Constellation DAG - My #1 Long Term Project - AMA With Founder Ben Jorgensen

Hey, this is James Pelton and I am actually at Zion National Park in Utah. So I do travel quite a bit, bring my laptop with me and sometimes people say, Hey, you know what? You should take a break from YouTube and just spend time on your vacation. But actually I look at YouTube as a break from my vacation. So I'm actually, I'm excited to make these videos and kind of stay in the loop. I am going to be gone for like a month. So you're going to be getting a lot of hotel backgrounds and low quality camera, which is all part of the charm and authenticity of my channel, I think. But today my project that I want to talk about is the Constellation Network. So I have a AMA with Benjamin or Ben from the Constellation team, Ben Jorgensen. So again, completely Doc's team, DAG is a chain. It's got no transaction fees. So again, that's wildly different than Ethereum. And we talk about why they do that and how they're able to do that. But Constellation, I believe if you fast forward maybe five years, I think that this will be one of the biggest crypto things. So they're a great bridge between traditional businesses and the blockchain. In crypto, we're so used to like weird NFTs and weird AVAX, you know, play to earn games and things like that. And, you know, I love those things, but there's not really real world use cases for a lot of these NFTs or play to earn games or things like that or Node projects even. So Constellation is really bridging traditional business and the blockchain. And I'm really excited for that because that's what we need. If we want to make money in the crypto space, we're going to need more money coming into the crypto space, OK? And I think Constellation is going to be a big part of that going forward. They also, you know, everybody's worried about regulation and how the government and crypto are going to, you know, interplay. And Constellation is actually working hand in hand with the Department of Defense. So working with the government to get the government up to speed on blockchain and on crypto. So all in all, Constellation and their DAG token and their LTX token might be like my top long term play along with the projects that are on there. So, you know, I did Bio5 the other day. I think these types of projects are going to change the world. So there again, they're not my traditional short term plays where, hey, get your initial out as fast as you can and then, you know, use house money. I think these are long term plays. I see these as I'm using my short term passive income plays to fund these so that I have long term wealth through these. So I hope this is helpful for you. Here is my AMA with Ben from Constellation. All right. Well, this is James Pelton and I am here with Benjamin from Constellation. Ben, thanks for being here. Really appreciate it. You go by Benjamin or can I call you Ben? Call me Ben, man. Make it easy. You know, I've tried to get people to say Benjamin. There's another Benjamin in our co-founder group. And so I just go by Ben. I'll take the short and sweet. OK. I just noticed your email address was Ben at. So I figured that might maybe that's OK. If you could go ahead and just kind of introduce yourself and maybe give a little bit of your background. Yeah. No, absolutely. I'm Ben Jorgensen. I'm the CEO of an ecosystem called Constellation Network. We're our own layer zero protocol. So we are our own chain. We're not a fork of any other chain. We built an ecosystem that attracts use cases in major industries that want to put data on a blockchain. So our focus is to make our blockchain integrable within existing data infrastructures as well as decentralized networks. So you could think of Constellation as a network, much like Ethereum is its own ecosystem. Solana is its own ecosystem where developers build on top of us. OK. No, that's very helpful. And so you kind of already got into this a little bit, but I think it'd be helpful. How does Constellation fit in? So like Ethereum is kind of the NFT chain, and now we have AVAX, which is maybe like the node and game chain. And how does Constellation kind of fit in there? Yeah. Great question. So we are a vertically integrated ecosystem. And what that means is that we built our own network from scratch where people mine our cryptocurrency called DAG, D-A-G, and people then build layer one solutions on top of us. And then on top of that, we have hardware where people can buy our hardware and mine cryptocurrency in exchange for the data that they produce from this piece of hardware called the door traffic miner. So where we fit in the ecosystem and where what people gravitate to us for is that we are zero transaction fees. So Ethereum has very high transaction fees, a lot of gas fees. We're known for having zero transaction fees. And so people that come to us are real time bidding ad exchanges that are coming on to our network, building real time bidding ad exchange or digital advertising, putting the content creator economy on top of our blockchain. We've got another application around putting DNA data like 23andMe data on our blockchain. So we gravitate towards people that have conventional businesses and are looking to create crypto economies with our technology. Why do you think? Because I've noticed that, too, that it's a lot of like, you know, existing businesses who are wanting to put their data on the blockchain. They're they're kind of flocking. Constellation seems to be the place to go. Why do you think that is? Why do you think they're choosing Constellation over these other chains? Yes, it's a it's an amazing evolution. And I think what we saw last week or, you know, a couple of weeks ago around the Luna ecosystem and people building DeFi applications that didn't that were really interesting, exciting, high APYs, things that were really attractive to kind of short term traders. We looked at we want to create real world utility around a token. So the companies that come to us are going, wow, we can't build on these other chains because they have variable transaction fees. I can't build a scalable business on that chain because we might be paying $100 in gas fees or we might be paying $15. Well, you can't conduct conventional businesses with these uncertainties, these financial uncertainties. And so when you look at data and data, everything produces data, every click that we do, every metric that we're measuring, that's a lot of information that would be stored on a blockchain. And so if you think about every time you wanted to store a file or track some sort of data, that would be so exorbitantly expensive. And so constellations attracting these use cases like real time bidding ad advertising, you know, thousands of impressions a second where you're creating an immutable layer on our ledger that would cost so much money. So people have no choice but to go to a new chain. So we really see like that we're attracting the evolution of businesses and how I tie that in with kind of the Luna ecosystem is that they did some amazing things in creating a really user friendly interface. But now we need to evolve past that and go, what are real businesses that are coming into the crypto ecosystem? I love that because, yeah, what a lot of people's experience with cryptocurrency is, it's kind of goofy, like it's goofy games and goofy NFTs and things like that that actually don't have any correlation with the real world. And one of the things I've liked about Constellation so far is the projects that are on Constellation are real, real businesses with real revenue streams and you're actually providing real solutions for them. So that's one of the things that Constellation. Can I ask without getting too technical, can I ask how you're able to do the no gas fees and why do other chains not do that? Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, it's more of like a theoretical approach, which shifts the onus onto a layer one or an application layer. When you develop a blockchain from scratch, you're really creating the business model. So a very easy business model to think of is, well, if I use the network, I have to pay for the network. Well, that's very short sighted thinking and we're very long term thinking. We're thinking of, well, how will that impact every application that wants to use blockchain technology in an immutable layer? So the way that we did that, and probably why most people haven't heard about us and we're kind of still considered a boutique chain in many ways, is that the onus was on us to create a vision, a vision around where we're going that wasn't so immediate as well. Gas fees are immediate to understand. You understand the business of that. You understand how people get paid. Well, the onus was shifted on us as a company to really think very far in advance on what that next layer would be. So so we're able to do that. And I'm thankful to say that we're one of the top 150 projects out there that still people haven't heard of, which is so amazing. But we shift the onus on the application layer to not only create a flexible and scalable business, but to define their, their, their fees on their business. So payment processing can exist on our blockchain if they wanted to. And they could still function and compete in existing centralized businesses. OK, very cool. Could you talk a little bit more about existing projects that are on Constellation, like with real business use cases? Yeah, absolutely. We have one application called GeoJam. Their ticker is Jam. And GeoJam was a Web2 application that you can actually download today on iOS, where they were focused on activating the the content creator or the influencer economy, if you will. But they create these robust experiences that people can vote and do transactions to win an experience with Mariah Carey, who's one of their their backers. Right. When we worked with them, we said, oh, hey, how could we take DeFi mechanisms like pools and voting and governance and apply that into the creator economy where you really get both the creator and the consumer to come in? And this is a prime example that they can't build a functioning economy without a zero transaction fee. They need to have that flexibility. A user on a traditional Web 2.0 application like GeoJam won't be able to figure out why am I paying fifty dollars to make a vote to win this experience? Right. And so you think about these real interesting applications that are going to come out that leverage zero transaction fees. On the other spectrum, we have a company called Alchemy that's in the digital advertising space. And as I mentioned earlier, they're actually building a real time bidding ad exchange on Constellation, something that requires the ability to scale with high transaction, high throughput with very little cost so that they can compete with conventional real time bidding. The other one I'd like to highlight, too, is a group called Genico. Genico's was is recently coming out into the fold where they're taking your genomic data and they're rewarding people for putting your your genomic data on data on the chain where they can then go sell your data and you get paid for it. This is a very different mindset shift and real big use cases that that come in with like industry disrupting technology. Yeah, I did. I did an interview with BioFi. OK, yeah. The other day. That team. So, yeah, that's they're they're big on Constellation ecosystem as well. So, yeah, I love it. I love to hear it. Yeah, we're we we have an amazing flight. We call it the flight program. It's an accelerator program where 70 some companies right now are learning how to become a crypto company, but really tie crypto economics to their traditional business model. OK, that was actually going to be my next question is, how do you go about getting marketing, getting new companies into the Constellation ecosystem? Yeah, we have we have quite a little bit of a cult following, which is really spectacular to see. We're very early in providing developer tools. So a lot of developers don't know about us because we haven't really released those yet. And the way people kind of discover us, you know, I think in many ways through our Telegram channel, Twitter, we have a very active community that that doesn't just talk about price action. They talk about the technology. They talk about our theories on generative economics. And so we attract this kind of audience. It's very curious on the technical aspects, but also a vision that scales beyond what we're currently seeing in the ecosystem today. So we've had a very grassroots effort in what we've attracted, and it's mostly people that are saying, hey, I can't really build my business here, but I have an entrepreneurial mindset. I can't do it on Ethereum. I can't do it on all these chains. There's too many Band-Aids on Ethereum. So they've come looking to us and we start building a technical roadmap together. That's very cool. And one of the things that I know has really drawn me to the Constellation Network also is your involvement with the government. Yes. Everybody's worried about regulation. And so I think people like to see, you know, the government working with someone in crypto that kind of makes them feel comfortable. Can you talk a little bit about how that came about and what exactly that entails? Yeah. You know, I'm one of the unique people on the team where I'm allowed to talk about it. There are certain individuals that have a certain class that classified access to information and working with the DoD, Department of Defense. We have a couple of engagements going on with the government, but namely what we're doing, we're one of a couple blockchains working with the government, and it's been really fascinating over the last three years to work with them because I've heard about all the R&D they've done with other chains and it just doesn't work for what they're looking to solve. And we're actually solving some really robust problems that are very specific to the DoD, namely is using our decentralized network to identify threat vectors on their centralized databases. So all the data that the United States Air Force and the Department of Defense are one of the largest producers and aggregators of data. You think about all the comms and logistics they send throughout the world. They're one of the largest creators and thus they have some of the most, I don't know, vulnerable points of failure. And so what we're using is our network and our own consensus mechanism to identify threats against their centralized databases in a decentralized manner where there's no one single point of failure. That is that's super cool. And so where do you see, and again, I don't know how much of this you can talk about or anything, but where do you see that partnership with the Department of Defense going? Like, is that a long term, you know, 20, 30 year type thing or where do you kind of see that partnership going? Yeah, I mean, this is something that started out as research and development on their part to actively building prototypes. We've actually built prototypes for them. It solves a massive problem for them. I think this is very particular to the public sector, like the government, that it's not very applicable to the private sector. And so where that's why I see it, it's very relevant, right? There's nobody going to be there's no one going to compete with us to build this because most private companies are building government technologies that they can then put into a box and sell off the shelf to the private sector. So this is a real long term vision that the that the government has in thinking about how do you work off cybersecurity or cyber threats in the future? What does that look like? Which is which is a it's a cultural shift in the DOD as well. So this is like really just getting started. And like that is where a lot of the threats are happening. So they're thinking about cybersecurity in a completely different light. And really, we're just beginning. I mean, some of their big data initiatives kicked off just last year, and those big data initiatives need security threats or to thwart off security threats in the future. So it's it's it's really got a long ways to go and could and the goal is ultimately to work with every agency over there that every agency in the government can use this technology to improve their security. Yeah, I just think that's so incredible because people always they always see crypto at odds with the government. Right. And that's how it's always viewed at any time we talk about crypto in the government. They're always at odds with each other. And so it's been cool to hear about, no, actually, the government is on board with this and, you know, is seeing value in this and is working with Constellation. That's that's been a plus for me as I've been looking into things. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely the side of speculation that you see that that gets them worried about our people doing things in a regulatory capacity. And being a U.S. nexus of a company, we have the onus to to to work with those regulatory pressures and showing them and in many ways we're kind of showing them ways that this technology can be used and harnessed for for good and for their enablement in a very cost effective way. Like this is an expensive technology that we're talking about. Yes, it is to build it. And so when you get out of the speculation around token price and you look at the fundamentals, I think it's pretty fascinating. Awesome. Awesome. What would you what is what are you most excited for on the upcoming roadmap for Constellation? Yeah, so I'm really excited. We're launching our web, our mainnet 2.0. It's an upgrade of our existing mainnet. We're going to be bringing on hundreds more node operators to really build out our global footprint of our network in the horizon. We're going to whitelist it to everybody to really expand and show how we will be the biggest network out there. I'm also really. And so this also invites developer tools coming out with their own token standard that people can start building on. NFT standards, DeFi standards to really bring in the developer persona into our ecosystem. So I'm super excited about that. I'm also excited about our door traffic miner, our piece of hardware that we started pre-selling as an NFT. So you would buy this NFT and it would be a voucher for the actual piece of hardware. And the hardware sticks above your doorway or an entryway where there's foot traffic and you get rewarded for the amount of data or foot traffic that you provide. And we've structured some pretty interesting partners that are buying that data. So we're starting to see real utility and usability of blockchain frameworks and cryptocurrency models and traditional businesses that were scared of this two years ago aren't. And that to me is going to be the evolution that we've seen. You know, during these pullbacks that we see, you start to see a changing of the guard. And I've seen this time and time again over the last five years that there's always a changing of the guard that happens within these pullbacks. And there's a new initiative that takes place. And I think we're actually at the point of connecting real world incentives and bounties to actual items. So I'm pretty excited about that. Yeah, I'm excited about that too. One of my passions and one of the reasons I started my YouTube channel was to try to get average people into crypto. And what we're seeing right now in crypto is just there's so many just tokenomics going around and people money in crypto and in DeFi in particular. And so I'm excited. I see Constellation as maybe being a bridge for, hey, let's get some real businesses in here with real use cases. And that could be a great bridge. We call ourselves the Welcome Committee of Web3. We want to make it so like you, James, like we want to educate just anybody and that it's super easy to get involved. And that's why we talk about being vertically integrated. Yeah, we want some stuff for the developers, the hardcore techies that understand the technology and scalability. But we also want to make it easy for somebody to go, here's a device much like a helium hotspot that I can buy, put up above my doorway and I check my wallet and I'm making some money. And like what an easy way to introduce people and go, oh, I get it. It's not just speculation. Like clearly there's a need for this data. You know, Constellation is handling that that data exchange and value exchange like we want. We want to invite everybody into this. And I think there's an opportunity to do that, do that. And it doesn't have to be these complex like tokenomics, DeFi, I got to stake this, bond this. There's there's an opportunity to just go, hey, stick this device up here, earn currency. And you know what, like participate in this crazy social experiment called Crypto. Very cool. So if everything goes according to plan, so your dreams are all accomplished, where do you see Constellation in, we'll say, three years? I think that's a good time frame. Yeah, last week we were like, where do you see it in one year? And now it's like, all right, maybe three years. We'll give it some time. Yeah, I really see Constellation being a household name. I believe that we'll be a top 10 ecosystem. We differentiate ourselves vastly from the other ecosystems are out there. I see that in the use cases of projects wanting to build on us. As we release developer tools, that's just going to further exponentially increase the demand for Constellation and our ability to connect with conventional businesses. My goal is really to go after the eighty eight trillion dollars of the gross domestic product, the GDP. That's a big number. But I think if you can take if you can go after the eighty eight trillion dollar GDP, you're ultimately going to be able to tokenize a percentage of that revenue. And that's where I really see this ecosystem going. And I think that we can make a huge dent in three years as we start to be as crypto becomes more familiar. I mean, like a year ago, I was just watching TV the other day. I wouldn't have imagined a year ago that we'd be seeing, you know, logos for exchanges on Formula One racers, right? Something like so niche as Formula One racers are like their cars are sponsored by exchanges. You watch the NBA playoffs, the basketball things are the hoops are sponsored by crypto. So the money's coming in to bring in people and it's only going to get easier for people to understand what is going on. And it won't be this esoteric technology. And so like you and educating people, we want it to just be easy. We want people to have a good experience when they come into crypto. I love that because I think a lot of times people see, yeah, like traditional finance at odds with crypto. Like you have to pick. Are you going to get involved with the GDP of the United States? Are you going to get involved with crypto? But if you combine that, we're hey, crypto is making Target more successful. Yes. It's making traditional businesses more make more money than you don't have to pick. Are you going to be in crypto or traditional business? Yeah. Start to be intertwined with each other. So I think that's really cool. It's very cool. All right. So for people who are watching, this is super informative for me. I'm getting kind of pumped up. But for people who want to get involved, what's the best way for people to kind of take advantage of it? They think that, hey, this is the future. I see what you see in three years. What's the best way for them to kind of jump on board and take advantage of that? Yeah. I mean, if you want to learn more about our token, we are listed on several exchanges, KuCoin, Gate. If you want to get into the weeds of Constellation and experience our community, our vibe, our culture, start to get familiar with our governance. I would go to Telegram and look up Constellation. But our website probably is the best starting point. You can learn about the door traffic miner. You can learn about how to go through our incubator program called the flight program. If you're interested, that website is ConstellationNetwork.io and I think that's just a source of knowledge. And we're in every channel. We're very active founders, very active team. And we're just we we love educating and walking people into our world. OK, so maybe the easiest way to get involved financially would just be buying the DAG token. DAG and LTX. LTX, Lattice Exchange, what it's called, is kind of our user interface. And we have a lot of things coming out around that. That's sometimes easiest way to access some of the projects that are building on us. We have a launchpad where people can back projects that they're excited about. We also by using the LTX token, you can stake and work with other projects that are looking for distribution and marketing and technical support. So, yeah, I would say the first two ways to get involved with Constellation, look at DAG, look at LTX. OK, and then I'll just ask and you can go as deep into this or as shallow into this as you want. But I know people are going to be wondering about the nodes, you know, and the DAG nodes. Do you want to just talk about I'm trying to even think of the best way to frame that. Do you want to just talk a little bit about what's available now? What's going to be available later? So currently, our network is one of the only truly decentralized networks. We do not have master nodes that run our network. We have 120 nodes that secure our network and earn DAG as a reward and that secures the network. We have a pipeline right now. We have our testnet is running where we've got another, I think, north of 200 nodes to be onboarded onto our network. So bringing our network up to about 300, best way to find that information is through Discord. We also have a pipeline of people that can earn. They can act or simulate the experience and build through our soft node program, which you can find on Lattice.Exchange, our website, where people stake 250,000 DAG to create a soft node. So you don't need to be technically inclined to participate. You can actually get involved on Lattice Exchange, stake your DAG, and that's essentially simulate in a node, which acts as kind of a pipeline to be pushed through into our main network. Hopefully I didn't confuse everybody there. No, that makes a lot of sense. So this is more just for my own curiosity. So I have 250,000 DAG. Yeah. So is there just like, is it kind of just a first come, first served or a waiting basis for knowing if those will ever become a node or how does that work? Yeah, no, absolutely. So there's technical things that you need to do to spin up a node. And you can you can find that in Discord and get approved through our testnet. We have a group there to help you with the onboarding. If you're like, hey, I don't even want to deal with the technical side of things. You can take your 250,000 DAG. And at the first of every month, we do a restaking of those tokens where you stake the 250,000 DAG by connecting your wallet and you're immediately signed on and are starting to earn rewards as though you were a node operator. We've had 5,500, roughly every month we're seeing 5,500 nodes created on our soft node staking, which represents about 55 percent of the circulating supply. It's been absolutely amazing. Even with the pullback of the market, we saw that nobody forfeited their node. Everybody kept as a soft node. So really exciting kind of numbers to really follow along in our ecosystem. Yeah. And I think your community knows really well that this is not a short term passive income play. They're looking for, hey, this is going to be the future. So we're not buying, hoping that it goes up 10x tomorrow. Well, we're hoping it goes up 100x in the next five years or something like that. Absolutely. Yeah, very cool. All right. Well, hey, I think that's about all the questions that I had. I think this will be great. This was like perfect, perfect length. You were super on point, kept it under 30 minutes. I think this will be, I think this will be great. Well, James, I love your energy on this. And just that you knew the product was, knew the company was really exciting for me. You know, I come into a lot of these things and very cold. But to hear that you kind of understand already the workings, I think made this really authentic. So I can't thank you enough, man. This is great. Yeah. Thank you for coming by. I know you're you're busy and I'm really excited about that. You know, I think with the market down, it's caused me to really pause for a second and like, hey, if I want to help my audience, what do I think are going to be good investments long term? Because we've been doing so many of these Node projects and I've been wanting to just like, hey, let's focus on in three years. What can people invest in that have actually made money? And so that got me to BioFi, brought me to DAG. And so cool. Yeah. And I think that to me is what's exciting about this pullback is we take a deep breath on these like get rich quick schemes and we start looking at fundamentals and we do these little resets here and there, which I think are really good. It's not exciting, but it makes us kind of recalibrate our thesis on which projects are going to be viable in the future. How are they going to overcome setbacks like market pullbacks? Right. It always comes down to fundamentals and an overarching vision versus chasing a quick buck. And we've seen that with a lot of the get rich quick projects I've seen have have really pulled back in their market rank. I'm seeing even more wash trading going on behind the scenes to just keep to just kind of fuel the optics. But that's not sustainable. Yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, very cool. Thanks so much for hopping on. Really appreciate your time. Great to meet you, man. Let me know if I meet you, too. If you want any other introductions to any projects or if you want to do this again or even come on to our hypergraph hour, that would be awesome. We are having a Constellation Ecosystem Conference in August 6th. Would love to get your involvement in that and see what we could do there. It's in San Diego. Yeah, no, if I'm invited, I will be there. That'd be awesome. I'd love to be as involved as I can be. So I'd kind of I would consider Constellation probably one of my like top five like long term that could really change the landscape of crypto and and really just business in general. Yeah. So I'm really excited about seeing that. I appreciate that. Absolutely. And if you guys need any, you know, eyes on things, marketing. All right, James, I appreciate it. Absolutely. I'll follow up with you. Thank you so much for the time and just having me on it. I know you're busy as well and you got a million projects to choose from. So thank you. Awesome. Sounds great. Well, thanks, Ben. All right. Thanks, Jim. Have a good one. You do. Take it easy. All right. I hope you enjoyed that AMA with Ben. I really enjoyed talking to him. I'm sure I'll have him back on the channel. So if you'd like to get involved again, the best way is just to buy DAG token and to buy the LTX token. And so what I like to do is I don't know. I haven't talked a ton about it on my channel, but I do a lot of dollar cost averaging. So basically, you know, if you want to put in five thousand dollars into a project, we'll say one thousand dollars into a project. If you just buy a thousand dollars, there's a chance that you're hitting that token at all time high. Right. And then it goes down and then you lose money. So the purpose of dollar cost averaging is you can make sure you're not buying at the absolute high or selling at the absolute low. So if you want to buy a thousand dollars of a token instead of buying a thousand dollars you over the course of it and there's different strategies you could do over the course of 10 days, once a day you buy a hundred dollars worth. Or, you know, if you wanted to make it even more averaged, you could say over 10 weeks you're going to buy a hundred bucks a week or something like that. So there's different strategies. But KuCoin, which is one of my favorite exchanges, makes this very easy. They have a DCA bot. So if you go to trade and then trading bot in your KuCoin account, you can mess around with these other bots if you want. There's some fun stuff there. But I like these DCA bots. And so what I do is LTX and DAG and Bitcoin and Flux and a few other tokens. But I will just say I want DAG and we'll say every day I want five hundred dollars of DAG up to, we'll say, you know, a node right now costs about twenty five thousand dollars at the price of its twenty five, two hundred fifty thousand tokens. And it's currently one ten cents ish. So it's going to be about twenty six thousand. So we'll say I want up to twenty five thousand five hundred dollars a day. Then you just create. And as long as you have that much USDT available in your balance, it'll just every day buy that DAG for you. So, again, that's just an easy way just to kind of set it and then forget about it. Make sure you're funding your account or maybe, you know, this might be a little intense. So maybe let's say a hundred dollars every week is what you want to do. And then you kind of just set it and forget about it. And it'll just constantly dollar cost average for you. So it's a way to not have to remember it. So, again, I do that for DAG. I do that for LTX, which is which is another token on the Constellation Network. I do that for Bitcoin, Flux, et cetera. So I hope that's helpful for you. Again, I appreciate all the support. Please do leave a like and a subscribe. And I hope all of you have a great rest of your day.