Thomas Ruble Podcast Transcript
Thomas Ruble 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 Thomas Ruble. Thomas Ruble is a humanist and technologist. His career began with an advanced degree in computer science, leading him through diverse industries from healthcare, ai, and banking to cloud infrastructure. Today he focuses on decentralized finance, drawn by the promise of open autonomous systems enabled by blockchain technology.
Well, good afternoon, Thomas. Welcome to the show.
Thomas Ruble: Good afternoon. It’s very nice to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely appreciate you traversing just, I’d say the same time zone right now, Austin to Kansas City, so I appreciate that. And we’re gonna jump in and do some really cool discussions around the defi space, as I like to call it.
But Thomas, your career spans from healthcare, ai, and banking to cloud infrastructure. What inspired your shift towards decentralized finance and how have your previous experiences influenced your approach in the crypto space?
Thomas Ruble: There’s actually an earlier stage before I got into technology. I pursued a philosophy PhD for quite a while through my twenties, thinking I’ll be a professor someday.
And I think that leads to an occupational hazard of being obsessed with first principles, thinking things down to the basics. And when crypto emerged, oh, about four or five years ago as a platform for. More than just assets, but applications, end user products, something that could rock the way we do things.
That was very alluring. It’s very alluring to get in there and see what we can do with this new technology.
Brian Thomas: I. So you were bit by the bug. You were doing some little bit of philosophy amongst other things you were doing in the tech space, whether it was healthcare, banking or cloud infrastructure. But again, bit by the bug, and I appreciate that because I was as well about 5, 6, 7 years ago, and that’s why this platform’s built on Web3 as well.
So Thomas, as the founder of Nirvana, could you elaborate on the platform’s mission and how it aims to address the volatility issues commonly associated with cryptocurrencies?
Thomas Ruble: The purpose of Nirvana is to make the best digital store of value we’ve ever seen. So much of crypto right now produces things that are fun or not fun.
Those are very speculative, but they don’t seem to be holding wealth all that well. I. And most of the interest in crypto has been about making a quick buck, and by quick I mean a non-sustainable one, at least since the ICO era from half a decade ago. But crypto initially began as a vehicle to eliminate fraud.
If you were to pull up the Bitcoin White paper from 2008, it says it right in the opening paragraph. We are trying to take humans out of the loop. We are trying to bring finance out into the open sunlight and get the fraud out of the system so you have fair, transparent, maybe even sometimes democratic access to these systems.
Nirvana is just a continuation of that original motivation. It’s a continuation of crypto’s dream of having fair and open. Assets by applying that to the market itself. So when you talk about volatility, you have to understand what goes on behind the scenes in traditional finance. And unfortunately, it’s the same behind the scenes for crypto assets today.
It’s all the same tricks, all the same playbooks. You have BlackRock and Michael Saylor buying these things up. Large exchanges like Coinbase and Binance doing what they do best, which is making money by trading against the traders. So we haven’t quite made a revolutionary leap forward yet with digital markets.
It’s just the same old stuff that you would find on Robinhood. So Nirvana is. A new step in a new direction to make markets themselves abide by the crypto principles, which are to be transparent, algorithmic stable. No chance for a human to get in there and succumb to the temptation to reach into the cookie jar.
Fairness. In other words, a lack of fraud.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that. You know, we talked earlier before we hit record, probably had close to 80, 90 people in this space. Out of my thousand episodes, we’ve had that many people that are leading Defi Web, three blockchain, crypto type projects like yourself, and I just really love this.
I eat it up. What stuck out the most there is you’re taking the crypto, the concept, the decentralization, taking the fraud out of it, right. You’re taking that to the next level, and I think that’s really important for our listeners tonight. A lot of our listeners are in this space, and we love knowing that there’s transparency in the big financial model.
So thank you. And Thomas, in your article, our Vision for Distributed Credit, you discussed the potential of distributed ledgers beyond immediate global payments. How do you envision the role of blockchain in revolutionizing credit systems? And what steps is Nirvana finance taking in this direction?
Thomas Ruble: It turns out that blockchains don’t actually make a difference.
Let me unpack that. Many, many, many companies run their stack on AWS on Google Cloud on their own homegrown servers, or they might run their company on a blockchain. It makes no difference what computer you use to operate your company. If you’re going to operate it according to centralized processes, if at the end of the day there are just some stakeholders who make gut decisions in the moment to freeze a payment, cancel a withdrawal, maybe close out a position, the blockchain doesn’t make any difference whether they’re running on an Oracle server in a closet or something like Ethereum.
The point I’m making is that for crypto to actually be different in a meaningful way from traditional finance, it’s more of an approach, more of a process rather than a technology. I. I mean, after all, what we have seen in the crypto space has been nothing revolutionary in the last decade. It’s been the same tired playbook of pump and dump scams, Ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, shadowy individuals and multinational offshore companies that.
Manipulate markets and, and do whatever they want to do regardless of the fact that it’s on a blockchain. So just refine your question to say there is an idea lying at the heart of this endeavor we call crypto, which is to do your business according to transparent algorithms and out in the open with nothing to hide.
Now Nirvana embodies that idea. It does use a blockchain. It doesn’t need to at the end of the day, but blockchains are very accessible platforms that anybody can access from anywhere in the world. But the most important thing that you follow, a rule book called Code. And you show everything with full transparency and explainability.
That’s what I think is going to change the way we do business, and I’ll underline the perhaps heretical point that this can operate out in the open with or without a blockchain, and they can operate in the shadows with or without a blockchain as well. Most defi operates in the shadows as point of fact.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you highlighting that and you made a a great point. We need to have a major departure, really, from centralization to truly decentralization in order to have more transparency. And I know Nirvana embodies true transparency, as you mentioned. I appreciate that. And you did highlight a little bit regardless of the technology.
It could be one way or the other. And, and the important thing that, I guess the message is whatever platform it’s on, it needs to be on a platform that is very transparent. So I appreciate the message there, Thomas. The last question of the day I have for you, considering your journey from a software engineer to a crypto innovator, what trends do you foresee shaping the future of digital assets, and how should both new and seasoned investors prepare for these changes?
Thomas Ruble: Digital assets are still in a puberty phase right now. We don’t yet know what they’re going to turn into. It’s been an era rife with speculation, these highly volatile things that we call cryptocurrencies, that people essentially day trade on. It clearly cannot be what this is for and let’s just do a state of the union.
Bitcoin is about half the market cap of Nvidia. It’s quite small. Comparatively as an asset, 2% of the wallets own 90% of the supply, so it’s, it’s quite centralized, or at least concentrated, I guess you could say. As an asset. I’m starting to think that assets are not the point of crypto, but products and systems are my aha moment.
With this world we call crypto or defi was getting a loan within five minutes you can take some digitized asset you have posted as collateral and you have a line of credit, no questions asked. Just that money is in your pocket. You can spend it and you pay your interest and you repay. And it’s a very simple product that produces that.
I think what we are going to see are not significant improvements in assets, but improvements in process. Where things become faster, smoother, more disintermediated. In other words, that the machines are gonna take humans jobs, and you can have very small neobank using very tight controlled algorithms. I.
Performing transactions 24 7 in an open venue where anybody can have access to what they need. I think that’s the direction of the trend, not the speculation and the gambling, which is characterize the space for better or for worse, the last five years.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that, and I do like to hear your perspective.
It’s a little bit different than a lot of the guests I’ve had on the show, but I really do appreciate that. But you’re absolutely right. I still think digital assets are really in that puberty phase. In fact, I still think, gosh, it’s pre puberty. There’s just so much speculation going on and, and somebody sneezes in the market changes and they say, well.
Crypto’s not here to stay, that sort of thing. But there’s so much more, as you know, there’s more use cases for using digital assets. And of course I liked how you highlighted in the future, faster, smoother, better. Machines will run everything in a transparent mode while humans can do the thing they do the best.
So I appreciate that and Thomas, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Thomas Ruble: Likewise. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Thomas Ruble Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
