0xResearch | June 20th, 2025

Transcript

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All right, guys. We're here live, chilling in the house. I can't believe they let this man out of the cages today. Uh, coming back to you, Zerox Research Live, joined by Bacio. That hairline is looking absolutely fresh today. And and Carlos from the research team. How you guys doing? Good. How's my hairline looking? It looks pretty good, man. The headphones really accentuate.

Thank you, man. You and Ryan Connor are really holding up the holding up that side of the fort for sure. Let's Let's skip this part. Let's go. We can't cut when it's live, Bo. We just go. Um, how are we feeling? Next week's permissionless. I'm excited actually to see most of the team there. I'm excited to see hopefully some of our uh more enthusiastic Telegram community members come out to Permissionless. We'll have the Dunk Tank. We'll have I think we're going to have a little arcade basketball game. We're going to have some stuff at the OX Arena. Like it should be a good time. We keep talking about these, but I feel like we don't really know if they're happening. The Dunk Tank's

happening. No, the dunk tank's happening, but I don't know the size of the dunk tank. I It could be [ __ ] massive. It could be tiny. I don't know the arcade system. You think you won't fit? You You think you won't fit guy? You know what? If I show up to him, they're like, "No, actually, sir, you can't get in this one. This the size the sizing doesn't work. The girth." They're like, "No, you can't be in here." Yeah. Box talking about girth of the dunk tank. What's up, Daniel? I'm sorry. What did I just join? We got Dan Reverend Smith back on. Glad to have him back. We've been needing his presence. Talking about permissionless. Excited to see there.

What are you excited for, Mr. Reverend? Uh what am I excited for? Uh seeing the team in person. That's that gets me fired up. We uh we work pretty remote. We have an office in New York obviously, but everybody's kind of spread out uh across the US and Europe. So, it's always a pleasure getting to get everybody in the same room, man. So maybe it's a selfish answer because uh it's not a selfish answer. It's just kind of a bait answer. It's like it's like saying, "Oh, I love the team. I just want to see the team." Give me specifics. To be fair, I have the same corny answer in interviews because it's true, right? Like why do I love works?

Like the answer is the people. I think you have a more detailed and interesting answer to why it's the people, but uh this company is awesome. the amount of the talent density, the number of high agency people here. I've never seen anything like it. I came from like the big four accounting world where you are truly a cog in the machine. So maybe that's why I'm so excited to work at a high pace startup. That's a nice That's a nice sentiment to have. I Carlos, why are you excited, man? I would second just I would just second Dan's answer. No. Yeah. I don't know. What are you excited about, Boach? I'm excited for Jacob Sharpel's talks on Dex activity across the industry and Westy's talk around how you can distill active addresses into a useful metric. Dude, I'm not

going to lie. You don't care about either. I know. Guy guy who hates numbers. Neither of them involved hyperlquid. No hyperlid talk. No, but the thing is I think it'll be interesting. First of all, I'm excited to see Jacob talk because I've never actually seen Jacob talk. Um, this might come as a surprise to the viewers, but Daniel Smith does not let me talk to the data guys because every time I used to, it used to be about hyperlquid data and then now that we have it, they won't let me chat to them anymore. Um, I'm also excited to see Westy, but only because I don't really understand how Westi is built. Like, I've only seen him in this format, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to me like how he exists. And I'm excited to to see how it works out. Dude's built like a Mac truck. Dude,

that's I'm kind of worried because he's like at the gym all day plus doing like 10 15k races all the time. That's irrelevant. Danny, please can you bring us back to relevant topics? Yeah. Well, I guess I want to say why I'm excited. Uh, I think the people is one. This will be my first crypto conference. So excited for that. excited that it's permissionless and excited there'll be a dunk tank there. Um, but yeah, I think on the people side, I've never never met any of you in person. So, uh, it should be fun for that reason alone, regardless of the corporate versus startup culture maybe that was referenced, but I do think that's a that's an interesting piece of it as well. I would agree with Dan coming from a a more corporate job

in a in a prior life as well. Uh, there's something difference about something different about it for sure in the culture. Uh, let's David says he's excited to out drink me and Bach with Daniel. Are we doing that on the live stream? That could be fun. Yeah, it could be. That would be insane. One of us says something wrong and then somebody dies live from alcohol poisoning. All right, let let's get into it. Let's talk about markets. Um, there's actually a lot of stuff going on um this week. I feel like last week we kind of struggled with some topics. It was, you know, the same old same old. Everyone was talking about stable coins, but there really wasn't that much to speak about if I'm being quite honest. Uh, this week I feel like there's been a lot more happening. Um, and maybe Dan, it might be good to

start with No, we'll save it for later. Let's let's let the viewers trickle in and then we'll we'll talk about token transparency later. Um, we'll get to that one. We'll tease it up a little bit. Um, another topic of yours that I want to get into though is about sex is getting on chain. I talked a little bit with this with with Bach and Ryan on the recent round table. Um, but they weren't as passionate about this idea as I think you are. Um, but I do want to get into this because I think it's an interesting topic. It goes back to some of the conversations and like tweets and like ideas that have been circulating like you know quote core tweet from a few months ago, Robin Hood's just going to come on chain and like eat everybody's lunch or whatever. Um, but we're we're

kind of seeing this actually just within the industry. you know, Coinbase coming on chain, Binance is like making a push back on chain with B&B chain, um, and now Bybit coming on chain. So, yeah, if you wanna I can pull up your tweet, but I want you to talk through some of these ideas. Yeah, shared screen. Okay, cool. Um, okay. So, I was poking around with the idea of um, okay, if we look through history, we've had a different, you know, we've had different exchanges come on chain in a different way uh, over time. And if you just like intuitively think about it, it was sort of the exact opposite way you probably would guess, right? I think naturally my brain would go, okay, you start with the most lightweight way and then you transition into trying to own the full stack. And we actually saw the again the exact opposite. So Binance was first. I think

2019 B&B chain launched. uh they were an L1 proof of authority and really I think the goal here was to own the full stack but also create this like integrated ecosystem centered around the BMBB token right so Binance has different uh products and they like work handinhand with the actual chain uh so like their launchpad right you have to stake B&B is sort of like your entry ticket into being being able to participate uh or Binance Alpha they do interesting programs on uh the actual chain so I think right now they're incentivizing volume on certain pairs on Pancake Swap. That's why you see these massive blowouts in BMBB volume on chain. Um, but yeah, that's that's kind of the point, right? I think like their motive here again was to create this

vertically integrated ecosystem around this token. Then you see Coinbase, I think Bass launched 2023, I feel confident in saying uh maybe maybe 24, but yeah, probably 2023. Uh, so they went the L2 route, right? So a little bit more lightweight. uh and obviously the base is built on Ethereum and the they're actually creating a revenue stream for the exchange here with the gross sequencer profit uh based on the activity that happens on base. Um and then this one actually I think the motive is oh in terms of product integration as well. Uh so USDC they you know they're parking user deposits there they can improve the the you know I think they talked about the settlement times decrease rather than holding it on other chains. uh they actually probably feel a little bit more comfortable from a security standpoint holding it on

base. Um and even with the launch of CBBTC, their wrapped Bitcoin product, they've been really focused on catalyzing growth through deployments on base or even like Morpho, right? Now they're offering uh Bitcoin back loans through Morpho on on base, right? So you see this like product line that's focused at improving the experience you get from either the exchanges products um or directly through the exchange app, right? Right. And even just the other day they announced the you can uh trade any asset uh that's deployed to a ser um an integrated dex on base. So again, all of that kind of goes to say that the chain exists to accelerate the the roadmap or the product offering of the exchange, which is slightly different than what we saw with Binance, right?

Again, that feels like they're trying to build this more robust ecosystem inclusive of both things simultaneously, whereas Coinbase seems to have the view um hey, all we're trying to do is accelerate the exchanges vision and a chain gets us there. Uh and then by the recent announcement, right? So instead of doing anything related to building their own tech stack, a chain or an L1, L2, they're just going to deploy smart smart contracts or programs on Salana, uh it's facilitated around being a DEX. Um so we don't really know what the value of cruel here is yet. It's not deployed. I think it goes live on test net at the end of the month and um presumably there'll be some trading fees there, but really this just says, okay, you know, the core focus of our exchange is to uh list more assets and facilitate deep liquid trades, uh tight spreads.

and they were like okay well forget all the chain stuff let's just deploy programs on Salana again so this is the most lightweight version of getting uh where they wanted to be which is improving the single focus of the exchange which is trading assets uh so I just thought that was really interesting how you've seen this life cycle shift from really heavy to more lightweight I think there's a couple reasons for that probably the reality is when Binance launched BMBB chain there really wasn't that that ecosystem that would serve their vision they really want it seemed you know they centered this thing around the token B&B. Uh so you kind of needed the chain to make that happen. And then fast forward to the end of the spectrum with VBIT. They're they're like okay you know we like we think Salana is the got a

great scaling roadmap. They're high throughput. Uh tons of volumes happening there today. Why don't we just use that to partake in that ecosystem rather than trying to start from scratch build the full stack. We've seen that take multi-year to get off the ground as well. Um, so I'll pause there because I think the interesting thing why I was thinking about this was thinking about how uh large banks and fintexs are going to come on chain. Uh, so I was like, okay, well sexes are kind of like the crypto version of that in some regards. So let's kind of take a look at what they thought. But I'm curious if you have uh any thoughts about this. I think yeah, my end takeaway was the battle moved up the stack getting closer to the user um over time going from Binance's approach to buy bits approach. Yeah, I would agree. I I think there was

like maybe a realization that happened over the past few years where um maybe all of these teams thought that like building a chain was the requirement to do this like to get users and liquidity or what what have you whatever that thinking was. I mean at the time that was the thing right like you build a chain and then you get people to come there and trade and do whatever. Um but there's been a shift and I think a realization here that that that's not necessary at all. you know, you can just build an app on a pre-existing chain um and drive volume there and earn earn a ton of revenue on on trading fees and spreads and other things. Um and I think we've kind of slowly been seeing this shift. And I think one that you didn't mention but um seems like is pretty

relevant as well is like OKX wallet has also been like making some similar moves here where you know you start with a wallet and then like you build in like onchain trading infra and like back end behind that and you know I think they're routing to some meaningful partners now like Phantom um and maybe some others. So yeah, I mean I think we've seen like this slow shift of realization that like building a chain or an L2 or what have you for like a high FTV token is maybe less meaningful then you can just go out and build a product that earns a ton of money right off the rip. Yeah, Coinbase wallet too, right? Like they again they just want to be closer to the user. Um and so the L2 is kind of like this hybrid, right? It is fairly lightweight. Um they'd probably disagree. I think

they have a pretty meaningful engineering team focused on the scaling side of that. Uh but I think like the interesting point becomes it's like okay well you think about like Bank of America JP Morgan they have all the resources in the world to you know launch their own chain even Robin Hood. Um will they do that is the burning question. So like it's I'm pretty hardressed to think Robin Hood won't launch a chain. um it just feels like the natural point but uh maybe they look at what Bybit did and said hey that's a really lightweight to get off zero and maybe that's the natural starting point and we'll take more layers in uh over time just given the you know they do already have the customer they have their own web two front end that has done you know they put thousands of hours in uh tens of thousands hundreds

of thousands of hours into work of building um so I don't know man maybe I'm a little bit shifted here because JP Morgan certainly thinks they have the distribution network to build their own chain, right? They already have a chain, but it's like a private back-end style chain from sort of like that enterprise blockchain thesis. It's called uh it was Onyx, now it's Kexus. Um I don't I don't know the the construct there. Is it maybe it's an avalanche L1. Um but point being, you know, they launched JPMD, this stable coin, and it's on base. uh and you would have think that that'd probably be a great starting point for your own uh infrastructure, but they kind of went this more lightweight approach where they probably looked at Tether's B uh income statement, the most profitable company per employee in the world and

said, "Hey, we want some of that." Uh we've got the a lot of the surrounding infrastructure. All we need to do is issue this thing. Like that's the one piece that's missing for us. Like why not? Um so I don't know. It's going to be really interesting. I think I'm a less I think I'm a little bit less certain that we'll see all of these guys go build chains. Uh, and I think a lot of them are going to think about like lightweight infrastructure, whether that's issuing stable coins or other tokens, other assets, um, or a series of smart smart contracts or programs. Yeah. I um, one thing to note here is that previously it was more beneficial to just launch your own chain though because chains just got a massive um, bump in valuation. But now, I think this is probably with uh pumped off fun like and Telegram bots, you realize that

you can actually make a buttload of money um without having to wait the fouryear vesting cycle and whatnot that you would used to have to wait um and you can just like make a buttload of money doing that. So now we're actually seeing um more and more like people focusing more and more on applications. I wonder if this is going to also impact how good VCs operate because historically I feel like it's been kind of free lunch to just um I don't know give money to some dev who is building out a competitive L1 um and then cash out using that because you get you get an AML it has like a g guaranteed floor of like whatever 500 600 you take you get off on like a 60

70% discount you're making money still. Um versus now I feel like it's shifted quite a bit in that um a lot of VCs I assume can't even sell um they can't find buyers for their L1s. Um and probably like Alliance must have cleaned up, right? Um and I guess like app um VCs focused on apps as opposed to VCs who have historically been focused on L1's and infrastructure just because it was free money. Um, Daniel, just FYI, your screen is just It's fine. Only we can see it.

Don't do weird stuff. You're making it sound like I'm doing something weird. I am tweeting the link to this live stream. Last time you were moving weird on TikTok, switching up Coco Melon, Coco Malone. So that's but yeah that's I mean incentives have shifted people are making money on apps instead. Um we've really figured out that you can charge 3% for lottery tickets on volume and make a buttload of money. Um sometimes up to like eight n% if you figure if you count in priority fees and tips and whatnot um rev.

So yeah, we Yeah, I mean I feel like we've discovered that you can take an extra fee for offering users a better UI and then you can stack those up multiple times and the user doesn't care because they're they're happy to pay for it. I'll uh you know pump with a trading bot on top with a XYZ on top like you know the they don't care like they're just you know they're not cost-sensitive in this perspective. They're just they want to use like the best product and they'll pay for it. Yeah. Dan, do you know architecturally how the buy bit decks will look like? Like traditional AMMs like Orc and Radium like have an external piece and they rebalance the pools and they historically haven't been able to provide as tight spreads as let's say

prop AMMs like soul five zero etc. Like is BIB bit more like this later cohort of AMMs which has like a hybrid approach like no external piece like protocol own liquidity like tightest spreads like focusing on highly liquid markets. Great question. There's no docs yet so we don't really know but I would personally be pretty shocked and maybe even a little bit disappointed if it wasn't uh the prop style AMMs. um you come from Bybit's perspective, right? They already have great deep relationships with market makers and that's what you need to control these uh you know oracle price pools basically.

So I think you have the opportunity to do just that, right? You you just need to onboard market makers and kind of get them integrated with the system and start competing that way. Um so yeah, I don't know. It's not public yet, but we will see it on test net in 10 days. So we'll have a good indication then. Um, but yeah, again, I'd just be pretty shocked if it wasn't that. It's kind of the evolution of these onchain AMMs, uh, where they're going. I think eventually you end up at order books, but uh, you know, Phoenix tried to do this and, uh, the architect, the infrastructure just not quite there yet. So, these prop AMMs are kind of like a hybrid intermediary. Um, yeah, you see how well Sulfi, for example, is cleaning up on Jupiter retail flow, and that's a pretty good indication that that's probably the model to be using. Yeah.

And it's like the perfect setup, right? Can because they can actively take advantage of the sex dex arbitrage like just write redirecting like DEX activity to their their own exchange, right? Yeah. So, it'll definitely be interesting. Um I don't know. It's it could be more of like an RFQ system as well. Um sort of like Jupiter Z. I don't I'm not too familiar with the docs there, so I don't know exactly what that looks like, but Sulfi is like one degree different from an RFQ. uh are like I think in an RFQ system, you sort of need trust in able to get the right quote and then get that fill at that quote versus everything happening on chain like Sulfi uh you're just it's it looks like an AMM you're just being able to to move the liquidity for with an oracle instead of

a trade. Uh so I I don't know. I think I I would Yeah, again TLDDR I'd be a little bit upset if it wasn't that route or something new and innovative to be fair. I if it's just like a you know uni v2 fork like okay what are we doing like you could have made this a million times cooler. Yeah, I mean sexis have been able to compete like recently like you mentioned like OKX wallet and the OKX aggregator like it's been up on the index aggregator share since the beginning of May basically like Jupiter had like I'm checking like the chart from the dashboard Jupiter had like almost 100% share of text aggregator volume and today like OKX has around 18% % market share for the DEX aggregator volume on

Salena is the rest Jupiter is the rest yeah is the rest Jupiter Jupiter is 75% and then Dflow has around 6%. Yeah, I wonder if a lot of that volume for OKX is coming from um the like mobile app because I've seen it's like the fifth time I've talking about this, but I've seen this increasingly like new um user base for crypto which is just people with um Phantom on their phone who are just like raw swapping using that versus I feel like a lot of us I assume use Telegram bots mainly. But apart from that, I imagine a lot of us are using like a desktop to interact with like connect to

wallet the the old traditional way versus um I think a lot of the newer people who are onboarded are typically focused on using mobile and mobile wallet. So I imagine how much of that aggregator volume for OKX wallet is specifically coming from people who download the app and just use it that way. OKX wallet's also supposedly really good. Um, I think for a new entrant it is probably really good because it shows all of your I remember I fought with Ryan Connor about this because it shows all of your um all of your holdings in one page and to me that seems like hell because I like my like rabbi separate sooie wallet separate um Salana wallet is separate versus if I'm a new engine I probably want everything on one page and probably I only own

Salana. So yeah, I would agree with that. But they also done something to the aggregator because if you look at the share of trade routes on Camino swap like they did something in May and Camino swap has also been redirecting an increasing portion of trades through OKX uh since the beginning of May. Um I don't really understand the Camino bull case, Carlos. I'm going to be honest with you. Can you explain it to me? like I'm very very simple. Well, not all. It's trading at the lowest uh price to sales amongst all money markets and I think people are discounting the

growth that it may experience with B2 that was released a month ago. Um like B2 just embraces a modular architecture sort of like Morpho and Oiler. like in less than one month they've added like 12 new markets. They added eight curated lending bolts and they can tap now into like a a diversified set of lenders and borrowers. So they added new avenues of growth including like PT tokens from exponent that market already has like over 40 million in deposits um about 15 million in borrows. They've added private credit on the lending market. So they've on boarded a maple market. Oh, but for like really dog [ __ ]

assets right now, right? No disrespect to Kamino. Just like the early iteration, the assets that like the private credit markets they have are not fantastic. Piece of onchain private credit though. Yeah. No. No. Yeah. Riv. What is AAA private credit that's onchain? There isn't. I'm sorry. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, I agree. God, he's got so upset with me. Yeah. So, in summary, like private credit today on Cavinda looks like uh basically it's Maples uh syrup USDC. People are looping that against non-yielding stable coins. And then you also have Acred Sacred.

And people are also looping that against non-yield burning stables. Um so yeah in summary I think like B2 can spark a growth flywheel for a Camino and like they can scale aggressively. Um they also have like partner BS which I think is really interesting. So for instance Fuse just enabled like a bolt where users can deposit like directly from Fuse wallet to to Camino. And so you don't even have to use Cambina's front end to deposit into the money market. I think the left curve thesis is uh what's the meta trend happening and it's stable coins. So okay, all these stable coins come on chain, some of them gradually become yield bearing. uh what

gets interesting in that world. Then to me it's lending markets and then what's probably the uh more call option metatrend is like okay equity is coming on chain. Um okay well what do you what can you do with those when they're on chain? You're probably not going to be able to swap them through dexes today. Uh they're probably going to be transfer gated or transfer restricted right if you look at superstates um they have like a treasury fund and that's exactly how it operates. say like a and a couple other lending protocols are whitelisted uh and you can you know whitelist your own addresses you can transfer back and forth but other smart contracts are blacklisted because there's rules and regulations around how you can transfer those assets and if that's the case then basically the only thing that looks like it's going to be okay is lending markets so I think in both of those trends you see a

bullcase for lending markets um Salana has been at the center of a lot of activity this cycle a lot of it's been more uh let's call it like onchain native or left curve activity like memecoins and if you think there's going to be a maturation of the assets coming on chain uh it's still an interesting place for that to happen uh superstate for example uh they announced their first equity I think it was soul strategies I want to say and that's going to be coming on Salana um so maybe there's a pipeline there that gets interesting to consider and so given that perspective I think Camino is pretty exciting uh because it's the premier money market on Salana Um, and the other thing I think that is interesting is they have a unlock coming. I think someone actually in the ZeroX Telegram flagged this unlock. Uh,

but unlocks to me are only like scary or nerve-wracking for things that are wildly overvalued or overpriced uh or things that have valuations that cannot be justified. This is the cheapest lending mark uh lending money market uh based on uh revenue multiple. So, I think it's in a pretty safe spot for that to not really be a huge problem. I feel like you went I feel like your left curve thesis was not the left curve thesis. I feel like the left curve thesis is what you said on the end which is basically like Camino is essentially like if you took a plus morpho oiler on Salana um they they don't really have I think like stiff competition quite yet. So they're they're kind of like the blend of all of those things but on Salana and then you know comp the TVL

and the growth of stables etc on the chain. Um maybe even take the back half of that out like just say it's the a plus morphoiler of Salana basically. Yeah crack team is still innovating right the v2 launch went pretty well. They onboarded steakhouse and a few other uh well-known risk curators. So I think it's pretty exciting. Yeah, just long commamino. No, one last thing. They also have like uh they they're they aren't just the money market, right? They have like a full asset scaling suite now. So they have like the Camino swap product. They have limit orders that can power uh efficiency in the money market. So they can plug Camino swap into the multiply

product. So uses users don't get like slippage when they swap uh for looping strategies. They have a spot leverage product. They also have like liquidity bolts for bootstrapping new assets. So I think it's not just like a money market. They also have like a ton of other products that can like uh help them scale uh assets aggressively. One last thing I will say is that um I think like one reason it may trade at a low multiple is that there's no clarity around value acrruel for Camino today. So if you look at the Camino token today, it's not used for governance. Um it doesn't have any value aca is is talking about where people are discounting Camino because they're they

are like people are just not sure like what's the like what's the use of the token, right? So I think like if the team can add some clarity to that and align protocol growth with the token like over the coming like months I I think we would see uh repricing for sure. Yeah, Ryan Ryan said in chat by the lack of clarity. Uh I think it's a good point. What I guess maybe the follow-up question to that would be like let's say that's your idea. you know, how much time do you give them to provide that clarity um versus, you know, the rest of the market?

I think they should do it as soon as possible, right? Like I don't know their jurisdiction and I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. Um nor will I pretend to be one, but it seems like the regime is quite favorable. Um, I don't know about their like equity token relationship, but that's something that they can do through Daniel Smith's token transparency program. Um, in addition, segue. Beautifully done. Very good stuff. Um, yeah, I think like the time is now, right? like if I imagine there's quite a few people in it in their um circle or their adviserss or their VCs or team members who are telling them like this this needs to probably be

fixed or it needs to be disclosed such that uncertainty is I think a lot worse than because people can price um even if you have like a weird token equity relationship people can price that um but people can't price uncertainty and that makes it a difficult thing. So I think overall it I don't think you can go lower than having the lowest um multiple. Well, you can but I hope not. So I think uncertainty is probably worse there than go below zero. It's true. U but no I agree. The thing that really bothered me recently in these discussions was like oh they need to do a buyback or a dividend style distribution because they need to like prove that something's there. I'm like,

that is such an expensive way to prove that you aren't rugging the token. Um, that was actually what kind of kickstarted a lot of the idea behind the token transparency stuff. I'm like, there's just no way to just tell people you're not doing this. Uh, but yeah, I don't know because I agree like obviously you want to prove it, but uh forking over hardearned cash is a very expensive way to do that. That's in some cases negative EV to do. Wow. Oh, yeah. I agree. I agree with Dan. Like I I'm not advocating for like a buyback at this stage like in their growth cycle. I'm just advocating for more clarity around like aligning protocol growth with the token itself like but I agree it's hard to do that right. Uh I think yeah that taps into the token transparency stuff.

So they don't have any confirm like there's no public details about uh like where revenues flow in terms of like u the labs versus like the the token per se that's in the air. I think it flows to the DAO, right? But there's no Yeah, it flows to the Dow. I I just think there's no clarity around what Camina's utilities looks like, right? Beyond like seasonal staking boost today. That's fair. Well, I I do think that was a good segue, Dan. We should talk about token transparency then. Um, it sounds like Camino might be a great partner there to get signed up. Uh, you talked a little bit about the vision. I think we

should just dive into it a little bit. Um, I know we have some like the first cohort. We've got some details from them. Like I don't know, talk us through the the initial vision, what what we're looking at right now. And like, you know, I think people should realize that this is not like a final version. This is like a V1, maybe even like a V0. um you know it's going to need some improvement and some adjustment and some feedback but uh we're working towards that future state. So uh I'd love for you to dive into it like let's let's talk token transparency. What do we need? What do tokens need? Yeah, appreciate the the intro there and 100% strong agree that this is our first iteration. It's I would love to think we were capable of hitting a home run uh on day one, but the reality was we knew we wanted to get this to market in a way we

were happy to present it, hear community feedback, and continue to iterate. uh this thing is going to be evolving in real time. Uh it's only useful if the collective industry finds it's useful or else we've kind of failed at uh building a framework that pulls out the important information to the market. So broadly the idea was to just give these projects a tool to communicate an essential set of information about themselves, what they're doing, the operation, the entity structure to the market because previously that didn't exist. Uh and that's not inherently a bad thing that there isn't a disclosure regime today. But the what it does is basically create an opportunity for bad actors to come into space and profit off of ambiguity. If nobody is ever asking you to answer this question, you don't have to answer it. Uh and again, you can do sleazy

things behind everyone's back. Uh which leads to down only tokens, retail getting hurt, the industry looking bad, uh and a lack of growth. Right? If you talk to a lot of liquid funds today, they'll tell you that like raising their last fund was incredibly challenging. Uh I think a lot of this has to do with look if you have two tokens if you have a token and if two businesses one's a token one's an equity I think Felipe laid this out beautifully the discount rate you have to apply to the token today is much higher leading to a lower valuation because of all the risk you're taking on because DryFi has very uh well constructed markets that you know you're not going to get scammed or you can feel you don't know this but you're you can be very confident and you have the tools

to do sufficient due diligence to have uh again strong confidence you're going to be scammed. We even have like our own word for getting scammed in and being rubbed. Uh yeah, so I think if you haven't listened to Felipe's talk on lemon markets that he did at DBA's research day, strongly recommend that for getting a deep sense of what the actual problem statement is. Um but yeah, we launched a token transparency framework earlier this week on Wednesday. Uh I am overwhelmed with the feedback we've got in only just two days. The everybody was extremely excited about it. Jason Nanowitz, founder of Blockworks, tweeted, co-founder of Blockworks, tweeted out something to the effect of, you know, we're launching something next week. Uh, half the industry is gonna hate us, half the industry is going to love us. And that 50-50 split was honestly something I was like, yep, that's probably going

to end up being right. And oh, the the response was overwhelmingly supportive, like 991. Um, which I think really just goes to tell you how big of a problem everybody acknowledges this is. Uh, and so we were really excited to kind of put our hat in the ring and propose a solution. So the way the framework's constructed is there's four categories with a set total of 18 criteria. Uh they cover project and team, the token supply and allocation, the market structure and financial disclosure. Um and the we work with teams to actually fill this out. So they're submitting the the actual form itself. Uh and then we do a little an audit round on that to make sure everything's kind of like in line with what we'd expect the response to be. And then we publish that uh for everybody to view. The framework itself is open source. So you can go to

blockworks.co/token. cotoken transparency uh and click the template of the framework that we have available for everyone to check out. Um you can also please reach out we are setting up a streamlined submission form so we don't have that live today but if you are a project please reach out to myself Ryan Connor Jason Mike anybody at block works uh and you can get us in in touch with us to to get the submission in. The goal is to have everybody submitted. We want every project every token project to uh have completed this. I think it's I think it's just the right step forward for us as an industry. Uh and what I was probably most happy about, most satisfied with was when we started reaching out to uh projects that we kind of like knew the founders of or had great relationships with from just working in the industry. Uh they were

overwhelmingly excited to be a part of this because when somebody does something bad, it has this negative impact on everybody in the market. And so the people doing things the right way that spend tens and tens of hours, hundreds of hours uh ensuring they're doing things the right way, but hiring the right people, etc. Um it's it sucks when you get kind of stained with some bad actors actions when you're doing things the right way. And so that was the overwhelming surprise, right? And we've already had people like, you know, a couple of the large centralized exchanges reach out for like how can we integrate these into our product so that our users can see the transparency score. uh large uh companies that show price for tokens across the industry are excited as well. I think market makers are going to be excited about this as

well, right? They don't want that to be working with bad actors either and now they have an easier tool to ensure that. Um so it looks like we just got Brian from Jetto in and Jetto is of course in the first cohort. So Brian, it was a pleasure to have you go through this experience. Uh I think it's the you know I have an enormous amount of respect for the teams in the f first core first cohort because there is no precedent to doing this. Um and so you had to kind of be willing to do this out of your own goodwill uh for the industry acknowledging it's a problem and wanting to kind of produce that credible credible signal to the market that says hey we're doing things the right way. So first of all thank you. Yeah. No I mean thank you guys for putting so much

effort into this that I know it was a lot but I mean this is something I personally feel very passionate about. Like I was in you know traditional like public market investing for seven years. So like I know what like normal disclosure standards are and then being involved with judo for like three years you kind of see just like teams often don't have the right incentives and you know I think at jetto we've tried to do the right thing um as much as we can and not like cheerlead ourselves or anything like that but just kind of trying to lead by example but to create some sort of more system that you know rewards people that and also like talking to public market investors. it's really confusing for them to find any of this information. If you've like ever looked at a token yourself, it's like a day to find this basic information and now you

can find it in five minutes with your platform. And so changing project incentives and making crypto more accessible to people that want to invest in high quality projects is something that we really need. Yeah. No, I totally agree. Like that was the big challenge. It's like for a lot of these things you could find them, but it was it took hours of work and every single project did it differently. somewhere in the forums, somewhere in the docs, somewhere on a website you've never heard of, somewhere in Telegram, somewhere in Discord. And it was like, okay, there's no central repository for all of this essential information uh that to your point is like critical to making a decision about this token. Uh so not only for professional investors, I think there's a bit of an asymmetric uh angle here, right? Professional investors can generally get the founders or key members on the phone and get

these questions answered, but average Joe cannot. And so that was also the other thing that we really wanted to level the playing field and bring the essential information that you should be disclosing to the forefront. Um so yeah, I I I 100% agree there and again just glad to have people excited about it and just generally overjoyed with the reaction that crypto Twitter had. Uh it's not too often that 0x balloon lover will say something positive about Blockwork. So that was a huge win. Yeah, I think that's a big win. I I guess Dan, you kind of went through the framework generally and obviously, you know, mentioned Judo is one within that first cohort. Um, and I know Brian, you guys have also make been making your own attempts at headway um, with the regulatory agencies just in the conversations around tokens. So, but I

guess maybe maybe what we should frame up as a question here is like, you know, we know this is V 0 or V1. Like what are other things that you're thinking of or that came to mind from your end or from GTO's end as you went through this? Like, wow, this is great, but like maybe that, you know, we should also be including this information or that information. Um, what's that like future look like to you? Yeah, I mean I think this is a great V1, you know, proof of concept and there's a lot of widget to chop and you know, it sounds like you guys have had a flood of inbound from other projects teams which is awesome. I've been like showing it to a bunch of projects and teams I like. I'm like, "Hey, get involved because like we need it needs to be standardized um and

mainstream for it actually to work." I think the biggest thing that is on my wish list and it's not it couldn't have been included in the first batch because it's a very hard problem to solve, but is around insider token sales. Um, and that's something that we see, I mean, egregious examples of, or at least rumors of in the crypto space, and we like never have any idea if it's true or not. Um, and you can't just like be like, oh, this is founder A's wallet and like have, you know, an alert set up on Soul Scan that like tells you or something when it happens because like people need to protect their individual privacy. Um but if there is a way to you know aggregate all of the addresses not only team members but investors as well as any other insiders like foundations even uh and then have like a monthly report spit out about transactions there

then I think that is really critical information and so it's a it's a hard problem but like that you know as an investor would love to be able to understand like you know is the foundry dumping on me um and that's a key piece of information. Yeah, completely agree. Completely agree. I think there's a couple key areas we can we can improve on over time. So, of course, the criteria. I think there's some tweaking to be done. Consistency across the auditing side of things as well. Um, another one is who fills us out. Right now, it's like we kind of just went to the key members of the protocols and teams that we were building with. We're like, here's what we want to do and then they would kind of just figure it figure it out on their end. Um, but there's probably some standardization we should do there around who can actually

complete these, especially in the context of something like a truly decentralized DA. Maybe there's um somebody with x amount of voting power is is only eligible to actually complete this on behalf of the project. So there's like a million different directions you can go with the who. Uh the other one is when. So how often? Right now we have this kind of structured as a onetime filing and we're definitely taking in updates from teams especially in the first cohort. Like again we probably didn't get this perfect if you didn't get it perfect. That's just the realities of this being the first time it's ever been done. Um but Hester Pier uh Pur mentioned in her safe harbor 2.0 know a like rolling submission window of semiannual or every six months. So that could be an interesting thing to layer on in the future. The way I've been kind of talking about this is uh the industry on

a scale of 0 to 10 for its uh disclosure uh ability is at about a negative -2 right now and the V1 probably got us to a three or a four, right? And so it's like is that the end state? Absolutely not. But getting above zero I think was the most important thing we can do as an industry. And there's going to be baby steps of layering on and like incremental pain for the teams going through this to like actually complete the the work, right? you know, we get into this um insider transaction idea like, okay, we're gonna have to someone's gonna have to produce these reports. And I think the needle we really needed to thread on V1 was uh producing meaningful utility to the market, right? So getting the right information out without overburdening these teams because in a lot of cases, token projects go to market with less

than 10 people on the team, right? And you can't put like full gap accounting, full gap reporting, uh all of the trady uh disclosure regime built by the SEC onto the these teams. because it just won't happen. So, it's like, okay, how can we figure out what the right balance between those two things are? Um, I think we probably aired on the side of like simplicity. Uh, again, just for V1, getting this thing to market. And so, layering in these extra pieces, these extra criteria, uh, hardening up the amount of information we're we're actually requesting, uh, tightening down the scores to actually make sure we're getting there. There's there's a million different levers we can pull. So, over the last few days, we've been sprinting through like an internal review of, okay, we got five in. Let's let's digest this. What What were our key learnings?

let's make some small iterations before we go in and take in the next cohort. Um, so that's kind of the the goal, but we did get an enormous amount of in inbound as you flagged and uh that's just again a huge testament to how important people are actually treating this. And I just can't again I cannot be more overjoyed. Yeah, I think another area this is actually going to be really cool is if we have it for tokens that are launching imminently, right? New tokens have like no track record. it's really hard. And so having some sort of uniform standard, you know, say there's like 10 tokens or something launching this week and you can just filter through of like, okay, are these guys actually like giving revenue to the DAO? Um, are they, you know, where like the token sitting? Like all of this stuff is a really

interesting way to filter out new launches because if a token has been around for a while, like maybe you have some track record of like how the team has behaved and all that stuff, but like the uncertainty on new tokens is so high that I think this is really really valuable, right? In equity markets, you have like S1's and there are hundreds and hundreds of pages and here like at least you have some modeic of information to like this is worth investing in. 100% completely agree. Yeah, that's that's the idea for this but of course we have to go retroactive since nothing has existed and we have so many tokens. Uh but completely agree there's a lot of new launches on the horizon too. So I think we have some good opportunities uh at some integration partners there as well. Um but yeah shoot I had another thing I

wanted to mention on that but I'm blanking. I was going to say like I and I feel like that's one where the you know the timeline or the market itself the industry has kind of been asking for more clarity and more detail. You know you've seen with certain token launches in the recent like few quarters where conversation sparks up like oh they gave x% of supply to the exchange that they listed on and you know there's certain amount that's you know an airdrop but this is all kind of like rumors from people who maybe have a connection to an insider and so you just see it on the timeline and you're like is that true? Are they dumping on me on day one or are they, you know, are they locked up investing? Like, you know, I think the regular person again has no idea what's

happening here. You're just kind of like maybe taking the word of someone who is maybe two, three steps like down the rung of a connection to somebody who knows somebody at a protocol. Um, but yeah, I mean, totally agree. That's another big piece. Newly launching tokens having a lot more clarity around what all of that structure looks like before they come to market. Yeah, Danny, I I think that's a great point. And I think an a success metric for us internally is do we see when a new token is launching and if they've completed this do we see people arguing about what was said in this standardized form instead of like screenshotting something from discord and like from a year ago right that would be a huge win for us because now everyone has the information and then the market can decide for itself what's good and what's bad and

that was ultimately the goal. What we wanted to do is push this information into the market and not to the best of our ability not have an opinion about like is this the right or wrong way to do something. So like for example uh the relationship between the equity and the token is is a very uh contentious uh debate right now but we don't know what the best solution is like. So we don't want to say like is are you using this structure because we don't know what the the right structure is. So we kind of give an opportunity to describe the structure and the relationship between these two things instead of saying like being opinion baited about what you need to look like. Uh if you're curious to read more about that, like Miles Jennings uh from A16Z wrote a really interesting piece. I think it was titled the end of the foundation era or

something along that regard talking about Borgs and Dunas. And then Jake Travinsky had some really good thoughts. We did a round table um on a blockworks round table on that with Felipe as well. Actually, we gave some alpha in there for the listeners and uh we we kind of announced the token transparency quietly a couple days early in that round table. Uh but Jake Travinci has some kind of an interesting remarks around why foundations are actually uh a very good structure and it's just like it was people just abused how they were structured and that's kind of possible to do in many structures. Um so I don't know it's I would encourage that one as well. But uh yeah I think that's just kind of a good example for how we just want to push information into the market and let the market decide good versus bad.

Awesome. Well, Brian, appreciate having you on. I know you have a time crunch. Glad you could come on and talk uh you know, token transparency with us. Glad you were in that first, you guys were in that first cohort. And I'm expecting that uh you know, we'll continue refining what that looks like alongside you guys into the future. Yeah, thanks so much. Really bullish on this. If any teams want to talk to me about our experience going through it or however else I can be helpful to this, just anyone reach out to me and um I'll hook you up with what our experience was. So, thanks guys. Thanks, Brian. Cheers. Thanks Brian. My bad. I don't know. There we go. That's still me too. Um I don't want to waste Brian's time, which is why I didn't speak, but that I kind of want to harp on that that thing that you talked about, which is

that VCs and liquid funds um typically have access to this information um at will anyway. um at least from like good projects which is the list that we did currently. Um so I think this is like kind of really for the general it's for like even us I think it's because we're with Blockworks we can kind of you can message somebody on Twitter and say hey can you give me some information about XY Z um but I think the general populace um does not have access to this information. Well, and even if they do, like it's a bit of a good boys club, right? You know what I mean? Like if a new especially if you think that, you know, more institutions or new teams are going to enter this

space. It's it's not going to be appealing to them if you know they walk in and it's like, yeah, you know, these four or five VCs like they know everything about every token, but otherwise you're kind of locked out unless you have that connection. Um, so yeah, I mean I think it's just like broadly a win. Like democratization of the information is is just a win. Yeah, for sure. Um, I'm sure not all funds have Ryan Conor disagreeing with you in the comments. [ __ ] this guy. He said, "Fuck this guy to me." I mean that. Okay. So, I don't know where Ryan's going with this at all, but okay. So, one interesting thing that's one interesting thing that's that's definitely true is think, okay, if you're a, you know, a VC and you are

curious about someone like a project you weren't invested in, sure, you can like back channel and get to that founder eventually, but um you have like it's still there is still that access of like bringing this information to light. Um, and I think having teams answer these questions in this public format is just net positive for uh kind of like giving that standardization in that view. So maybe that's where Grime was going with it. I'm not entirely sure, but Oh, we got him on to yell at me to get his too. Look at this. That's all right. This guy's chilling at the house. How you guys doing? Hey, Ryan. It's been a while. I haven't seen you guys in so long. It's just been like me and Dan chatting. and took a transparency spot. We had a call this

morning. [ __ ] you're right. Carlos was on it. I mean, like, we haven't like properly hung out and now I feel like we can. Yeah, next week, baby. That's what Fridays are for. Permissionless. Yeah. Dan, ask him your question because I don't know what it was, but you're saying he's still somewhere with something. When When you said no, they don't. What were you referring to? like uh is professional investors still having access to this information? Was that Yeah, Fox said that VCs have access to this information and I think the blanket statement is not true. Um just think of the most recent rounds that we've heard about and chatting with VCs and they all kind of have different understanding of the

situation. Um and you know there's like um not all VCs are created equal. It's not just a homogeneous blob. I would assume that some exert leverage and others cannot to get information that they want. Um especially when markets get really hot, right? Like if it's a 2021 market, you know, the founder saying like you need to just commit to the round because I don't have the time to like send you the deck and you know the VC could be left in the dust. So, um, yeah, I don't think it's, um, a lot of people have been like a lot of the comments on token transparency is like, oh, now we're like fighting back against the VCs and like I don't know. I just think the blanket statement on like evil VCs is never something I've agreed with. You guys know this. Yeah. Ryan Connor

said it's easy apologist. It's easy to hate the rich, but do you have the courage to hate the poor? It's very powerful. Um, I think probably the only people who consistently have this data is centralized exchanges, right? Or like at least some form of this data in some way. Um, to me it like I don't want to make this whole token transparency live stream, but to me that feels like the I should probably do this in private with you, Daniel, to be honest with you, but to me it feels like that's the natural fit to do like some form of distribution to them. So, I don't know. go to SX and say, "Hey, look, like add this into your listings process so that we can automatically get it." Um, bish.

No, I think you're 100% right. That's something we're really excited about. If there's any exchanges listening to the stream, we'd be happy to chat on this. I I mean look part in the announcement blog post I wrote one of the points was like if this isn't useful for a centralized exchange in the listing process then we've missed and like we need to reconsider the questions we're asking how we're delivering it like we need to figure out why it's not and and solve that because it should be um I think it should help retail people and investors uh significantly and centralized exchanges largely act as a filter there right I think a lot of people with the least amount of knowledge that are in the case probably uh I can't I'm trying to make a serious comment and Ryan Connor's throwing different backgrounds on me. Uh I again

I think centralized exchanges uh act as this filtering mechanism, right? And so if we can make their lives easier on getting legitimate assets that have teams building actual products behind them onto the exchange and I think that's a huge win. So yeah, 100% thinking in the same line. Yeah, if only I was included into this process, maybe I could have given this information a lot. It's fine. I'm not unhappy. Yeah, I do think there's value there though as well, like having a body that's outside of them. Um because you know, naturally exchanges are only they're only going to get the information from the tokens that they're thinking about or planning to list on their exchange. So, you know, that's not the entire universe of tokens. So you know at block works just from the

interest of the data itself like there is something of a natural fit there to just gather information for any relevant token in the market that investors or researchers or developers might want to know about. So uh I do think I think that makes sense. The other benefit I could see there as well is just having this this confirmatory like you know the teams are saying these are the details maybe exchanges and maybe other parties as well are also confirming like you know yes these are some of the details that we've been provided as well like you can get a couple of you know potential handshakes in that process as well uh through having those connections whereas I mean we've talked about the example right now where it's just kind of like somebody posts a telegram chat and then like another person confirms or denies it on on Twitter, but there's no,

you know, truth, you know, there's no like pure truth to any of it. You're just kind of going on here say that's the negative, too. That's the negative, too. It's extremely unprofessional to just like say in a Discord, hey, we declare this as well. And I I think that's pretty objective and like if you want massive capital allocators to come into the space and provide capital so that teams can build cool things, you'll want them you'll want the the medium of communication to move away from those traditional channels. Yeah, that makes sense. And yeah, that's also why again why we've just been so excited about it is that hasn't existed. That tool did not exist prior to this. Um, and now teams have a way to to actually do this. So, yeah, I I think it's just a I think Jason might

have said this on the the roundup that went live today, but it was something to the effect of like 2025 is the year the industry matures and grows up and there'll be kind of that line in the sand between the two uh the two worlds, if you will, which is kind of also interesting in the context of like that plus the largest onchain activity this cycle was memecoins. Um, I don't know. It's I think like the barbell is very real and and very legitimate, very real things happening and then just the onchain nonsense is at alltime highs as well. Yeah. But I feel like memecoins really really took off partially as a response to people getting assaulted on uh what I will call VC coins and Ryan will get upset about like it was it was the fact

that there weren't clear disclosures. there was clear like secondary sales that were not being documented properly and not being explained and we didn't really know where everything like what was happening in the back end. Um which is so partially probably like apart from the whole gambling people like gambling thesis. Um I feel like partially at least it was like touted as like meme coins are like why buy a memecoin instead? Why buy like some insider fest VC coin while you can just like on pump everything is clearly seen like it's just a meme coin there's no expectations whatever um kind of a tie in there if you're interested Daniel

I think that was probably part of it like the I don't know I you know Ryan what are you gonna say just say it and then and then mute I I hate I hate that take. I hate that take that there like we got upset with the VC coin, so therefore we all went to the Well, the thing, but I very It's just not true. I very clearly said it's only Owen said, "I lost a bunch of money on TM. Now I want to go and trade coins." No, but that's not what I said at all. You didn't listen to me at all. You just you made up a narrative and then got upset about it. What I said is that it was pushed as something of that sort. It was pushed at like we all know that memecoins also are quite insidery

but it was pushed as people saying why buy specifically why buy tia berniski is just selling on your head look meme coins are not like that they're democratizing whatever just buy that this you can't I I'm not saying I agree with the stake I am saying that it was pushed this way through people said that publicly but I don't think that that was anyone's I don't think that anyone So you're agreeing you're agreeing with the thing that people people have said this but I don't think that it's true. No, but my argument is that people have said this. So you're you're agreeing you're you're confirming his argument, Ryan. He's just saying

he's doing one of those while doing it. People have said this. Yeah. Very good. Okay, that's one for Bach. I I will say like I think the nugget of truth to not I agree with Ryan here that like I don't think people made a conscious decision like oh I got dumped by VC token therefore I'm bidding with but I think that but I'm going to agree with you box so let me finish is that I think there's a nugget of truth that like at that point in time and even still now it's like you look around the the available token universe and you go yeah I mean basically all of these tokens are really just like narrative pump and dump. So like I should just buy the thing that's going to, you know, jump up the highest on the chart and that and that is probably a memecoin. So

I think that's really what it boils down to. You know, people just wanted the high highest volatility, high highest beta thing and they bid that. I I think people just saw people make a lot of money on Bonk and with and then Pump Fun made a very and people had been doing it for 10 years and then P made a very um low friction way to do that game. Yeah. But I think we're also like giving people more credit than we should probably. Um, I think a lot of people probably did buy meme coins because they were like, "Wow, like they fell for that Twitter narrative of financial nihilism." And we should Well, it's true. I don't know. Maybe the game is just like fun to play. I don't think it has to have this like grand mastermind

puppeteer behind the scenes. Like people just wanted to gamble and it was a it was the new gamble meta. Yeah. Yeah, I mean the reality is people probably a bunch of people brought bought TIA and staked it because of the narrative that you should buy and stake it. That was a gamble. I think that's worse. I think that's why I don't I think they're equally bad. I hate this [ __ ] lineup. By the way, this is the worst lineup for me to ever be. Threeon one. All right, next topic. That's funny. Can we talk about WorldCoin? Yeah. Yeah. What do you want to talk? uh that they're in talks with Reddit to uh be integrated onto that platform and Reddit's experiencing a huge um AI problem right now. Can they do that for Twitter, too, so I don't get the same four replies to every tweet I ever tweet? You're going to give

your eyeball data just so that you can post rev this week is up 32% on Salana. I actually haven't tweeted that in a while. Let me hold on. Please hold on. Let me farm the followers real quick. You know, like what's the what's the my I'm gonna say this and Ryan Connor is gonna call me a [ __ ] idiot, but if they ask me for my eyeball, I I'm not doing it. And I don't think a lot of people are going to do it, but the reality is that everybody's going to [ __ ] do it. And 50 million people have already done it. Yeah, I [ __ ] knew it. I [ __ ] knew it. 50 million people have already done it. And no one has possession over your eyeball other than you.

I is that true? Yeah, it's it's not like it's in their database. It's it's encrypted and uh the keys is the key is split and it's No, but it's held on your device so that you're the only one who has access. Yeah, he's asking about the 50 million and the 50 million is true, but a lot of it is like people I was asking about the privacy, but go off, King. Can I go off? A lot of the 50 million is like people going to um developing countries and emerging markets and saying, "Hey, I'll give you 40 bucks for this eyeball scan." And then they they get the $600 of airdrop that Worldcoin initially had.

Just FYI. I'm not saying that this won't happen. I think the world is a hellscape and it likely will happen, but I just want I'm bearish on the world. So, I'm bullish on worldcoin. Yeah, we've got optimist versus pessimist once again. Yeah. Yeah. If you I mean, you hate the AI stuff and this is this is a solution to that problem. Wait, that makes me sound like I'm one of those people that's like, oh, like AI is using 15 gallons of water per cury.

I'm not one of those people. I use AI all day. I think it's fantastic. I am. You hate the slop. I hate slop. Yeah, I despise slop. They've made Twitter fully slop now as well. It's like reb tweets, token transparency, Ryan Connor talking about pump fun. It's just pure slop. I Let's go back to the basics, the old stuff. FXS curve year in vaults. I want Freds on these. The originals, dude, don't take me back to Fracks, man. Westy Westy forced me to read the governance forums and write summaries about those for months. Come on. That was so funny. Hey, they got on the sphere. It's a win. Yeah. No, I think I think cool. I uh I don't know if I would scan my eyeballs. I it sound I

would say yes. I don't know if you put me in front of the orb if I could bring myself to do it. Uh there might need to be like two beers right next to it and then maybe I would do it. Um financial incentives. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I don't know if the the financial incentives not going to cut it, but two beers might. I don't know. I I like Okay, look. I you know if you've been to the airport recently you realize that your face is getting scanned every two seconds um your iPhone every time you open it up Apple wasn't there some monstrous data breach for Google and Apple as well like okay that's just probably worse than scanning your eyeball so I don't know and I'm definitely not like a I know there's like a lot of tech that goes into the safety behind these things that

I don't have a full grasp of but I feel like my eyeballs already been scanned I think it's natural, here's where I I'll agree with Dan, that like I think it's natural to be a skeptic about how they're handling the data just given how large corps have handled customer data just, you know, and obviously the assumptions there were different. And it's like, yeah, you're signing up for all these free apps and the result is that, you know, you're just giving them all of your data for free to go ahead and use and, you know, build apps or build ads and, you know, run their marketing machines with. But, and I, you know, maybe the ethos of this is totally different, but, you know, it just it's a natural concern, I think.

But that doesn't mean you have to be the 100,000th eyeball. you can still be the three billionth eyeball once you're convinced that you know it's meaningfully plus EV to for being a human or something versus being an AI. Yeah. What's your big take here, Ryan? I guess I'm curious where you wanted to go with this. Um I think the incentives are are just so strong from multiple directions to input to ingrain Worldcoin. um as first as a verification system, but then as perhaps a method of um payment on the internet. Uh that that's a step two and throw away. Can you guys hear that in the background? Yeah. What's happening? Are

you in a tornado? Dude, are you in a hurricane? Um is it is it still bad? No, you're good. Okay. Yeah. So, so two two big um powerful incentives to implement worlds coin. The first is um if you think that slap is going to destroy internet experiences, we're like, "Look, I'm looking for an apartment on online and all of the all apartment um photos now are doctorred by AI to the point where I show up at the apartment, I do not trust um what I'm getting into because they're so doctorred and it's so hard to tell the difference." Um, so if you think that slop is a problem, which it which I which I do admit it is

across certain verticals, you you could have hund you could lose hundreds of billions of dollars in in internet native market cap because it makes some of these companies experiences unusable. So there's a strong incentive for these companies to um work together to onboard um worldcoin. The other the other thing is A6Z. So they're an investor in world coin. their investor in most of the important companies in the valley everywhere from infrastructure to apps if you know they very famously I think it was uh they put their you know thumb on the scales of a few bank Silicon Valley bank to start banking crypto companies and that's how the first crypto companies got banked in the US because they were a portfolio company or they had extensive relationship uh you

see that in the valley if you know who the common investors are you can kind of guess first customers and who has more gold than them they're launching these absolute megapons. Um so you have you have different forces coming from different directions to incentivize um you know the use of in these applications and I think it's it's really there's a flurry of rodents attacking Ryan Connor at the moment. Um yeah no I mean I I I agree. He sent me a Mark Andre podcast the other day uh that talked about the mega funds and um kind of like their view of the world which was pretty interesting and ties directly into this and I think it's

pretty hard to ignore that in the context of like open AI and world coin coin and the overlap between the two. Um I don't know man is also cracked. I'm kind of changing the subject here, but uh our head of creative uh Reed Hannifford just put together a pretty cool ad for permission list in like two hours using VO3. Uh and it was it was pretty fun to kind of give him some ideas for like cryptonative slang that we we use in the industry to help build this out. Um and it was cool. It's just like incredibly incredibly obvious that you need to be adapting and evolving or you die. Uh yeah, this we live in a very strange era and that's like the only thing that I think you need to be reminding yourself. Yeah. Yeah. I like VO3 and I've been trying to play with it

actually for this pod to like make some animations and things like that. And um they recently I don't know if this is for every user or for some users, but they rate limited to three generations per day. And that has me absolutely raging because I'm trying to freaking get this model to do what I want. But yeah, the video from Reed was sick. Um, I think they only it only generates like short clips, so I'm assuming he really had to like piece together a ton of clips there. But, um, yeah, see what it can do. You should read his thread. I'll, uh, I'll put it in the chat here. It was just really cool to hear it from his perspective as somebody who's been a director their whole lives and like takes the design and and creative side of things incredibly seriously. Um

because you hear a lot of push back from from that community as a whole. You know, people are I think every career should be be scared to some regard, but I think the creative world has had some harsh reactions. If you remember like the studio Gibli uh phase we had, right? The actual creator of that design was incredibly offended uh because people were just like mass reproducing his work. Uh so yeah, Reed had really cool perspective on it. Really glad he shared that with the world. I'm gonna throw in the chat right quick. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the big takeaway there was something like along the lines of, you know, it's a it's a sick tool. Like you can really spit out some cool stuff pretty quickly, especially if you've given the right prompts and maybe you even need to like prompt to get your prompts to be good prompts for the video

prompts. Um it's a lot of prompting. But either way, um, you know, some of his big takeaways were like, you know, it's not going to be necessarily perfect, especially if you're from if you have that design view of like really what you want something to look like, but you know, you can very quickly get um, you know, good ideas and models like turn to life and then with additional editing flare, like you know, really make something interesting out of that. So, it can turn a ton of work into far less work, especially if you don't need to be absolutely 100% precise with all the details, which is awesome. And I imagine that's just going to get better.

Yeah. If you hear Sam Alman talk about how like, you know, he's like, "You all hate model names." Yeah. So do we. Like their goal is to make it so you don't even see the models and the based on the question you ask, it kind of solves that problem behind the scenes without you having to actually choose that. Um, so I think that, you know, right now we talk about how important it is to be like a prompt engineer. I think it's like their goal to kill that being important to ever. For what it's worth, I always use the top model for whatever I have to use. So now I have to wait like seven minutes because 03 Pro takes so [ __ ] long. I have thoughts, but I'm not going to share them. Oh, it's I mean Danny, your point that it's only going to get better. That's the thing and that's why this is so

urgent. Like we we know it's going to get better in the same way that we knew that semiconductors were were going to get better. Like folks who were working on semiconductors in the 60s, they understood Moore's law or 70s. They they understood Moore's law so they could do the math and know where things were going. Um you know Netflix, they started selling DVDs knowing that bandwidth was going to get to where streaming was going to make sense. scaling laws is increase the data 10x increase the compute 10x you get 2x improve improvement in performance it's whole day so we know how to and it's getting actually more efficient over time so we know where this is going and that's that's why things like are going to be so so important um like just think of the dating apps the dating apps lose all their market

cap if people go on there and they can't and they lose trust in what they're on the other side. You know, it's tens of billions of dollars. Worldcoin dating app. That sounds like my word. You got to scan your eyeballs like to avoid the bots. But but imagine you're a single person and you like you use those dating apps and um all of a sudden they don't work for you anymore. Uh and you don't know which one to trust. You get Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I feel like it's already the case. No, like any of the metrics that you see posted online from, you know, below average individuals in society are just like, "Yep, I have, you know, 9 million right swipes and I get like one match and then

it's a ghost." D, I can't believe you said below average human beings. I I mean it's just it's just the truth of what like this era is where like you know when everyone can see all the options available to them they want the really highly valuable ones and so then all of the less valuable like they get lumped into this bucket of like you know not wanteds or whatever you want to call it. But that that's just like what has happened to the online dating experience. But yeah no doubt that there are some problems. Um, I don't know how the stocks are doing, but um, I think it's important to consider that, yeah, the dating apps, they aren't necessarily for dating.

They're more for swiping and playing that game. But if you lose confidence in the end of the game, which is like to actually get the possibility of a real world experience, if if it's so diminished that you don't think that there are any humans on there that you might never talk to them, you might totally churn from the app. Um, same thing with Reddit. There are companies that are actually expensing resources to do their marketing solely through guerilla marketing via LLMs on Reddit to do like you know um to do like restaurant reviews like local. We lost them.

I will continue Ryan's point. I think he was going to say they're doing it through Reddit and LLMs will probably die soon because of that and we're all going to start touching grass is what I expect he was going to say. [Music] You want to continue your thought? Buck tried to finish it. Where did I get where did I get lost? LM's on Reddit. Yeah. So, so, so companies are not spending money on Instagram or they're they're opting to not spend money on Instagram ads in your feed and they're opting to pay devs to spin up.

I'm I'm kicking this dude because this is this is too much. All right. Um I hope he doesn't fire me for that, but we gota let's talk about coins. Is that okay? I'm in. Yeah. A little trench talk. little bit of trench talk. Um, is anybody finding anything particularly interesting that I should be buying right now? My portfolio is contra constructed of hyperlquid and BTC. So, I'm looking for tokens. Did you buy any circle? No, I didn't. I don't buy David was chill and drink on the chat. We can

I can't I can't buy David. They're permanently. I will say we just lost Ryan Connor. I want to share a hilarious quote from him the other day where he said, "Are the trenches back or am I just insane right now?" Because he's hit some runners in the memecoin trenches. I get I wanted to get your guys' thoughts. Are the trenches back right now? Do you think so? I don't know. The thing is that anytime you're like it's bad, somebody will be like, "Well, I just hit a 30x, so you can't really Which is a Ryan Connor case." Um I feel like they're not back. Um, but it's it's very difficult to index to it because

like the way that I'm thinking about it is November, December, January where everything went up and like it felt like the lower ceiling was 20 30 mil for tokens. Um, versus now I feel like things are topping way way earlier. So to me indexing back to that I feel like they're not back. I'm sure that there are pockets where like you can outperform just because you're buying the right token at the right time. Um, but I don't know if I would say we are fully fully back because that feels like kind of disrespecting what we had before. Yeah, it's an interesting question. Um I mean from a activity standpoint around like volume and

um revenue for pump fund they it feels like they've been pretty consistent right if like the AMM obviously has accelerated their growth from their own view but if you look at just the bonding curve uh you know we've kind of been at this let's call it a homeostasis since uh late February uh so it's like six month period now where we've kind of this has sort of been the new normal um so I wouldn't say are not back, right? I mean, the numbers don't support them being uh at a new high or new low really. Um, but we've mostly just been in this new this new normal. Um, where we're kind of just chilling around that 10 million in in weekly revenue. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think you can definitely hit runners in this environment and when you do hit

a runner, you do feel like the second coming of Christ. So, I I guess that's kind of in line with Connor's uh Ryan Connor's, you know, remarks. Uh, same. Yeah, we've been flat on like tokens launched, tokens graduated in the same neighborhood. Interestingly, actually, token graduated up from that same like homeostasis period, but I mean, not much. Um, and I guess the the market cap one, I think, is the interesting one here. That this is my if I could pick one KPI of like a launchpad, to me, it's this one. Um, the amount of revenue can vary based on your, you know, your your fee structure. the amount of volume can differ based on if you have an AMM after the the the uh bonding curve etc. Uh but the amount of value uh from the tokens that you've launched is ultimately kind of like the the competing number. So

yeah, I think I think this is also good evidence evidence and then looking back to that that period we've kind of been looking at uh so early February we're slightly elevated from that. It looks like interestingly volume held up around this period from between February and April. Uh but market cap bled pretty significantly. Um but yeah, you can see we're kind of back at uh somewhere around the five bill mark uh short of an all-time high just under 12. Yeah, I mean it seems like Ryan is just hitting some winners right now. He's, you know, maybe he's just in tune with the trenches at the moment. Um that that's the vibe I'm getting. And I think I like that chart that we have as well, Dan, with um number of co tokens at X market cap or above X market cap and then it's like broken out right next

just go back up the one that was right next to the one you were looking at. And then if you zoom that one out as well, it's like you can see a similar trend there where it's like, you know, there's still activity of course like people are trading, tokens are doing things, but um yeah, I mean I think Bach had a point that like the market caps that tokens are running to are certainly you know distinctly lower than they were back in Q4, Q1. Um but there has been like an uptick in the past what two months, right? Do we have any stats on like pump live streams and how they've been doing?

Yeah, it's the burning question. I don't think there's anything on chain that signifies if a token is related to a live stream or not. So, we'll probably have to work with the team to try to get that actual data. I'm gonna I'm going to probably test that later today. Maybe I shouldn't say that. Um, I'm not going to actually live stream. I'm literally just testing. Uh, maybe I'm not doing it anymore. Uh, but uh I don't think there's anything on chain, so we'd have to work with the team to get that data. But I mean that's an awesome question. Yeah, I think and I will say like obviously Pump, they have their own front end for it, but Axiom as well, they have um a segmented um like UI like tab on their on their app that um is specifically live stream tokens. So yeah, I'm sure they have some way of categorizing them uh based on the

data. Yeah, I guess I was kind of just using a actually I mean we can do this. I was kind of using pump as the proxy for uh sort of all activity but I mean I think it generally is uh I mean the issue is say anecdotally like I don't have stats on like the number of coins but the I've been watching just like the top live stream tokens and there's not been anything crazy going on there outside of like the few personalities who have spun up tokens. So like the Gainzy Streamcoin has been anywhere from like a few million to like 10 million market cap. Rasmer just did a

coin and live stream on Pump Fun and it similarly like went to you know 10 million but I think is in the few million range. So, it seems like, you know, these creators that are relatively wellknown in the space, like they're they're hitting interesting market caps and then there's a lot of just like I think you would probably call it slop content to be quite honest in terms of live streaming where, you know, maybe it's just like an AI thing that's like an AI radio or like just music playing on loop, this type of stuff. Yeah, we should get Dan, you guys, you know, get Sharples on it. We need to get some data on the live stream coins. That'd be great to break out. Do you guys know what's going on with Pancake Swap? Like I'm just checking the DEX spot volume dashboard and they doing they're doing like over 50% of all DEX

volumes. I can chain. Yes. Yes, we do. It's the uh Binance is doing an alpha program where they're paying for like they're incentivizing the volume side of the trade. So, usually you see like the liquidity incentivized, but this one is like you you get dollar you get points which turn to dollars for every dollar of trade volume you execute. Uh, and so they're running that on Pancake Swap on B&B chain. So, um, yeah, you can see the outsiz impact B&B and Pancake Swap have in like all of the data right now. It's very very annoying. Uh, I'm not happy with them for this. It ruins all the charts. Uh, even like I mean you could debate about whether or not that should be filtered out, but like it's fee paying volume at the end of the day. Maybe we can put like an incentive toggle on there if there's like a known program running on a pool. Um, that'd be

pretty interesting actually. But yeah, TLDDR, Binance Alpha program is running an incentives program and specifically incentivizing the volume which is unique with BNB token. I don't know actually what they end up paying you in. Um, it's a great question. It's very hard to find any information on this. I found like one Binance forum post uh that kind of like laid out the I'll try to find the tweet uh of like how they were structuring it. Incentive token transparency, incentive program transparency. Yes, we need another initiative. Yeah. Do you think categorizing categorizing like the tokens with the incentives would be really interesting and then have that as a category on the chart and see like what portion of the total volume is

coming from those pools. Um because I'm just going to pull up Dex screener here real quick as an example. But like you can see bedrock this token has done nearly three billion in volume on 16 million liquidity on this pool at a 10 million market cap. So like what's it paired with this in this case USDT. Okay. It's not a CO one, but like previously the ZKJ CO pool or pair was the top traded coin, but I'm assuming this Bedrock token has the like current best campaign or maybe it's the only active campaign currently. Um, I know there's like a it's been a variety of coins and they've kind of been like going through different periods where they're active.

But, uh, yeah, I mean this this pool's four days old and it's it doing three billion in volume in the past 24 hours. So, um, at a $10 million market cap, like that doesn't make any sense. So, yeah, you can you can see the the very obvious impact that that it's having on the trading here. Yeah. I mean, but as Dan says, it's fee paying because like I'm looking at our app compare tab and then over the past seven days, the only projects that have done more revenue than Pancake Swap are Hyperlid and Sena. like hype like pancake swipe is third across all uh all projects in revenue which is crazy. That is crazy. Um what's the multiple that it's trading at over that

time frame over seven days two to four right? I mean, you can kind of see the market one. Exactly. I think you can see the market kind of discounting the quality of that revenue as well in real time because Yeah, I found that tweet. So, they're giving you points again. You get two $2 of volume gets you one point and it scales up um from there. So, $4 volume gets you two points, $8, three points, 164, 325, and so on. Uh it's unclear to me what exactly these points get uh redeemed into, but clearly there's demand for the points. Man, that's a great that's a great design for the most volume possible. It's hilarious.

Let's do a logarithmic curve for points farming. Yeah. I I mean and naturally like I think if you look back on Pancake Swap's trading volumes like I mean they've done more than a 10x or so in like total volume that they were trading on a daily basis from before to now that these campaigns are active. I would imagine that sure they're while they're earning some revenues from this I I don't think their revenues 10x like these still must be lower fee pools than they otherwise would have been because yeah a lot of them are one bit. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody would shove 10 you know a billion dollars through a pool if they were paying you know some 0.25% fee on the volume.

Indeed. Indeed. that ZKJ coach pool was was indeed one BIP doing like four billion in daily volume. Yeah. Yeah. I mean I'm sure whatever like the math on the trading campaign is like you know whoever the whoever is doing the trading here like it's there's the the design is very clear. So you know you can do out the math and see like up to what amount of volume you make sense to trade and then just exactly trade that amount of volume for the points and those points will you know convert into dollars for you or whatever they get converted into. if it's BNB or USDT or what have you. So, um I think we're just seeing the natural outcome of that where this will continue to play as long as they keep those incentives rolling. Um something I want to ask about that is maybe slightly

related but different is um we're seeing that X is also now maybe getting into trading on platform um investing and trading they mentioned. So, you know, maybe that includes like buying stocks, but maybe also like trading crypto or other things on the platform kind of, you know, I think this has been an idea for a long time for a lot of social media platforms like they want to get all of this like the entire universe of what their users kind of do on their phone like all onto their platform and obviously investing in trading like that's a bit a very valuable piece just given that you can take you know spread and trading fees and we've seen how profitable that has been for you know the pump funds and the trading bots and the wallets of the world. Um, I'm curious if you guys have any like strong thoughts about this. Like to me, it just

feels like another, you know, like Telegram has ton chain, but in my opinion, there's like really not that's not really like that well integrated today. And, you know, trading bots, for example, that use Telegram as like their backend for their app, you know, they make all the money and Ton doesn't get that today. Um I I don't know how X may go about this differently. Um you know force it all on platform and you know connect with market makers and exchanges to kind of run it themselves. What are we thinking about this? Yeah, I think it's very interesting. Um I think that you know messaging for most people on planet Earth is not really a natural place for financial activity. And in

fact, people do not want um financial activity within their messaging application, at least historically. Um I think that it happened for um very path dependent reasons for WeChat, and I think there are obvious reasons why it didn't happen elsewhere. Um the other problem with Telegram, I I I do I do like the Telegram story, but but there there are obviously risks to it. And the and the biggest one is that uh they don't really have the wealthiest markets. Telegram is most popular in places with, you know, GDP that are it's far less than Western Europe and in the United States. Um but that's the opposite for X. X has a very US- ccentric um very um western and um wealthy audience. Um it's a little more high brow. a lot of you

know it's a a place where like kind of more intellectual like uh or you know knowledge based industries tend to you know have their social conversation and I think that's a much more obvious place to launch financial products than in app messaging how credible do you think it actually is that they are planning on building this because I remember 2021 they were speaking about like adding Bitcoin in ETH addresses like to profiles and being able to tip in that. I mean, they could just be like saying stuff and not actually doing it.

I heard last summer that ex employees were working on it. I think I think it was like an open secret that ex employees were perhaps working on it and who knows like I feel like there at big companies there's always someone working on everything. Um, but hey, you know, you just look to Elon's past and you know, Elon has said for two decades and, you know, this was his plan with PayPal that he wanted to make a super app um, you know, with payments and social and he's talked about it recently and it it hasn't left and I think I think it's like the natural progression if you had um markets where um that weren't burdened by regulation and you know political consideration ations like if you remember like 20

years ago like Walmart tried to get into finance and they couldn't because regulators stopped them. You had Meta who tried to do a payments app because very because they had the user base but again regulators stop them. um it's a very natural place to kind of launch financial products if you have a big audience and the primary thing stopping these uh companies from doing that has been just like overzealous regulators and you know perhaps this is the moment that we have in the United States where we don't have that and they can actually execute on these things and it's going to be frankly it's going to be easier than ever because stable coins are very internet native uh whereas in the past it was much harder um because you didn't have these internet native um financial products, but how credible is it? I'm sure someone's working on it, but how

how seriously are they being taken? I don't know. Elon's serious, though. It just it's just a matter of when, I think. Yeah, makes sense. They We also recently saw the Poly Market and X integration or partnership, whatever it may be. And I think that's a pretty interesting way to think about how they're viewing it, right? Like they have the distribution, and if you have the distribution, you can partner with the product. Um, and you know, you take a cut of flow. I think the the monetization path there is pretty straightforward and favorable for the player with that has the distribution as well. Um, so yeah, I don't know. It'll be very interesting to see where it goes, but I I'm definitely bullish on the idea. Um, I don't know. I to your point about not wanting everything in the same spot, I kind of feel that way like but I'm here to experiment, so I'm down. And if I could,

we've said this a lot about uh podcasts recently, but it feels like if you have a debate podcast, there should be some sort of live market on the winner of the debate, then if you could do that all directly within X, it would be very cool. So, I think there's cool ideas like that that are more so in this new direction rather than just like, yeah, my, you know, I can like double tap my power button and pull up my XPay. Like, I I don't know. that doesn't really get me that excited, but versus thinking about content in a new way. Yeah. And I I do wonder how focused they are on like even their live content, for example. Um it it's quite limited, I would say, relative to other live streaming platforms in terms of like audience interaction with the

stream. And maybe that's maybe that's fine, but um it seems like if you added in some more of this like onplatform payments and trading and other things like there would be an opportunity there for like greater integration of like you know yeah now users and followers of different you know these different personalities or uh you know streaming or live streaming like groups or pages could you know then interact with them directly or you know you hook in you know topics being talked about and the assets being traded into that sort of conversation. Um, similar to what you're talking about with with with Poly Market there, Dan, but um, I I like the point about distribution, you know, the finance and like crypto communities on here. Certainly like

there's just a ton of discussion about the assets that they're thinking about buying that they are buying that they are selling the options that they want to trade and then like obviously all of that activity happens elsewhere. So it does feel somewhat natural that there might be an opportunity to like get a piece of that um and just pull it on the platform because this is where a lot of that discovery and conversation is happening for a ton of users. Clearly this also taps into like the super app kind of framework like you see more common in Asian markets where you have like kind of one super app for everything. I just feel like in the US and Europe and the West in general, it hasn't been the case where you have like everything just in one place. Um, but yeah, it's I don't know. I'm skeptical

that it will work, but it's an interesting idea for sure. Yeah, I think in the US the iPhone is the super app. It's going to be hard to break that. That's going to be but but you can bundle some products for sure. They have the distribution to do so. It's it's but it's actually kind of odd like to watch Grock kind of flounder, right? Like maybe that's a test. Um I don't find I'm not using Grock as I and it's not because I don't want to. I think it's a good model. I just forget to Yeah. Yeah. It's like separated from the product experience, right? Uh I feel like the you know trying to integrate it like into the you know when you see a

tweet there's like the gro button and it can like you know do some of that for I feel like they just need to take away some of the user choice in the matter and just like more you know focus more heavily on like from a product standpoint how is it integrated and making the like user experience better. It's it's I see a lot of tweets responding to uh or a lot of replies where it's like, "Hey, Grock, is this true?" Um maybe that's the form factor where it's like, "Hey, um Grock, agent, Grock, finance agent, like 2x long Apple um based on this tweet or something."

I will say though like we've tried that a lot like I mean there have been many attempts like within crypto where obviously the focus is generally all trading at the moment with you know these protocols and bots that you know you can set up in your discord that exist on Twitter and all these other places where you know you can add them and then go long a token but uh it seems like it's an it's an idea that's you know people get behind it and then it fizzles out fizzles out two weeks later like it isn't um there's not something like interesting enough to keep it going. I don't know, maybe that just needs to hit a critical mass, but to me it still feels like this is going to sound insane, but like it feels like too much work to have to

write out a tweet to say, "Hey, at thing go buy this for me." than just like open the app and hit the buy button. And maybe that will change, but you know, I I do think there is something to this concept of like giving a user like endless choice versus just like giving them a button to push. It's an interesting point. I But but it makes me feel the opposite. Like how many times do you see like the big go token that kind of ripped based on this tool and um someone else chatting about um I don't know blockchain design stuff. If I could reply to that tweet really fast in app as opposed to having to switch apps.

I agree with that point. But I maybe reply this contract address when you It should be better. It should be even better, right? I shouldn't even have to reply. Like Grock should say you're a neural link should it should it should do it like it should know okay and then this is the CA and then it makes the button and it says buy and you just press it like I think they need to abstract all of that and just put the button there for you and that is like the winning product and then you log into into X with Neurolink and then you don't even have to click buy or sell. It's just you just think you just see their feed in front of you with augmented reality through your neural link. See where this is going. This is nuts.

Wall-ally is next. Where where' Boach go? I don't know. He got scared. Um Yeah, he he was scared of you. No, I I agree with your points about Grock, though. I don't use the inapp Grock. I think it's trash. I don't know why it's so bad, but it's horrible. It doesn't know anything about Twitter, and that kind of is like why I'd want to use it. I've downloaded their secondary app and it's pretty good. Um, but I don't know. I'm just kind of like a O3 guy, so that's my go-to. Yeah, this is what I thought of with the Neuralink idea. See action. Totally.

What else we got? Um, I got one more thing that maybe we can we can talk about. Um it's interesting because it's a little we talked earlier about um making chains, you know, centralized exchanges or you know, crypto companies making their own chains to come on chain. Um and then now we're seeing that trend where, you know, maybe they're just making products on pre-existing chains just getting right to the user. Um let me pull the monkey off the screen. Um but we do still see like and obviously this was already in motion but um Inc. for example Krakens Inc. uh they have announced the INC token is coming.

Uh I don't know that much is really happening on Inc. today. But I do think it just it presents like this kind of interesting crossroads that we're at as an industry right now where you know you see teams like by bit and OKX like we talked about you know they're just going out they're building products they're building wallet they're building index you know they're getting right on chain where the users are um and then you kind of see this continuation of this idea of like you know we need to do what Coinbase and Base did let's launch a chain let's build an ecosystem there let's get a token out um I don't know I don't have super high expectations for Inc. mostly because I don't really think anything is happening there. I mean, we could pull up the numbers, but I I don't think that they would get many of us excited

today. I don't know. Is there a big takeaway here? Is this just like get the token out? Why not? Yeah, you go. Go for it, D. No, you go. I like I like Kraken. I I haven't used it, but I increasingly meet people who are using it and who really like the product and you can see that something's changed there. I think for years they were they were behind and you know they've really accelerated listings velocity and they've partnered with uh I think the right chains and are not being so ideological which I heard you know internally they were. So, um I think if there's a sleeper that you want to bet on, I'm not saying that this is what Blockworks re research feels

about Inc., but Kraken's doing a lot of the right things. So, yeah, I don't know. They've building a chain is really hard. Uh and getting activity on your chain is very hard. We've seen a lot of chains that are at that two, three year mark and there's still essentially nothing happening on them. Um, I think it's going to be increasingly hard to do that. Uh, but I think Inc. has the power of Kraken behind it and we saw how well that worked for Coinbase and base, right? And so if you can uh iterate on that playbook and figure out a few key optimizations to make, then you know they have every reason to be successful. Um, I hope they didn't just launch the token to have an incentive tool. I think that's just like a sad and depressing end state if that's the case. uh but is

certainly possible. Um but uh I think netnet it's it's interesting right because they're in the optimism collective and so the super chain or the optimism collective governs the super chain which INC is a part of. So the token actually doesn't have governance rights over the chain itself which is kind of interesting. Uh we never really hit this problem because BAS didn't launch a token. Um maybe problem is not even the right way to be phrasing it just like interesting thing we've yet to see before. Uh but like tokens like mode or chains like mode have a token as well and um I mean mode's maybe a bad example because it didn't really work out uh to see too much activity happening over there. Um or even unis swap and you know that doesn't govern the uni swap uh uni chain uh but presumably it's going to have a role once the UVN goes live. So

it's just kind of interesting to think about if there is no governance rights then what is the role of the token? Uh if it doesn't have a governance rights value acrruel like it feels like an incentive token. Um, and that's definitely something to be wary of in this case, I think. Yeah, I think I think I agree with that. Like I think tokens are incredibly powerful for distribution. Like think about like the Sena Seeker and the Seeker token. Um, I think like Seeker in that case is just like a distribution tool to get people to buy the phone. Uh, I think the same thing here. I think like the in token is just bringing attention to like the Inc. chain. I don't think a lot of people are using it now and like they can showcase like the

products that the chain has via ink incentives or like embedding it in like the native lending markets or native taxes of the chain. So I think it's just like a distribution tool. Like is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. But I think undoubtedly you'll see more people use ink because of the token and without it. Yeah, maybe I'm changing my tune a little bit after thinking about it a bit more because I think to Ryan's point like we've really seen Kraken amp up some of their efforts at least it seems that way just based on recent announce announcements and you know like we know they're going after tokenized equities on chain for example with backed on Salana um but then obviously also there's inc as an L2

on ETH and I don't know, maybe this is just like they're they're putting out a bunch of like tendrils and like, you know, we're just going to see what what sticks, where we find traction and um clearly seeing like, you know, Coinbase and and Bass has been like relatively a success for them. So, um maybe there's an idea to kind of replicate that strategy a little bit and and Coinbase is or not Coinbase, Binance is doing this a little bit as well um with B&B chain. So, you know, maybe they just see the opportunity there to, you know, put some of the assets on chain, issue some of their own assets, put them on that chain, like, you know, do some integrations with the exchange, but then also explore other products. Um, maybe I was a little too bearish to

start. It might just be another interesting experiment for them, and if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. The other important context is that, you know, Coinbase isn't firing on all cylinders, right? Which helps I will say though like we for a while it looked like um you know for K Kraken was kind of maybe getting ahead of the game with some of these like product expansions that we would expect or announcements that we would expected from Coinbase. But we did just see Coinbase also recently mentioned um wanting to do equities on chain. think they're in, you know, maybe some uh initial talks with the SEC to like get that approved perhaps or like define

what that looks like for like US customers or maybe customers abroad or maybe both. I'm not sure. Um but like we've seen plus Shopify payments plus JP Morgan. I'd push back a little bit on not firing on all cylinders. I think they're a big corp and they get a lot of [ __ ] for moving slow, but um I don't know. They've had some big wins lately. JP Morgan, Shopify, and um well, some big announcements. Equities on chain. Yeah. Yeah, true. I think we're working on announcements for all of these teams, right? So, it's like we need to see what gets delivered, but true. And I'm the first person to tell you that velocity is all that matters when it comes to getting assets on chain. And JP Morgan's JPMD is not going to have huge velocity, but I think this is a rare exception

where the sticker actually means a lot, right? If you have JP Morgan's involvement in your environment, I think that's actually a meaningful win versus some, you know, community or regional bank uh doing the same thing. It's like, yeah, that's really cool, but how much does that mean, right? These assets won't have high velocity because they're going to have transfer restrictions and they're mostly just being parked on the chain. Yeah, I think that's fair. at the very like I'm going to give Coinbase some credit here at least like you know I think stuff like the Morpho integration with the exchange we haven't seen I want to see more from like they teased the idea around permission pools with unis4 hooks but I don't think that's gotten anywhere yet maybe that is the aerodyrome integration though recently

so now you can like trade a drone pools like through the coin through the coinbase app which I think it's an interesting integration like they have like morpho integration like money markets now they have the aerodyome integration like taxes so I I think they're moving like in the right direction in this sense yeah my expectation is for that to just like eventually encompass everything you know sex and dex things from like this don't call it a super app but no yeah I mean I think you're completely right like why would you not as a centralized exchange have a dex aggregate trader like offering. Forget about getting figuring out the liquidity. Just use what's on chain today and just route trades. Um,

yeah, I think I think you'll definitely see that. And things like Dflow on Salon are kind of like optimized for that. Like you have known retail flow coming from the Coinbase app. Uh, then you can quote that at tighter spreads. So, I I think you're going to probably see that route get taken, which I'm not totally sure what their announcement was um the other day related to being able to, you know, automatically trade any asset trading on base through the Coinbase app. Um I imagine it's something to the effect of a DEX aggregator. Like in my head, that's kind of like what the construction would look like, but I could see that going a couple different ways.

Cool. All right. Well, we've been live for a good bit here, gentlemen. I think we can call it before we close out though uh permissionless next week. I don't know if anyone's going to buy any tickets at this point, but if you are coming, I think we'll be excited to see you there. Uh in Brooklyn 24th through the 26th, I think. Is everyone here giving a talk or on a panel? I would imagine the answer is yes to that. It is indeed. It is indeed. You can come out listen to the Reverend. What What are you gonna be talking about, Reverend Smith? I think I'm doing a panel and then um me, Ryan, and Felipe are jamming on all things token transparency. Uh maybe we have another cohort live by then. That's probably a little bit ambitious. Uh but we're working on that

aggressively and we'd love to have more more data points to talk about. Yeah, it I'm moderating a panel uh on me with folks from JTO um DFlow. Uh so yeah, it's going to be great. Brian, anything beyond what Dan said? I know you'll be we'll be doing some pod recordings and I I believe you'll be on some of those. I don't know what else you'll be doing there, though. No, I I don't know what I'm doing. I'm so behind. No clue. Remind a three-week sprint here to to get this thing out the door. So, uh Ryan Ryan's going to be there. You know, it's it's all there. He'll be selling. He's always selling. Um I'll be there. I'll be at the booth. I think we have a good location. It's going to be awesome.

Industry City is great. It's going be fun. We'll get him in the dunk tank and I'll be there. I'll be doing a panel. Uh I'll be doing some pods with you know your guys' favorite Pacio and I think probably Ryan and we've got some good guests lined up. I think um I'd have to double check. I think maybe we got John, maybe we've got Felipe coming on uh some of those. But then I'll be doing a panel on nextgen consumer apps. We'll have Sal from Bullpen. We'll have uh Pat Kim from Narrative and Vishall from True Markets. So, that should be a fun one as well. Very nice. Tune in if you love consumer.

All right, I think we can call it there, gents. I want everyone to have a great weekend. Uh go get some sun, touch some grass, do whatever. Go have a pint at the pub with your mates and then uh get fueled up and we'll see you next week in New York. We'll see you next week. Amen. Awesome. Thanks for coming on this week, guys. We are gonna close it out. Hopefully. Nope. I need feeding the ducks. Oh, there it is.

Good night. Good night, New York. [Music] [Music]