Getting Started with Hedera

GM GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week for founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase their product. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Jake Hall, who's a DevRel at Hedera Hashgraph. So if you didn't know, Hedera is an open-source, leaderless proof-of-stake network that powers the next generation of the web. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Jake give us an overview of Hedera, a brief recon of how HederaCon went yesterday, and how you can start using Hedera today. All right, let's get into it.

GM GM. Welcome to the show, Jake. Pleasure to have you on, man.

Yeah, thank you very much, man. Really appreciate it. And looking forward to talking about all things Hedera, AI, HederaCon, anything that gets asked to me. So yeah, really excited for this one.

Excellent, excellent. Yeah, looking forward to it as well. I guess before we get into all the great stuff you have prepared for us, did you want to give a brief intro about yourself?

Yeah, of course, of course. So I work, I work at Hashgraph. Hashgraph is a bit confusing. I think other blockchains have a similar multi-organizational structure. Hedera's the blockchain. That's our limited company based in the United States, registered in Texas. They've got the governing council, who basically operate the day-to-day network and the nodes and also help with the strategy of the network. I work for Hashgraph where Hashgraph, a few years ago, we were Hedera, but then we sort of split apart. You can think of it as the labs to Hedera. So we're working on the development. We've got the big engineering team. I'm also part of the marketing team where there's obviously a lot of support with marketing that happens from Hashgraph. So I'm in developer relations as I mentioned, sitting under the marketing section. But yeah, that's sort of a quick background about me in terms of what I'm doing at the moment. And I've been in this position since November. So I joined Hashgraph in DevRel since November. First DevRel role actually, but sort of I've been doing it without realizing it for the past two or three years. So I've been building in the community, specifically on Hedera for about three years now. And yeah, when I found out that there was this DevRel opportunity and I was like, huh, you can get paid for this? Sign me up. Because again, I was doing a lot of content before anyway. I was doing a lot of telling people about the network and trying to get people to give it a try.

Awesome, man. Yeah, a lot of folks don't realize they're doing the work of DevRel. So that's how they end up getting the jobs they do. That's amazing, man. I guess prior to that, like, do you want to dive in a little bit around your background in tech? Like did you start off your tech career in Web3 or were you doing software development or something else before?

Yeah, so I guess the first time which I dabbled in tech, I've always been more of a mathy, scientific person. So that's been my strongest set of skills, as I think a lot of engineers in the space and a lot of people in this community. Besides all of the amazing artists, ah no, that's a, I take that back, we've got amazing diversity of all sorts of talent in the Web3 space, which is why it makes it so good. But I first dabbled in web development when I was pretty young, when I was maybe 12 or 13. And that's just because I don't know, I somehow, I guess I wanted to learn how to build a website and I just sort of went through and did it and just with HTML and a bit of CSS, a bit of JavaScript. Pretty superficial stuff. And then I took a bit of a break and it was actually when I was about 17, 18 when I really started going back at it again. And I'd still always been quite interested in coding. And then I had some I guess entrepreneurial ideas. I've always been a bit entrepreneurial and often you need to have a website to show your amazing million-dollar business idea that you have. So that's when I got back into it and back into web development. And this time was a bit further, a bit more mature, so as opposed to just being your vanilla HTML and CSS, that's when I started getting exposure to frontend frameworks like React, started looking more into the backend side of things as well. And I've really, I mean since then, I've just been coding pretty much nonstop. Every single day at least. And when I got into Web3 a few years after that, where I was essentially buying Bitcoin, buying Ethereum from an investment perspective. And I was kind of like, huh, okay, well what actually does this blockchain do? So started reading into it a bit more and started looking at Solidity smart contracts for obviously the EVM and started playing around with it from there and then ultimately pivoted to, found out about Hedera and sort of then basically got stuck in the Hedera ecosystem. Not that it's a bad thing at all, it's a very fortunate thing to be stuck into. And I've basically been developing on Hedera, yeah, for about the last three years. So that sort of my journey. It started with more Web2 stuff, but pretty quickly pivoted to Web3. And I've always been quite a strong affiliation to these concepts of ownership and then also the operational efficiency that can be achieved when it comes to tokenization, given you're transacting tokens all on-chain. And also like the democratization that it can really bring on multiple perspectives. But I think the one example which I often give is how you can have exposure to particular asset classes from anywhere in the world, theoretically, which previously you might need to have $50,000 for, which immediately rules over 95% of the world's population. So having these, this tokenization, fractional ownership and all of that stuff which tokenization of real-world assets enables is quite exciting for me in that regard.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's something like a very subtle piece, not a lot of people understand or don't grasp immediately, but it's a very powerful concept. And your origin story is very, very familiar, a lot of folks have started in the space just as speculators but then went down the rabbit hole. Yeah.

Exactly. All-out self-taught when it comes to development, which I think has its pros and cons. But I'm always looking to, always looking to keep upskilling. And I guess more of the recent one is AI, I'm sort of heavily at my role at Hashgraph, heavily involved with AI agents. I also did start getting into sort of leveraging generative AI a couple years ago now in the sense of not just for accelerating the development, but also building applications with LangChain, RAG, that sort of stuff. So it's really nice now to see there is convergence between AI agents and sort of the frameworks that have been happening kind of in parallel. They do now seem to be converging and there is a nice intersect of AI and blockchain, which I'm really, really excited about as well.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Like just a few, a year or two back, whenever you mentioned, or whenever I mentioned rather, like how AI and Web3 would intersect, a lot of people are like, oh it's not really there yet and so forth. And then it's like, oh bang, it's like all the rage now. Yeah, exactly. Amazing, man. And you're at ETHDenver, correct?

That's correct. So I got here, flew over from the UK, that's where I live, I'm from England. Half English, half Spanish, but I've grown up in England my whole life. And yeah, got here on Saturday. Bit of jet lag, but straight at the event on Sunday. Good sort of initial networking, telling people about our bounties, which I sort of briefly mentioned. So obviously if you are at ETHDenver and you're watching this, then definitely come over to the Hedera booth. We've got $50,000 worth of bounties, so pretty big, pretty big prizes there. There is a $20,000 bounty for EVM development, so the winner would get 10,000 and then there's prizes for second, third, and fourth. There's a $25,000 bounty for AI agents, again winner gets 15,000 and then second, third, fourth also get a smaller chunk. And if you're sort of interested in Hedera, maybe you're watching this and you're like, huh, Hedera, I've heard of it, I see them maybe at ETHDenver, but you don't know much about it. We also have a smaller track, Hedera Explorers, which you just need to use any one of the Hedera services, build an app, and there's five $1,000 prizes on the lines for that one.

Wow, a lot of money to be made. And all you got to do is hack.

All you got to do is hack. And you can also, like, I don't know, let's say you do a EVM track which uses Chainlink or whatever. If Chainlink have a bounty, you can actually apply to both as well. So there's no harm in strategically identifying where are the overlaps. Definitely if you are looking to use oracles and bridges, this is some stuff which Hedera, we've been integrating and really focusing on over the last year, really ensuring that we are totally EVM compatible and we offer all of the tools that EVM builders need to have to make sort of these interoperable apps, which is what the future is.

100% and yeah, I always look forward to these hackathons because basically all the next-gen companies kind of get spun out here, right? So yeah. Really fun times. I guess also wanted to touch on HederaCon. HederaCon was yesterday and the afterparty, the DD Hedera afterparty also took place. Spill the tea. What was the highlights in your mind?

Yeah, so it was, it was a really, I mean sort of looking back on it, it was only yesterday, so I've got a pretty good memory of it. But it was just a really well-executed event and I don't think anything went wrong. A big shoutout to the whole team who organized it, particularly some colleagues within marketing of mine, so Lena, Allison, if you're watching this, big thanks to you. You really did an amazing job. It was everything on time. We had some really big names, amazing, amazing talks. I mean one of the highlights would have of course been Leemon Baird speaking with Charles Hoskinson. So Leemon is the founder of Hedera, founder of the Hashgraph consensus algorithm. He's still obviously heavily related within the business, as well as Charles Hoskinson, as everyone knows, the founder of Cardano. So they were both on stage sharing some really fascinating insights, like proper big picture stuff. Almost all of us devs and DevRels, we get bogged down, not bogged down, we're here speaking with the people on ground. But obviously these guys, they're looking at the strategic 5-year, 10-year plan, identifying which countries and how to identify how to deal with particular countries based on politics and whatever. So getting that understanding I just thought was really great. And that's just scratching the surface in terms of the quality of speakers. We had a main stage, all of this by the way has been recorded, so I think if you go to the Hedera channel you'll be able to find it. But we had a main stage with some really big names, I mean we had guests obviously within the ecosystem, but also people from Swift came over, loads of people who I would have missed. And then we had a nice tech stage as well, which again if you're a techy person looking to find out a bit more about Hedera, that tech stage is going to be a great place because we got all of it's really, really high quality audio footage, that sort of stuff. But a lot of the most recent innovations that have been going on within the Hedera ecosystem from the technical level was covered on that part. So definitely recommend it to check out the Hedera.com website, have a look at the live stream, and find something which you're interested in, skip through to it, give it a like and subscribe. But yeah, it was great. Food was good, the vibes were really good. There were some community members who had their stalls up. Yeah, it was just a really, really good day. I think definitely superseded my expectations, a nice balance of people within the ecosystem, developers as well as the retail community, HBARbarians, and also people who are looking to maybe didn't even hear about Hedera or have heard about it but haven't really stepped foot in and I think that was just a testament to the quality of speakers and the organization of it. It was really good.

Amazing, love to hear that. And yeah, I'll definitely be checking out some of the videos. Unfortunately wasn't able to make ETHDenver this year. Pardon me?

Have you been to ETHDenver before?

I have not. One of these years, one of these years I'll make the trek down. But we'll meet up when you're here. Yeah, looking forward to it. Looking forward to it. I guess with that, did you want to bring up the content you have prepared for today?

Let's do it. Yeah, for sure. So I guess just just quickly before I do pull it up, what I'm about to share is specifically regarding AI agents. So I mentioned earlier we have one of these tracks at ETHDenver AI agents. That's not right actually, it's AI or AI agents. So anyone can build any sort of AI tool, maybe like data provenance on the training side. But I'm going to be focusing this quick demo on the AI agent side of things. It's not if you're watching this in the future after ETHDenver's over, we still have lots of hackathons planned for AI agents. So I think this is going to be quite good. And then I'm just going to be sharing some of the recent open-source stuff which we've been doing within the AI agent space. So I'll share my screen now. Entire screen. And there we go. Is the screen on the stage? There we go. Cool. Okay. Right. So yeah, let me just share, so in terms of AI agents, we have these current SDKs, the developer kits, that a developer who wants to build on Hedera, build an AI agent on Hedera would use.

So we've got the Hedera Agent Kit SDK, and I'll obviously go into what that is. We've got the Hedera Eliza Plugin, and we have the Hedera LangChain/LangGraph agent implementation as well. And to give a quick summary as to each one, I'll deep dive into them and show them in action. The Hedera Agent Kit SDK, we can find it over here. Essentially what this is, is it's a big class which aggregates lots of Hedera functions like mint NFT token, transfer HBAR, claim airdrop. All of these core functions which may be needed by a particular agent can be found in this quite opinionated class which I just say, yeah, it's an aggregation of all of these interactions with the Hedera network. So it's relatively opinionated and let's take a look at say the create token function. So this create token function, this method sorry, this create fungible token method, when you use the native SDK on sort of that base layer, it's very highly configurable. You can edit loads in keys, there's a lot of customization. With this particular implementation, it's a bit more opinionated, and I guess part of the reason for that is just to make it easier for the AI agent to understand the intent and then sort of actually create the token. And often there's some stuff which is needed for more advanced use cases, but maybe for your generic AI agent it might not be needed. So that's sort of a bit about this Hedera Agent Kit. Now the reason for this is it acts as a really good base class to then actually integrate and build integrations for other AI agent frameworks. The Eliza Plugin of course being one of them, as well as the LangChain framework. So in both of these Eliza Plugin and the LangChain agent, we are importing the Hedera Agent Kit SDK and using that opinionated class and all of its easy methods to allow the agent to have the tools that it needs to interact with the Hedera network. So that's sort of a bit about the architecture. And then you can find these repos, I mean if you have a look at my, I've got this document up. This is sort of aimed at people at ETHDenver at the moment. You can find this on my Twitter, it's the pinned post at the moment. My Twitter is JCool3, J-A-Y-C-O-O-L-3. And it basically gives all of the repos and everything like that, all of the setup that's required. We can play around with it today as well. And yeah, but the repos are also here, totally open-source. I mean if you want to contribute to it, amazing, please do. It also counts as one of the AI/AI agent submissions if you're contributing to our Agent Kit. We had a really cool guest, or a cool builder at ETHDenver who I was speaking to just the other day. And then I come back to my hotel and find out he's already raised a pull request for SaucerSwap, which is one of our decentralized exchanges. So that was a really, really heartwarming thing to see. But again, the Hedera Agent Kit's open-source, we've got this Hedera Eliza Plugin which we're working to get pulled into the Eliza Plugin registry. And I think now's probably a good time for me to, I guess I'll show the LangChain agent in action because I've got it open.

And I mean here what I've got is I have cloned the Hedera Agent Kit SDK repo. So that's here, that's this one. I've cloned this repo. Also inside of this repo we have our LangChain agent, all of the tools for our LangChain agent. So sort of this is the LangChain implementation of our Hedera Agent Kit. And I've cloned that, I've obviously got my environment variables all set up, and you can sort of run a test with it just by obviously doing the npm test script. And what it does is it gives you the option to basically chat with it. So we can see some of the functionalities that are currently supported. So I'll enter the chat mode. It also does have an autonomous action mode, which is a bit, not very useful at the moment. But we can sort of ask it generic questions like, let's see what it does first. Hey, what can you do? And it should give back all of the tools it has access to. Sorry, is the LLM running locally on your machine or via inference API? So this is using an inference API. Good question. So currently we're just using OpenAI. But actually with LangChain, one of the great things about LangChain and also in fairness Eliza, is their support for, is there agnosticism for the relevant LLM provider that you use. So we can have a look at how it gets implemented over here. We've got this createReactAgent, which is coming from LangGraph, LangGraph being like a subset of LangChain. So a React agent, it's not web development React. React here is reasoning then action, something like that. But it's basically, it's a methodology when it comes to interpreting texts and then identifying which action to use. So it's quite a popular method when it comes to AI agents. And we can see that when we create this React agent, I think it's reasoning and action I think, we pass in this LLM, which we can set up here. So currently I'm using chat OpenAI, but actually I could just as easily use, I could say I could do new Ollama, so Ollama should be one of them. Or chat Ollama. I might need to install it separately. But essentially my point being is that you can use other, you can use Anthropic, you can use Ollama where Ollama is a sort of something which you run locally. It's that little tool up here where you can then get open-source models and you can run it on your local computer. I do find that typically these, still the unless you can get like maybe a 70 billion parameter model for Ollama, for something like Llama 70B, the smaller models sometimes don't pick up the correct action as well as the likes of GPT-4 and obviously the other reasoning models that are around there. So yeah, but it's very flexible and it's also very flexible with Eliza as well. You can really plug in whichever LLM you want to use, which I think's very helpful. And you can also, you can also have, create these multi-agent flows where okay you've got one agent which uses GPT-4 because maybe it needs to be able to understand what is the user's intent. Out of these 12 tools which I have, which of them do I need to call? Maybe for that one you want to use a bit more of a mature, state-of-the-art model. Whereas after that's done, maybe you just need to do some post-processing afterwards. And in that case you can probably outsource that to a local model which is running like a 7-billion parameter model that can basically run on most computers pretty well now. But we can like ask it to create us a token, so create a token called DevDAO and symbol DAO. Now it should be intelligent enough here, I've not given it enough information, but LangChain I think because of the reasoning, this reasoning then action, oh it's done it okay. Sometimes what happens is it goes ah you need to give me more information. But I guess we've got default parameters here. So maybe if I didn't give it the name it'd go ah you need to give me more information. And it would then ask the user to obviously prompt it again. But as you can see we've now created this new token. We can then say okay airdrop that token to, I can just go and spin up an account of mine quickly. Testnet one, that's not the right one. So I can like, we can just say yeah send it over to this account. Give them a thousand. And this will do an airdrop to them and we can query it even more. We could say okay well what's the current balance now? I guess we can check the balance, so check the balance of that token to that account. So hopefully this should now the LLM here and this is where I mean something like a smaller model would probably struggle a bit more. But part of the, part of when we set up this agent, we gave it memory. So we gave it the ability to sort of have this short-term memory where it knows the context that it's sort of being asked questions within. So we have here check the balance of that token to that account. Now if I was to ask it without all of the previous context it'd be like what are you talking about? But obviously we've just said okay airdrop that token to this particular account. So it realizes that token is the one we just created, that account is this. So it will call the token balance check and as you can see we have Developer DAO tokens for account is 1000 DAO. And it's done the, it's done the query over here so we can see it's done a Mirror Node query. Now this is a very sort of high-level demonstration as to what you can build. But obviously you can build something far more thorough. And we've been hearing things like basically lowering the barrier to access to DeFi where if you have 100,000 HBAR and you want to put it to work, you would currently have to either do a very, very basic staking protocol. There's HBARX or stake the actual HBAR token to the network, but that has relatively low yields. So you'd probably have to then go okay well look into the DeFi world, look into the different DEXs and whatever or borrowing lending protocols that we have and have to learn about them and realize okay well what sort of risk appetite do I have and okay I now need to learn about providing liquidity. So there are various concepts which are generally quite tricky and require a bit of upskilling and I mean people just coming into Web3 they're just getting their head around wallets I guess. So what you could technically do with these AI agents is improve that user experience. I've got my 100,000 HBAR, I could then be speaking to an LLM, an AI agent which goes right, I've got this amount, I want to I'm happy to go for something high risk. And then the LLM could maybe use one of its tools which searches for the yields of particular liquidity pools or particular other protocols on the network, can maybe return it to the user, go these are potential options that you have, can give it a bit more context to help the user understand, and then it could actually execute the particular smart contract function which would be needed. So if it's providing liquidity to a liquidity pool, there's almost two steps there. You'd need to swap it to another token, the token B, and then provide both of those tokens as liquidity. Now the AI agent could abstract all of that and do it for the end-user, ultimately making it a much friendlier user experience, especially as we're seeing a convergence to this chat user interface which the next generation of young'uns are basically totally native with now and sort of almost expecting to a degree. So that's the quick demo. I could do this all day and we've really just done a very high-level demonstration of this LangChain particular part. We do of course have the Hedera Plugin Eliza. If you go to this sort of document there's a Gitpod for it so you can open the Gitpod, set up the environment variables and try out the Eliza Plugin as well, which would actually allow you to do things like the Eliza Plugin, that would allow you to do things like integrate it into Twitter or integrate it into Discord, Telegram, other social platforms. That's where Eliza's pretty cool at the moment. You've got the ability to have agentic tool calling, function calling, but also it can be like a social agent where it's sort of plugging into your X profile and creating content on there or interacting with your users through there. So I think it's another interesting use case for these agents.

100%, 100%. And Nikita from the crowd, yeah I think we all feel this, like making interactions with Web3 more easy and humanizing them makes it more accessible for all. So definitely lowering those barriers is the way to go. Yeah.

I guess from your experience and what you've seen thus far, what are there any memorable AI agents that you've seen built thus far or something that's like really caught your eye?

Yeah, so on Hedera or just in general? Both. Both. Yeah. So I think in Hedera we're still we were definitely later to the game than the likes of Solana and Base who are really leading at the front. But there are some, there are some Hedera AI agent sort of tokens and communities which have popped up. So one is there's one called BSL Defender, which is basically it's got like a tool calling set where it actually checks, you ask it for a token and it checks whether it gives it an analysis. Is this a rug pull? Is the creator of that token a bit dodgy? Have they been is it an account which just was created five days ago and there's loads of centralized exchange funding and it's created 10 tokens? That's a bit of a red flag. So there's that one and it's got quite a funny personality. There's also some other ones in the community, so there's like one called Timmy AI, which is just savage, he just absolutely violates everyone. And so yeah there's a few funny ones like that. I think it's naturally we see more the social type stuff which have personalities and the building communities see them first. But there are also, I mean I've spoken in like a personal capacity to some of the projects in our ecosystem who actually could really value from a particular from an AI agent. And I won't sort of drop any names but I can give like a conceptual example where one of the really big projects in our ecosystem, they are sort of in the they have a Web3 stuff but they have a business outside which is sort of related to sports. And people who you could have an AI agent which essentially people can interact with via Twitter, via X, I still call it Twitter all the time. You can people can interact with it via X and it can ask it about okay well what about this athlete or what's up next? And you can have this interaction where as a result of that they're getting exposure, they're almost getting marketing because people are asking questions on X. But also the user is getting that instant feedback in a nice friendly chat way, as opposed to having to go to the website and dig around and then find the background about this particular athlete. So there are definitely some real valuable use cases that I see within the Hedera ecosystem which are more which aren't just the meme-y type stuff. And then I think outside of the outside of even the Web3 even the Web2 industry, we're definitely seeing a lot of exciting businesses starting to adopt AI, their risk appetite is getting a bit sort of a bit more receptive to AI now. I think a couple years ago I was working before working at Hashgraph, I was working sort of for consultancies and we were doing a lot of stuff with AI for clients, but most people were still in that early proof-of-concept stage like okay yeah but what if things go wrong, we really need a human in the loop. Now things are getting a bit more mainstream and I think we're going to see the adoption of it sort of I mean all the time. I know if you see the stats, it's developers who are using it the most, as you'd expect given we're at the front of tech. But yeah it's a pretty exciting space and it's moving quite quick. I think take everything that you hear from Sam Altman and Elon with a pinch of salt because they are selling it. But also there's a strong case that it's going to be even bigger than we can imagine.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's going to be wholly integrated in our lives in some way or another regardless if we're developers or not. It's just like a matter of making it subtle enough so that people don't really understand. Like for example like just having like Claude or O3 or whatever at your side when you're like developing at like a startup or maybe you're like a solo founder, right? Like it's such a powerful thing now, like you don't need such a big team anymore to be able to push out like really significant products, which is really cool.

Yeah, exactly. And it's going to be interesting to see sort of where that develops, how it develops. But totally you can have like a team of what would take five devs is now is now one dev plus a AI copilot. And I guess I think you look at these sort of events historically, you've got the every time there's an industrial revolution, people are like oh it's going to take jobs. But often what does happen is more jobs are created. So I don't know if this is the outlier, maybe this is the final one where game over and I don't know or not or or we're a product of the typical human experience where we think oh this is the end and then actually loads of new innovations come out and productivity increases, quality around the world gets better. It'll be good.

Humans are pretty good at adapting so I'm sure it'll work out. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, we are unfortunately getting close to time. Just a couple final questions. Obviously you see AI, AI agents as one of the leading trends. Is there anything else that kind of excites you in the Web3 space now for Hedera or in general?

Yeah, I mean for sure. There's a lot of stuff. I think I touched on it slightly earlier with that sort of real-world asset tokenization and that democratization of exposure to asset classes which weren't possible before and the fact that someone from a part in the world where their currency is much weaker, they could actually invest 10 bucks, 20 bucks into something where previously it was just totally ruled out. So that does excite me. And sort of the actual instruments, the financial instruments that can technically be created, this is another thing where it's just we can't even really imagine what can be created because of the operational and operational efficiency that gets enabled by DLT and atomic swaps and also the sort of just efficiencies of it. Like the fractional ownership, these are things which traditionally if you're doing this in TradFi, you need like 100 employees working on 100 different Excel spreadsheets to keep everything up to date. It's just not very feasible. But actually when you have it built into a smart contract logic, it's native to the protocol. So that's exciting. I think also on the AI side, I mean we spoke a lot about AI agents, but there's a lot of stuff on AI data integrity and sort of data provenance, which is I guess a bit upstream of that of that AI life cycle. It's more on the training data side and making sure that models are performing and make sure that models maybe haven't been poisoned by malicious actors. Because obviously with AI being more adopted more frequently, that does bring risks. It does sort of have a new surface area of cyber attacks potentially. So having sort of this process transparent and on-chain for use cases where the AI should be transparent is really powerful, quite exciting to see that development. I've had a few conversations at ETHDenver about these sorts of things or tokenizing datasets, which you can then sort of prove that this dataset's good and then you can let license it to people. That's another exciting intersect of data and blockchain. But also I think just generally in the Hedera ecosystem, I'm really just bullish actually at the changes which have been happening. We've got a lot of refinements in the Hedera Foundation, sorry the HBAR Foundation soon to be known as the Hedera Foundation. Likewise, there's been sort of a lot of focus on going forward and a big focus on retail. I think there's been like a Hedera has traditionally been known for it's that enterprise blockchain, it's got the governing council and it's not targeted for retail users. And the learning over the last few years has been retail and enterprise, they're one and the same. They're symbiotic in the sense that if an enterprise might come over to Hedera and look at us and go, wow this looks really good, there's really great governance, the tech's pretty cool, cheap, I can use EVM, I can use SDKs which are more familiar for Web2 devs, but what's the liquidity? Or what's the total value locked? These are questions which get asked. And that comes from retail. So there's been a big understanding of this and sort of I guess like a pivot of strategy to focus on actually really empowering the community, getting them the entrepreneurs in our ecosystem. So I'm really excited to see where that leads. And yeah, I think there's going to be some pretty cool news coming out in the in the next few months and years about our stuff and our ecosystem.

Amazing, amazing. And yeah I think that's a great place to end things off. And just really quick again if folks are indeed hacking or want to hack, what's the best way for them to find out? You mentioned checking out your X profile.

Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty active on X and always happy to sort of answer questions and whatnot. I think in terms of if you're watching this live and you're taking part in ETHDenver, have a look at the ETHDenver website and then that sort of directs you to the Devfolio website, which will give you all of the current hacks that we have, the current bounties that we have. But sort of in the future we've got Hedera.com/events. So that's where all of our future hackathons are. If you're in by any chance you're in Kenya right now, if you have a Kenyan audience, then we've got a hackathon which is happening in Kenya in it's going to be online aimed at a Kenyan audience. Recently the Nairobi Stock Exchange just joined the governing council. So that's happening basically starting next month, 24th of March. That's one week of hacking and then there's going to be an in-person event on the 12th of April where everyone's going to come together, it's going to be a good networking event, and the top projects will pitch it to a live audience of judges and we'll find the actual winner over there. So that's quite exciting. But yeah, for for the bigger ones, I know we've got a couple hackathons in sort of the second half of the year, online ones open to everyone with pretty big prizes. You'll find that on Hedera.com/events and also just on the Hedera channels like LinkedIn, X, those are probably the main ones. So yeah, there's various places, but also if you follow me, give myself the plug there, I'll be talking about these things a lot too.

Amazing and yeah we have Jake's X handle linked in the YouTube description as well as tagged on X on this live stream right now. And with that also for those of you who are watching live I just dropped a link in the chat for you to claim your attendance badge from BitBadges for watching us live today. So you'll have an hour from now to be able to do that, so definitely get on that if collectibles are your thing. And Jake, it was a pleasure, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show, really appreciate you having you on man.

I really appreciate bro. Happy to come on anytime. So I really enjoyed this and yeah love talking tech.

Excellent, looking forward to it man. And yeah happy Wednesday to everybody, enjoy ETHDenver and we will catch you back here actually on Friday, this Friday for another episode of DevNTell. Till then, cheers, enjoy the conference.

Cheers.