Sishir Vargese Podcast Transcript
Sishir Vargese joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Sishir Vargese. Sishir Vargese is the CEO and founder of Spectral Labs. Prior to Spectral Labs, Sishir did the Kernel Fellowship at Gitcoin and was an architect at the Jerde Partnership.
Spectral, a pioneer of the agent economy behind Syntax, is at the forefront of integrating AI with blockchain to democratize development in Web3. Its mission is to simplify the creation and deployment of dApps through autonomous on chain agents. Syntax, Spectral’s flagship product, translates natural language into solidity code, enabling both novices and experts to build on the blockchain effortlessly.
Well, good afternoon Sishir. Welcome to the show!
Sishir Vargese: Thanks for having me excited to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate you making the time doing this today. Love these podcasts. And today, Sishir, we’re going to jump in and talk a little bit about Web3/Blockchain. That’s what I love. This is what we’re built on.
So, Sishir, I’m going to jump into your first question. Given your background as an architect, blockchain solutions, particularly in terms of structure and scalability?
Sishir Vargese: Yeah, one thing I actually saw like Brian Chesky from Airbnb, he used to be an architect as well. He gave this really interesting analogy for architects, which I actually hadn’t realized during my kind of tenure as an architect is that architects tend to be kind of these really flexible, versatile product managers.
And if you think of it from the perspective that a user and the architectural perspective is like the habitant of like a home or a building. The product itself is the building that the architect is designing. And so, the same way you would kind of design that doorway or how that user or that inhabitant feels when they walk into a room.
It’s kind of the same kind of behavioral or psychological kind of practices you apply when a user is using an app or a product. You know, when that button is clicked, what is the next screen? What is this kind of user journey? And this user journey that kind of instilled into me as an architect was starting to apply as we started to like design products, starting to understand the end user was a lot of like correlations there and parallels that helped me apply a lot of different things.
The other side of it is that, you know, blockchain technology and Web3 is quite diverse and it’s kind of fundamentals. You know, there’s like technology, there’s users, there’s finance, there’s economics. Similarly, as an architect, you have to take into consideration a whole slew of different things.
As you know, obviously the behavioral things, as I mentioned, but there’s also structural integrity, there’s physics, there’s math, there’s behavioral things, there’s materials, texture, a lot of these kinds of versatile like elements that come into play. And so, applying like this kind of systemic thinking was quite powerful in like trying to engage into the web3 and really kind of incentivize me to like start kind of going down this rabbit hole.
Brian Thomas: I love that story. I really do. That’s just awesome. And we see a lot of people that have come out of various industries that have come into this blockchain space, which we really love and embrace. So, I appreciate the story really do. I know our audience will and to share spectral labs is pioneering the agent economy through syntax, which integrates AI with blockchain.
Can you explain what the agent economy is and how it’s changing the Web3 landscape?
Sishir Vargese: Yeah, definitely. So maybe just to take a step back, we’ve seen kind of, you know, in Web3, like, we kind of evolved from digital finance, which was kind of starting to happen in FinTech, where a lot of finance is becoming digitized.
What Web3 and blockchain technology allowed us to do is really evolve into decentralized finance. What that allowed us to do was actually build permissionless systems. And so, while the digitization of finance was happening in Web 2 through FinTech, it was still kind of controlled by central intermediaries.
And so, there was never really kind of a sovereign nature of, like, controlling your finances or having any kind of, like, control of your aspects of what you could do in the financial world. And then when DeFi came about. There was this kind of chasm that we crossed where users would be able to be controlling a lot of their operations and would actually be able to custody their assets and become like sovereign control of it.
What we’re really trying to push here in this agent economy is this kind of next phase of that, which is kind of like autonomous finance. And so, you know, maybe like 10, 15 years ago, maybe even longer, there was like a really like this new advent of kind of like robo-strategies where there was like, kind of automated wealth management.
You know, these companies and fintech companies tried to basically simplify and abstract away. A lot of the complexities for users, you know, those things are to take off. But we really, I think, at least at the time, actually thought it was going to be a lot more powerful. And I think right now what we’re seeing with and agents in particular.
Is this kind of really this new advancement of what I, at least personally, what I was expecting to be back then. So now what we’re trying to push here is this idea of like autonomous finance where these agents can actually act on your behalf And actually have the best interest of your kind of wealth incentives and whether it’s to try to make as much money as possible Maybe it’s to minimize losses But agents really kind of take away that kind of complexity and actually level have a level of reasoning And so in web 3, the powerful thing here is that, you know, blockchains allow for like programmatic finance and programmatic digital currencies.
And so, users can actually have an agents can have access to digital currencies, you know, an on chain agent, which is a piece of software basically runs automated. Doesn’t necessarily have the access to walk into a bank and open a bank account and then kind of wire money or use, but in this kind of digital Web3 context, digital currencies really make that amenable to agents and so transacting in the digital currency world is actually quite natural for these agents and it becomes a lot more seamless.
And so, it’s spectral what we’re really trying to do here. Is make the creation of these agents really easy, probably a really easy way to understand. This is if you’ve ever used chat. There’s a lot of different use cases there where it’s very much informational. So, there may be a for data analysis.
Maybe there’s another for, like, talking or writing like Shakespeare. A lot of these things are kind of taken, like, the manual, like, automation of humans and made it much easier for humans to do. So, if you apply that to the Web 3 context, you could actually apply this to trading strategies. And so each of these agents in Spectral actually have access to their own wallet and private keys, which means that as a user, I can quite literally just write and communicate in natural language.
If this wallet buys this asset, I can copy that wallet. Or if this wallet sells, or if this indicator, you know, goes up or down, I can make an automation just by kind of communicating this in natural language and actually writes all the code for you. And then actually runs on a schedule. So basically, has this level of reasoning that takes your intents, And actually translates it into a code naturally for you.
And so, this idea of on-chain agents is this idea that it’s a piece of software that has access to its own wallet and can actually do the same functionality that a human can do at the end of the day. And all the human is actually doing is declaring their intents and what they want the agent to do. And then the agent goes off and is able to do that autonomously.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. You know, you talked about. And 15 years ago, we thought we were going to do some cutting-edge technology and we just weren’t there yet. And so, I really appreciate you being on the forefront of this agent economy and walking us through that. I think that’s very helpful. You know, we’re going to have personal assistance that we can all afford in our, in our pocket.
And thanks to people like you, we’re, we’re enabling that now. So thank you. So Shir, your flagship product, Syntax, translates natural language into solidity code, which you’d mentioned. How does this technology democratize blockchain development, especially for those who are new to coding?
Sishir Vargese: Yeah, so a lot of, like, kind of functionality in Web3 is still quite cumbersome.
And so, you know, wallets, private keys, signatures, permissions, these are all like random terms that most people around the world don’t necessarily want to dig into. They actually just want to transfer some money. They want to make payments. They want to, you know, use their finances in a really kind of seamless, easy way.
I think FinTech did a great job at kind of like abstracting that away. But you know, when you try to translate that, and you want the benefits of web three or anything in the on chain world. It becomes almost a burden, right? Like this kind of clunky UX that we currently live in, and the current state of things isn’t necessarily conducive to like somebody’s grandma or a regular person that doesn’t necessarily care about these things to start transacting or, you know, interact with any of these products that we’re building here regardless of how powerful they may be or how, regardless of how much control they give the end user.
And so, what we’re trying to do is actually try to dial it back to that kind of ease of use. And so, running a lot of these kind of complex strategies or any kind of action on chain really just boils down to a user declaring what they want to do in natural language. And so, our software basically takes these intents and translates them into code and automated strategies.
So, like an end user could actually start to do these things quite seamlessly. You wouldn’t necessarily need to care about your private keys. You wouldn’t necessarily need to worry about signatures. You would actually have access to all of the same things that, you know, is usually regarded to like institutions or very kind of complex advanced users.
And so, a regular retail user, it actually just say very simple things, transfer this bridge, this asset, take it here, take a loan, you know, buy this, or if this trigger hits, make this action. It’s as simple as that. And so, a lot of what we’re trying to do while we’re building a lot of this automation software and agent software at the end of the day, this larger vision is really to try to abstract away the complexities of what this kind of current state of the UX is.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And we’ve had some guests on here to talk about some of the things that they’re doing, especially with the low code, no code feeding an agent or an AI at a bot and be able to seamlessly make all these transactions in these different action items that you want to declare with your personal assistant.
So, I really love this really do. Sishir, last question of the day. As you look ahead, what innovations or advancements are you most excited about in the aging economy and the intersection of AI and blockchain? And how is Spectral Labs positioning itself to lead in this space?
Sishir Vargese: Yeah, I think the advancements I’m really excited about are really kind of the consumer retail side of things.
I think in Web3 and in blockchain technology, there’s been a huge emphasis on like infrastructure, building more advanced layer one blockchains. And so, we see like a, you know, an abundant amount of them kind of coming out and a lot of funding going to these projects. But I would say over the last, maybe like 4 or 5 years, everybody kind of in this industry, and especially during the hype cycles.
When we see retail starting to like to encroach into this industry, they usually tend to back out because there really isn’t any isn’t enough like consumer-based apps. And so, I think with the advent of AI and LLMs, which can abstract and simplify a lot of these things. I really do believe that, you know, once this kind of UX becomes simpler, then we could actually start to push a lot of these things, you know, and back when I first got into crypto, which was around 2014, you know, I learned about it through a friend that was doing a documentary on video games in the gaming industry in Korea.
And then I had another friend that was kind of mining Bitcoin on his laptop, and they started to tell me about it. And, you know, at first it didn’t necessarily click back then because. It really just to me, it seemed like just another version of like PayPal or money transferring, you know, the idea of kind of controlling your money or being sovereign in terms of your finances doesn’t necessarily click at 1st and so, you know, around 2016, as I was still in the industry, you know, I was being quite active and went about a lot of the new fundamentals of like Ethereum and a lot of the ways that programmatic money could work.
And I thought that was a really powerful concept. And so, you know, I started a venture capital firm within crypto to help early-stage founders build their products. And then around 2020, end of 2020, 2021 is when I actually had this kind of start to itch of trying to build something myself. You know, I’ve been in the industry active quite some time, met a lot of good founders and builders in the space, but want to actually build and make kind of an impact myself.
And so, this is when I started to kind of come up with this idea around spectral labs. We’ve been building since then, but you know, this advancements that we’ve seen just in the past, like kind of less than a decade, even the time that I’ve been in the space has really been quite powerful because it really started with this kind of idea of programmatic money, but it’s still kind of was held behind this wall of UX and wallets and kind of private keys permissions, all these things that I mentioned earlier, but I think finally, there’s kind of like a clear light at the end of the tunnel.
And I think, you know, over the next, like, 6 to 12 months, even 1 to 2 years. We’ll start to see a lot of these complexities just be gone and I think like retail users the same way you could just transfer money and why people were so kind of like interested in like PayPal all these other fintech products, we could actually have that same type of UX kind of enabled for retail users and crypto.
And the powerful thing here is that the infrastructure underlying a lot of these things is way more powerful than what we’ve seen before and gives the user a lot more capabilities. But, you know, to, in order to reach those capabilities, users always had to have some advanced level of understanding and kind of understanding of the technology itself, which most people don’t necessarily want to care about.
And that’s okay. And I think now, you know, it’s clear to see that, like, and it’s really exciting to see. Now users can actually start interacting with these products, receive the same benefits that these advanced kind of traders and advanced users have, but really with, you know, almost no barrier to entry.
And so, a lot of these things is what we’re working on. These kind of concepts of abstracting away complex UX is
Brian Thomas: going to be really powerful for a lot of our users. That’s awesome. Thank you for breaking that down. I can tell just in your voice the passion you have for this work that you do. You know, we kind of run in the same space.
Korea, esports, I can tell you all about that and professional gaming as well. But I loved that and that’s kind of how things started for me in the, in the Web3 crypto space as well. So, I really do appreciate that. Sishir, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Sishir Vargese: Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Brian. It was a pleasure.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Sishir Vargese Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
