Cryptocurrency has grown exponentially over the past decade and is now a major player in the financial sector. Max Lyman and his brother who started a cryptocurrency mining company in 2018, are prime examples of the advancements crypto has made. Although their mining business did not survive the crash of 2018, Max continued to explore the space, consulting for Ethereum protocols and eventually founding Solon Labs with his co-founder Ben in 2020.Max was drawn to the Ethereum ecosystem because of its potential to create a system of decentralization that could protect people from corruption and inflation. Decentralization and blockchain technology enable people to be their own custodians and keep their assets in something stable, like US Dollar coin, without having to trust their local currency or any banks. As Max and Ben discussed on a recent podcast, “people are always doing what’s in their best interest. We would hope they act that they do things for the greater good so that everybody wins.”Max’s goal with Solon Labs is to create a platform that simplifies the process of transacting on the Ethereum blockchain, allowing users to pay transaction fees in whatever asset they are trading and bringing them all into one central location. To do this, Max is developing an operating system for decentralization that will make interacting with decentralized applications more user friendly. This system will include a home screen of applications that represent individual companies or operations, as well as solutions such as bundling transactions together to reduce costs, social recovery instead of seed phrases for wallet creation, and a smart contract wallet with a time lock to protect users from losing their assets in case of a hack.Max’s motivation for creating this system is rooted in his knowledge of the power of decentralization, but also in his own personal experience. As a student of electrical engineering at Northeastern University, Max was considering dropping out to focus on his business, but found a way to use his engineering mindset to benefit the cryptocurrency industry. And one story that really inspired him was when Bob Moore bought an NFT for someone who accidentally sold theirs and was unable to control his muscles due to a disease. This moment highlighted the positive impact that decentralization can have on people’s lives. The cryptocurrency space has become increasingly competitive in recent years due to the influx of users. There were 5 million users in 2017, but by 2021 that number had grown to 105 million. This has led to new projects like Solon Labs, which Max and Ben are launching.Max’s story is a testament to the potential of decentralization, and Solon Labs is his way of bringing that potential to life. As he says, “blockchain technology can create any sort of configuration we can dream of, including restrictions on who can interact or create proposals.” By using his engineering skills and his passion for decentralization, Max is working to make the world a better place, one blockchain-based application at a time.

Links:

https://twitter.com/Crypto__Jesus_

https://twitter.com/solonlabs

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Transcript

[0:00:16 ] Rudy: Welcome, Max Lyman, to the wholesome Crypto podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here this morning. Thanks for having so I know that you're working on Stolen Labs. It's going to be an amazing platform to do everything on crypto. But before we get into what it is, what you're doing in the crypto space, I want to know more about where you were in life before ever hearing about cryptocurrencies.

[0:00:46 ] Max: I really got involved in the crypto space in 2016, but I first found out about crypto in 2013, and I was playing to you as go. I was 13 years old. I was playing to Go on my laptop, actually on my desktop, and some random dude hit me up, and he's like, Yo, I want your skin. Okay, what's a skid through the marketplace? Okay, so before NFTs, there are some cool niche games. Obviously, you could use, like, ingame currency or maybe some, like, the Next Evolution, US. Dollars to purchase in game assets. Right? And Valve kind of really revolutionized this. Before out of teas with the Steam Assets marketplace, where any users can actually own skins, which is just like art for your guns and knives and all these other things. And you could trade them for cash, and then you could actually use that cash to buy games or other things. But it would always stay as, like, Valve in the ecosystem credit. Because, yeah, sure, it was like US. Dollars, but you would have to use it on Steam within their platform. But it was cool.

[0:01:59 ] Max: It was a lot of fun at the time. So I was just playing. Soon as Ghost, some guy hit me up, and he's like, hey, I'll buy the skid for you. He's like, I'll give you ten bitcoin. I was like, at the time, I had no clue what bitcoin. So I'm 13 years old. I hit up Google. I'm looking up, like, woods bitcoin. I just find a bunch of random things. I still have no clue what bitcoin really is. But I see there's a price attached to it, has value. And I was just like, whatever. You know what? I'll do it. And I made a trade.

[0:02:33 ] Max: He actually ended just rugged. And then I sold it a few months later for, I think, like $6,000. And I was sold.

[0:02:44 ] Rudy: I mean, it's natural to be hyped for as a young kid too.

[0:02:49 ] Max: Oh, yeah. It was like the most money I'd ever seen in my life, and I just couldn't believe it. And obviously today I'd be with it. She'd spend more money. But I like to believe everything happens for you. You're a cooler person if you have to work for things, right? And then in 2016, my older brother I kind of completely forgot about bitcoin for a while. My older brother was like, Yo, I found this cool new thing. It's called bitcoin. I was like, okay, cool, cool. And he's like, I'm going to make a lot of money. I'm like, all right, cool. He's like, you want to make money too? So that's honestly how I really got involved with cryptos back then. He didn't really know anything technical, but he was very much a business guy, my older brother.

[0:03:35 ] Max: So we started a cryptocurrency money company, and I would just build out, assemble all the computers, nothing too complicated, with like, RX five, et cetera. And then we started moving into a six that we'd get from bitmain and other suppliers. And then we designed like, some of our own CPU, cooling hardware and a few other things, and we had our own warehouse space. And then 2018 happened. In 2018, everything was s**t, and everyone wanted to liquidate everything. And the worst for the ASIC miners, because those are created specifically to form applications designed around mining bitcoin. Right. Improving consensus on the bitcoin blockchain. So they were like, absolutely worthless. So we paid probably like, I think it was like $2,000 per miner per ASIC, and they were selling in 2018 for like $50.

[0:04:29 ] Rudy: So you bought them on the hype and then.

[0:04:33 ] Max: Well, we bought them directly from the supplier. Not even on the recent yeah, I know, we bought them from BitMate. Once you paid for, like, you would have to pay to expedite the china, so it took a month to get them from china. Then you would have to pay all these custodial fees, and you would have to deal with any letters for seizures from the US. Government, all this other s**t. And then when you finally paid the government off, then they would actually let you get your mind. But yeah, dude, these things were like they were definitely even the components on them. Like, if you just literally took a soldering iron and just scrapped it right? Were was worth more than $50, but that was going price for them. Is everyone lost fate in crypto. Like, that was the first real big bull run we ever had. And so much liquidity exited so quickly and just did not want anything to do with it after that.

[0:05:26 ] Rudy: Wow. At this point, you're really focused on just making a profit mining bitcoin. Is that kind of the extent of your technical knowledge of the cryptocurrency industry and blockchain technology? You just knew that if I mine, I generate bitcoin, and if my electricity expenses were enough to pay off by selling bitcoin, you'd just make money, then you'd be happy. But did you know anything about Aetherium or ICOs at that point?

[0:05:56 ] Max: No, not really. I saw some bitcoin ICOs, but I wasn't really paying attention to the whole ethereum ecosystem. I honestly didn't even know anything about it. Didn't really know anything about smart contracts. I just understood the blockchain and consensus. I understood consensus technology. And at the time we did a lot of operations where our non ASIC miners would mine alternate blockchains and then convert assets through pools or wherever else into bitcoin, but really I only knew about consensus. And then in the beginning of 2020, during the pandemic, I I got really just bored, and I kind of I kind of really jugged back into crypto, and I decided to give Aetherium, and the Ethereum Ecosystem was shot. And now I'm Aetherium back. Yeah. So I consulted for a little bit. In the Ethereum world, there are some protocols helping them to add value to the government tokens or just create new general valuable utility, and then worked for the government for a little bit, and I started Stolen with them.

[0:07:08 ] Rudy: Did you complete university or college?

[0:07:13 ] Max: So actually, I'm in school right now. I go to Northeastern University, and I actually literally just dropped a class. But it's hard to full class load and working full time at the same time.

[0:07:31 ] Rudy: Yeah, it's not easy.

[0:07:32 ] Max: And managing people at the same time. Right. It'