But to that point and to sort of further share my, my.

My equal ignorance, I guess, as it were as soon as I found out about this Bitcoin thing, I mean, I'm like, I was was, I'm a techie, right? To some extent or degree. Let's say like the simple way to explain it is whenever something goes wrong in the house in the families, in the families sort of tech world, like I'm the guy.

And it's been that way since I was 10. Not much has changed now. So, so, you know, back then I had just taken out a a loan for a PC with an epic tower had like an AMD hex core It's like 3. 2 gigahertz with six cores with like four with like four gigs of ram and I had an xfx 6950 the beastie beastie pc And and I went to buy that I said that I said, I want to mine this magic internet money and he's like okay, what's it going to cost?

So i'm like, okay, so my psu is like a thousand watts So, you know, probably like about as much as an AC running a 24 7. And back then the, the, the bills were, were ridiculously expensive. They were three times what, what they are now. So it's like there's, there's no way that's going to happen. Go fuck yourselves, basically.

And I, and I unfortunately listened. But the same thing I always say is, is even if I hadn't, I would have probably spent that on some kind of Honda Civic in my early twenties anyway, let's face it. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, what would you rather have a 10,000 Bitcoin or two pizzas?

Exactly. Like back then it was it was You know, like it, it was just an idea. It was, people don't understand just 15 years ago, even like saying the word epic in public was, it was really weird. It was like, that's something that you only do, you know, over TeamSpeak or Ventrilo or, or, or, you know, you don't do it in public because if you do, people are going to look at you weird.

Now there's, you know, one of the biggest companies in the gaming industry is called Epic. You know, and, and, and everyone's kids play Fortnite, so the, the, the world is like drastically shifted and the same thing has happened with, with Bitcoin. This used to be something that, you know, you'd, you'd meet someone really randomly, you have no idea how, but you realize that, that there's a set of unspoken ideas and roots that align you, at least pre 2017.

That's how things were, I think post 2017 things are very different. 

We know what it's done today, I mean, in that last 15 years, but when did it click for you that you said, Hey, this thing could actually get really big, and it's actually going to do more than just be another payment method?

It's actually going to change the world. How long did it take for you to start to have this realization that I need to spend more time on this?

First time my mother came to me and said, Hey, Jean, what's Bitcoin? I know you've been looking at it for some time, but my friends are talking about it now. What is it?

What is it? What does it do? How does it work? What does, what does it matter? That for me was the, was the aha moment. You know, when, when, when gen pop, as it were, like that's, that's how I think about the, the, the, the, the world, you know, when, when gen pop start asking questions, it means it means it's important.

It means it's extremely immature, extremely, because in reality. Genpop should have no idea about how the tech works. Like, no one knows how, how large language models, machine learning, deep learning, neural nets. No one knows how all that shit works. They just use Google and it works. You know what I mean?

And, and that's because it's, it's mature. But in the beginning, in the beginning was how do I create an email address? That's what it was, you know? And that for me was the same kind of moment, just a few years, many years apart. 

I remember being at a conference and listening to Anthony Di Iorio, and he was basically stating that, you know, what the internet was back 20, 30 years ago was the exchange for information and what Bitcoin and all this blockchain technology was allowing for the exchange of value.

And it's something we've never really experienced before. And I think you're right. It's the best analogy. It is. When you go back to the days of like getting started with your first email, I mean, I think there's some listeners here that would just be, what do you mean it's always been there, but it's the same thing.

No, that's a, that's a, that's a fantastically important point. So during my, my, my last startup, I raised, I raised a little bit of money for for for a blockchain project a couple of million euros. And we set out to build the Internet of value, right? So, and in doing so, we created some really, really cool tech.

Like, we created a blockchain agnostic platform. That, that essentially says, like, it doesn't matter what chain you use. Just speak to us and we'll fix the chain part out for you in a way where you own, own custody. But more importantly we. Dove into like, what really differentiates web two and web three, right?

So web, web, web two had, it's sort of is at its peak at the moment. You can like, let's go back actually. Sorry, web one, you could Google search, you could find a listing of a business that you've never met without speaking to anyone and know that they exist. Right? Within Web 2, you can order food from somebody you've never met, pay with money you've never touched, and have it delivered by somebody you've never spoken to.

Right. That's the, that's the sort of peak, sort of the sort of peak of it. And now the reason why, or the reason the shift towards Web3 is occurring, because in the Web2 model, the stream of finance and the stream of data are separate. Visa lives separately to Google login. There are two different entities.

So, but value encompasses both of those. So, my idea, my sort of philosophy is that the Internet of Value is actually just the encompassing and the, the, the, the, of data and finance in, in one data stream.

I've never really thought about it that way where I just kind of treated them as separate and I think a lot of people see it as separate.

They don't see Web3 as being really The, the sum of web one and web two, and, you know, as if there's like a wall there.

I think it's, we're, we're at a sort of point in time where, where that the definition of web three has, hasn't yet been made in the same way, the definition of the Metaverse hasn't yet been made or, or, or be it that's for many different reasons.

But I think we, we, we sort of all have this. We're at a unique point in history where we all have this opportunity to shape what the next version of the internet is going to look like and be like. And it's through conversations like these that we, that we, Figure these things out. Right.

The next question I have, I'm actually gonna modify it based on what we're chatting about right now. The original question was just that kind of ask about these trends where, you know, Bitcoin goes through a big peak and all crypto seems to follow it. And then every four years, there's a bit of a crash cycle.

And I'm kind of wondering, it's there's also in the background, we've seen a massive spike in AI. And we've seen AI companies kind of coexist with blockchain. I'm just wondering, what do you see in the future as, you know, we're kind of like maybe on the downside of another crypto winter, but AI is taken up.

Do you think these two are going to always coexist and pick each other up and be part of this? Acceleration that's just beyond AI.

I love this question. So I think that AI is what will, is what will fuel the growth of blockchain. So if we agree that Web3 has multiple pillars, right? As far as technology goes, there's blockchain, there's AI, there's VR, AR, XR. etc. Those are all, all, all different examples of, of. of pillars of Web3 and we know that each of them are in their relative infancy and that they are evolving at a more rapid pace than than their counterparts 15 years ago and that was already bloody rapid like think about how much time it took to get from a Nokia 3310 to a to the first iPhone.

It wasn't that long, you know? So if we bear all that in mind and we also understand that technology is inherently agnostic, it's not good or bad. It can be you, it's, it's, it's the actor wielding the gun that determines whether the gun is used for evil or good. Then we will also, then we can say that deepfakes are only going to become more and more of a problem.

They are already a very big problem in the telco industry with robocalls, for example. This is a pertinent issue that people are talking about now. It's not, it's not, you know, five years in the future. And we had Cambridge Analytica not too long ago. Okay, and now while that wasn't technically deepfakes, the next iteration of that is definitely using deepfakes to swing elections.

And we're starting to see countries wake up to it. In fact, there was... One country, this, I believe that announced earlier on this morning that they're, that they're regulating, they're regulating deepfakes and they're going to calling them digital I want to say digital examples is the legal, is the legal term that they use, but I'll see if I can find that and why is this important and how does this affect blockchain?

So if we can, if we can agree that blockchain and crypto are two completely different things because they absolutely are. And then if you, if you, if you can't, then this explanation will make no sense to you. But blockchain is essentially just... a series of hashes, a series of hashes layered on top of each other.

So blockchain can, in really simple terms, somebody who's never, who's never heard about a blockchain, a blockchain is just a networked database. That's all it is. blockchain, and when you update one of the, one of the instances, every instance also gets updated, assuming they assume it's a, it's a correct request.

Simplest explanation for a blockchain you can ever find. Now, on a, on a, on a blockchain can enable value in, in three ways, and only three ways. All those, every value metric blockchain can enable falls under these three umbrellas, digital identity, data integrity, and delivery versus payment. Those are the everything that it does, the immutability, the transparency, all falls under those, those three things.

Crypto is just one use case, but. Let's say the, the industry took an interesting turn once, once the ICO day sort of came about and the defied agents came in and the NFT came and did their thing. That's not the point. That's the, the people that think that that that's. The value is in, is in, is in crypto can't see the trees because the can't see the forest because the trees are in the way the value is within the blockchain.

So the only way to properly prevent deep fakes across multiple platforms in multiple jurisdictions, with multiple parties owned by many different people in a way that's trustworthy and no party can screw over one another is a blockchain. There's no other solution that's perfect for that. And I say that knowing that blockchains are useless for 90 percent of use cases.

Completely useless. Which is why 90 percent of projects fail. Because they integrate a blockchain for the sake of integrating a blockchain. The same way they're now integrating AI for the sake of integrating AI. Thanks for watching! Because there's a bunch of fucking charlatans in this industry who are after the money.

But I'm not saying don't follow the money. I'm saying the value is not where people see it. It's one thing I've learned. It's very few things in this industry are as they seem.

Would you say that this whole topic of deepfakes I find interesting because you're right. This can change elections. This could basically...

Make a company succeed at the expense of someone else. This could bankrupt people and companies. Do you see a blockchain being able to help us? Solve some of these problems of knowing that DeepFakes exist and maybe even having apps that someone doesn't have to understand what's behind the tech, just to know that, hey, I can trust that this message is real.

Of course. So you, you, you touched on a really, really important point, right. Which sort of echoes back to what I said earlier, which is the only way that, that the tech is going to work is if people don't know the tech is there. Right? So they don't have to understand how it works. It just has to work. So there are ways to technically do this.

So the problem isn't the tech. The problem is the people. It's always the people. People are saying, you know, like you know, 70, 000 TPS is nothing on Solana. Like, fuck off. When have you ever seen that? When have you ever seen this? That much need for, for, for on chain direct activities. This is just marketers pushing down.

You know marketing posts because they need something to write about, right? And they need something to put behind those sponsored, those sponsored posts. So if you think about things, if you think about things in reality, if you're batching and you're, you're, you're batching multiple times over and over again, within, within one transaction, you can batch another, I don't know, 700 on most chains quite easily.

And I've tested that personally on. to two different chains. So, and that's, so, so technicality is a part. The tech isn't the problem. The people are the problem. So what we are talking about is essentially a security measure. Do we agree?

Absolutely. It's, it's, it's security. And you've kind of asked a future question I had, which is all about KYC, where it's a big problem in B2C.

I believe it's a massive problem in B2B, but it's not really being talked about or addressed. And I kind of think that there are companies that will try to solve this with non custodial style wallets, but I kind of wonder, you know, what, what are the blockchain implications that are going to solve the same thing?

And I think maybe... This whole concept of not just only deep fake, but the fact of like, you know, someone's ability to, I don't know, fraudulently edit documents. I think we're going to need something here that's going to connect, you know, real data sources to say that these are authentic documents. This is an authentic video and.

Yeah. That people just have to get behind it.

I'm happy that you, you said that I, I, I personally couldn't agree more. There's a few problems with it. Or, or a few roadblocks in the way which are, which mostly boil down to the point I was going to make, which is that security people don't buy security.

People buy compliance. They are two fundamentally different things. To put it to you in simple terms, if you're, I don't know, your son is going to play a game of football, for example and he needs to wear Persian guards because he needs to play, then you go to the store, you spend 10 euros and you buy a kid a pair of shin guards.

But if you're worried that your kid might actually hurt, you're gonna go and spend 100 bucks by the best shin guards known to man. It's a very different perspective, right? So, so it's the same thing with security. So people don't invest in security. They invest in compliance with the exception of military.

Military and space are the only two exceptions to that statement. So. One of the companies I advise is actually a self sovereign identity provider that uses that does exactly what we're, what we're talking about actually in the, in the best possible way. So what they do is they they allow you to create a digital wallet on your phone.

They grab your, you grab your a passport, you slap the passport to your phone, and that sucks in all the cryptographically signed information from the chip. And that's a government signed, digitally signed chip, which cannot be frauded, right? Because it's, it's cryptographically Secure and it and it combines that with a little liveness check and and lets you own your own data and and store it, et cetera.

But and it does it in a. technically a non custodial way. So you're holding your own keys which is kind of the, the dream. So something which we're exploring is, is number one is we, we've partnered with with a company called Trust Elevate to extend the service of facility for children. So how do we secure children's personal data online?

Like, how do I, how do I make sure my kid isn't in some, like, you'd let, you'd let your kids. You wouldn't let your kid go to a playground with a 45 year old. So why would you let them in a, in a, in a lobby with them? You know, it's, it's, it's kind of weird. So, so the beauty of this is that it's all sort of done in a zero knowledge way, but once we started exploring payments then the fact that it's non custodial becomes a problem because many, many companies.

legally cannot work with a non custodial provider. If you're in a regulated market and you, you're working with, with crypto as far as I know, very few to no regulated markets allow non custodial service providers. And that is a huge problem because we're doing it wrong. Like centralized exchanges technically shouldn't exist.

They are, they are like a stepping stone to what is to what needs to be and what needs to be is an atomic exchange where everyone holds their own funds within a separate wallet that they also hold half a key through that's in someone else's infrastructure. It's like, think about it this way. As a a centralized exchange grabs all your funds and stores it in one, one big vault.

And then Sam Badman Freed comes and grabs half of it and spends it on hookers and blow in Vegas over the weekend, right? That's centralized exchanges. Now regulated exchanges do the same thing. The only difference is they actually keep 5 percent in one big vault and 95 percent in other vaults around the world.

That's the regulatory standard. The way it needs to be is I keep my funds in this, in this. In this decentralized vault, but it's in a, it's in a safety deposit box with two keys and I hold one key and the bank holds the other key or the exchange holds the other key so they can't open it without me and I can't open it without them.

That's how it's going to be. I guarantee you. It's a matter of time.

That makes sense. And it probably didn't happen over a weekend with the, with the SBF, but maybe it was a couple of years.

Couple of years. Well, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Well, I'm going to, I'm going to jump over to the affiliate marketing side.

And just as a small segue, I still find thousands of websites linking to FTX with an affiliate tracking link. These are websites that are up to date, legit, and they're still doing it. I'm kind of shocked at how this is a common problem in affiliate marketing. So segueing to problems in affiliate marketing obviously you've got a ton of experience in blockchain and I've always kind of kept my foot in the door.

Just to understand it, and I've always wondered if blockchain and like Web3 has the power to completely dominate or fully take over the affiliate marketing space in terms of the tracking tech. The way tracking works today is anyone can set up an affiliate program. The operator of the affiliate program can Edit, delete data as they wish.

You're kind of at their mercy. Like you are today with a bank where they delete your account. You just don't exist. But I just find that these tracking tech. Like it's kind of like cat and mouse, like Google says they want to kill cookies, but it's not happened yet. And I'm just wondering, like, are we going to approach something where everything I see in crypto, you've got real time data.

There's a lot of trust and I think maybe people want that. And I think the people that already work in affiliate marketing in crypto, they're kind of used to having it their way when they go over to our side. They're just kind of shocked at how horrendous things are. So I kind of want to get your take on that.

That's an area which I spend a lot of time thinking about actually just because I'm, I'm, I'm based out of Malta. This is the, the, one of the sort of hotspots for the gambling industry. And as a result, obviously the affiliate industry is just as just as big in parallel. So I think there is so much opportunity.

It's not even funny. So here are the, the, the problems like you, like you mentioned, right? You, you're the affiliate is constantly at. Because all of the data is owned by, by the merchant and they have full control over it. And what happens is Every, every period, every week, every month, whatever the, the, the merchant would say okay, this is the amount of revenue, which you've generated for my platform based on this very complicated.

Deal. Sometimes it's it's a fee up front. Sometimes it's a fee up front and rev share on the sort of parameters of these kinds of deals are quite, quite fast. So it creates very, very complicated accounting. So there can be mistakes that happen. In two ways. It's either a question of, you know, there's admin mistake from from the finance department.

It's just a genuine, a genuine mistake, or it's it's the merchant is legitimately trying to screw the affiliate on the other hand, there's there can also be affiliate abuse because they can sort of get fake customers, put them through fake customer journeys, understand where the where the sort of power points are, where the customer has all of their all of their worth and then rug pull under that.

So there's, let's say it how it is, you know, there's, there's sort of. Foul play on both sides, but ultimately this is more of a problem for the affiliate than it is for the merchant because the merchant has more power, right? So, so that means the change let's talk about what the, what the change can do.

Like I said, you, you, you in the, in, in this industry, you reconcile every week or every month, right? So, and sometimes that's by design. Because it, it allows the merchants to sort of loan off of the, take a loan off of the affiliates, right? Which is kind of abuse in its own way. But blockchain, before I mentioned the three pillars of blockchain, right?

Like how blockchain creates value. Now, now the only, the ways it creates this value or the way that these three pillars are leveraged are And are also in two ways. Two simple ways. Number one is the reduction of fraud and number two is the automation of administrative tasks. Only, only those two, those, those are the real, real use, real use case, real cases of the world, every real blockchain use case, you can point back to those two.

So what do we know? We know there's a ridiculous amount of reconciliation that happens between the merchant and the affiliate all the time. But we also know that The merchant is benefiting from the situation and they are in a position where they hold the keys to the castle. Now, you need to understand that the nature of man is greed, is greed.

Literally greed. So people don't give away power. They never do, never willingly. That is what's different with Web3. And that's what will make successful Web3 companies. Successful ones will give away power willingly. That's what will make them grow. One example I can think of is peak. io. But that's a, that's a, that's a story for a different time.

So I think there's a world of opportunity in the affiliate space. But like I said, the issue is people. So what needs to happen is there needs to be a small consortium of affiliates. That together make up the buying, negotiating power of one big affiliate and they make one deal. And when the first merchant comes on board, he'll snowball from there.

That's what needs to happen.

That's interesting. I'm going to have to go back and listen to that a couple more times because there's just a lot there. I mean, obviously in the affiliate space, it's getting weird where maybe this is another thing to touch upon where I think when you said that, you know, people need to kind of, you know, give up some of that power in order to obtain power or get more market share.

I think we're seeing an extreme amount of consolidation in the iGaming affiliate space where the big are just getting bigger. I'm just wondering if if anything's going to change, if that's actually going to become, you know, rather than having, you know, 50 major affiliate groups. It's actually going to be like 10 and they're going to hold all the power.

They're going to use that power over affiliate programs and affiliate programs are going to have to create their own affiliate sites just to be able to.

So that's the, that's the, that's the way it will always be. That's the, that's the way the, the economy and capitalism works. Unfortunately, that's the downside of capitalism, right?

Is that, that's, that's, that's eventually it's consolidation, consolidation, consolidation. That's what happens. Now I'm I personally a believer in splitting up large companies because it's it better is the industry and it better is the world, right? Because I believe that public companies should serve the public, not the other way around.

But and we have history and proof that this worked, you know, like there's a there's a fantastic. Series I watched a long time ago called the men who built America fantastic series. It's like it goes through the stories of the, of the Carnegie's and the Vanderbilt's and the Rockefeller's and, and my chase, et cetera.

And, and. how these, these massive conglomerates became sort of like bubbles in their, in their industry. And then what happened is they got too big. The, the, the, and the, and the the Congress came out and said, okay, now we're gonna. Split you up, but what happened as a result, you know, we got General Electric and Chevron and one of these, all these companies, okay, which didn't do great for the world now, but we're at the end of that cycle, right, where it's just at the point where it just needs to be repeated.

That's my feeling like, because I, because I feel like once you split them up, you get some great things happening in the world for a, for a, for a period of time, and then they need to be, the same thing happens again and you rinse repeat.

Yeah, you get innovation and there's actually a lot of chatter that this could be happening to Google where there's a lot of people in the SEO space that believe that there's going to be more of this.

Fruit so to speak of having this situation like, you know, Google being maybe not split up But maybe having it such that they're not the dominant market share and they think there'll be more innovation if this does happen. 

It needs to be split up. It should have been split up five years ago. Same thing with metal same thing with Amazon It should have Amazon not five years ago.

Amazon is kind of right now Because because they I think it took Amazon like nine or 10 years to deliver shareholder profits for the first time. So it took them a long ass time. But those guys got their investment back and everyone's happy. You know what I mean? It's like it's it's it's you know, the I think I think a lot of what's been lost in the business world is service to the public, right?

I mean, if you're even if you're if you're whatever business you are, you're in service to someone that person's your, your customer, you know, and services, I think is I think a word that, that's that people sort of take, take lightly or, or look at wrongly. And That's why, what I think will make Web3 companies successful, the difference, the difference in understanding the importance of service to that extent.

Alright, another question is, let's assume you were going to build this affiliate tracking platform. What blockchain would you build it on and how would Web3 integrate with this?

I would make the platform blockchain agnostic. So my rationale and reasoning is that there's no one blockchain to rule them all blockchains are like vehicles and you need different blockchains for different kinds of journeys, right?

Like a snowmobile is super, but if you, if you stick it on a, on a, on a, you know, in the sea, you're going to have a bad time. You know, so affiliate marketing on chain is a, is a particular use case, right? What do you need? You need high TPS, you need low, low transaction costs and you need relatively high availability, but not too high and you don't need too much security.

You don't need the security levels that you don't need military level grade security, right? So, so are you familiar with the scalability trilemma? No. Okay. Are you familiar with the iron triangle? Nope. I got some homework to do. Okay. So the, so the, so the iron triangle is really, really simple, right?

Whenever you're buying any kind of product or service you can have, you can only ever have two factors in your, in your favor. Speed, price and quality, right? If something is. cheap, it's going to be, you're going to get it quick and you're gonna, and it's going to be, it can be good quality, but if something is sorry, let's, let's go back to that again.

If you're, if you're buying something and the price is, is low, then, then the quality needs can be high, but you, and you won't receive it quickly, right? So, so only over two, two of those in your favor. With that same sort of rationale, same, same triangle, scalability, decentralization, and security. Choose two.

Right. And so all, all blockchains work. Like, Bitcoin is super, super secure, but it's slow and it's expensive. So in, in this case, you don't need the kind of security that Bitcoin provides. You need the sort of transaction costs that Solana provides and the speed that Solana provides. But you also need something in case Solana goes down because let's face it, Solana has DDoS attack.

Two Bitcoin back then, literally two bit, like someone liquidated two Bitcoin, sucked them into Solana, sent the requests out, DDoS'd the entire network. That, that will, will, will help as, as, will, will change as things grow. Maybe it'll be three Bitcoins instead of two. But ultimately, you, you, you still need some kind of backup, right?

So I would go, go to the sort of blockchain agnostic approach, whereby you interface with, with a platform, and the platform does the puppet mastering. across different, different chains, depending on availability, price, and finality.

What do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?

I think we live in a, and I say this from a sort of outsider's perspective, by no means am I an expert in affiliate marketing, not even close. So I, this is my uneducated Neanderthal opinion, right? I would say that a lot of data at the moment is siloed, which is. What perpetuates the current model of affiliation?

It's what keeps the, the power in the hands of the, of the merchants. I think once those data pools are correctly merged in a way where ownership can be directly attributed and reports can be generated from a collective data pool, I think I think BI is going to be a fucking interesting space.

Jean Michel, how can people get a hold of you?

LinkedIn, DMs, always the best or my website jeanmichelazzopardi.com

I will put the, that website and your LinkedIn in the show notes. Jean Michel, thank you so much for doing this. I learned a lot today.

Pleasure. Likewise. It was fun. Thank you.

To reach Jean-Michel

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