Mara Schmiedt, CGO of Alluvial, on Liquid Staking and The Future of Staking

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Mara Schmiedt, CGO of Alluvial, talks about the impact of liquid staking on the crypto ecosystem, the future of staking, and how institutions and consumers should begin to think about security and decentralization trade-offs.

About Mara Schmiedt

Mara Schmiedt is the Chief Growth Officer at Alluvial. Mara focuses on advancing industry participation and adoption of Liquid Collective, seeking out world-class partnership opportunities, and overseeing Business Development, Sales, and other strategic functions. Mara recently joined Alluvial as Chief Growth Officer from Coinbase, where she served as the Head of Sales for Coinbase Cloud, the leading developer platform for blockchain-based infrastructure products and APIs. She expanded Cloud’s staking business, supporting large-scale organizations, enterprises, and institutional investors. Prior to joining Coinbase, she managed Business Development at Bison Trails, a leading provider of blockchain-based infrastructure acquired by Coinbase in February 2021. Mara also served as Strategy Manager at ConsenSys, where she supported the strategic development of Codefi, the blockchain application suite for Web3 Commerce and Finance.

Mara is passionate about open-source technology and has published research multiple research reports and papers on liquid staking, such as The Internet Bond and Ethereum 2.0 Staking Ecosystem Report.

Mara Schmiedt gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com. 

Highlights Of The Interview

• The trend towards more centralization in terms of validation power among major blockchain networks
• Liquid collective – enterprise-grade standard for liquid staking
• The impact of liquid staking on the ecosystem as a whole
• The future of staking – how can staking become safer for consumers
• How institutions and consumers should begin to think about security and decentralization trade-offs

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab 
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Pod. We’re buzzing as always on this lovely Friday in Jan, super pumped out today’s guest on the show today we have Mara Schmiedt, who is the Chief Growth Officer, the CGO at Alluvial. Mara focuses on advancing industry participation and adoption of Liquid Collective, seeking out world class partnership opportunities and overseeing Bizdev sales and other strategic functions. Mara recently joined Alluvial as the CGO from Coinbase, where she served as Head of Sales for Coinbase Cloud. A true vet been in the space for a while. Been a hot minute pumped to have you on, Mara, welcome to the show. 

Mara Schmiedt
Thank you, Matt, excited to be here. 

Matt Zahab 
Pumped to have you on. Before we get going. You got to show our listeners and viewers the hoodie. That is a nice it’s more of a pullover, but what’s the back? What’s the backstory behind that? Where’d you get it? 

Mara Schmiedt 
This is the Flashbots hoodie obviously, I will show you the back to there we go. Um, either released a MEV boosted That’s right. Yes, I usually end up picking things out of my swag drawer in the morning. So this one made the cut for this morning’s podcast. 

Matt Zahab 
Nice. That’s awesome. So let’s start sort of day one kind of thing. Coinbase. So many stories, I have a couple people in my network who’ve worked at Coinbase. I’ve heard very conflicting things. Now of course, we will get into Alluvial. What was your time like working at Coinbase must have been pretty sweet being Head of Sales for Coinbase Cloud. And I’d love if you could also touch on Coinbase Cloud because that is a part of Coinbase vertical that a lot of people are aware of how powerful it is it really has a lot of potential to be a massive like 10 figure sort of revenue line on the balance sheet. So the floor is yours. Tell us about Coinbase, Coinbase Cloud, your time there, Head of Sales, the whole nine yards. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Oh, for sure. Yeah. So I think you touched on this briefly. But I’ve been in the space for a couple of years now I think I’m coming up to my seventh. And spend time at incredible companies through great journeys and supporting great founders. My Coinbase journey was pretty interesting, actually. So back in 2020, I joined Joe and Aaron, the founders of then Bison Trails, which was one of the leading infrastructure providers in the space to really grow out the business and really get us to scale. So I joined to, you know, support our business development team then. And just a couple of months later, we actually got acquired by Coinbase. So at the time, Bison Trails had, you know, really leaned into this enterprise grade infrastructure product and managed services offering, so offering staking infrastructure would also read write note infrastructure for enterprise users, and institutional clients. And Coinbase, one of our early investors, but also partner in the process, moved to acquisition of the company in February 2021. So that was a incredible, you know, union, I think of visions in terms of, you know, where crypto is going, and where the largest needs were at the time. And really supporting the growth of the developer ecosystem, you know, supporting developers and builders with the right tools and products to continue building on this space. And I think that is an essence, right? What Coinbase Cloud is supporting in the market today. And in many ways, what we’re trying to do at Alluvial, and through Liquid Collective is really empowering the builders in the market to use very robust, you know, security, conscious, and combined products to build out amazing experiences for users across the board. 

Matt Zahab 
Tell me more about Liquid Collective like, the name is so it’s a great name too like, it has a little like oomph to it. You know, it’s like it makes you wonder, what exactly is it? And when I was doing research for the show, again, I found that very interesting. I’ve sort of done both sides of them, the B2C and B2B sales, there’s so much they’re incredibly different from each other, right? Like you’re speaking to different types of decision makers. Obviously, a consumer is much easier. And the profit margins are much lower. And then on the B2B side, you have the crazy high margins, but you also have to know what the tech speed, all the nitty gritty, it’s interesting, I’d love to know if you have any, like really good one liners or any sales pitches or anything like that. We have tons of listeners who always chime in about stories and whatnot, you have any specific stories about you know, maybe closing someone who was just, you know, giving so many objections you were handling all of them and then boom, got the close, anything like that. And then a little segue also tell us more about Liquid Collective. What exactly you guys do there, what exactly Liquid Collective is and why it’s so useful for devs. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Okay, great, maybe we’ll dissect a couple of those questions and maybe start with the first one, right. So what is Liquid Collective? And what are we trying to do in the market. So the short version of is, we’re building an enterprise grade standard for liquid staking, loads to dissect there, I do want to spend the time to dig into that a little bit, because it’s not an intuitive response, right, in terms of what we’re focusing on, and what need in the market we’re really trying to solve. So to really understand the consideration here now, I’ll go to storytelling to for you, Matt. So you have the whole background on, you know, how this came to be, why we’re a collective love that chose that approach. So one of the big and very important changes that we’ve seen in the Blockchain innovation space over the last call it 10 years, is this general migration from what used to be called Proof of Work, consensus mechanisms to Proof of Stake, so in effect, how Blockchain is secure and maintain consensus, in order to, you know, propagate a ledger that displays the truth and, and maintains its integrity. So, as we’ve seen Proof of Stake, become a much more prominent consensus mechanisms for Blockchains that are launching now and have been launching for the last couple of years, as well as Blockchains like Ethereum, that have actually migrated from a Proof of Work to Proof of Stake consensus mechanism. Staking is becoming, you know, top of mind, not just from the perspective of you know, where the foundation of the technology is, but also, you know, what we’re seeing users actually doing with the tokens that they have and how they support the ecosystems they’re a part of. So staking is a very primitive call it base level function, where users lock up tokens that they have as collateral, and in exchange for providing security to network receive rewards for doing so. Right. So that is staking a very primitive basis, super attractive as you can think of it kind of as the risk free rate of participation in Web3, right? It’s really participating at the base layer of Blockchains, with a risk adjusted rate that is fairly stable, fairly constant, and that provides a good, you know, perspective on reward returns. But I think the big piece here is that staking in and of itself, is designed to preserve security for networks. And as a result, there’s a lot of different mechanisms, that staking enforces things such as warm-up periods, or lock-up periods, or activation cues or exit cues. There’s a lot of different names. But what it means in short, is that when you participate in staking, so when you lock-up your tokens, in order to receive rewards for securing the Blockchain, there is some type of illiquidity window, right. And that can span anywhere from you know, a couple of days to, in the case of Ethereum a couple of years at this point, right. And that obviously creates a challenge for participants from the perspective of thinking about not just the capital efficiency, but also the opportunity cost of not being able to take their tokens, exit their positions, or even do anything else with them, right. And a good example of that, let’s kind of tie this back to the real world. Imagine you went and you bought a house, right? In most cases, you would be able to, you know, take that house and use it as collateral for other financial utility, you wouldn’t really be required to sell out of that position out of that property in order to achieve financial utility elsewhere, right. And that’s kind of where the market is trending. So it is really this piece that we’re trying to solve for enabling users to participate in the risk free rate in crypto, but being able to do so with a different liquidity mechanism so that they have the freedom to move capital route more efficiently. And that is what Liquid Collective is trying to solve for. 

Matt Zahab 
That was a incredible explanation. Love the example with the home too. And you guys, like you guys are working with its massive firms, the Coinbase, the Kraken, Figment, and other Web3 providers. How did you beat out the other, you know, staking providers like this is huge. Like what does it take to you know, you have led some of the largest institutions in Web3 to participate in staking, like what did it take to make that happen? 

Mara Schmiedt 
Yeah, I think this is a really proud man because it kind of ties back to where we started and why we started there. So liquid staking as a market is fairly nascent. So solutions and liquid staking have been around for at most, I would say around two years at this point. And a lot of those solutions have been catered to supporting what I would call the really early adopter segment. So crypto native retail people like you and I, that you know, love tooling around with kind of new solutions and technologies. One of the things that we realized, and I realized at the time at which, you know, I was still working at Coinbase. And working with a lot of other exchanges and custodians in the market that were starting to look at this problem was that number one, we realized that there was a need to offer our users, whether retail users or institutional users, the optionality to do things with their assets once they state them. So liquid staking became a really important priority for us. But then we thought about, you know, how might we built this right? And how do we think other people are going to want to build this? So one of the first things that we looked at is, you know, what solutions exist in the market today, are there solutions that we can use that know suit our needs, and that offer a great experience to our customers, and the challenges that we run into there as I mentioned earlier, a lot of these solutions have been built, as you mentioned, B2C products, products that have been built to be consumer facing right, not solutions that have necessarily been tailored to meeting the enterprise grade security and compliance requirements that large, you know, more sophisticated enterprises and regulated companies might have like a Coinbase or a Kraken. But that was the big, I think, realization for us in thinking through this piece, and also how we decide to approach the market with a very specific product tailored to the needs of those businesses to provide a lot broader access to the community and market as a whole. 

Matt Zahab 
What the It’s just crazy, it’s so cool. And again, I guess, to go back to my question that I asked you, you know, sort of before we got into Liquid Collective, any good stories for us, Mara, in regards to, you know, any of the sales lines or pitches, or when you were with the decision maker, and they were just you know, I’ve been with decision makers, who are just incredible at throwing objections out. And I’m just the objection handler for the call, and almost nothing else, you have any good stories about sort of selling the product itself? 

Mara Schmiedt 
Yes. What I want to say once we came to the conclusion, it’s interesting, because different people came to the same conclusion at the same time. But once we realized there wasn’t a product that we could use for ourselves that already existed, obviously, we thought about building one ourselves. But then we looked around, and it sounded like everyone was also going to build their own product. And I think that led, you know, led me to pause and say, Wait a minute, do we really want 20 different solutions in the market? Is that even solving problem in the first place? Or can we do better? And can we actually bring the ETHOS of like, what Web3 is about, which is, you know, collaboration, building composable technologies, no building standards in the market? Can we apply that principle and build something that is better than that? Right. And one of my favorite, I think, moments, and that, you know, kind of process was that? You know, at the beginning of the year, we looked for potential partners on the solution, right. And one of those partners was Figment who actually, if you think about it as one of Coinbase Cloud’s biggest competitors. And so was cracking on the extreme side, right? So we called it, we called our competitors. And we said, hey, guys, what do you think about doing this together? Right. And growing the pie together and offering a solution that truthfully is better for the market, is better for our users, and provides a lot more value add in totality. And the interesting part is when we spoke to Figment and Matt at the time, who’s our CEO now was actually add Figment. At that time, I think it took us maybe 10 minutes into the conversation for, you know, both people on both sides, to kind of raise their hands and say, This is what we should do. And, you know, let’s put aside kind of the concerns on the competitive end, and really focus on what we’re trying to solve for, which is much larger and much bigger than what we could ever, you know, built individually or by ourselves. And I think that was a very exciting moment to see kind of, you know, partners in the ecosystem come together in such a way, right. And I think that’s why we ended up with the name Liquid Collective in the first place, because that’s really what it is. It’s a lot of market leaders come in.

Matt Zahab 
Great name. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Yeah to build a standard. And shout out to mark for sure, by the way, Otto on ideating on that name. 

Matt Zahab 
Imagine if the rest of the world like acted in collaboration, like you guys did, my goodness, what a place the world would be. I mean, it’s already pretty darn good. But think about all the problems that would be gone. That’s like a story like that, it’s just unheard of, walk into the competitor’s office, and yeah, wow, I can’t even think of like another instance where that happened. But that’s like in war, when both countries or both parties are waving the white flag, like that’s crazy. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Yeah, it’s a little bit like, imagine AWS or like GCP suddenly decided to, you know, build a product together. I don’t think we would see that. But I think media of the space and it’s the media, honestly of the importance of the technology that’s being built, you know that sometimes the recognition that building standards together is the only way to build a standard in the first place, is really what we have to do. And if you think about it, the Internet was kind of built in a very similar way, right, with a, you know, collective and cohort of individuals that really contributed to standards that are now standard railways for us to use when we interact with a website or, you know, write an email. So. 

Matt Zahab 
So true. That’s such a good story. I feel like that story should be more you know, front of mind and center like that just the crypto industry has such a shady light shined upon us at all times. And like we need more stories like this out there. But hell, that’s a heck rather, that’s a story for another day. I want to talk about staking a little more staking has was sort of one of the catalysts that tipped us over in 2022. A lot of the you know, the Celsius is that we’re offering, yields that were far too high for staking coins turned out to be not legit. And then you have firms like yours who do things the right way with a proven track record with Proof of Funds and everything else. Where do you see staking going next year and moving forward? Are there going to be more shake outs because of staking, will staking return to it’s you know, 2020 2021 years where it was a not legit perhaps is the wrong word, but at least a semi decent reputable way to earn fair yield. What do you think staking is going to be like over the next couple of years? 

Mara Schmiedt 
For sure. Definitely a question I want to dig into. So I think it’s very important that we decouple the primitives that make up a solution, like staking from the products and services that centralized entities might be building and the practices and the compliance that they implement on their side. Right, which sets kind of a layer above so I think that distinction is really important. And it’s really important because it feeds into the narrative that we are currently, you know, experiencing in the space where, you know, a bad actor, a centralized bad actor does not invalidate the merit, the value and the values of the space that, you know, we’re building in the technology that we’re building, right. And that’s also true in healthcare. And that’s also true in traditional finance, there’s always going to be bad actors that have, you know, poor policies when it comes to risk management, compliance and solution building, right. So I do want to distinguish those two and decouple those. I think what’s really important when we talk about staking, as you know, the core function that natively interact with the Blockchain, no, you know, bells and whistles on top of it, I think one of the things that we’ve seen has been incredible growth and adoption. Over the last two years, I’ve been in the staking space pretty much since it’s been around. And I think one of the things that we’ve really started seeing through the last year was uptake on the institutional side, right. And I think that’s one of the trends that we’re going to continue observing, as we move into later stages of, you know, maturity and adoption there, and products and services that can build around it. So liquid staking, in many ways is a lever, but also a catalyst to help really build, you know, more mature products that tie back to, you know, on-chain services and capabilities. And I think that’s a really important thing to kind of think through in terms of, you know, the trends that we’re likely going to see, especially this year, right, as some major milestones in this industry, such as the Shanghai Fork on Ethereum are gonna be met. 

Matt Zahab 
Shanghai, yeah, it’s a synonym for sort of ETH 2.0 that not a lot of people are cognizant of. Mara, you’ve been on fire, but we got to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show that is PrimeXBT, Cryptonews and PrimeXBT has been partners for a hot minute. We love these guys as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet you can use PrimeXBT to utilize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50, that’s CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And that is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word, to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Mara. Mara, let’s keep buzzing on sort of the trends and themes of 2023. A lot of people are talking about getting their coins off centralized exchanges, not your keys, not your coins. Again, it’s much harder to perform and a lot of staking activities when you’re not on centralized exchanges, you guys, yourselves partner with centralized exchanges, mind you, the legit ones, the Coinbase is the Krakens, who while Coinbase, public traded company, Kraken Proof of Reserve, Proof of Funds, it’s all in your face, it’s there. How will institutions and consumers sort of begin to think about the security aspect and the whole decentralization aspect and taking their coins off exchanges? Are we gonna see any second order  network effects from this? What will this look like in 2023. And moving forward? 

Mara Schmiedt 
Definitely think that we’re gonna, and as part of this, which I think in many ways, as a positive progress back to fundamentals, right, the things that really matter to help build know, great experiences and safe experiences for customers, I think one of the consequences of, you know, the observations from last year, and as I mentioned, you know, having bad actors in the space that you know, didn’t have, you know, robust considerations in place to protect users and protect, you know, customers, I think one of the things that we’re gonna see is a lot more focus and emphasis not just from the regulatory side, but endemic to the space on what it means to offer, you know, good, safe and compliant products. And I think when you look at, you know, kind of our early partners, but you know, also what we’re really trying to double down on, it’s really this, you know, not fast and furious style of building, it’s really building with strong fundamentals, building with, you know, compliance, that we’re embedding into our solution to ensure that any, you know, partner, exchange or custodian or financial services company that integrates throughout product has the adequate, you know, policies and procedures in place to support their customers, and making sure that, you know, our partners can offer their finds great experiences, that are, you know, safe, that adhere to certain performance and risk standards, you know, and then have been vetted by some of our partners, to ensure that, you know, we can offer a great experience and a great product to customers of all types, right, whether those are retail customers, coming through our exchange partners, or institutional clients coming through some of our custodial partners, that was one of the things that was incredibly important to us. And let me tell you, it’s not an easy way to build. But it’s an investment that we want to make. And I think that the industry is going to make as a whole to progress forward and, you know, consider a much more robust approach to building in the future. 

Matt Zahab 
What about you yourself, Mara, what gets you fired up for this year? I keep saying next year, 2023, I’m keep forgetting that we’re already a couple of days in even I literally discussed this before the show. But for this year, while I need to wakey-wakey, smell some coffee a little. 2023 what are you most excited for you personally, in regards to crypto any specific parts, I know you and the team at Alluvial are going to obviously ship a bunch of incredible things. But we’ll get to your goal in this year for 2023. 

Mara Schmiedt 
I’m really excited. And it’s funny, because this answer has been similar over different years. But obviously, with a very different kind of backdrop of participation in demand. I’m really excited to see the market as a whole, you know, progress from, you know, early use cases of crypto usage. So for example, Asset Custody, and then the most natural second thing Trading Tokens. Now we’re getting into the really fun part, which is utilization and how can people use the tokens that they have to know generate rewards to secure Blockchain. So I think staking is going to be a huge fundamental part of that shift in the market. And we’re really excited to see that, you know, companies across the board are investing and making this accessible to their clients. I think, for me, personally, I’m thrilled that, you know, we’re coming to market with a product that’s really designed to give a mainstream user to give, you know, an institution that is starting to onboard into crypto, a really great product to use, that offers them a lot of flexibility and a lot of optionality as it comes to, you know, what they might want to do next. And I think that’s really kind of the catalyst that I’m excited to see next year. I’m kind of seeing slowly how know that trajectory has moved along. And you know, how we’ve seen adoption develop, and I think now is really no, the year where we’re gonna see a lot of that convert. And I think that in turn, you know, will compound a lot of network effects that we’re just gonna, you know, drive and foster innovation in DeFi that’s gonna drive adoption, you know, for innovation and centralized solution for financial services and products. And I’m really excited to see that and as contributing to it, of course. 

Matt Zahab 
Love the little two cents in the cookie jar there. One thing that I’m really curious about Mara, you are a true OG in the space you’ve been in for I think you said seven years now you’re legit original gangster here. I’ve not been in the space as long as you have and I still have people you know, I have family members, friends network, and then Twitter trolls, you name it. Cryptos gone, everyone’s gone. So You know, Bitcoin and everything’s gonna go to zero, you guys are all clowns and idiots, blah, blah, blah. You’ve been hearing this for seven years now, I’ve been hearing this for, you know, three or four, not as long as you what do you do to, to keep your Northstar centralized, keep your moral compass, you know, stay motivated, like any tips or tricks for those listening because we get these questions all the time. And it is a battle when everyone on the outside is currently trying to kick you down time after time. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Definitely, I think when you go through a couple of these cycles, you really start, you know, focusing your time, your energy on fundamentals, which is the things that sit at the bottom, where, you know, hype always comes and goes right. And I think kind of tied back to the conversation we had one of the current and like majority use cases that we have, and with tokens is still, you know, speculation and trading enabled activities. And that’s like a very, you know, primitive and important use case for us to provide but I think it kind of leads into the next chapter, which is, what are the fundamental usages that we can enable? How can we really drive utilization and adaption that is more consistent. And also, truthfully, you know, how do we embed in cement the right fundamentals as an industry, in terms of, you know, how we built, where we trust and how we build that trust, collectively. So for me, that’s always been important. As you can tell, I ended up in the very bottom of the technology stack, we had felt very important that we first solve the pigs and shovels and the unattractive infrastructure that really provides all the security and know the robust things that we need in the background, so that the things on top of it can live and thrive and, you know, be and turn into great experiences for customers. So I think that is, you know, one of the things that for me, ended up being a great place to be because the truth is, whether it’s an up market or a down market, these things need to get built, and these things are critical to be built. And when you focus on those areas, I think for me, it’s been very helpful to kind of avoid the noise around me because I know that you know, the things that are getting built at the moment that you know, layer of the technology stack are so important to, you know, move things forward. 

Matt Zahab 
Well said, Mara, we have a segment on the show called the hot take factory. This is where we both of us, we jump in the hot take factory, we put our you know, our shit kickin, boots on the knee high boots, and we bled a couple hot takes flight doesn’t have to be crypto related, can be food, sports, geo, politics, space, you name it, whatever. But give me a couple of Mara hot takes that only you believe in that most other people do not. 

Mara Schmiedt
Super rad on the hot takes. Okay. I think one of the things that I’ve been really thinking about a lot is what schools are going to be doing about all the Chat AIs, that are now producing, you know, fully needed answers to all test questions. I was like, are there council meetings? Probably not. So what is that? What is what is next year going to look like in terms of, you know, test scores and results? And where what is the divergence is going to be because I think we’re going to observe one that, no, we’re going to have to analyze and kind of dissect, as we kind of see a lot of the accessibility around AI, another great technology that’s taken, you know, time to, you know, build the path to adoption. Now, really hitting mainstream right there, your average user is like millions of people using these products at this point in time. So that’s probably one of my hot takes. I’m very excited to see the impact of that on education, both in the positive and potentially on the negative end. So. 

Matt Zahab 
I love that. This is something that I’ve also thought about on perhaps, in the shower on Vox was the famous quote, If you’re not thinking about it in the shower doesn’t mean a lot to you something along along the likes of that. For me, it’s like what, what would I have done if I had this tech when I was in school? You know, like my parents always give me the stories about LEGO when I had to write an essay, I had to go to the library and you know, open up the bookshelves and do my research and at least even I had Google that of course millions of resources but kids today they can literally pretend you are a 20 year old university student at University X aiming for an 80% on this essay on topic X, Y and Z like it’s a cakewalk and what do you do because you can’t I feel like it would give you a stencil but then that university student could then come in and edit that essay themselves it probably wouldn’t show up on turnitin.com like a its crazy and like you said the test answers to like you can just copy pasta boom and furthermore so much of today’s education is online. Where it’s like obviously if it’s in person you can if it’s in class, you can’t really use ChatGPT but so much testing is online now. It’s pretty crazy. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Have you thought about like the solution like if you were a dean at a school, what would you do? 

Mara Schmiedt 
Well, I’m really curious because there’s a real trade off here, right? It’s like, the process of verification is going to be expensive. If you go down the route of doing things that move away from like, manual submissions, like the overhead of that is going to be huge. The alternative, which is more interesting as to your topic of how do you think about the IP? What IP belongs to whom? And is the product of the software? Is that going to, you know, carry credentialing that can be observed, verified? And know, what does that kind of system even look like? You know, I think that’s the real interesting question. When it comes to that, and then you know, how these IP laws regulations and considerations intersect with our current fabric, right, and what it really means to ingest that in our economy. So I think those are, you know, two pieces that I’m thinking about specifically where now I’m honestly thrilled to see like, how we, you know, evolve these things and like, how we might think about them. But yeah, definitely something that like I have when I go shower. 

Matt Zahab 
Give me more hot take. Give me one more hot take. Before we wrap up here. 

Mara Schmiedt 
My last hot take, I think probably the more kind of coming back to the crypto side of things I think are hot take for this year. I think we’re going to have finally an observation of you know, really what it means to have privacy enabled technologies in crypto. So I think we’re gonna see and have been honestly like observing a lot of developments in the privacy space and the ZK space. I think that’s definitely an area to watch, just in terms of, you know, a critical or fundamental piece of the technology that we’re building today that I think is gonna really hit you know, a different level of adoption, implementation and innovation this year. So. 

Matt Zahab 
ZK Rollups baby, that’s a trendy topic. Everyone’s been loving that very complex to explain, I think of everything crypto related. Mara, that is the topic that my me personally, I have the most trouble explaining to friends, family, people, even people in the space it’s like, it’s not easy, man. It’s a lot behind the scenes and I always ask our guests can you give me you know, explain ZK Rollups or ZK Tech to me like I’m a five year old and a lot of good examples. I always love analogies, but it’s so tough to like really nailed down. Yeah, we need a nice little, you know, two to three minute YouTube video with a bunch of animations and everything else. Maybe I’ll get one of the AI software’s to make that for us. But that’s what I love it. 

Mara Schmiedt 
I love that too. Amazing. 

Matt Zahab 
Mara, thank you so much. Truly a treat really appreciate you coming on. And obviously you and the team are doing some incredible work in a space where there are a lot of shitty players and we need more people like you and we need more teams like Alluvial And we’d love to see that before you go can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and Alluvial online and on socials. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Absolutely. So you can find us online obviously on Twitter so @alluvialfinance on Twitter as well as Liquid Collective. So, the handle is @liquid.col, if you are a builder, if you are an integrator, if you want to you know connect with us to contribute to what we’re building, please reach out to us at [email protected], so [email protected] if you want to connect with our team to chat about, you know supporting our efforts. 

Matt Zahab 
Mara Thank you really appreciate it and pumped to have you on for round two in the near future. 

Mara Schmiedt 
Thank you, Matt. 

Matt Zahab 
Folks what an episode with Mara Schmiedt from Alluvial. She was dropping knowledge bombs left right and center and just like she said, if you are a builder in this space, and you want to learn a little bit more about liquid staking head on over check them out, send an email as always, we will include all of the links in the show notes to my team love you guys. Thank you for all your help as always. Justas my amazing sound editor. You’re the GOAT, appreciate you and to the listeners love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.