Unlocking the Secrets of Crypto Staking: A Conversation with Nodrs CEO Ioannis Ioannidis

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to another interview with the crypto CEOs. I'm Jeremy Britton from cryllionaire.com and Boston Trading Company.

And with me I have Ioannis from Noders. Ioannis is the founder and CEO of Notice, which is a professional blockchain validator.

So Ioannis, after you introduce yourself with the proper pronunciation of your name, I'll get you to give us two explanations. A 60 second one for the technical nerdy geeks and a two minute explanation for the people who are just ordinary run of the mill non coders.

Sure, perfect. So my name is Ioannis Ioannidis, as you mentioned, I'm founder and CEO of Nodrs. So we're professional validators and web3 developers.

We are kind of, in a way, we are the most optimal, ROI optimized vehicle of investment in blockchains, because the infrastructure that we are running for blockchains and the work we do for them makes us the most ROI optimized investment vehicle in the blockchains.

And pretty much, well, no other fund can compete with ROI we can get just because we produce lots of value both for blockchains, for end users, well, pretty much for the whole crypto space. Makes sense.

Now, was that the complicated version or was that the not complicated version?

That was both. Like, I mean, the first one was the short one, more kind of, you know, simple one.

It still sounds, it still sounds very complicated.

So I know that, you know, people who are investing in crypto for the first time, they buy a couple of coins that they like and sometimes on different exchanges they say you can stake your coins and people go, what's staking? Well, it's kind of like leaving your money at the bank rather than taking your money home and putting it into a safe.

Obviously in the bank you might earn 4% interest, whereas staking on a crypto exchange you can make a slightly bigger reward. But isn't there a higher risk to doing it that way?

Well, look, there are two.

It's a bit different if you stake on our notes, for example, and if you stake on exchanges, because exchanges, they're custodians, so they keep your tokens and so you have the risk that the exchange might disappear. We've seen this stuff quite a few times already.

While if you stake on our nodes, we don't hold your tokens, so your tokens are being frozen on your wallet and you just kind of give us the right to vote on your behalf in different votings that happen in one specific blockchain and because kind of vote on your behalf, you receive a guaranteed yield that might be, you know, 5%, 10% depends on the blockchain and the token you're staking. So it's pretty much risk free because again, we don't hold your tokens. It's.

I sleep pretty well at night because we can't be hacked, which is beautiful. And well, it's pretty much silly not to stake because this kind of is basically, it's pretty much free money.

So I see, I think that people who don't stake, they just eat at the moment and at the moment and they just don't know that staking exists and so they don't know, you know, how it really works.

So some, some people are not staking because they don't know how to stake or they've never heard of staking. But there may be some people who, you know, a couple of years ago we had ftx, we had Celsius and people were staking their coins on another exchange.

And as you say, that exchange disappeared and their money's gone.

So how do we absolutely know that even if something happens to you, even if something happens to, to your business, we're still going to keep our coins?

Yeah, that's, that's the beauty of our business. Again as I mentioned, that's why I sleep at really well at nights and that's why we kind of.

There's a huge difference between staking on exchanges and on our notes and usual usually also I want to mention is that usually exchanges give way smaller percentage for staking because they keep, you know, kind of a healthy percent for themselves because the kind of, the staking is not their main business and the kind of, you know, they just one of the kind of features they offer to their users.

Excuse my puppies going bananas. So you, you were saying before that the, the coins actually stay in my wallet.

Yeah.

So how, how do, how do they get locked up when I, I'm staking with you, but I'm not staking with you. You've got control of them, but you don't actually take them.

Well, we, we call it staking but in a way it's just delegation of the voting rights.

So your tokens are being frozen on your wallet so you can't, you know, send them to someone or sell them, you know, during the time when you are staking. So you delegate to us your rights to vote on your behalf, we kind of keep on voting and you keep on getting the yield.

If you want to unstake if you want to, let's say, sell your tokens, send them to someone, et cetera, et cetera, you have to unstake them and there is usually an unstaking period, which depends on the blockchain.

Sometimes it might be five minutes, might be, you know, a few days they get unfrozen and then again a few to do, you know, whatever you want with them. But as soon as you got, they get unfrozen, you stop getting the yield. Make sense?

Yeah. Similar to how term deposit works in the bank.

Like I can lock it up for three months, but then if I change my mind, I need the money, I can go in and get it literally the next day, but I'm not going to get the returns, so.

Exactly.

The returns from different coins, are they all different returns in different lockup periods?

Yeah, it all depends on the blockchain. So as I mentioned, some blockchains have period, five minutes, some might have a few days, a few hours. It all depends.

And the yield percentage also depends on the blockchain. I think that the lowest is somewhere around maybe 3.5 and it might go up to 40, 70% per year.

40% per year, yeah. Wow.

The thing is that the idea here is that the younger the blockchain, the bigger the percent they want to give to their stakers. And as soon as they get more fundamental and popular and so on so forth, they start decreasing the percent.

Because therefore you have, let's say, less risk staking the tokens. Because if you stake your tokens, let's say, and a frozen period, and frozen period, let's say it's like three days.

If kind of a crash happens to the market, you can't, you know, sell your tokens really fast.

So they kind of, they want to incentivize more, you know, the stakers with big percent, so the stake, you know, as much as possible and therefore kind of the price of the token is going to be a bit more, a bit more stable and less volatile during different turmoils on the market.

The price is more stable because less people can sell it more quickly. Is that what you mean?

Yes.

And also, like, I mean, and also it's really important for the blockchains that as many tokens as possible are being staked because the more tokens are staked, the more secure is the blockchain. Does that make sense?

You're saying, you're saying newer blockchains paying more. So something like Bitcoin or Ethereum, that's.

Been around for 10 years, Bitcoin doesn't have staking. We're talking only about proof of stake blockchains.

I would say that at the moment, well approximately maybe 80, 90% of the blockchains utilize the proof of stake consensus while the blockchain, while the bitcoin is proof of work so it doesn't have staking but Ethereum and I know Solana, Aptos, Sui, Celestia and so on so forth, they all have staking. It's really beneficial for the blockchains also to have as many tokens staked as possible. The idea and the concept of airdrops have been introduced.

I guess people who kind of encrypted have heard about them.

So if you stake your for example Tia the token of Celestia, you would also get, you would get the yield and you'd also get different airdrops of like different projects that have been built on top of Celestia or that have, you know, partnerships. Yeah, which is also like, I mean pretty much free tokens for you. So not staking if you kind of a long term holder is well pretty much silly.

I would say that, I would say that only traders should not stake because they have to sell, buy, etc. Etc. While if you buy tokens and you want to keep them at least for a couple of months, staking is just no brainer.

Yeah.

Okay.

So is, is there other companies out there who are doing this sort of thing?

Definitely. Definitely.

Why are you better?

Pardon?

Why are you the best?

Well, I wouldn't say that we're the best. I would say that we are one of the best.

I mean the market is quite big and we have big players who have started their businesses three, four years before us. So they're definitely bigger than us.

They kind of already multi billion companies and some of them are being baked by big funds like Coinbase and so on, so forth. While we're kind of in.

I would say we are the second wave of validators and what differentiates us from the majority of and I would say pretty much 99% of other validators is that we kind of, we are active contributors to development of lots of blockchains.

So what we do apart from so obviously, I mean we provide all sorts of highly reliable infrastructure validator nodes, RPC, GRPC, State 6, there are lots of different, you know, infrastructure stuff. Then we kind of try to be really as helpful as possible because we feel that we have skin the game if we validate the blockchain.

So we develop different tech stuff, develop community apps, we organize events, we do marketing we help with funding and so on, Forth. And because we sort of really smart money for these blockchains, they kind of really prefer to work with us than with our competitors.

And I would say that, you know, there are maybe hundreds, maybe even thousand or maybe more validators. I would say that now we are kind of in the top 50 and I think that we have pretty good chance to get to top 10 within next year.

Fantastic.

We have approximately, I would say that the market looks at the Moment like maybe 15, 20 validators are the ones that kind of buy in their places in active sets because the amount of validators is limited. So usually it's around 100.

Most of the blockchains have limited amount of validators who can validate and really earn money for providing infrastructure. Then maybe 40, 50 teams, teams who contribute.

And between these teams, I would say that we are one of the best because the product that we kind of build are just pretty much unique. And we have like a queue of blockchains who have asked us to build for them. You know, the community app.

I don't know, maybe if you want I can show you how it looks like or maybe you can share the link with your audience later. Would you prefer?

Definitely. We'll put some link, put some links.

So I would give you like a Celestia hub so people can jump in, maybe just give you like a short introduction of what it is. So pretty much it's a portal totally devoted to one specific blockchain and people can find all the information about this blockchain in one place.

So that's a deep dive in the blockchain itself. There's a library of all the projects being built on top of the blockchains with descriptions and so on.

Forth, that's educational materials for end users and developers. DevTools with RPC, RPCs, different tooling and so on. Forth and Advanced Explorer with, well, pretty much incredible amount of different metrics.

People might need, you know, to deep dive in the blockchain. And this is a kind of concept that is going to be ever evolving. So we're going to be adding more stuff later on.

Along with that, we also like usually run Twitter fan pages and organize Zillow campaigns and so forth. You would share the link with the audience so they can open it, play with it. It looks pretty cool. Yeah.

And that's why we do have a queue of blockchains who have already ordered these apps for them. And our business model is that we build this app sort of for free. And we just received delegation from the blockchains themselves.

You're saying that there's some companies that pay you 3%, some of the projects pay you up to 40%. Is there companies that you say no to? Is there companies that you look at and just go, it's too high risk? We don't like this project.

We don't like what it stands for. How do you reject them?

Well, almost not, to be honest. You see, it's crypto space. Things can change really rapidly.

And sometimes we've seen lots of times in cases when, let's say a project which kind of looked intermediate to say the least, at some point, you know, the big funds come along, they inject, you know, shitloads of money, and then poof, you have Solana. These things happen.

I was just, you know, looking on different marketing, you know, the kind of pitch decks, websites and so on forth. So that's what, you know, the project tells us about the project.

When we as validators collaborate with them and we sit with them, you know, in, in a discord, we can see, you know, what they're really doing, you know, how they kind of keep the work, what are they doing, the plans, you know, how they ship stuff and so forth. So we do know, well, way more. We have more information than I would say regular investors.

And that's why we kind of, we can jump in the project and maybe later on kind of just leave it because, like, it's just piece of crap.

These things have happened few times and those, like, you see, our kind of business models is really robust because like, we don't, we don't invest in tokens or we invest in really rarely. So we kind of have only the cost of sustaining the infrastructure and we have then, you know, the delegation.

And so if the delegation, the earnings of delegation cover for us, you know, the cost of infrastructure and the team, then we kind of can keep this blockchain. If not, it's kind of, we press a button, bum done, no cost at all. So kind of, it's pretty much risk free for us.

Okay, so these, these projects that might be paying say 10%, 15%, you're just taking a little bit of cream off top of that so you can pay for your running costs.

Yeah, look, it's really important to understand that, you know, so we have the staker.

So let's say a retail investor or like the funds, they stake their tokens, you know, with us and they receive like, let's say 10, 10%, 40%, 20%, 5%, whatever it is, and we just take a percent of their percentage. Make sense?

Yeah.

And this percentage that we're getting covers our cost of sustaining the team, the cost of running the company and running the specific node. Then we can, obviously, it's just profitable. So we run this node. It might be at some point that we see that the project is kind of really good.

And they might just go in through difficult times because something happens, maybe market conditions, so we can keep maybe some notes for maybe a few months. Kind of not producing kind of profit for us because of kind of belief in the project.

This has happened maybe a couple of times, not so often, but for the most part, 98% of the nodes we're running is profitable. Profitable. So we don't have any problems at all.

Which were the projects that you really believed and even when nobody else did?

Well, I still believe in nim. They still actually, they're still going through difficult times. I think that, you know, they have pretty good technology, pretty new technology.

Because, you know, between blockchains, I've seen, well, I know, well, hundreds of blockchains. I deep dived in most of them. And, well, frankly speaking, like, 80% of them don't really, don't really offer anything special.

They just change the name and say, okay, we have like maybe, I know, 12,000 TPS. Oh, we have like 13,000 TPS and we called like, whatever. So. And even the white papers are usually. It's quite often that are pretty much the same.

While we don't have that, we don't see that often, you know, blockchains who kind of really do something different.

And Nim, I think, is one of the projects that they have, you know, the NIM technology and they have the mixnet, but they're still going through difficult times. I kind of still hope that they're going to kind of, you know, survive, but let's see how it goes. It skip the market, you know, it's crazy. So.

So running your business, I mean, you guys have got the validators, you've got the connections. You just rely on people giving you funds.

How difficult is it for you to scale your business if you suddenly had a million new customers turn up tomorrow?

No problem at all. The beauty is that, you know, we run the node and, well, Any amount of people can stake. It doesn't change anything for us.

It's only a matter that, you know, we just have to do, you know, some sort of marketing to attract the stakers.

And that's why kind of we're raising funds now because we want to build, you know, our own staking platform and do, you know, proper marketing because the, well, the business is three years old now. Three years in one month almost.

So during these three years we were kind of focused on producing as much value as possible for the blockchains to get delegations from them to get to active sets and so on so forth. Now we have got to, we have approximately $100 million stake on our notes.

It's fluctuating, obviously it's altcoin, so it's kind of fluctuating amount. It's kind of between 50 million to 150. We have 30 plus blockchain that we validate at the moment. We have at the moment 43 or 44 testnets.

So it's kind of the blockchains are going to launch their minute quite soon and we have 93 blockchains coming soon.

So we have been concentrating on producing as much value as possible for the blockchains and now, and we have at moments somewhere around, you know, 20k stakers, retail investors, and now we can raise funds, you know, to build our own stake platforms, do the marketing, as I said, and attract, well, hopefully millions of stakers. But for the core business, for nodes, no problem at all.

One node can handle millions of dollars being staked and tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of millions, people staking.

Fantastic. So you call the business noders just because you've got nodes. There's no hidden meaning. Anything special about that?

No.

And no downtime, no problems, Everybody gets paid on time.

Yeah, it's automatic. It's just a smart contract is not automatic. The only way how people can lose money with staking is slashing.

So if at some point, let's say we run, we will say we have a server in one place and there is an earthquake or something happens to the server so it can go down. It would take us some time, maybe a few minutes, like 10 minutes or 20 minutes to move the node.

The software to another location, which we can do really fast.

So the downtime of the nodes might at some point be slashed, which means that the stake that is being delegated to this node will be kind of some amount of tokens will be deducted. So this is the only risk we have. And first of all, three years in business we pretty much never had, you know, this kind of accident. That's first.

And second, we're going to have insurance. It's kind of like Costco. You have for that you have for your, for your car. If you kind of, you know, crash it, it's going to be paid.

So pretty much no risk.

Fantastic. So Jan, where do you see your business heading in the future?

Well, look at the moment, well, we're kind of growing really fast. We.

Well, I do believe that, well, approximately one year ago, actually I realized that we can become a multi billion company within a couple of years. So the goal for the next year is to become a company that is valued for more than 1 billion.

I mean all these numbers, it depends on the market conditions, if we have bear market, if some kind of politics or maybe, you know, economic conditions, you know, around the globe might, you know, might definitely, you know, influence, influence somehow this our goals. But I'm pretty confident that we definitely can achieve this also.

Like, I want one thing I want to mention is that the beauty of our business is that I think that it's one of the rare cases in crypto when the business might and most likely will survive for decades to come. Because blockchains, because, you know, kind of different narratives might change, you know, defi nfts, you know, and so on forth.

While blockchains, which is kind of the ball of the whole crypto space, they need infrastructure and we're the guys who kind of supply them the infrastructure. So the core business, I think that's definitely going to kind of last for decades.

Which means that you have to get the kind of the earnings all day long every day. So some of these blockchains definitely going to disappear.

But the beauty of our business is that we don't have a fixed amount of blockchains for validate. We keep on kind of getting new blockchains. So it's kind of we grow organically irregardless of of funding, which is again beautiful.

And yeah, so the first goal as I mentioned, you know, for the next year is as I said, you know, to become like multi billion company, to have like more than 10 billion stakes and then just keep on growing and expanding and adapting because like you know, crypto space is definitely a space that evolves really fast. Innovation happens really fast. For the time being we have proof of stake.

I do think that you know, it's going to last well for the next few years it's going to dominate, you know, the place. Maybe later, maybe later we're going to see some other consensus.

But anyways, blockchain is going to definitely need some infrastructure and we're just going to be adopting and providing first world infrastructure and then as much value as possible because we're kind of the value oriented company.

Fantastic.

I sort of compare the infrastructure plays to you're the toll roads and whether we have artificial intelligence, whether we have self driving cars, motorbikes, trucks, doesn't really matter.

And as you say some of these projects, some of these blockchains may disappear but you're supplying the infrastructure and they're always going to need that computational power. I've got two more questions before we wrap up.

Sure.

Number one is where can we find out more information? Where can people read up about notas and how do they get involved?

Well first of all I can share with you the pitch deck so people can get some information about us over there.

Second, I will share the links to our website, to the product, that community app I mentioned and also like two other resources that we kind of, you know, manage. We build them and manage. It's a cosmos list that's kind of endpoint list for cosmos chains.

And second one is service for validators with different, well tech tools and kind of, you know, services for validators and node runners. So I will share all the links and people can look around, play with them and so on, so forth.

Okay, so final question, mate. In two years time when the company's worth over a billion dollars, I'm assuming you'd be a billionaire. Are we invited to the yacht party?

Pardon?

Are we invited to the yacht party?

When you're a billionaire, of course we have the party.

Excellent, excellent. So we've got witnesses, you said yes we're all going on the yacht party.

We would love to.

Brilliant. So, okay, this interview will be on Spotify, buy out on YouTube, so look in the. In the links to find out more about notas.

How you can hold your own coins rather than delegating them to someone else without risk of loss. And you can make, you know, 3% up to 40% on your crypto. Giannis, thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. Best of luck. Cheers.

Beautiful. We did it.

Bye. Bye.

So if you send me the links to people to get some more information, like the Twitters and the.

I will send you all the links right away.

Yep. And I'll have it uploaded to YouTube and the next couple of hours.

Perfect. Thanks a lot, by the way.

So if there's going to be some investors who are interested, they're going to contact you and you're going to let me know and then we take it further. That's right.

They'll probably go straight through your website.

Okay, perfect.

Cool.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Jens.