Burnt Xion Interview:The Crypto Project You Can’t Ignore in 2025!

So hey guys, today we're going to really look at something that's about mass adoption, making something work, Web3 in the background, but Web2 everywhere else. And it's really using all the features of Web3. So today we have Anthony from Burnt Banksy, or Burnt, or Zion as they're now called. So Anthony, welcome to the channel. Thank you, thank you for having me. Do you want to start with an artistic aspect first, or do you want to start with a more analytical aspect first? What's too artistic? That sounds more fun. I guess the start is like, you know, why? Why Burnt? Great question. I ask myself that every day. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I mean, dude, I mean, I've been in crypto for so long and it is still unusable. That's why Burnt, is to make it usable. So we'll burn it first. What happened? Let's burn it. Let's burn everything down first and then try to make it work, right? Yeah, we'll just throw it all in together. It doesn't need to make any sense. Got it, got it. And what do you think is the pain points of crypto? What made you kind of feel like, oh yeah, this all needs to go? I mean, I think it started a while ago when I burnt a Banksy and kind of lit it on fire. But like, even that time, if you weren't crypto native, you couldn't participate in the Banksy auction. You had to, you know, get a Coinbase and then KYC and then Bridge and download a wallet and have to know what all this shit was. And I think that the pain points easier seen with like how small the industry still is when it just doesn't need to be that small. Interesting. Interesting. And you legit burnt the Banksy. Why the hell would you do that? It was funny. No, I mean, that's a great question, dude. Again, I was, I mean, I've been in this industry for a while. Well, I lit it on, I lit it on fire because a lot of people at the time when I was collecting CryptoKitties and early CryptoPunks, they were telling me that like they didn't have any value and there's no value in digital art. So I said, all right, let me take something that has value, a Banksy, sold in a Sotheby's auction, light it on fire and sell it as an NFT and let's see what happens. And it ended up breaking the record at the time for the highest price sold NFT. That's art. That is art. There you go. That's legit art. That's an expression. That's an expression. That's what art is supposed to be, right? It's not meant to be analyzed. It's meant to be enjoyed. Exactly. And it's forever on a blockchain now. Exactly. And it always will be. How about the ashes? What happens to the ashes? Someone actually has the ashes. It was like some random NFT group at the time who had helped with it. Someone has the ashes. I don't remember the guy's name or the NFT group. This is like back in clubhouse days, if you remember that. Oh, yeah. Those days. Yeah. Those days. One day it will resurface. The ashes. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to be like, I need those now. Exactly. So, okay. So it's going through all this. It's crypto. It's fun. It's art. So what's kind of the objective behind Burnt? Or Zion? Zion. Yeah, yeah. Burnt, Zion, they go hand in hand. The entire goal is to make crypto disappear. That's pretty much it. We want it to feel like you're using a Web 2 experience when in reality you're using Web 3. Gotcha, gotcha. And kind of like how are the steps to achieve this? Like what kind of steps were you going to take to achieve this? I mean, on a technical level, we've been building for three years. We can go into that. It's kind of boring. But at the end of the day. I'm fine. We can do an extended interview. We'll be like, yo, let's go to the technical side. Dive in the deep. Dive in the deep. Yeah, why not? I love it. I love it. Yeah. I mean, I think at first it's a lot of it is like I would say it's 70% design, which is pretty funny. Which is, you know, instead of saying, you know, instead of saying connect wallet, log in, having things denominated in dollars, which is like we can get into the intricacies of like USDC or using any token as like a settlement token to then buy back and burn Zion. Everything's a smart contract account. So there's no wallets on the chain. We are completely walletless L1, which then just allows for what you would consider chain abstraction and interoperability that way. But I mean, the end goal is like it's easier to see the goal because it's kind of what we use every day. It's signing in with Google. It's using a credit card. It's not needing to know what a wallet is or a Solana or even what a Zion is and just everything kind of working in the back end. Gotcha. Gotcha. So it's like the super app status, right? Like you go on and you can pay for anything because I feel like that's kind of the issue with payments in North America. So there's just so many different providers or so many different experiences. You just want one app, one experience and this experience encounters everything pretty much. Yeah, kind of. And I mean, I think being collaborative with other L1s is an important way to get there, right? Like I don't ever want to say Zion will completely take over everything crypto. That's a really stupid outlook to take. But if they have products, it doesn't fucking matter what chain they're on. I hope I can curse on this interview. Yeah, of course. It doesn't matter what chain they're on. I just want products to be able to exist in this industry. Got it. Got it. And in essence, so you have a team building it. What kind of core underlying tech do you have? Like what's powering this? Yeah. I mean, really at the base base layer about three years ago, three and a half years ago at this point, well, we forked the Cosmos 10-minute SDK. And so Comet BFT there, a lot of it is very different though, as it kind of relates to what we do in the signature curves. And so most kind of L1s bake into this kind of EOA aspect being the only signer. EOA is externally owned account, which is pretty much like the word for wallet or legacy word for wallet. But in our kind of capacity, everything is a smart contract account. So think EIP 4337, but on the protocol layer instead of the kind of smart contract layer. Ah, interesting. Interesting. So it's actually very fundamentally different. You actually reimagined how things should work. Yeah. Right? It's like, so everything's a smart contract. So what's your advantage of it? What's the core advantage of that? Everything being a core smart contract. There's like an economic advantage, which is probably the most boring one. But the fact of the matter is we can do, it's the only place where it's feasible to do zero cost transactions. Right? Like if you want to like something and there's not like a monetary value with that, if you were to go through like a turnkey or a privy or one of these other people, you have to pay per transaction. And so if there's no money going through and no one's making a profit off of that, you can see a very quick spam factor. And so anyone malicious would be able to kind of take advantage of that, where it costs a penny to not to lose a penny, right? Especially in this industry. There is a composable aspect, right? Where it's not just ETH. We can connect all rollups and Solana and BNB. You know, pretty much anything that we can mirror a smart contract on, we're able to do that. And so for everything. And then any token, we doesn't really matter. It's very agnostic in that way. Right, right, right. Okay, so it's very like, the way I see it, you fundamentally changed how we look at wallets. So everything's a smart contract rather than having an individual wallet. So just more functionality there. There's more interoperability there. And there's more access. But does that mean that multiple people can access the same wallet then in that case? Is there multiple permissions or how does that work? So you can have like, you kind of have what we call a meta account. And you can attach a, you can attach a MetaMask wallet. You can attach a Solana wallet. You can attach literally up to 256 things, including your email, including if you want your pass key, including your ledger and have them being authenticators. And so you can have like this kind of multiple party system that all ties into your meta account. And the thing is like, we don't really care where funds sit. And I think a lot of our focus to kind of take a step back isn't really DeFi. It's consumer applications. And a lot of this is because we've built incredible, incredible onboarding tools. And number one, DeFi is like, it's a very, very small insular pool. And we don't think that we're building amazing tools because grandparents of the world aren't going to be slinging perpetuals on hyperliquid. That's just not my, you know. They might. And I, you know, they might. But, you know, I think we're such a small industry that we need to pick a focus. And our focus is really it's consumer applications. Got it. Got it. And what stage are you at right now? So how's everything? Like, you know, it's launched. There's a lot of mystery, I think, surrounding where everything's happening. Can you tell me, like, you know, can you reveal a little bit of the secrets of what's going on? Dude, absolutely. And honestly, what an absolutely exciting week to be doing that. Literally, last week alone, we launched the mainnet. The Promethean Saga is what we call it. And I think we're having something around the lines of like 100,000 daily active users. It's absolutely incredible. We recently on, what is it? What's today? Tuesday? On, geez, yesterday we announced Uber is utilizing a project built on us. That's already live with ZKTLS. Amazon Prime is doing something as well. We announced that today. And, I mean, I can click a button right now and announce Marvel Rivals being announced. That's the next one going live. We have 150 brands that we're going to be powering by the end of the next three months. In addition to 200 ecosystem projects already deploying on us. It's one of these things. So how does this happen? So let's look at something in detail. You said that Uber is partnering with you guys and using stuff. How does it work? Like, what are they interested in? How does it work? So in this exact example, and we expect Uber and a bunch of these other brands to work with us in many different capacities. But in the case of Uber, to be very specific, and we put a case study out for this, it's really, really interesting because the way that they want to do this is via customer acquisition. And they're using blockchain for customer acquisition and kind of their global growth program. And so what does that mean? So the way that you can, you can do this right now on Zion, but Uber will effectively, you enter into a sweepstakes if you connect your Lyft account. And via ZKTLS, we can verify that you are who you are without exposing that. Lyft, Grab, Bolt, and a couple others, any pretty much ride sharing app. And right now, that's a sweepstakes. So if you are a user of any of these other ones, and you've taken a ride before on any other app, Uber will literally pay you to go to Uber. And this is like the first example of that. And I mean, dude, the absolute mind-blowing potential of this is extremely crazy. All of it powered by ZKTLS. All of it pretty much built on Zion. Interesting. So it's not really a pure payment, but it's really a proof that you're a customer of somewhere else. Let me migrate over so he can have a big... So it's very hard to game the system in that case, right? So it's a way to prove that, okay, I'm a Lyft user. I'm a big Lyft user, maybe. And you can verifiably prove that my identity is here, but it doesn't reveal my name. It doesn't dox my social security card number or whatever dangerous things that can leak. So just proving that, oh yeah, I'm a Lyft account, done some rides in there, boom, come to Uber, cheaper rides here. And now imagine that, like imagine you're Robinhood, right? And hey, I want to target the top eToro traders, right? Via ZKTLS, you can log into eToro and effectively say, this is how much I've spent on eToro. And think of how valuable you are as a customer to Robinhood and how much they will directly pay you to say, trade on us. And we can prove all of this. And this is never like to say that this is only possible on blockchain. This is only possible on blockchain. And furthermore, like no real user. Imagine if you're like connecting a Lyft account and then you have to download a phantom wallet, go to Coinbase, do KYC, buy the native token, bridge it over and then use it. That's not going to happen and that's not how we're able to actually unlock growth. The only way that this is able to work is because nobody notices that there's Web3 going on in the background. You log in with your Google, log in with your email, and you're able to just kind of earn the money. Everything's denominated in dollars, which on the back end is USDC, but it's dollars for lack of better words. Gotcha. So this is really combining the pinnacle of tech, right? So using blockchain, but you're also using ZK tech to show identity without revealing identity. So proof, a verifiable proof, but without revealing any actual information to any party. So that's why everyone can trust each other. It's like, it's trustless and it's identityless, but you're proving something. Exactly. Which is something that's, which is very abstract. I mean, if you try to explain this to someone, you're like, what? Like what? You know, like Web2 users, like you have to prove it. You have to, I have to see it to happen. Right. But with, with everything that's happening with cryptography, you don't have to see it. You can just see a proof. We'll see. Yeah. See, yeah. So, so I guess that that's, that that's the power of everything. Really? That's really, really interesting. So you're kind of growing that with consumer apps and people don't really have to really even use that in the background. Basically, they can just sign into Uber. So any user, Uber customer is a Zion. There you go. Basically, there you go. Amazing. That's, that's really amazing. That's really, really cool in the background. So, so, so everybody works in the background. How about for other, other, other players? You said, you said games can get on board as well. Like, are there any friction, like friction issues with, you know, potential onboarding of people who are on the app store or something like that, which, you know, Apple wants to take their 30% or whatnot. That's actually a really, that's another really good, good question, because since we're not a wallet, you don't need to download a Chrome extension, meaning all you need is a device with enough RAM and Wi-Fi. And so, like, for instance, last, during our test that Kyle Samani was using our test net via his Apple glasses or the Apple Vision Pro, I should say. A lot of people, we had this Zion Everywhere campaign where people were doing it on, like, treadmills and Nintendo DSs, and it was really awesome. So, to that point, there is no app. We don't actually need to go to the app store. You can just use it directly on your Safari or Chrome without having to do any Chrome extensions or anything like that or download a phantom app. Got it. That's really cool. But that presents a problem then, like, what happens if, is it really decentralized if my login is Google? I mean, I think that's like, you know, I mean, that's a very great question, right? Like, I think that is one of the pinnacle things that we're solving for. And, like, there's always going to be a tradeoff of being able to onboard the next, you know, billion users who really just, like, they're going to be optimizing for a complete experience versus the people who, let's say, are like me and you who'd want to use, like, a ledger who'd want to use a MetaMask. I think a lot of this comes in the fact that you can have multiple authenticators, right? And so being able to say, yes, I can use my email because it's easy. I can also sign in with my MetaMask. I can also sign in with my OKEx wallet. I could also just sign in with my fingerprint. Or I have 15 other ways that I can sign in with. Or Palm. Yeah, right? Yeah. Exactly. Okay. So basically, so right now it's currently attached to something like a universal sign-in, but you can attach it to more things in the future and secure in your account, right? Yep. Okay, so let's say, for example, I'm onboarded. I'm playing around with Uber magically. Let's assume that I migrated to Uber from Lyft, okay? Okay. I got my free money. Congratulations, right? Thank you, Uber. Thank you for your free money. All right. How do I onboard into crypto then? You said everything's working in the background. I just got my free Uber credit. I didn't even see anything, Zion. I didn't see anything related. What's next for me? You know, it's like, is it Web3 and done or is it Web3 and more Web3? Well, I think that a lot of this is where the future lies, right? When you're on the internet and you're like, you're using, I don't know, you're using YouTube. The idea is that you're going to go and you're going to create a new tab and then maybe go on Gmail, right? That's the vision, right? It needs to be that seamless where, you know, whether there's discovery or more applications, my thing is there's no apps in this industry. Like you have DEXs, you have NFT marketplaces, and then you have 45 different variations of all of those doing the exact same thing. I think no shade, a little shade, a lot of shade actually. But, you know, and I think that once we get to a point where it's like, oh, okay, I want to go on Netflix, right? And there's a crypto Netflix or Netflix starts adopting crypto. But like it needs to be that seamless because that's where the entire world is and we need to meet them where they are. Got it. Got it. So hopefully just open another tab using a same sign on. You see a sign on account and it can go cross chain, do whatever the hell you want, right? Like you're onboarded, you're onboarded already. We didn't tell you where you're onboarded, but it's onboarded already because you used to sign in. And that is much better. Excellent. That actually sounds really exciting because like, you know, I mean, I've been in crypto too. I've been there for a long time and, you know, the original crypto guys were very adamant, you know. The first thing you should do is write down 12 words. And no one wants to do that, right? No one ever. But 24 words, like the first thing you want to do, write it onto a piece of paper. Like pen, paper? I'm like, I'm not doing this. Yeah, no, no, no, no. I can put it off until 2024. Until you lose it. And then you're like, oh my God, I remember I bought that meme coin back in 2017. Exactly. There's so many back stuff that I think I lost because I was just like losing paper. So many. I think like, yeah, it's just, it's impossible. All right. So, so I guess, I guess that's where we are at. What else is exciting? So that's, you're announcing partnerships nonstop. What else is, what else is on the table? What is this exciting you? On the horizon or maybe further horizon. But further horizon is, I'm excited to have the next, you know, I think Facebook really was the epitome of the early internet, right? Like the internet really took off with Facebook. It connected people from around the world. And it was really that kind of first time, in my mind at least, where we flipped from, we need to get everyone on the internet on Facebook to, we need to get everyone on the internet through Facebook. And I think that a lot of that comes with the network effects that come with Web2 that we have not found in Web3. And I think that, I don't know if it's going to happen this year. I don't know if it's going to take five years. But I think the only way that we can achieve this hyper growth is the ability for people to not have immense friction coming in. And so my goal is to, again, we're going to make crypto completely disappear. When I say the killer app, I don't mean the people on crypto Twitter that are just circular posting it into Telegram cabals and having the price go up and then go down 90% the next day. I'm talking about genuine sustainable growth for an actual product. I'm really, really excited for that. And I think you even look at the projects building on Zion. I think there's immense potential for at least a handful. All right. So the circle jerk of Starra, there's a love and hate relationship with the circle jerk, right? You talk about crypto, everyone's circle jerks a coin. But I'm probably going to say, what's your Zion for if it's not for the circle jerk? I think the circle jerk got us here. I mean, I would be nowhere without the circle jerk, right? And I think we use words like testnet. We use words like token launch. And we're on exchanges, et cetera. But if you look at what we launched now, I refuse to use the word NFT anywhere. I refuse to show dollar sign Zion as a gas token. Everything's in dollars, right? So if you use the products that we build now, they are completely web too. But that's like, if you present a problem, if everything is denominated in dollars, what's the point of people holding Zion? Do they even know they have Zion? You know, what's the point? Well, I mean, they're not, you know. Listen, if every gas fee, which is in USDC, goes and buys and burns the Zion token, it does not take a lot for the entire supply to be burned. And I think we need to think about that because for the first time, we're growing larger than 300,000 people. And like, I would be willing to say that that's probably the amount of genuine crypto users there are right now, probably less, right? And so when we start talking about the billions of people that are out there and the amount of transactions that will be made every day, I'm absolutely not worried that if people hold Zion because Zion is being used whether they know or not. So Zion is a fuel. It's fuel for gas. It's the under the hood gas token. But then you said, like, what if there's none left? What if there's none left? You know, what if it's all burned? Well, I think that would be an amazing situation. If we're like the one crypto company that finds out that we had too much usage, I think that is a great problem to have. I don't know. You know, there's obviously metrics to this, but I don't think that's I don't think it'll all get burned. Okay. So you're thinking so there's probably mechanisms in a way to reduce it. Okay. Of course. Yeah. Okay. So that's the value of it. So as long as the underlying currency gets burned and you're looking for transactions, you're looking for heavy usage, heavy transactions, and then of course just economies of scale. Exciting. Really, really exciting. So, yeah, I think that covers a lot of what we want to talk about. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Dude, we covered a good amount. Yeah, we covered a really good amount. I think I really, really enjoyed talking to you. I think it really opened my eyes a little bit as well to everything that's going on. So thank you. I hope you come again. Thank you. Appreciate you having me. Thank you so much. All right. And I hope if you guys want to follow everything else, Bert Banksy, we'll put the links down below for Bert Banksy for Anthony himself and of course for Zion as well. Everything there is very mysterious. So you should follow them. It's an adventure. All right. Thank you, guys. All right. Cool. Thank you. Cool. All right. We'll leave that there. Thank you so much. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.