Interview with John Lilic, CEO at John Lilic Capital | EBC11

Hi everyone, we are here at the European Blockchain Convention number 11 here in Barcelona. I'm Alona, CEO at Rebel PR Agency. And joining me now, John Lilick, uh a cryptoeconomic builder, an investor, right,

and product advisor. So many interesting titles. Let's dive into all of them.

Yeah. Oh, well, probably mostly a failed investor, but I guess that's that's how it goes. But, uh, yeah. No, I mean, I guess, uh, maybe some people in crypto might know me. I've been around forever.

I was at Consensus many years. God, before that, in New York City at the, uh, Bitcoin Center, big fat Greek guy, although he's lost a lot of weight now, Nick Spanos, absolute legend. He had this incredible massive facility right next to the New York Stock Exchange. So, I was there in 2013, 2014 volunteering. That's where I met a lot of people early on.

I got deep into Ethereum uh later and spent six years at consensus later Polygon and uh and then I've been running my own fund for probably about 5 years trying to do different things and uh yeah once in a while I pop into some of these uh conventions. Uh but this one is really fantastic. You know, I used to live in Barcelona a long time ago. It's a great city, super good food. Uh and wipo wonderful people um and then also up the coast if you go to Costa Brava I don't know if you've been like kak up there Salvador Dollies from there you have to go to Katakiz and do some LSD you won't regret it trust me we get the Salvador Dolly experience so it but uh no super good event you guys did a really good job here

very cool so what's a cryptocake builder means tell us and the viewers a little bit about

yeah well what so with consensus you know when we started it was just a small number of us And at that time Ethereum had just begun. Actually, consensus uh formed even before the Ethereum mainet launch. And we realized very quickly that well in order for Ethereum to flourish, we had to build a lot of infrastructure tooling, developer tooling, uh the things that you know formed the foundation so you could go up to the application layer. And today obviously with many things, DeFi, all these different applications in Ethereum that is sort of starting to come true. uh but back in those days and so we've built things like meta mask for example um but in order to have metamask metamask needs a view of reality which infuro provides and that's another thing we built on the data side etc and so building uh you know cryptoeconomic building is a particular niche most of the time you fail what you should try to do is fail very quickly and cheaply but you know a lot of the times it's funny because you see for example poly market and shane copelan etc tremendous a success obviously, but that thing started 5 years ago and it it was pretty dead for many years.

So, a big part of it is also just staying on the grind for a very long time. Um, and you know, sometimes that can be painful because you spend years and you're dedicated and then it just never works. But, you know, a lot of the times it does and then it ends up changing the world. And I think that's kind of like what it really means to be a crypto builder is just being like very persistent essentially. Oh, so from the you know economy building side and the investment side, I guess you get to see a lot of like innovation, new projects, new ideas.

Do you feel like there is a trend uh in the past year that is different than what we've seen before? Are you seeing 2026 to be showing us maybe some new stuff that we haven't met yet?

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people think I'm kind of this weird guy that's talking about quantum all the time. And last summer, you know, I kind of went deep. I met a couple guys from Oxford. I call it the special ven diagram.

So, quantum physicist, computer engineer, cryptonative.

That's it.

Smart ones.

Very small ven diagram. Few people like that. Uh this guy Stephano uh Yodioso and Fabitio Genevese. Stefan was a fellow at Oxford. Uh incredibly, let's say incredible academic pedigree.

Uh Fabitio has been involved with Mev and Flashbots and many things in the Ethereum ecosystem. So you kind of put the thesis together and it's like this in my opinion uh the quantum ecosystem is developing tremendously and it's one of those things that um it's like suddenly then all at once and I think what people have to look at is the road maps uh DARPA ti for example the UAE which is the DARPA equivalent of the UAE the big tech companies the startups they all have road maps what's really important is to understand that everything we rely on this ecosystem is based on elliptic curve cryptography ECDSA. Okay. So, what that means is um and I say this often, you know, by the grace of God, if I'm lucky enough tomorrow to wake up and still be alive, two things will be true. The sun will be shining and my Bitcoin will be there, right?

Provided I take good care of my private keys. However, quantum computers are a particular kind of technology that essentially replicates some of the weird behavior in nature at the quantum level that allows for it's not a magic bullet. It's not going to just like make everything amazing, but there's certain things they do very well. Factoring large numbers is one of those things. The cryptography we rely on relies on this fundamental principle.

Yet, it's very hard to do that kind of calculation. And therefore, um, to take a private key and derive a public key using classical computing, I mean, you're talking about billions of years. Okay? That's why it's secure. um if this technology comes to fruition, what we're talking about is the order of days or weeks or maybe even hours.

Okay. And so, okay, now what does that mean? Well, it means that the basis of trust or the foundation of trust we have in this ecosystem is potentially threatened. I'm not saying that's tomorrow. It's not in the next couple years, but the growth curves when you look at these road maps are spectacular.

You can clot it along a curve. Okay. So um when we get to a certain point in time and I think that starts to look like 2030ish um these companies like Saquantum or the big tech companies and others could have that capability meaning they have a sufficient number of logical cubits to run algorithms that can break uh basically the underlying assumptions that we have with accounts and specifically your public key. somebody has that and they can determine your private key and therefore move your coins. All right, that's one thing.

Now, kind of like as a waterfall from that, upgrading blockchains is hard because we're decentralized. There's governance. There's many stakeholders. It's hard. It's not like a bank or some other like entity that owns their database.

All right. When you look at the road maps of all the blockchain networks, I vibe coded a website called quantumre.info. It's like coin market cap but it just measures quantum readiness based on road maps and things that are announced. It's a woolful state.

Okay. And I think the problem is it's going to take a quite a bit of time and it's a big effort and if we're not ready in time suddenly we could be caught off guard where this ecosystem is going fast and we don't have enough time. Okay. Then the other part of it is from a competitive standpoint and I've been talking about this notion of quantum money or quantum enforced finance. uh and you sort of look at um basically what's known as the no cloning theorem which means a quantum state cannot be copied.

It's very unique. And so that can serve as the basis for what I call quantum money or what's referred to as quantum money. And so you can imagine digital assets like stable coins and other things we have um secured by this principle rather than by all the blockchain trust infrastructure like miners and stakers. And the thing is quantum money won't need blockchains. Now that's a ways away and we have dependencies like quantum memory.

There's hard technology problems and theoretical physics problems. But those I would contend are being solved at an everinccreasing pace. And if we get to that point, we face a double whammy, which is the threat to our underlying security and cryptography and this new competitive force of digital assets that are private, safe, secure, enforced by physics, and just probably superior. Yeah. And I think that's the thing that, you know, and I've been doing podcasts and stuff and talking about it and, you know, right now I probably look crazy and maybe this stuff doesn't happen for another 20, 40, 50 years.

Um

I hear talks about 10.

Yes. Yes. And when you look at all the smartest I mean it's you know you look at these companies they have incredible researchers. You look at all the money like sovereign wealth money big capital has gone into this ecosystem for a long time. It dwarfs um let's say the investment we see in our relatively small ecosystem.

But at the same time you know it's a multi- trillion dollar ecosystem based on this security assumption which we have to take seriously because it is potentially threatened. Yeah. Um, and so yeah, that's kind of one of my messages. We'll see if it pans out or not, but uh, and I'm investing in this space, so I'm putting my money where my mouth is, so to speak.

So, you investing strictly in quantum related companies?

Well, I've started to pivot. Yeah, it so it's like if I invest in your project and I get tokens four or five years from now, you know, that's how it goes with VC, you're locked up. I won't do that anymore because I don't feel comfortable after 2028, 2029. I did make an investment in Ever Local. These are my guys at Oxford.

uh they're building the quantum cryptography stack and many other let's say things within that space and others um just sort of as a hedge excuse me and also it's an education process because you learn about this stuff it's very fascinating

um but yeah so I'm kind of like the the the guy talking about all this stuff uh that that's been my moniker the last six or seven months

very cool very interesting so what do you think would be the point in time where companies and welcome management and assets should start thinking about migrating to the next superior eventually better infrastructure that can

so so there's two ways to think about it defense and attack defense refers to protecting what exists

yeah and that migration for all blockchains is relatively difficult and there's a lot of challenges but it can be done provided we have a sufficient amount of time

and we do

for the moment but not in my opinion if we continue basically not uh

in all

significantly ly escalating efforts in capital. Um when you look at all the road maps and this is what I tell people, you make your own decision. Okay, you have to look at uh the startupsquantum ion etc. They're incentivized to give you good news because their business model is raising money. But then you have big tech, Microsoft, Google, even Amazon etc.

They have less of an incentive to sort of like BS this stuff. But then you also have the government agencies like DARPA, TII, etc. So you amalgamate you put all the road maps together and I think and you plot you can see the plots and the plots along the curve represent um key technology milestones different components that we need and we're hitting we're actually ahead um and so that seems to converge around 2030 in my opinion but and this is the other thing I say and I don't think this is a conspiracy I don't think the first run of quantum computing capability will be available to the general public and market but rather it will go to the military intelligence agencies, the NSA, uh you know, uh the PLA, etc. And they are highly incentivized not to reveal. And by the way, when you look at the regulation around it, exporting devices that have 50 or more cubits is already banned.

So governments are taking this seriously. Now, I wrote an article JD Vance on my Twitter. I don't think you'll ever see it. And I said, you know, Bitcoin is a military target at this point because the West in America in particular is leveraging trillions into its economy with Bitcoin as the underlying. All the stable coins are in USD.

Okay? And I outlined a scenario where the CCP could assign the PLA and the PLA could actually assign it to a proxy like Lazarus and North Korea who are very adept at hacking crypto to go ahead and do funny things like take Satoshi's coins and announce an attack. The reason they would do that is because it would have consequences to the price. There would be cascading liquidations. Yeah.

Much worse than what we just saw last week. Okay. Now, here's the other point. This is very important. There is no day tant.

Bitcoin is not owned by anyone. There is no and likewise you look at Ethereum, Salana, these foundations. Ethereum is a nonprofit foundation in Switzerland. There is no NATO article 5. If you attack Ethereum, it's not like attacking the Fed or the CIA.

There's no military day tant. It's a sitting target. Uh the only day we have is to from a technology standpoint um upgrade the systems. But again, when you get into the de devils in the detail, it's quite a complicated effort that you know has uncertain like outcomes. And so when you look at Ethereum, we spent 10 years building this L2 ecosystem, which a lot of people think is parasitic and not great.

Uh and Salana has a fast L1, but it has some trade-offs. I mean it's hard to build these things at scale and there's always trade-offs and likewise with this let's say migration effort the there's a multitude of trade-offs and all of those have to be considered I'll give you a specific example very quickly there's about six if I recall correctly six six and a half million bitcoin that are in old address types where the public key is visible the new address types it's a hash of the public key okay so satoshi's coins etc um all of that unless it moves into a new address type can be taken. And so even in the Bitcoin community now they're debating what to do like confiscate that Bitcoin and Ethereum at the Dow moment. Can Bitcoin even survive a Dow moment where you know coins are confiscated ostensively to uh protect the price because 6.5 million Bitcoin getting dumped on the market will have a very detrimental impact on price.

So rather than being a doomer, I flip it around and I say the most bullish thing a blockchain network can do is upgrade because then it removes, let's say, the spectre of that threat. Um, and that's the way I like talk about it, but it's important to acknowledge some of these potential realities and then people can make up their own minds.

This was fascinating. Thank you so much for your time. Oh,

thank you.

Thank you for joining us.

Super good. Thank you.