$195M Stolen, Angel Investing, NFT Growth Hacking & Synapse Chain | Roundup

Transcript

[Music] this episode is brought to you by core the brand new non-custodial wallet that offers a seamless and secure experience on avalanche you'll hear more about core later in the show they were commenting that i like have terrible like do you read a lot of the youtube comments because i find i love i love trolls there's people that like they're like this guy has no semblance like he doesn't even know how to speak to the camera i'm like i don't know man i'm all over the place like i'm i'm looking in my room like you know what i mean like i'm not going to look straight it's so weird it was like like why is santiago the unhappiest man in crypto this guy's never seen a smile i'm like what because it's cuz guys come

down a ton what are you talking about like can't you see i'm visibly depressed um no no i love people that's like so i'm gonna make an effort to look straight literally like a psycho just look straight in in the camera it's very weird yeah like i think i'm like socially awkward and so looking at the camera feels like i'm looking at someone in the eyes and it's like i don't yeah yeah i think um i i mean i think the way that the internet goes is like the deepest trolls are on 4chan the second deepest trolls are probably in the depths of the youtube comments and are definitely crypto like definitely yeah the two venn diagrams are very much so yeah yeah um man it is uh yeah the youtube comments are a scary place try not to look at those it's a tough crowd to please so

anyways i'm still to do this i don't care so i'm not going to get i'm also not getting a podcast video unless blockhorse wants to send me to a camp and get me a coach to do like pr training which i'm not there in life then i'm okay i'm just going to keep doing my thing have you ever used a business coach or like an investing coach or uh like anything very briefly like like a wendy in billions um but briefly and i'm a big believer though in therapy and self-care um i think it's one of the best investments i've made but i've usually just don't use them for business stuff it's more like personal stuff that i wouldn't be able to talk to friends for the other stuff i just use this

podcast as my way to brief and did you just uh subtly compare yourself to bobby axelrod santi [Laughter] there is an episode where he does give one of his employees a ledger like with like loaded with like a billion btc i still remember that scene but yeah or maybe maybe you're more of a uh who's the who's the person that he hires taylor maybe you're more of a tailor oh well man i don't know if i should take that as a compliment or not but all right we're moving on we're moving past that check how we feeling about the uh about the current markets i'm feeling pretty hot i'm feeling pretty good about it uh i think uh increasingly like i look you always sort of look at signs of the bottom uh there's a few that i've observed uh

the one that i was reading today is this there's a index that is composed of like private market secondary valuations and that has come down to a point where it is down like 28 year date which is now below the nasdaq performance and i've always felt that like there was a time where the not just in crypto but like about private market valuations were still very inflated and hadn't corrected and now they have at least like this index is not comprehensive but it does track some stuff and i think that's a very healthy barometer of like okay we probably you know you always look at things that need to be corrected and this was one that i was looking at and i think it's sort of a a late indicator and an important one

for a sign that we probably bottomed so inflation seems to be coming down a bit uh obviously there's risks still china that is concerning and the whole taiwan situation that could be escalating or not and then europe and gas prices i mean just like the energy prices and i mean europe's pretty much going to go into a recession i think so but that doesn't necessarily concern me i'm not a macro expert i observe it but no i'm feeling pretty good in crypto there's a lot to talk about especially this week a lot of events since we did the last round up so i'm excited yeah yeah uh it feels like the last part of the market that hasn't been hit hard is still the labor market actually um that's pretty i think there's still more pain to be seen in

the labor market but we've seen a lot of the extent of the actual uh equities in crypto market pain has been uh i think we've seen the bottom there i don't think we've seen the bottom in the labor market that's the probably last big thing i'm watching yeah it was interesting i think we mentioned in in a prior episode but uh i think it was uh peters who said it um bitcoin was a leading indicator of risk and bitcoin actually and crypto generally like topped and declined before you know all the recession concerns like this is november of last year and if you believe that to be true again like then then perhaps crypto is also going to mark the bottom and then you know i mean obviously ethan bitcoin general crypto markets up quite a bit uh since last

month since the bottom and so that may be a leading indicator yeah yeah um yeah i mean speaking of the labor market we saw robin hood do layoffs second second round of layoffs uh we saw gemini did the same thing they laid off a couple people uh a little bit of the workforce then they had to do bigger layoffs so robinhood they did nine percent cuts in april now they just did 23 so i think you actually i think there's a second round of layoffs coming for companies that didn't dig deep enough uh maybe back in let's say june or even july in the in the june or july cuts um and so i think that's a that's a big thing i'm paying attention to larry summers the former treasury secretary i don't know if you saw this he stated that um we need five percent unemployment for five

years to get uh to get inflation under control that would be a 40 increase in the unemployment rate um so i think that's pretty interesting i'm curious how your um how you're advising your are are you seeing crypto companies like what are you seeing from your portfolio in terms of the layoffs well i thought you were going to ask me like in terms of deal flow but in terms of layoffs not so much um what i have observed is it is easier for so a lot of the companies that i talk to just raise around certain position of strength or actually go out and hire and they've found that it's a pretty interesting market because a lot of talent comes up and is available whereas in you know a year ago it was impossible to hire like uh

competent people is like super expensive and competitive now um you know a lot of folks are looking to go elsewhere and it's easier for these companies that are just raised around well capitalized to go out and hire like really really good talent which i think is is um is great um yeah and so that's what i'm observing i've also been more active uh there was i tracked like my average kind of check size i um like my deployment cadence and all the number of deals and dollars at work that kind of like really took a hit over the last three months i just wasn't seeing good deals um not so much that the valuation wasn't there i think there was a lot of these deals kind of came down quite a bit it was just like i don't know i didn't i didn't talk to

that many um teams even though they were interesting fun rounds i wasn't part of many um now over the last two weeks i've just literally committed to six new deals uh one of which you actually shared with me so i appreciate it um but uh yeah i've seen a really good kind of like a new wave of and crop of pretty interesting companies across the gamut of d5 gaming core infrastructure and so i'm really excited to see that um and and good to see like you know founders come to the space and want to continue to build a lot of these are first-time founders in crypto we're successful outside of crypto but are coming in and that to me has always been um a really positive signal yeah when you do when okay so you wrote six

checks in the last couple weeks or you plan on writing uh checks into these six companies are you doing the same size into each of these do you size it up based on conviction how do you think about an angel investment i typically have a minimum check size that to me i asked for uh if i because if i don't feel that i can do that then to me it just feels like i don't have enough conviction or haven't done enough work so i try to take discipline at a minimum kind of threshold of dollars at work that i want to have and then that's kind of based on portfolio size and a bunch of other things like i i sort of think of it as if a position is if you're not willing to make a position like at least kind of 50 basis points or 25 basis points or

one percent of your portfolio then you're probably you're probably like better off doing something else so i try to kind of size it like that um so yeah it's at least a minimum threshold there are instances where i've meaningfully like increase uh that uh based on conviction yeah and will you so like let's say okay so this this uh the company that i introduce you to um when you look at something like that uh it sounds like you're doing it by the way um but when you look at something like that are you saying like okay the min maybe i'll allocate my normal check size but i have a lowest allocation that i'm comfortable with if they can't give me the minimum check size i'm

comfortable with it's just not worth it for my time uh and and what is that how do you calculate that minimum is it 0.25 percent of your uh 25 bips of your total portfolio of your angel portfolio how do you think about that yeah look sometimes sometimes i really come acro i come across founders um that are kind of exceptional that i really want to work with and i align myself like philosophically and i i like i'm not hard and fast um i i obviously try to push for a minimum but if i can't get it like in this case super late in the process he's just making it like squeezing me in and so um i'll be very vocal about trying to get the minimum but if i can't then at that point it's like do i really want to work with this person and um

you know um i want to be a part of that journey and so i kind of like yeah uncertain exception there are certain exceptions where i just say look this is a team that i really like and i want to be a part of this story and and i'm fine like just getting whatever i can get yeah how do you think about the opportunity cost of doing these angel deals so company we invested in i think it's going to be a big company but there's like but i also think eth is going to go up a lot we've got the merge coming up right so it's like the opportunity cost of doing these angel deals that are illiquid too where like maybe there's not a token coming uh it's just incred i feel like it's higher than ever right now yeah it's a great question because

it's really hard to perform ethan long term like yeah very very hard um i guess like not all my portfolio is invested in in in private a lot of it is a liquid a lot of it is in early stage stuff i just like it i i i feel like that's where i enjoy the most working with teams but you're right it's you have to believe that this whatever company you're or team your backing will outperform factoring in like applying some sort of liquidity discount right of 20 30 percent however much you want to do it and some sort of sort of hurdle if you think ethan's gonna do 2x hypothetically speaking and none of this financial advice but hypothetically if you think ethan's going to do a 2x or a

3x then you have to clear that hurdle over whatever time horizon and be willing to take the liquidity and so you apply further discount attached to that and so if after doing all that math you come out and say okay i will outperform then then that's it right uh the other thing that you obviously need to think about is look a lot of times the biggest mistakes i've made and observed other folks do is like you spend 90 of your time building a thesis doing research talking to the team and and at the very end you think about allocation and portfolio construction and that's where most of the mistakes i made are based where i had faulty portfolio construction meaning i was too weighted

on liquid or illiquid i didn't really think much about that it was a great investment but it wasn't sized big enough so it didn't really move the needle and look if you think like if i look at my portfolio historically there have been there's been out of all the winners i think from uh absolute return dollar wise it's been only a handful that have really meaningfully drove that out performance and there were certainly times where it was a great bet it wasn't sized correctly and i think as an investor i always i always like to think look the odds of me continuing to perform x really go down like this sort of mean reversion is is very true

uh and unfortunately a lot of people in crypto are conditioned to think that a five x is like a me it's like a terrible return it's like guys that that kind of thing is very destructive uh because like if you continue to do a 5x you'll literally be the best investor of all time the history of the world like that's just not going to be the case and so um so anyways yeah what i'm trying to say is portfolio construction is equally as important uh as as doing the work and doing the research like on the particular company um and so so yeah look it's an evolving kind of criteria and process i um it really depends on market conditions and you know for a while for instance over the last like nine months you probably saw better r r uh sorry

better probably risk adjusted returns on eth than a lot of private deals that were being funded at like north of 100 million with like no product yeah yeah i am starting to get i heard um the co-founder of hubspot talking about his angel investments and you know the guy's worth probably hundreds of millions or actually probably at this point maybe over a billion at this point he's done a hundred plus angel deals he'll write big check sizes he'll write 250k check he'll write million dollar angel checks and his take on angel investing is um it's actually you probably will outperform it in crypto in the public markets um you'll probably outperform your angel investments most people will uh outperform in the public markets just by buying eth or something like that or

buying a couple of uh concentrated tokens that you that you really really like uh but the angel side of things if you're a founder and you like to build there's like no better feeling than sitting down with these founders that you've uh invested in early and helping them out and also candidly there's like a flex as he talks about you know he's like i invested i was like one of the first checks in the coinbase like yeah that's a i made a lot of money but like that's a flex that goes on the that goes on the resume you know that's absolutely right i mean sometimes it is about that network and it is about that kind of insight that you can get by talking and being close to founders and teams building um you know for instance you might you might have angeled into say a gaming

deal not actually maybe it was one that wasn't as successful or not successful at all but by virtue of you making that investment perhaps you learned so much about the web 3 gaming space what was right what went wrong why didn't take off why the game like in-game economy was broken that insight had you not invested in this particular company hypothetically you may that that learning you may have never gotten and so a lot of times i think okay if i want to get smarter in a category i'm going to deploy x dollars of work say i i want to learn about you know zero knowledge proofs well of course the universe is smaller but maybe that's not a good example so say i want to learn about gaming right and so i go out and invest in five different

companies 10 different companies i will deploy kind of 25k checks hypothetically into all these and so okay you're putting 250 000 of work to learn about a category you think it's gonna be massive so you you have to believe the category is going to be huge to warrant this kind of investment as a percent of your portfolio whatever that sum is and it could be deployed into public or private companies right uh because a lot of folks might be listening wait a minute um i don't have access to 10 private companies that's fine but in crypto the beauty is there's all these projects and discord channels you can join right and so you can go out and for all intents and purposes every crypto investor right now whether it's a token or not is a venture capital is an angel investor because these are super early stage

projects with liquidity and so anyways what i'm trying to say is sometimes you're right you want to get smart in the category and there's it's kind of unrealistic to assume that you're gonna really pay attention to something if you don't have skin in the game and so or and the learnings that you can get from being really close to founders not just investing privately but also like just buying the token whatever and then joining the discord because founders are really accessible in crypto and that gets you ultimately smarter about a category and so um i've always found you know so naval kind of said it best i think there was a old tweet from him that said look as an angel

you kind of have to assume and be comfortable with losing like all of your principle um understanding that like there might be like one or two really asymmetric uh outcomes but even if you lose everything it would have been worthwhile to learn and to get access to these founders that are really really smart yeah i want to get your take on uh eth merge and just uh and actually bitcoin uh for the second half of the year and then we can jump into some of the news of the week what is your current allocation uh bitcoin to eth allocation uh nine to one

eath to bitcoin the bitcoin yeah i just see a very clean compelling narrative and catalyst for ethereum and and i think that marriage is understood but not necessarily kind of priced in i think and don't ask me why i just i just have a feeling like i i think that a lot of institutions like kind of understand it but look the merge has been kind of talked about for so many years and you know every time there's like some commentary from the devs tim or whoever about a potential delay a lot of people are like here we go again this has been delayed for years i think most people still are discounting the fact that it's actually going to go

through um but i think the setup for and this is for anyone listening here there's a great episode that we had with drive traffic yeah travis um go listen to that because i think that really covers it well and i believe in most of what is discussed there um look it's not to say that i'm i don't believe in bitcoin i don't it's just to me i always think of okay what's the catalyst and there's a very compelling strong catalyst for ethereum um that i don't think is wholly properly understood by kind of the majority of the market participants out there yeah yeah interesting do you think um do you think it's like a bitcoin halving event where uh maybe like the price doesn't actually

move that much uh post having but maybe like a year usually at the having like the price doesn't rip it at the having it's like maybe it takes six or nine or twelve years like three six months after right yeah yeah yeah yeah a lot of people a lot of people there's always this idea that like bitcoin happenings this one it's like the next bitcoin happening will be priced in and historically it hasn't right you've never had this phenomenon um other correlations like tell me tell me the price action of ether do you think we um we maybe it's like buy the rumor sell the news it's like we kind of rip into the merge it sells off and then we kind of consolidate around for several months and that and then it and then the merge gets priced in whatever well i mean it's like taking out a crystal ball

because i have no idea i think you become less of a gambler or more of a speculator if you have a longer than one year time horizon and um so whatever ethereum does in the near term likely will be correlated likely will kind of trail if we're continuing to be in this macro uncertainty backdrop then i think the merges while very interesting catalyst will take a back seat and macro macros still is front seat in a lot of markets they're still jittery they still trade around you know whether pelosi's going to taiwan or you know gas prices and whatever happens in europe and so i think there's earnings season people are still looking at that and

then everything else kind of moves according to that which it means if you're a patient long-term investor it's kind of a great setup when you think about it because you know this is coming whether market participants want to pay attention to it they're probably going to be really distracted for the rest of the year and so i always like to think of these moments as like you're never you can never really play a short game because you're really going to get you're really going to get carried away right and that's where you really mess up but if you say look the merge has been something that is going to be very net positive for ethereum long term it will further credentialize the fact that this is a network that can upgrade that can execute on the roadmap that has been discussed for a long time

and it's a very interesting from an esg narrative um you know perspective um and then you know i think i think if you see that then you kind of observe and cost every like what i would do what i'm doing is i always kind of like build conviction and accordingly allocate it's not that i'm doing it all at once um and and i feel good about these entry points over a two three four five year horizon like i don't know like i i hopefully folks listening here like i'm never in a position like you know do when i when i do liquid stuff

and i try not to do as much because i know i'm terrible at timing it and we can talk about like even someone like kathy wood super sophisticated i think has one of the best research shops and out there has been really right about calling certain like macro technological trends whether it's tesla and you know batteries and electric vehicles and or genetics um and like stuff like crispr and certainly crypto she punched out a coin base literally on the 27th of july and coinbase is up almost 100 percent like so like yeah you know anyways i know what uh an amazing hedge fund uh that i know that's very qui uh they're quite successful they texted me a week ago and said we're we're putting on a big short

on coinbase what are you guys doing they're like we're putting on a big short on coinbase i don't know it's already down a lot they're like no we got it's like it was right after the uh the nft video that they launched the board 8 video they're like this is ridiculous like they're clearly wasting so much money um put on a big short and uh yeah even the best even the best traders have no idea what's happening in the short term i will say i am getting very bullish on things right now i had two conversations that have made this week that have made me rethink what this bear market will look like i've previously been thinking that this is going to be a long and maybe a deep bear market again i had um i had two conversations with one one of the biggest market makers uh

in the world and then b uh the second one was the head of crypto one of the largest uh financial institutions in the world they are both pushing uh deeper into crypto right now they are not backing off they're both doubling down and i was really surprised to hear that and even when you kind of push at them a little and and probe and and see if they're actually doing that they are leaning into the merge and they're really excited internally and that made me think that you know it's only two conversations it's completely anecdotal but that made me think that this bear market might be a little more shallow uh a little less intense than i originally thought yeah i hope that's the case um yeah you know the institutions are coming has been a narrative that has been ongoing in crypto and we're still here

but uh you're right i mean i do since a lot of the discussions i've had over the last two years are are smart investors that haven't allocated to crypto that see the merge and are tracking it and have done a lot of work over the last couple years to understand the implications that that has on the ethereum network so i think people are ready to to execute on it and a lot of them might just be kind of waiting for this to to go live to to really go back to their investment committee and say okay it's here let's go yeah speaking of institutions i forgot to plug our conference the last three weeks and our team keeps getting really pissed at me uh we are hosting digital asset summit september 13th and 14th we have a competition going on internally santi

okay uh whoever drives the most tickets using their discount code gets a free dinner and i want that free dinner so you can use yano 250 to get 250 bucks off there's the plug uh no no no this isn't in uh new york or london because you do this is new york it's actually really interesting what we've put together so like permissionless like very crypto native event uh das we have put together an event that kind of combines the macro with the crypto so we have folks like rob leshner and like amy wu at ftx and mickey at uh at paradigm and antonio founder of dydx but then we also have jurian timmer the head of macro fidelity with brent johnson danielle dimartino booth mark yusko um

uh like a really really really interesting uh macro crowd so it's like i don't think there's ever been an event that puts you know mike green and brent johnson and danielle dimartino booth on the same stage as like michael schaullov and rebecca reddig and danielle dimartin and uh and and rob leshner and like some of these deep crypto folks i think it'll be a really interesting event actually nice that's great yeah yeah it should be good maybe you'll uh maybe it'll show this time oh uh maybe or yeah yeah i won't make any promises given how constrained air traffic is these days and travel but uh certainly i'm messing with i think a lot of this tourism flow is going the other way because americans trying to go to europe because the euro is kind of

really low but nonetheless we can be controlled that's true all right all right now that the plug is out of the way we can talk about the hacks yeah definitely let's definitely talk about the the salon hike yeah you want to start with solana you said yeah yeah uh let's start with solano we'll also talk about nomad i will say people are calling this the solana hack i think it should really be called the slope failure um uh this was you know a lot of people are saying this is the solana hack really here so here so here's what happened on wednesday morning there's uh fear started to spread through the solana ecosystem thousands of users started reporting that their wallets were drained without any approval i think the final numbers that over 7 000 i think was like 77 or 7 800 wallets were hit by

yeah we're hit by hackers now it's a relatively small number like out of 25 million there are about 25 million users on the solana network or wallets so it's 7 000 or 8 000 out of 25 million but still that's 7 700 more than should happen about 5 million were drained so we'll talk about the nomad hack nomad was 190 million this was only 5 million anatoly the ceo of solana labs said it looked like a supply chain attack on ios based wallets what a supply chain attack is for those who don't know supply chain attacks happen when a hacker basically enters and modifies software by injecting malicious code in a system the code inserts can be employed to deliver a malicious payload

or backdoor malware in solana's case as what anatoly said is that it's possible that hacker attacked the ios wallet libraries to extract private keys um i think uh what ended up coming out today or yesterday is that um what what really happened there is that um this was not a solano protocol failure but it was actually connected to slope which is a solana based wallet uh slope stores their users i think this is either a theory or maybe it's been confirmed but slope stores their user seed phrases in plain text on servers so what they do is like so you've got the wallet app they were sending user seed phrases to a centralized server um that could then be

read like the the phrases were not encrypted so anybody with access to the specific server could potentially access users private keys um and i think this really lo that is a low security standard it actually makes me concerned i'm like i know this is a low security standard i bet other folks are doing this though the low security standard probably led to the breach which gave hackers the ability to acquire the seed phrases and drain funds so that's the overview that's great over i woke up and i was monitoring this like like crazy because for a while i you didn't know what was really going on there most of the users were salon but there was a few like ethereum wallets there's some ether ones there were smooth theorem ones too and so you started then i think there's some

really good folks that you should go out and follow when all this goes goes on samsung obviously he was not as vocal in this time he was very vocal nomad um adam what's his name court corcharin um he was tracking this a lot i think he talked to a lot of users that had their wallets drained to understand kind of the the profile of the user that it that was being exploited uh and you know over the ensuing kind of like 12 to 16 hours they very quickly said okay everyone here has like used slope um and or imported their private key into slope uh and so that kind of like it was great to see the

the developer community come together to kind of get to the bottom of it um not so great seeing folks really jump the gun quickly and dunk on something solana say oh here we go you know this is why solana's crap you know and i think that you i pay attention to the kind of folks that do that uh because you know it's it look at the end of the day like we'll talk about nomad in a second but from a sheer magnitude dollars that have been like lost i mean nomad was orders magnitude higher um and so and that was just like solidity code like uh issue um and so yeah look i mean i think i i take this opportunity to tell users like the most

important thing the takeaway when you see these kind of incidents hopefully no one was affected um are two things one get a hardwood wallet just don't trade convenience for security like security is paramount um and i don't care what anyone says just go get a hardware wallet if you're if you have more than a hundred dollars at work in crypto go get a hardware wallet it costs like 50 60 bucks you'll understand about security you you'll it's it's not easy to use but take it as learning like it's not like super intuitive at first but then it becomes very easy once you get the hang of it and i think it's a very worthwhile time and money investment to understand security like if you're bullish on crypto

and you really want to start allocating your time and attention and energy and money like trust me it will pay off like it will pay dividends just having a hardware wallet get one two three ten i don't care um related to this there's a few accounts that i think we should link here in the notes that i think provide really good security like best practices um the founder of what is it my crypto um i'll we'll put together some stuff yeah tay tay did something bobby uh bobby ong gekko did something tay is one of the more like very outspoken like will not hold back what she thinks and provides really comprehensive threads about security and i recommend following her um

and so anyways um that was uh i'm glad that we got to the bottom of of this pretty quickly uh because it could have been way worse and it wasn't it wasn't a salon of failure it wasn't it was just simply devs not being very cautious and like adopting terrible practices and copying libraries and not really understanding what they're doing yeah so this was a um uh this was a private key so the private keys were compromised here right this was not like a phishing scam this was not like malicious approval and smart contracts this was just a a private key compromise through these centralized servers um yeah like when you generate a key with slope or you import a key a private key through slope they were

just like storing that in plain text like for i mean it's just like if there's one thing that you need to do as a wallet like seriously is like make sure that whatever you do you just don't store in in a third party like this is the most important or even if you do store in a third party which you really shouldn't be doing uh they have to be encrypted there has to be some sort of encryption there i think they're destroying them in plain text yeah this is like at the very top of the things that you need to do as a wallet developer like and be focused on is not doing this and they did that so it was also like pretty disappointing to see their statement like their post mortem was like it it wasn't sufficiently clear to users that they should

if they had created an account to create a new private key outside of slope and migrate their assets immediately like this should have been in plain red text and it was not and i understand they might be like worried about being sued which they probably will um but still like goddammit guys like protect your users like what are you guys doing so anyways this is like gross negligence in my mind like um you know it's okay look as a developer you're gonna there are things that you may there are other hacks where like some of the stuff the surface area is pretty complex if you're if you're doing a bridge like bridges are very hard and in this case i just think like whatever it is just own up to it and protect users like make sure that you

mitigate and contain it as soon as possible um and communicating to users uh clearly and allowing them to kind of take the necessary steps to protect themselves is paramount and i didn't see that in the press release candidly it was it was like very underwhelming yeah yeah so i have a i have a maybe a second order impact i think this is um this feels like pretty bullish for solana actually i don't i don't know like there's there's a crazy amount of adversity that solana has gone through um recently it's like you've got these like i feel like a lot of it like wormhole you've got like these bridge hacks and def like the d5 packs and wallet hacks you had like a lot of performance issues you had like

stability issues the network kept going down you have these like decentralization narratives about how the network's not decentralized you have all these other l1s like aptos and sui are rising a lot of attention being on like cosmos right now and things like that it's a non-evms ecosystem but you know i'm looking at the price right now it is still it it is still hovering around 40 bucks like for the last three months no two months uh this thing is like refuses to go below 35 i mean maybe sam's just got like a fat finger bid sitting at 35 but uh yeah it's pretty interesting that it hasn't gone down more yeah there's a very interesting tweet from raj one of the co-founders of salon it says like this further solidifies the case to have

a solana based phone um and i'm not an expert on like hardware like secure enclaves or whatever but like the idea anatoly had a tweet uh and we should bring him on to really talk about the salon phone because i think he'll be in he's coming off he's coming on um because a lot of this might just like if you think about okay going forward like how can we really mitigate these type of things um in some capacity it's um just the hardware device and what you could do if you're interacting on mobile and so i think it sets us up for an interesting discussion around the salonophone why it's actually necessary um and i think this hack further kind of um supports that thesis all right folks this episode is brought to you by our friends at avalanche and ava labs they

have just dropped a new crypto wallet called core you're going to be hearing a lot about it over the coming months you can now be one of the first to try it out here's the reason i'm excited to partner with them on empire right now crypto wallets and browser extensions they feel clunky they feel non-intuitive that's why ava labs built core it's a free non-custodial browser extension that gives avalanche users a seamless and secure web through experience across the entire avalanche ecosystem here are a few reasons to try core here's what i'm experimenting with number one core has intuitive dashboards with a unified display for all of your nft collections all your crypto assets you can execute asset swaps directly inside the wallet

it's a really nice experience uh maybe you want to earn yield or borrow against your bitcoin but you don't want to do it on one of those c5 platforms right now core's native bridging functionality makes it really easy to bridge your bitcoin to avalanche's robust defy ecosystem last but not least core makes on-ramping super easy you can convert dollars to crypto right now using the moonpay integration just takes a few clicks download core today using the link in the show notes it's really really nice if you are interested in the avalanche ecosystem at all you have to be using core download core using the link below now let's get back to the show yeah yeah

um all right should we talk about nomad yeah um all right so let me i'll do my best to try to explain this but jump in jump in where i'm missing things so nomad is um nomad is a bridge uh nomad is kind of the bridge for like evmos moon beam uh milko meta which i don't even know what milco meta is but maybe i should uh they were hacked on monday for over 190 million dollars basically they their cross-chain bridge um that supports token transfers across like eth uh moonbeam avalanche they raised i think it was 22 million bucks earlier this year uh from folks like openc coinbase some other corporates and also some crypto native vcs um what happened with nomad and i'll try to

do my best here but again fill in the gaps is there is a previous protocol upgrade led to a vulnerability that basically enabled hackers to withdraw an unlimited amount of funds from the bridge so after this hacker realized this and initiated these large transfers i think it was like 300 other users copy pasted those transaction scripts replaced the receiver address with their own uh and and basically started to exploit it as well so uh this was i think a smart contract exploit i think it was samson explained it like this i can just quote him because he broke it down way better than i ever could um the bug came from the developers erroneously modifying the bridge's smart contract and deploying uh the code without proper audit the nomad bridge

hack oh this is the important part the nomad bridge hack is made possible due to an improper initialization leading to the zero address so 0x00 being marked as a trusted root which led to every message being proven valid by default so basically what this means is that marking it as 0x00 also called a zero address uh accidentally turned off a smart contract check that ensured that withdrawals were made to valid addresses only so after it was turned off you could essentially anyone could withdraw from funds from the bridge if they wanted so this it's interesting like this is a lot of money 190 million the exploit didn't require any like advanced technical knowledge of smart contracts or anything like that

all you had to do was basically just edit the hackers transaction with ether scan replace the destination address with your own address and then make the withdrawal request from the nomad bridge um yeah i mean no it's it's uh when you when you put it like that it's like no wonder that there's this feeding frenzy of hundreds of bad actors here who pulled a total total of 190 million out there were some folks that were white hacking this so like they they they saw this and then they like quickly used the same um transaction modified the withdrawal address and then kind of try to you know do that to safeguard funds and then re some of them that was only nine so that they did like they did do that their white had hackers but there's only nine

million so yeah so far yeah yeah yeah i agree um yeah i think right what was that third biggest hack of the year i think ronin was 625 wormhole was 325 or 326. um i guess harmony bridge was was a hundred million um there was the i mean the paulie network was six eleven yeah but that was that was different yeah i wanna i wanna before we move away from these hacks i i found an interesting use case for nfts uh in the solana um in the what is it the uh uh i don't wanna call it the solana hack but nonetheless the the what is it the

sledge we should edit the slope slope i found an interesting use case um for nfts related to the slow pack which was this there was a there was a person that sent an nft that was hosted on a pri like a specific domain to the hacker wallet and was waiting for them to open the nft and then that would like would that would reveal the ip address presumably of the hacker of course if you could if you were monitoring the address and you open it up in your computer it would have like it's not the hacker but it's an interesting way to like triangulate around ip addresses behind a wallet um with nfts and i think this is in large part why you

get a lot of these kind of spam nfts sent to your wallet that you don't see in openc um but um but also going forward you can envision like traditional companies imagine saying hey i want to understand where most of the board apes are and if you're a high-end business in new york all of a sudden you understand which wallet like like you can re-target these people and so at the end of the day nfts are the cookies of web3 and uh i guess it's important to use a vpn all the time uh if you care about like you know just folks not like trying to understand you're where you're based yeah and if these are the cookies of web3 i completely agree with that i think what will end up happening is is

not just around ips but actually um just like movement of capital on chains so like let's uh let's say someone goes through an onboarding solution like a moon pay or like kado or something like that what one of those folks could do is like drop an nft basically uh could like give an nft to that user once they once they onboard um and they can essentially i think what they could what they could do is they could keep i mean one once you're basically onboarded through one of those folks they can see your movement of capital essentially forever unless you put it through like a tornado or something like that they could keep dropping nfts into your wallet once you like let's say they see that you've made like 50 transactions inside the salon ecosystem

they partner with solana and they drop you like a solana 50 activity nft and then other folks and other folks can be like oh who owns that nft let me let me target you uh and i think this ends up leading into a web three crm that was oh i mean 100 so imagine this pick whatever event that you go say you went to a stadium or a music concert and in that event you can you know middle the event is a scandalous qr code potentially to win a sweepstake or whatever you scan the code you get a nft of proof of attendance if you will if you're smart maybe you just want to use a burner wallet you know whatever say a subset of users just uses their their their only wallet

um and then all of a sudden that event organizer artist sports company whatever now has really interesting data on who attended um and and what the preferences are what kind of nfts are buying of course now it's like you know you could you know you can infer so many things just now imagine we have limited time of a lot of these users but really rich data and at the end of the day blockchains are data rich and so imagine how much more data is going to exponentially rise over the next 10 years of users just may have one or two wallets or was it can be easily linked through stuff like chain analysis and look for a lot of people are out there it's like oh my god this is like

panopticon this is like big brother like this is what you don't want to hear but it's just a reality right and so again privacy is one of the things that is important uh in crypto but nfts make it make it hard yeah here's a product request if there are any entrepreneurs listening to this is so when we launched permis we launched permis 555 nfts that basically got you access to permission lists uh and a whole bunch and our research platform and a whole bunch of other stuff i really i manually would go in and look at the address of the people who had bought the permis and it tells you really interesting things you're like oh okay this perme whale is also like a doodle's whale so it turns out like we had a lot of folks who hold doodles who also hold permits we had a

lot of like board ape folks who also held permis and and it gives you some really interesting insight because it's like okay if you can see that let's say you know i don't know moon birds holders there's a massive crossover between like moon birds and permies well then you can do a collab that tells us our marketing team that we should then do a collab with moon birds right or let's say we see that the permies holders there are like no whales right maybe there's just like a bunch of like really really really small uh each person has like less than a thousand or like one eath in their account or something like that like you want to market to those folks very differently and talk to those folks very differently than if everyone who holds a permeate has like 50 eth for example so anyone

who can like i think this is a i think this is a huge platform i think this web 3 crm is will will be really really big and feel free to answer this question or not but you look at this data did you go back to like some of the sponsors or organize and say hey listen the average transaction value of the people attending permissions is x and so you better give me a discount on why or something like that i mean at this point and we didn't but we should have maybe you just hired me to run your growth hacking no i'm kidding web3 growth hacking um look every time i tweet about this there are very vocal people that say god this is not why we designed web3 like this is this is terrible this is the police state big brother i'm like guys it's

just it's just in a reality whether you want to see it or not and whether you want to be cautious or not and take precautions that's up to you right bridges you want to talk uh synapse i want to talk synapse chain which i think was a pretty interesting announcement i don't know if you saw that here let me maybe it's uh helpful to have a quick primer on bridges so basically bridges are uh bridges move assets uh between chains so like if i want to move some capital from like solana into ethereum that's technically really really challenging so i need a bridge to do that bridges can be classified into trustless bridges and trusted bridges right so uh the the latter means that the bridge relies on a centralized

entity to function the former means that the bridge relies on smart contracts so for trusted uh bridges users need to trust the security and good faith reputation of these centralized custodians the risks are centralized entities going rogue and kind of this incompetent security management which we're seeing play out with some of this stuff like slope for trustless bridges users need to trust the security of the underlying blockchain and the smart contracts written on top to enable the functionalities of the bridge the risks are like badly written code social engineering or new vector attacks that were previously overlooked so that's um i think bridges will end up i think bridges are a really really really crucial aspect of crypto as everything goes goes multi-chain

they're also clearly the hardest thing to build technically we've had over a billion dollars in bridging hacks um but and i i think maybe one of the problems is that users actually shouldn't be interacting with bridges i feel like bridges should just be like completely behind the scenes nobody ever knows that they're using a bridge um i feel like that's where the future of bridges go yeah it is uh it's pretty hard from a very high at a very high level you have two different networks um blockchains if you will that have different security levels levels of security and the bridge is essentially connecting these two trying to get some finality on the transfer the state transition one at

like if you're moving one asset or messaging or whatever generally that is recorded in the blockchain and one on one side to the other through the bridge then that needs to be balanced recorded on both sides both my which have different levels of security and finality and and both from a time perspective and quality of like of the security itself and so the bridge is kind of a lot of need to figure out that out which is very complex and and so sometimes require like a trusted like a system of relayers if you will in the bridge that are doing this and taking some risk and being compensated for that um and and so that's kind of like it's probably as you said which i would agree

it's one of the more complex things um in in crypto at least now because it has a lot of surface area meaning like there's a lot of different kind of components that need to work um and it requires a lot of i think they're kind of like bridges and zero knowledge proofs are heavily researched um but ex like i would characterize as one of the more kind of ambitious on the road map of things in cryptography need to be figured out and so uh but but to your point i think both are are kind of will work at some point or are critical for the functioning of where at least i see and i think you see crypto volume which is it's a multi-chain world and one that allows for massive scalability through zero-knowledge proofs and

multi-chain through bridges yeah um there's the interesting bridge announcement last no was it this week earlier this week with synapse right synapses is uh launching their i don't know i don't know you call it l1 maybe or smart contract ecosystem i don't know basically uh synapses is one of the biggest bridges right so they're a cross-chain uh protocol that is best known for the br they have a synapse bridge they also have um uh the the the bridge consists of the synapse network and the synapse cross chain amm um they're one of the market leaders right now so they have weekly volume around like 20 million i think it's on par with like wormhole which is around 25 million it's ahead of other bridges like hop or

stargate synapse for folks who've been around for a while probably remember them as nerve they started as a stable swap amm on the binance smart chain which just goes to show you how much folks can pivot and they really start as like a gateway for moving assets between ethan binance smartchain anyways why are we talking about synapse they are one of the most popular bridges they were they uh they revealed earlier this week or end of last week that they're going to be one of the first maybe the first bridging protocol to actually develop their own smart contract platform so they're calling it synapse chain and i don't know i think it's a i think it's pretty interesting conversation around uh one of the main problems that many teams building cross chain applications are

facing today is the lack of a single execution environment so instead what they have to do is they have to deploy smart contracts on like several different chains this ends up increasing security risks communication barriers development needs et cetera unlike those existing systems and how things are built today with synapses uh chain the way i understand it today is it's uh it enables developers to build a cross-chain smart contract exclusively on the sim apps chain so you can basically build uh apps can get built on the synapse chain they can then execute that logic across any blockchain and then the finality happens on ethereum so i think it's pretty interesting um it's compatible with right evm

it enables any existing app to be deployed on synapse chain gives developers a similar building experience to like any other evm chain but allows you to build uh a cross chain application i think it's i think it's good they actually reached out to me last week and we can get them all yeah yeah i mean we had um the the biggest competitor to this is probably layer zero uh we had brian on the podcast um i the way i understand the layer zero is this is a very direct competitor to it um layer zero raised what they raised at a three billion dollar evaluation bunch of money obviously very hot project um i think layer zero competes directly with this so um yeah interesting yeah i will say uh synapse block works research had the

alpha i have to plug this we wrote we wrote a piece on this saying um synapse is going to be doing this we wrote it july 14th uh and recommended that the synapse that like sin is maybe interesting as synapse ends up launching their chain and so um yeah we had the alpha two weeks two weeks before it was live and synapse token did pop fifty percent on the day it announced so how many people how many as an aside how many guys do you have in your research team we have a um [Music] eight person research team now okay uh seven percent they have like any like full liberty to go out and research whatever they want or uh so there's like a director no actually so each analyst the way that we've set up set everything up is

there's each analyst has covers only like two or three different protocols um and so instead of like we think other maybe research folks in crypto have made the mistake of being like way way way too wide and they try to cover everything in crypto and like all right there's nfts popping up boom we're gonna go race and try to cover that like we are hyper focused on defy right now and so each one of our anal each of our analysts like just covers two or three or maybe four things and what like coverage means is like they're in the discord they're they're on the governance forums they know everyone at the protocols uh and and because of that we can give uh hopefully a lot of alpha through the platform so that's great i'll get you access if you're if you're

a permit holder you uh yeah oh there you go yeah i'd love to check it out yeah cool um i've had i had a thought while reading about the synapse chain which is um in cfi all apps end up converging to become like a bank so if you look at like so no matter if you start with uh you know there's all these companies that started as custodians like anchorage and bitco and and copper and folks like that uh then there's like block fi and well you know some of the borrow and lend platforms didn't didn't end up making it too much but like the block guys of the world then there's like coinbase and gemini they all basically end up looking like a bank in d5 it feels like everyone is building their own chains everyone's building like ave launched their own stablecoin synapse they started like ave starts as

a borrowlend platform they launched their own stable synapse starts as a bridge now they're launching their own smart contract platform they have their own amm it feels like everyone in d5 is now starting to like i don't know the right word if c5 converges and everyone creates a bank d5 converges everyone creates an ecosystem a a vertically integrated economic centralized state that eventually collapses now you know do you know what i'm saying though i i don't i do i do it's sort of like this idea of like um it is common at times to be vertically integrated and or or horizontally um the thing though is it's hard to make the analogy i think because well i'm gonna say two things one is

in crypto this idea of composability is really powerful because you know you have apps connecting and talking to each other in a very seamless kind of atomic way you don't have that in web too like composability is like the eighth wonder of the world if you will um it sort of obliviates the need the simple thesis for defy is if you look at what plaid this company that is you know is trying to stitch together uh financial applications so your uh one application that you have on your phone your bank of america app talks to another app like venmo if you will and be able to do that seamlessly or seamlessly in the front end and

so they try to patch this kind of very disparate convoluted complex patchwork financial applications and services that have been created since kind of the modern age if you will web 2 with the internet and even preceding the internet okay it's very bare bones because it's like trying to patch together stuff that will never talk to something that is redesigned from scratch from the bottom up they just talk to each other seamlessly comp like the composability is what makes d5 amazing and super powerful um and it it's sort of like you don't need these kind of like connectors if you will that lose there's a lot of friction still and so that's why d5 is so powerful but still

i just you know was talking to a company earlier actually the one that you introduced me to these guys saying okay listen if you want to build and integrate with d5 protocol so say that you're a bank which we it will happen right if you're a financial institution robin hood or whatever paypal or what have you they want to integrate with d5 it's actually quite hard to plug into all these protocols because the documentation is not necessarily there you know if there's upgrades from ivy v2 to v3 or you know whatever it requires a lot of know-how and complexity to do that and so that's what i mean by like you're still going to probably have these kind of let's call middleware solutions connector solutions that like allow

you know non kind of web 3 native solutions or maybe front ends like user aggregators to like stitch together and connect to this very composable ecosystem because it's not necessarily easy for banks to do that or like some other application so that's one idea um the other thing is and we've talked about this in prior gaming episodes which is at the end of the day maybe what is an interesting phenomenon happening is a lot of games will maybe roll out their entire suite of d5 and l1 like like something like step in for instance is now the number one dex in solana why because it has all the users

like if you look at the there's a great tweet we'll link it in the show notes but like overnight well not overnight but like because stefan has become a very popular app being a number of users it is just it isn't naturally interesting if you're the team to say why don't we just build our own kind of apps and control the experience for the user and maybe even go out as far as creating an l1 because hey solana keeps going down or it's not supporting us so you know it keeps breaking if you will it's just a virtue of like the amount of demand and so that's i think what is informing a lot of these kind of product choices of these teams that say hey listen it's just it's not it's not kind of tailor-made it's not

fulfilling our needs and so um let's go out and build a dex or a lending protocol or a stable coin and so but i would say like i'll the last thing i'll say on this is i don't think we're going to see the same level of kind of consolidation vertical or integration vertical integration in web 3 generally even though you've seen companies like you know um yuga labs try to do a lot you know they built a game and they're gonna build other stuff i still think that i'm still of the mind that there are advantages of using a settlement layer like ethereum which is much farther along much proven much kind of benefits from

what i do think is a network effect of an ecosystem of developers and applications that you can plug into seamlessly or you know through like evm compatibility i think that's a really good take um [Music] let's move on to another ecosystem announcement this week which was magic eden so open c is the biggest ethereum uh open c is the biggest ethereum nft marketplace magic eden is the top solana nft marketplace they have 90 of solana's nft market share um they announced that so so back in april open c integrated with solana um magic eden just announced that they're integrating with eth this uh raises a really interesting question which is like are communities gonna be

continue to be loyal to their marketplaces is this a winner take all market uh magic eden obviously raised a big 130 million dollar series a about two months ago at a 1.6 billion valuation um this is probably comparable actually to open seas series b which was a hundred million uh at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation that they raised exactly a year ago so it feels like maybe magic eden is about 12 months behind open c but uh there's there's some pretty interesting data i've been looking at that uh is points in the direction of magic eden doing well which is when you compete when you look at marketplace businesses and like whether it's airbnb or uber or anything ebay the the most important

metric is not actually the the gmv like the gross merchandising value it's the uh it's the transaction frequency because transaction frequencies build user habits that's much more important to marketplaces than gmv so i haven't i haven't looked at this data in a little bit but like openc has a much higher gross merchandising value but magic eden has less users and two times and and more transactions which means that users on magic eden are transacting like i haven't again haven't looked at the data in a little while but last time i looked it was like four or five times as much as openc users and that that's the end goal of a marketplace would you say that would you say that that uh is because of like lower uh transaction fees

or just the type of user that is using solana is just more free active or or the value of what you're or also a function of like a lot of the solana nfts or just in aggregate on average median whatever you want to see it is much lower than like the blue i think there's probably two things yeah i think there's probably two things which is like if you are in the solana ecosystem like you're probably a pretty active user of crypto in general like solana users are probably much more active than eth users for a number of reasons um and then i think also like the average price point of a magic eden nft is probably like one

tenth or one twentieth of the average price of an open sea nft i i would guess and so i think this leads to higher frequency of purchases which which then obviously leads to greater user retention which means more opportunities to step into value uh for like other other areas right that the marketplace can build and i think it was lee jin put this she explained this really well which helped define my thinking on this which is like so uber like uber is a big marketplace for car connecting cars and people obviously for transportation uber starts as uber black then they expand to uberx then they expand to ubereats and other product lines it's like you're basically just as a marketplace ramping uh the the frequency of transaction within the marketplace so

yeah yep we'll keep an eye on data on uh magic eden versus openc anything else auntie any other uh oh here's another one i don't have much commentary on it michael saylor stepping down from ceo at microstrategy takes on a new post as exec chairman i mean just reviewing the data they own 130 000 bitcoin uh they bought it at an average price of 30k uh bitcoin's sitting at 23k right now so they what is the uh you wanna help me do some mental math here two billion they've got like two billion bitcoin they bought it for like three billion yeah no they've got three billion they bought it at four billion i think is my

mental math so they're down like a billion on on the bitcoin trade that's all i got for micro strategy um i guess other news we'll keep running through this uh sec charged vorsage founders promoters uh in 300 million crypto ponzi scheme the cboe reported a 460 million dollar write down on the aeros x transaction um crypto backed spax uh excuse me pacs uh are starting to ramp up spending um for the primaries and uh yeah i think that's the news of the week yeah um there are some other interesting some interesting news that we don't have

to all cover here but uh uh like the cftc came out saying like they're gonna the regulation of like bitcoin ethereum will squarely fall into their domain there's been interesting like we're gonna have a great episode on regulation with uh uh rebecca and jake um around around these type of topics so we'll save discussion for that but there's some really interesting developments it feels to me like there's a higher cadence of like discussion among regulatory bodies in the us which to me feels like there's a maturation of like properly kind of understanding these and then regulating these stablecoin kind of act and bill and i think all of these things ultimately will be in a positive irrespective kind of the resolution

i think regulators understand that it is the next very interesting arc of innovation and they don't want to like necessarily just create something that totally shuts down the space um and so uh there's a lot of development and interesting kind of things that i will foresee will happen over the next six twelve months um that it's just interesting to pay attention to and is is a narrative that we'll continue to track closely in the pod and bring on guests that can more eloquently talk about it what else it was another um there was another interesting did we cover coinbase i mean obviously the stock is up like a ton but uh you know they they were chosen by blackrock do we cover that should we cover that i can give the i can give the overview here which is that uh there's

big news from the kind of institutional crypto world today uh coinbase announced they're partnering with blackrock blackrock is obviously the largest asset manager in the entire world uh tldr on the on the partnership institutional clients of aladdin aladdin is blackrock's investment management platform uh institutional clients of aladdin now have direct access to crypto trading crypto custody crypto prime brokerage and crypto reporting through a direct integration with coinbase prime i think users uh have to be clients of both coinbase and aladdin but i mean this is this is a huge deal i would say for coinbase um this is really helpful for i mean this is an amazing integration for uh clients of uh of of of blackrock and of aladdin like

it's pretty frustrating if you're a private client of someone like let's say the two big ones like goldman or jp morgan like if you are a private client right now of someone like goldman you can't hold your crypto with with goldman uh you can allocate to on their on their platform to different funds um but you can actually hold your crypto uh you can't trade crypto you can't uh so there's a lot of there are a lot of folks who made a lot of money in crypto they they don't want to bank at like their their use their checking account that they use when they were you know uh in college or something they want to go be a private client of like a goldman or jp morgan but most of their wealth is in crypto so they can't actually yeah absolutely

this really sets us up for more interesting products like being able to use cryptos collateral for a number of other things um and it's not just blackrock i mean obviously blackrock is the largest is it it is the largest money manager in the world 10 trillion what 10 trillion right it's and the setup there is uh explosive i think um especially not the the key things are the custody of it it's like the full suite of coinbase uh that they've already developed i think that's their biggest mo call what it is whether margins are down you don't agree with the management team or the they do have this kind of moat of having built like an end-to-end

suite of solutions that an institution like bro blackrock is probably gonna go and use them versus someone else um there was also an interesting development that happened in europe uh bmp paribas which is if not the largest one of the largest banks in france also similarly is now going to allow their private clients to um you know support them like you know allocating to to crypto and uh by allocation i mean like being able to like from their platform you log in you buy it and like you you see it in your statement like it's there i you know and they're i don't think they're i'm not sure who they're using on the back end uh but it's it's um like from a custodial standpoint and what have you

but uh yeah these are some of the headlines that kind of go unnoticed in in during these markets uh you know most people find this coin this coinbase announcement if there's a bull market it is plastered all over crypto twitter it's like front page news it's like just quietly goes goes by in a bear market yeah you know um so i think uh speaking around that uh which i think just to tie nicely kind of the episode is we had uh the head of research at ark uh come on uh last week and i think he's a you know these guys are in my opinion one of the best research shops out there and yeah you know they they traded out of coinbase which they've held for quite a bit of time um was it two weeks ago week and a half ago i think july 27th they kind of

punched out um and now you know obviously you know the the stocks up a ton now 80 70 100 depending on where things are probably move quite a bit during this recording um so you're left wondering like again um we didn't ask them much but like why did they punch out of it and you know a lot of people are obviously saying well you literally took like the bottom and this is why it's so hard to think on i don't know what their thesis or their if it was like a force-selling situation they had to just i don't know the particulars but what i'm trying to say is i think um it's important to kind of appreciate and go back to the

the original thesis of why coinbase is valuable why i think it's valuable and the most that it has and just from first principles like should this business be worth x and it's trading out why um it's interesting because i think coinbase and microstrategy both will will tell you the sentiment around crypto and how far how far that pendulum is swinging from you know how are marx's great quote and i keep going with howard marks because i think he's one of the best investors um which is like the business the real world deviates and kind of here

the market is you have the psychological component in humans not being very rational with species deviates like this and so it's like how fundamentals really changed and so in the margin yeah maybe right uh how much of it's priced in we're super hard to understand but at least you can like point to saying okay this business has x amount of cash on their balance sheet it's generating y unless i fundamentally think that's gonna totally go away and it's trading at this p multiple which is like below distressed steel mills should this what is still a technology business that is you know synonymous with crypto and one of the largest markets in the world should it be trading at close to book value or you know like a p ratio of like

six or seven or four well maybe not and so yeah you know it just as a reminder that you can they're very smart people looking at these things and and even them you know it's it's it's it's really hard to time out time the market but uh yeah it's an i look at coinbase and microstrategy as like very clear barometers of of general sentiment towards the asset class um and and you know i think it was like again have we bought them i don't know but like there was a while there with coinbase was trading out like pretty distressed levels yeah so i don't know you could argue still is uh but you know you guys should go and do the work do the work all right santi good app you

excited for new york my friend uh very much so uh assuming us i am flying through heathrow i believe and so oh ooh i had a very bad call hey listen uh you know uh it is what it is i will just uh i'm excited to go uh and and meet up with some folks out there uh we didn't cover it but as a punk holder i i will say it will be interesting to see this tiffany i will well let's just end it with this tiffany and i know i think one of the sons of bernard um is you know has a board ape i think has his profile picture and he's been you know very much in the frontier of being pro web 3 and and i think developing a strategy for the suite of

luxury brands whether it's tag the watchmaker or tiffany the jeweler or some of the other ones right and so in this case tiffany unveiled that it was doing 250 uh pendants uh so if you have a punk you some there are some folks that were whitelisted others that are just gonna try to buy it up to you know just 250 um nfts and you can redeem the nft and get a custom like pendant with some like rare gemstones if you will of the punk itself but you can only claim it within the first i think like couple weeks or like months uh it's not like you can wait forever um so yeah it's interesting from um you know i think it will

pave the way and show other luxury brands why web3 is so important because i think lvmh as a conglomerate is by far in fact it's my top three if i could just own one stock and i don't typically own stocks other than private companies going public in my portfolio um it would be probably lvmh because humans always want to differentiate and i think they they're the way they've kind of gone after and developed this luxury conglomerate across multiple categories is very impressive so you're left wondering who's next within their portfolio of lvmh brands um you know especially in the backdrop when a lot of sales they've been hit hard with

you know the us dollar rising if you're like luxury brand based in the us and or russia all of a sudden like certain brands like dolce gabbana and like that like we're deriving like 30 40 50 of the revenue from russia well guess what that just went to zero and china for a while has been like clamping down on like anti-corruption practices and so like that also has put pressure on these brands and so what's next they always wonder like what's next what's the next how do you appeal to a a younger demographic and capture growth well uh i don't know maybe do what uh tiffany is doing so i think it's a very interesting experiment whether you like it or not whether you like the pendants or not i personally probably will not be shelling out 30 eth because i um

i don't have a significant other and i'm not much independent um but uh but they look pretty cool i mean i i guess i will say the only thing that i was thinking was oh let me go out and buy a bunch of female punks because then i think like i don't know like look it it's like a man it's like a satchel you remember that scene in the in the hangover which is like he's wearing like a man back and there's this whole discussion about what what it is and i think they look yeah don't get me wrong if you're gonna use man back satchel what are we going to call it great but i'm just not a pendant guy so i always buy for personal consumption and this is not something that i at this point in my life uh see myself uh just wearing i'm i'm with you i mean

this is uh yeah i mean shout out to louis vuitton and lvmh like first off bernard arno the french billionaire who dude's worth 168 billion they own lvmh owns dior fendi mark jacobs what is it uh celine sephora tag here like some of the best liquor brands out there yeah and like just they they uh i think they're behind el catterdon like the amazing investment firm um he put the reason i think this deal went down is he put his son alexander the 28 year old in in charge of tiffany so it's no wonder that like tiffany is doing this uh shout out to i pinged alexander see if we can bring him on the podcast yeah

santi be well i'm excited to see you soon in new york thank you yeah likewise uh thanks everyone for listening um and hope uh hope you stay safe out there and we'll be back next week [Music] you