Web3 with Sam Kamani
369: Tezos, Etherlink & Tokenized Uranium: The Future of Blockchain Infrastructure with Guest Speaker Adebola Adeniran from Tezos
18 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You know, we say everyone should learn how to code. I think now everyone should learn how to prompt. So if you go to uranium.io today, you can actually buy tokenized uranium. The agents also are really good at understanding blockchain, right? Understanding the blockchain, understanding distributed systems, understanding like solidity, understanding some of the tooling.
So I think it's an amazing time to be a builder. I think that if you were a 5x engineer before, I think working with agents makes you an 100x engineer, right? I made my agent into an asset manager and said, hey, every single morning before the market opens, go and read all of the different pieces of news from everywhere.
And then kind of like piece all of that news together and then tell me, you know, what's the market looking like today? Should I be buying anything? Should I keep my position? Should I offload my position? Hello, innovators, investors, and risk-takers. Welcome to another episode of Web3 with Sam Kumani Podcast.
And today on this podcast episode, I am interviewing Adibola from the Tezos Foundation or network. I have known about Tezos for a very long time, and he's here to share about all the new innovation that they are building on this platform.
as always nothing that we talk about here should be taken as investment advice and please like share subscribe and follow and with all that out of the way let's get into it and we are recording this live actually at ETH Denver and even though despite of what people say there are still a lot of founders here there are still a lot of builders here and they are still innovating things are still moving on but yeah let's get into this conversation more about ETH Denver later on
Welcome to the show. I've been looking forward to interviewing you, Adibola, on this show and talking about Tezos because Tezos is something that I came across, I think 2017-18 ICO time. So it is one of the long-standing projects in the crypto space and the whole blockchain ecosystem. So yeah, I just wanted to find out what are you guys busy with working these days and what's new at Tezos?
Yeah, thanks so much, Sam, for having me on the podcast. I'm super excited to be here. I'm also super excited to be out here at eDenver as well. I think it's been a pretty interesting experience. We've had a lot of people come to our stand, just talking to us about the protocol in general, talking to us about our EVM runtime as well. It's a link.
I know we're going to talk about that later on in the podcast as well. But I think these days, what are we working on at Tezos, on the Tezos protocol? Again, we still have our Layer 1 that everyone knows. So in terms of governance, in terms of settlement, finality, all of that still happens on Tezos Layer 1 today.
But also in the past year, year and a half, we've also released EtherLink, which is our EVM Layer 2 roll-up built on top of Tezos. So essentially with EtherLink, the transactions still settle onto the Tezos Layer 1. But the thing about Eterlink is that you can now use your EVM tools. So you don't have to make too many changes to your code base to deploy on Eterlink.
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Chapter 2: What innovations are being introduced in the Tezos ecosystem?
Yeah, so I think, yes, the reason why we've not seen a lot of adoption is because, you know, people don't really understand it. But I think with what we're doing with uranium and just people understanding like, you know, gold in general or silver in general, I think there's going to be some opportunities there for metals. Yeah, yeah.
Now let's talk about EtherLink, the second topic, and that is around what's so unique about EtherLink that builders and developers cannot do in the current ecosystem that they can only do at EtherLink. Yeah, I mean, I would say the same things that you can do on our EVM chain, you can probably do on any other L2.
But rather than trying to figure out which L2 is going to win, because it's also like a lot of fragmentation within L2, right? Yes. Rather than trying to figure out which L2 is going to win, if you like Tezos, you love Tezos, you love the project, you love the protocol, But you don't, essentially, you don't want to use some of our Layer 1 tooling or some of our Layer 1 languages.
This, for you, is the perfect opportunity. You're an EVM developer, you love the project, you love the protocol. You can simply bring your EVM projects and deploy them on Tezos, essentially, right? So if you deploy them on EtherLink, which is our EVM Layer 2, that also gets, you know, settlement and finality on the Layer 1.
So we allow you to get the same security, the same governance, the same consensus that we have on the L1 protocol. we allow you to access that on the EVM chain. Yeah, absolutely. It's just that it's so hard because I've interviewed so many L1, L2 founders, and this is the number one question I ask all of them. It's like, okay, why do we need another L1? Why do we need another L2?
I think the Ethereum ecosystem is huge, right? A lot of people are just super comfortable writing in Solidity. The AI agents also understand Solidity pretty well right now. So you can move super fast. There's also a lot of tooling, right?
If you think about JavaScript, for example, as a language, there's a lot of tooling for JavaScript developers to use and to launch projects and to launch products. If you're building something greenfield, if you're building something new, you want an ecosystem that is already tried and trusted. There are tools, there's support for you, and you can kind of launch very quickly.
And so for us, that's kind of where we saw the opportunity. We're like, hey, you know what? There are a lot of people who want to come into the Tezos ecosystem, but there's also some kind of a barrier to entry with some of the languages and some of the tooling that we have today. And for that, for them, we just simply offered up another way for them to come into our ecosystem, right?
Using Etherlink, our EVM runtime. So, I mean, if you already write Solidity, if you're already an EVM developer, and even if you're not, even if you've never written a single line of Solidity before, Because there's so much tooling and support out there. You can start off on Tezos by writing Solidity on the EVM chain. Yeah, yeah, definitely.
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Chapter 3: How does Etherlink facilitate EVM compatibility for developers?
But again, that being said, I also think that in general, if you're a, I guess, you know, sometimes people don't really look at themselves as blockchain developers, right? Yeah. They look at themselves as software engineers first, right?
So if I can write JavaScript or if I can write TypeScript or Ruby on Rails or Go, if I can write any of those languages, I'm probably not writing smart contracts every single day, right? So if I'm working on a project that needs me to write a smart contract, I can go ahead and write that smart contract.
But I mean, necessarily not refer to myself as a blockchain engineer or as a blockchain developer. That's very true. You're 100% right. Exactly.
So I think that while, yes, we may feel that those numbers have kind of remained constant, I think we also see a lot of influx of developers who will be dabbling with on-chain experiences, writing code, writing programs, writing smart contracts on-chain, but not necessarily doing that every single day and calling themselves blockchain engineers or blockchain developers.
That's the way I would think about it. Definitely, definitely. And, you know, AI has completely changed how development works, whether it's with wipe coding or, I mean, previously also we had like no code or low code movement and indie hackers and places like that and product hands where people were always building MVPs, releasing. But now it's kind of like turbocharged with AI. Exactly, exactly.
Anyone can, like, previously you want to do low code, you still need to understand the basics and now you can be be really dangerous. You could be anyone. Exactly. And you could do anything. I mean, nearly, nearly anything. What have you observed? How is it changing our space of industry?
I think I'll kind of start with Trilitech, our research and development lab in London that works on the Tether's protocol. We are like super pro AI. And we've got like a Slack channel called Engineering Code Agents.
And every single day, everyone is dropping ideas of different things that they've seen on X, or some new models that have just been released, and just kind of sharing ideas back and forth. And at the company, developers, because we're mostly engineers at the company, we're all supported to use Agents to build and to code and to prototype. And so it's been a super exciting time.
I think the first time I really saw the power of Agents was last year when we had an internal hackathon. we need to build these apps in 24 hours. I was like, okay, we're going to do this. We're all engineers, we all know how to figure this out, but we can't move that quickly. But when we started to work, that's when I got introduced to Coursera for the very first time.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of tokenizing uranium as an asset class?
And I think that, yeah, so I think that right now is just the perfect time for that. And I also see, like, a lot of opportunity as well in terms of agent-to-agent payments. Yes. So if you think about... Like 402... Yeah, like export to exactly. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
We've got to also be experimenting with that as well, you know, where so if you're on your chat GPT, because I mean, people are spending hours and hours and hours on chat GPT today and chat GPT literally knows everything about you. And I was giving this example on a different podcast yesterday where it's like, hey, I've got a fridge in my house. I buy groceries on, say, Sunday.
Sunday afternoon, nice sunny Sunday afternoon. I put those groceries in my fridge and I simply tell my agent and say, hey, look, when my milk gets to this level, reorder new milk and reorder new cereal, reorder new chocolate bars, protein bars, whatever, right? But again, those agents will still need a way to interact. You can interact with the store, right?
But I think that you also need to be able to make payments. And I think that it's just the perfect time in the world right now to kind of build products around that that helps agents to do the things that they should be able to do, right? So if you want to pay for hotel booking, if you want to pay for travel, some pay for groceries.
I think, yeah, your agents should just simply know that, oh, you've got a trip coming up in five weeks, the price of your ticket has gone down today, I need to make that payment for you right now before the price goes back up.
Yeah, so I think it's just a perfect time for you to just have your agents walking around the clock, like with OpenClaw, for example, but then they also need a way to make payments. Yeah, I mean, OpenClaw is super dangerous. It is free in a way, you know, and all sorts of security concerns. And you could potentially give OpenClo access to your credit card. There is nothing stopping you.
Why do we even need crypto? Why do we need them to have a digital wallet? Yeah, I think, but I mean, at the end of the day, I think that you always need, you know, I would say like multiple payment methods, right? So credit card, yes, is one way, but not everyone has a credit card. Not everyone is able to access a credit card, right? Or not everyone wants to pay the credit card fees. Exactly.
Or not everyone wants to pay the credit card fees, right? So I think people have to have alternatives. And I think that's what makes the world a beautiful place, right? I'm not locked into one product or one financial tool or one financial service. I can essentially like switch or I can decide not to use a kind of financial product and just use, you know, crypto, right?
So I think it's just an amazing time in the world. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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Chapter 5: Why has the adoption of real-world assets been limited?
Oh yeah, I mean this is, it's like AI and like interaction of AI with blockchain is like a whole another kind of... And I think we'll see a lot of products now built on chain because of AI. So people who typically would not touch development on the blockchain, just simply because for them it's like, hey, this is a little bit complicated, I need to spend more time trying to understand protocols,
I need to spend more time trying to understand the language of the chain. Because sometimes it can get like super complicated and you can kind of feel like this entire other world that no one knows about.
But I think if you're working with AI agents today, you would actually just, if you have an idea and you're like, hey, like the blockchain is perfect for this, then working with an AI agent to release and build and launch a product on chain is going to be super easy now. Like my job essentially all day now is simply thinking about what kind of content can I release
that ai agents can consume and help you turn your idea into a product right so even when we think about documentation internally as well it's like how can we make it machine readable so that your cloud.md file can simply uh you can simply like read this documentation and then go build this right and you can simply build an entire plan of the documentation that we've written because it's like clear it's concise it's written in the language of agents and you can take it and run with it i'm good whatever how does one write in the language of agents
Yeah, I think at least what I experiment with in my role as dev role is every time I produce a piece of content, like a blog, documentation, I will typically feed it into the agent and say, hey, go build X using this documentation, right? Only use this documentation and see if you can execute on X, if you can understand how to get to a certain result.
And then if it struggles, and this is kind of how I determine whether or not what I've done is good, right? If the agent's kind of struggling and coming back to me with questions, then I know that either my documentation is not clear enough, I'm not referencing other relevant documentation within that documentation for the agents to pick up. Excellent advice.
So that interaction between human and agents can just help you fine-tune what you're producing to help agents get to a desired outcome even faster. Oh, that's fantastic. Apart from Tezos, there's so many products out there in our industry, so many other projects as well.
Are there any particular projects that you think are doing really well when it comes to building, comes to engaging developers, or any other aspect either could be? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of projects out there. I'm trying to think of one that I find surprising. I think right now, like for me, I'm mostly just kind of consumed with the AI.
I won't call it a craze because I work with these agents every single day. And so I see first hand how powerful they are. I use them for everything, right? Now, I think this morning, like just before I came out here, I essentially built like a almost like a fund manager, like an asset manager. Right.
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