XION is the first Layer-1 blockchain that abstracts the complexity of cryptographic technology and is built specifically for mainstream user adoption. Its developer Burnt has raised more than $11 million from top investors such as Animoca, Circle, Multicoin, Spartan, HashKey, etc. Recently, Burn Banksy, the founder of XION, was a guest on the XD Academy podcast, talking about his growth process, entrepreneurial experience, the original intention of creating XION, and the current development progress of XION.
The following is a condensed version of the conversation, compiled and edited by XION World.
Host: Please introduce yourself to everyone.
Burnt：
Hi, I’m Burnt Banksy, a nickname I got from burning the artworks of graffiti artist Banksy.
About two and a half years ago, I bought a Banksy artwork, burned it, and issued it as an NFT. This was reported by many major news media, such as CBS, Forbes, BBC, TechCrunch, etc. Some people may find it funny, but my real idea at the time was to bring NFT, a cryptocurrency, to retail users and mainstream audiences.
This is my origin.
Host: How much did you spend on Banksy's artwork?
Burnt：
USD 90,000.
Host: So this was something that happened before you founded XION?
Burnt：
Yes, this was before XION, which was only 18 months old.
I burned the Banksy artwork before the Beeple $69 million NFT auction. It was probably in February 2021.
Host: Let's dig deeper into this story. From what I've heard, you were early to NFTs, and you tried to promote NFTs like physical objects, burning the physical objects and concentrating all the value on digital ownership. Is that right?
Burnt：
Yes. First of all, I really like the idea of NFTs, and not just because I own CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks, and other NFTs. I was the same way back in the early days of NFTs. When NFTs first came out, I was paying attention to it, and it was like art on the internet, like for the first time ever, art had scarcity digitally, which was awesome. So, I wanted to see if if you burn a physical object and then issue it as an NFT, would its value still be retained.
Host: So how much did the NFT sell for in the end?
Burnt：
I auctioned it in ETH as payment, and the final bid was about $400,000. I didn't sell the ETH and I still hold it.
Host: It turns out that your burning of physical art and issuing it as NFTs ended up being a phenomenal business strategy, which is pretty cool. Let’s get back to the point, I was wondering how you got into crypto in the first place?
Burnt：
Man, it's crypto time. The reason I got into crypto was that the CEO of Injective and I were mining Ethereum in our college dorm rooms, and to be honest, we mined a bunch of crypto, and DeFi, represented by Uniswap, was in its early stages, and that was my first exposure to crypto. I would say I just started with mining.
Host: So when did you first hear about cryptocurrency and when did you become interested in it?
Burnt：
I think everyone has their own Crypto story. One of my middle school classmates bought drugs on the dark web Silk Road, and of course it also introduced many people to Bitcoin for the first time. But from then on, I thought Bitcoin was interesting. It's not just like playing video games like Call of Duty, where the interest is only temporary. When I grew up, that is, in college, I realized that Bitcoin could also make me money. So my classmates and I bought a lot of GPUs for mining. At that time, not many people even knew what mining was. Looking back now, this experience was really cool. But I was discovered by the school. They thought I was hacking into the school network, so I was forced to explain what cryptocurrency was to the school board, and later I was banned from returning to the dormitory. Now think about it, we should use cryptocurrency better, work to make it legal, and do something beneficial to society, instead of using free electricity and taking advantage of society.
Later, I joined the core community of Crypto, where some are users, some are validators, and some are developers. Although we have different roles, our desire for "revolution" will never stop.
Host: If you could simplify your interest in cryptocurrency into one word, what would you choose?
Burnt：
Just like many people like to summarize the characteristics of cryptocurrency as cooperation, collaboration, digital scarcity, anonymity, transparency, and autonomy, but I think that at a fundamental level, cryptocurrency is trustless and unnecessary. There is no need to eliminate trust, but to eliminate the need for trust. The code is the law of Crypto to some extent. So, I would choose the word Trustless.
Host: There are a lot of people creating educational crypto videos and podcasts, just like us, we are trying to get people who are interested in cryptocurrencies to quickly improve their knowledge of crypto terminology and quickly participate in the crypto ecosystem. As we all know, the field of cryptocurrencies is not very friendly to non-technical users. And most people who can understand cryptocurrencies well, I feel, often have high motivations, such as making money, because they have to filter out a lot of junk information to get really useful information. So what is your process of learning crypto knowledge like?
Burnt：
That’s an interesting question, and it’s like a lot of the questions we want to solve with XION.
I have lost my cryptocurrencies by clicking on phishing links, but using real money to make mistakes is not a good thing for an industry.
My learning process of cryptocurrency can be traced back to when I was mining in college, because I needed to learn what proof of work (PoW), proof of stake (PoS), Ethereum will switch from PoW to PoS, what deflation means. When I founded Burnt, I had to learn programming languages, such as Rust, and understand the differences between these languages.
So, you just need to know what your ultimate goal is and what you are passionate about, whether it is to become a user, a staker, or a node? After finding your goal, then invest in your own research, and you will be passionate in the process. You don't have to learn everything about this industry, learning the part that interests you most is the best.
Moderator: That is indeed a very good suggestion. Let's get back to the topic, and then let's talk about XION. So is this your new project?
Burnt：
Yes. So from the last conversation we can understand that the current user experience in the crypto industry is terrible, with barriers to entry for new users, complex terminology, and a huge amount of learning. These will hinder the eventual large-scale adoption of Web3.
To solve these problems, we built XION as a universal abstraction layer for Web3. Simply put, we want to abstract away everything that new users need to learn, such as signatures, interoperability, gas, payments, and other complex terms/concepts, so that users can only enjoy the benefits of cryptocurrency.
Ultimately, we want to provide a seamless Web3 experience for mainstream users. That’s what XION is.
Host: How did you do it?
Burnt：
You may have heard of account abstraction, ERC-4337. XION also has its own version of account abstraction, but it is at the protocol level.
Other than that, XION is signature agnostic, which means you can sign with the Ethereum signature curve, sign with the Solana signature curve, or you can sign with the iPhone’s FaceID.
We also abstract the concept of interoperability, allowing all other Layer-1s to connect to the XION common abstraction layer.
We also abstracted the concept of payments. As we announced previously, XION has partnered with Circle to allow everything on XION to be denominated in USDC. While XION can indeed accept any token like a traditional public chain, adopting USDC allows users to spend directly on the chain using credit and debit cards.
In addition, since we use smart contract accounts (SCA), users do not actually need to store private keys in the browser, which means that users do not need any wallets, and there is no need for the concept of wallets. Users can use email, mobile phone numbers and other common Web2 login methods to log in to SCA, which also means that using mobile phones to conduct on-chain transactions is easier than ever before.
Ultimately, we want to build Web2 experiences for Web3, where mainstream audiences won’t know they are using blockchain and cryptocurrency, and I think that’s the only way Web3 can truly break into the mainstream world.
Moderator: Thank you for your answer. I heard a lot of things that surprised me. The one that confused me the most was how you let users use credit cards to spend on the chain?
Burnt：
This is one of my favorite parts. We’ve been building XION for 18 months, and frankly, making Web3 feel like Web2 is a hard thing to do. We always joke that we’re just trying really hard to emulate Web2. We have multi-year credit card processing contracts with Stripe and Checkout.com, and since everything on the XION chain is denominated in USDC, we can use Circle’s CCTP to handle one-to-one currency swaps, such as exchanging USD for USDC. If you want to buy an NFT with a credit card, after clicking buy, the USD in the credit card will be sent to the USD/USDC pool and automatically exchanged for USDC, and then exchanged for NFTs.
Moderator: Why do we need to abstract away encryption knowledge?
Burnt：
In fact, we have been building on Solana for quite some time, and we have built many early standards for Solana, such as NFT standards and digital collectibles standards. I love Solana, and I love its community.
But you know how hard it is to get a mainstream audience into crypto, like when we explain to our friends, “Hey, let’s buy an NFT,” they say, “Okay, how do I do this?” So we have to tell them the process, “You have to download a Coinbase, then buy a SOL token, transfer it to a Phantom wallet.” But with XION, the mainstream audience no longer has to go through these cumbersome processes.
In fact, building XION is more for our own development, because we built a product on Solana with more than 30,000 active users per month. But the real problem is that after the SBF incident, cryptocurrency and Web3 have become untrustworthy industries. If the mainstream audience wants to believe in cryptocurrency again and believe in the benefits of cryptocurrency and Web3, they need to see it with their own eyes. We want to present Web3 to them in the simplest way.
For ordinary people who can’t even tell the difference between stocks and bonds, they don’t need a yield aggregator, and they don’t need a perpetual DEX with 100x leverage. Mainstream users will definitely not use DEX to use Web3.
Host: So what do mainstream users need?
Burnt：
A completely new concept they hadn’t seen yet.
We’re not going to build a better Netflix, we’re not going to build a better Spotify, we’re not going to build a better eBay.
I think the concept of collaboration and co-ownership in Web3 is the best. Just like five people from all over the world collaborate to create and issue PFP NFTs, sell them, these five people have a common motivation, that is, they want NFTs to succeed, and then they will do their best to promote NFTs and get equal compensation. And the user who buys the NFT owns the IP and can use the IP to make their own things. This is incredible. Let's apply this concept everywhere, for example, applications like Galaxy are designed to involve the community in the development of a project, and users can get NFTs for every participation.
Host: We're not going to build a better Netflix, why do you think that?
Burnt：
Because I think Netflix is the best. You might use blockchain to develop a better way to watch movies, or a better way for independent film artists to make movies, and I think the goal of Web3 is not to improve what we currently have, but to improve what is not getting better, and that is innovation.
Host: What’s next for XION?
Burnt：
Another testnet, like another version of the current testnet. Frankly speaking, there are many new L1 testnets that will end as long as they are good enough for the mainnet, even if they don’t reach the goal. But often they will encounter more problems after going online on the mainnet.
For me, we want to build a stronger ecosystem even on the testnet, and there are now 10 to 15 applications deployed in the XION ecosystem, which is far from enough. In addition, it is most important to ensure that these applications are consistent with our vision. We don’t need the common L1 trio of DEX, NFT market, and yield aggregator, which appear over and over again with different names and on different L1s. Just like the way we work with Circle, they can be deployed on the backend of XION to ensure that mainstream users will not see these things.
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