João Nuno Simões

Absolutely, absolutely.

So I always like to take a step back and like really explain a little bit of the story and why we are here, why this matters, right?

So taking a step back, I actually started getting involved in crypto in 2013 by starting to browse in a forum called Bitcoin.com.

Talk, which was the first forum for Bitcoin at the time.

And at the time, I was really curious and long, long story short, I opened the first Bitcoin mining company in Portugal at that time.

I ran that venture for

couple of years until 2017 in 2017 was when the first big mining companies in china started appearing and the mining difficulty went up the prices went all up and we pretty much stopped making money in 2017 ish

So I sold the company at that time, moved to London, was doing my bachelor's at the time in management, worked in Web2, then moved to the US, did my master's at UC Berkeley in finance and started working for a venture fund there, discovered back crypto, DeFi.

And then I was like, OK, this is so cool.

I love being at a VC, working in crypto.

Then COVID came.

COVID came, came back to Europe, work a little bit in private equity until a friend of mine.

So I started also doing a lot of public talks and podcasts like this.

And one day a friend of mine came to me, this was early 2023 and said, have you heard about risk-taking?

Have you heard about Eigen layer?

And I was like, what is that?

And he sent me the paper about EigenLay.

I read it.

I became instantly hooked.

Long story short, I was one of the founders of Inception LRP, which was one of the first restaking companies.