The AI portfolio manager with Daniel Machlup of FortyTwo

Transcript

I'm of the approach that all blockchains will be speaking to each other at some point I mean I think that's pretty common knowledge at this point Cosmos allows all chains to be speaking to each other so like why don't we build a cosmos wide application building primarily on Cosmos SDK based chains we have actually decided to move away from our own smart contracts and only deploy front end so really we're we're very much just focused on user experience theoretically AI is going to be able to make better financial decisions with our money than our Mega human brains can so we think that's that's sort of where things are headed is AI is going to be managing uh our our [Music] money welcome to the interop I'm here

with Daniel mashup he's the CEO and founder at 42 they're building a natural language intense protocol otherwise you can also say that they're building AI agents for Defi and specifically in The Interchange space Al they their Vision does expand into the broader crypto ecosystem and defi ecosystem before we get started please remember none of what we discussed here on the interrupt is investment advice you should always do your own research and also 42 Finance is a portfolio company of interop Ventures make sure to subscribe to get notified when new episodes drop and be sure to stick with us we're validating on a handful of networks and you can find interop in the active set hey Dan how's it going he s

thanks for welcoming me on today appreciate it yeah it's been a long time coming but uh I'm excited to finally get you on the podcast because I think you guys are building really a great product and um one that I can't wait to you know be sort of live on mainnet and with all the features that you guys are implementing uh so that you know um I can use it I think this is a product that I really want to use and one that I think a lot of folks in the interner chain are going to want to use as well so yeah bit of background like how did you want how did you come to want to solve this problem so yeah pretty much I mean I think as with all startups it's a it was

a constant iteration process uh we started on something pretty different uh and then when once we realized that that that wasn't going to come to fruition we sort of we were just speaking to a lot of users and really like I guess getting in touch with where crypto touches the ground again so to speak and like what are the fundamental needs of the ecosystem um but yeah I think uh just just going back into like I guess my quick background I mean I studied Finance worked in banking worked in fintech worked in venture capital I was at binance labs for a little while and then uh and then started 42 which was a originally in a very very

different space we were actually building on a something on OS to begin with um and sort of moved off that uh evos um as as you know Seb um obviously hits a lot of roadblocks along their launch process and we sort of took a step back at that point and and realized why we were already building within the cosmos ecosystem and we I'm of the approach that all blockchains will be speaking to each other at some point I mean I think that's pretty common um pretty common knowledge at this point in time but this was two years ago when when I was like why are we building on only one chain when firstly all blockchains are going to be speaking to each other and secondly Cosmos allows all chains to be speaking to each other

so like why don't we build a cosmos wide um application um built off like I guess the cosmos SDK or building F primarily on Cosmos SDK based chains um so yeah so we started we started just building we went to the cross chain app and then we just started like realizing how many um issues users have with navigating an interchain ecosystem so at the time it was like relatively complex to even just get your tokens from one IBC enabled chain to another IBC enabled chain never mind staking or earning yields across different chains so we were just like how do we actually solve for that which will hopefully bring users into the

crypto ecosystem users that we we haven't seen before yeah there's there's definitely been some pretty significant improvements on the interchain stack side in terms of being able to do the sort of things that you described right like having accounts on one chain that are enabling transactions on another chain is is really uh it's sort of like magic when it when when it works right and most of the times it does work but like to to just see that in in production and have that working in lots of protocols in Cosmos is is fantastic and I think if we are um align with the idea that there

will be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of individual blockchain applications or Sovereign applications in the form of you know either app chains or L l2s you kind of need that you you need that interruptibility and message passing ability as a as a first Principle as a as a primitive and um this is why I think you know we're all bullish on on the cosmos stack primarily because of because of these features that the stack has um embedded within it um how are you guys making use of that you know at 42 like how are you leveraging some of these unique features that the cosmos stack uh

provides yeah so that's actually a very interesting uh question with a a very interesting answer I would say but we are obviously still a pretty early stage team I mean although it was uh founded in a very different space we pivoted uh I'd say at least two or three times along the way to to find where we're headed towards now um and we started off specifically focusing on Cosmos SDK enabled chains um and the way the way that that was built was we were working with infrastructure providers that essentially allow us to deploy seamless smart contracts across a variety of chains very quickly however as we've been building that out we we started and

also this is just through through iterating speaking to users understanding the legal landscape understanding the tech landscape we've actually now moved away from deploying our own smart contracts so the way we had originally built the infrastructure was to deploy one smart contract on an infrastructure provider and allowed that smart contract to scale across IBC chains extremely quickly um however now we have actually decided to move away from our own smart contracts and only deploy front end so really we're we're very much just focused on user experience ux and UI like our bread and butter these days how do we make that better and some of our sort of findings along the way moving

away from only focusing on or or from deploying um smart contracts across chains and moving towards only ux and UI it's got a few advantag ages for us firstly we don't have all of the legal risk um associated with deploying your own smart contracts and therefore managing users funds um we also don't have um we don't need to be reliant on only Cosmos enabled chains because the fact that we the fact that we can now deploy our smart contracts or or sorry the fact that we can now integrate across any chain without deploying smart contracts means we can actually move into other ecosystem such as salana such as the the l2s because yeah once again we

are not deploying any uh smart contracts we're simply doing ux and UI so although we started very much uh reliant on the cosmos um Cosmos enabled technology um we have now to a large degree moved away from being reliant on that technology although it is good Tech and there's amazing infrastructure providers in the space that we are still reliant on and still are implementing um we ourselves are not implementing that technology so who who is the product for and what should people expect when using 42 yeah so the product is for people that want to use Defi and get access to um the variety of defi opportunities but

don't have the capacity or resources to um be doing all of their own research to be following all the trends to be following the right people on Twitter to enabling Twitter notifications for the right people it's for people that sort of want what I would say to a large degree is like lazy defi you want to be able to for example ape into a meme coin or perform a specific swap or stake into a stable sort of um real yield um uh Vault it's for those types of people that don't have the capacity to be doing all of their own research um which funnily enough is the user like myself um I think while I was building 42

obviously as a startup founder you've got a lot of um things to focus on in terms of the team um keeping it together the marketing fundraising etc etc Founders don't necessarily have the time to be reading up on every dii protocol that launches and trying to become eligible for every airdrop so through this process I was like I would actually love something like 42 where I could essentially ask an AI ask an AI bot something along the lines of what should I be doing with this um what should I be doing with my assets what are the latest air drops coming out how do I become eligible for them help me do help me do it um so it's for the people that don't have full capacity to spend researching defi yeah one of the ways that I've been

using AI for research is actually using Twitter's um llm the grock llm and uh I I basically will ask a question like what are the top airdrops right now and who's talking about them um or what are the newest defi protocols that people are talking about uh on Twitter um by number of of likes or something and and generally it I I don't know that it actually um Can integrate sort of the the metrics such as like number of likes or a number of Impressions uh when you're asking it but it generally responds with like some pretty good directions in which I should be doing my

research right because there's like so much stuff happening on Twitter and there's like so many different kind of pockets of crypto Twitter that you don't necessarily have access to if you're just following your feed and I found that the the llm there has been a good way to Kickstart you know some research oh like I never I didn't know about this thing like okay I'm going to go down that rabbit hole and go check it out and I think there's a really big potential there for these kinds of pre-made prompts that um that say like some a product like 42 could have that would just automatically be doing that research for for for people maybe on Twitter maybe on Discord like maybe capturing the data there and and you know having really well engineered

prompts that are getting Alpha basically like you kind of want to like utilize the AI agent as a as a way to generate Alpha you know what I'm saying completely and it's certainly not getting any worse that Tech right it's only going to get better and better in the next uh few months and years um also I saw today a company it's actually a web 2 company that we um base a lot of sort of we get a lot of inspiration from I would say is a one called perplexity AI which is essentially a a cross between Google and chat GPT so what it does is it like scans the internet and consolidates it for you and your own little mini web page so we saw today that perplexity raised $250 million

which is a quite a quite a big thing and and I mean that's essentially an AI agent but for web to just not for defi so that's that's what we uh we're basing it off for Define I think you were telling me about this other one called Brian knows is that was that you yeah so so Brian knows essentially you you you give it a query you connect your wallet and then it it will'll execute transactions for you is that exactly exactly so we we sort of think sorry I don't know if this is a step ahead but we sort of think that this is where the world is going um like our our view as a team is at some point in the next I don't know maybe 10 years

the we're just going to say to some sort of an AI agent manage this money for me and maybe we don't give it all of our money maybe we do um but theoretically AI is going to be able to make better financial decisions with our money than our meager human brains can so um so we think that's that's sort of where things are headed is AI is going to be managing our our money there is some sort of a dystopian type future there somewhere where where whose AI is faster but we don't need to go there um but if you sort of take that one step back um AI is at least going to be recommend or finding the best sources of yield and recommending it to you as a user and

you'll just have to click confirm confirm and if you sort of present value that one step it's AI is just going to be making sense of all this data and presenting it to you in some sort of a meaningful way um and those are sort of the three stages we see this progressing and and we're as a startup team building towards the first one at the moment so how are you implementing intense because it's like intense a lot of people are talking about it I think some uh implementations are more on the at the Smart contract or at the blockchain level and then you have protocols and that are um doing intense more like with an AI agent you know what is your view on these different approaches and in what way are you guys implementing it

specifically yeah so once again going back to our Tech stack is we are just focusing on front end so there are a number of solers out there that actually solve for the intents behind the scenes um and and execute the right transactions for the users we are just um in the in the space of presenting the right intent to the to the right user so so the way the way that we actually think about intent and I know there is some uh the disputes around what intents actually mean and what layers of the Tex stack the way the way we look at intents is what does the user say that they want to do what if sort of the the end state that the user wants to be in maybe the

user just says I want 20 osmo or 20 ethereum then that's the end State or the users's intent the next prompt that an I um agent would probably ask is you have these tokens which ones would you like to swap to get those 20 ethereum or whatever it is so um that's how we look at intents now and and we just provide that as as I mentioned that user information so prompting the user with another question to clarify their intent however how that intent gets solved on the back end that's where our infrastructure providers come into play they are the ones who going find the right route uh and and actually execute the

transaction so who who are these infrastructure providers and what is you know what is the relationship that they have to 42 are you guys implementing some sort of a matching mechanism for those those solvers or is it completely independent of the protocol yeah so I mean one of the infrastructure providers that we're using and we've been working with for quite a while is Skip protocol who have been uh amazing to work with they are obviously like to a large degree maintaining um a large not maintaining but improving a large uh portion of IBC um or Cosmos uh usability so um they've been amazing to

work with their sort of bread and butter in the future um is um and I hope I'm stating this correctly but is um is me attribution so they they enally are sourcing the transactions um and can essentially offer users the best the best prices um based on what they're finding or how they're solving the transactions um by being yeah the order sourcing and we that's their B but is the me and then they attribute some of that me back to us as a protocol so so yeah there's skip then there are a few others that we're also in early stage discussions with that are are looking at sort of these solver marketplaces so so places like skip but essentially finding

a Marketplace of of skip protocols for example um and I think there's a lot of development happening within the solver space yeah that's a space that I'm I'm not super familiar with can you expand a little bit on on the solver space and what are the different approaches here I mean are I guess like what I'm interested in is is there a market are there marketplaces for solvers that uh essentially allow any protocol call to kind of plug into this pool of solvers that will then go and like be mercenaries and just do whatever uh find like the best price or execute a transaction with the lowest slippage or yeah how does that space kind of work

yeah I mean I think that that's um as you're as you're saying it is is correct at least according to my understanding of the space and obviously I'm not an expert in in how the the tech infrastructure actually works and that's where we'd have to speak with teams like skip or or Noma for example my understanding is each of these protocols have their solvers that actually go and try and execute transactions in a varieties of ways find the cheapest or most efficient way to do that and once that's been proved to be the the cheapest or most efficient way that gets submitted and executed upon now there's obviously probably I don't want to say infinite but a large number of ways that a transaction can be solved for um and I guess these solver Marketplace is are

are the one step ahead or sorry one step uh One Step Above in the stack where they're looking at all of the different solutions being proposed and actually selecting the best one yeah so um those are the teams that we're we're speaking with right yeah you just reminded me I guess like anoma it's been a while since I caught up with them but I guess anoma is sort of the this this model right this kind of solver Marketplace model um yeah exactly it's an interesting idea because like I think if you take the solver idea to to its extremes right like solvers will leverage any means

necessary uh as long as it's economically viable to execute a transactions so that could be you know getting into some kind of murky meev space or or maybe even resorting to nefarious activity in order to execute transactions right so like if a solver determines that there's a smart contract that is that has a bug right the solver May uh a non-ethical solver May opt to hack that smart contract in order to uh to achieve um the goals that is required by the by the transaction issuer is that something you think

about is how do the transactions get solved if there's like a yeah like what are the ethics around solving transactions um I think about it in terms of like maybe it's like a slightly tangential thought but in terms of the fact that obviously what we've briefly discussed now is that AI is getting better and better and I think that there's just going to be a point where there are not so many bugs to exploit because I mean either as you say the solvers exploit them or the security protocols find them very quickly so I think like if there is a hack um an inevitable hack theoretically there's going to be security protocols that deploy their AI

their own AI agents across trains and go find these these sort of um exploits I mean I guess once again we reach this sort of uh dystopian type future where it's like AI agent of the good guys versus AI agent of the exploiters neck and neck whoever can find them first that's like the Bounty I guess um so um yeah I I don't know where that going but I feel like I feel like all of these are steps in the right direction as an industry like we do need to we we've we've seen it before like I think I think the the the dollars hacked over the last few years my understanding is it's significantly decreased as of as of recently because we we were in this

place as an industry where there were a lot of exploits but a lot of the exploits that that have sort of come about have now been patched up all over the place people know where they are and of course as we carry on developing there will be more vulnerabilities um but I think as an industry we do see like a new tech and then we see the hacks happen and then over time it gets smoothed out again um because it has to for an an efficient industry to run yeah thinking about the the aggregation space so you know in ethereum we've had defi aggregators or solvers for some time like um you know obviously like projects like 1 in and Paras Swap and cow swap these are

protocols that are meant to find the best price for a swap and you know they have networks of solvers that are uh solving these transactions and finding the best price at the best slippage then you have protocols like Rango that go even further and um execute cross chain transactions it will find the route for your token to uh to basically go from one chain to another those have been really valuable for me I've used them quite a bit to you know if not execute transactions at least find the best routes and the best uh price own trades sometimes I'll go and execute them myself or you know but whatever like I think these have created a lot of value

in the space um what but in in Cosmos aggregation is is not a a segment of the market that has a lot of competitors and like a lot of actors uh competing for for users you know why is that and you know taking a step back as you're building 42 what have you learned what lessons have you learned from aggregators in the ethereum ecosystem yeah so I think on the cosmos side I mean I am quite surprised about the lack of aggregators on the cosmo side because it does seem like an industry or a a segment ripe for aggregators because there are so many

chains already um but maybe that also came with its own complexities in a sort of nent Industry where or a nent like cross chain industry because obviously we're only starting to see the like the the um increas in Cross chain transactions recently as ethereum is obviously scaling into l2s which are cross chain now um and yeah I mean I think I think previously it was always kind of difficult to get your your assets across chains even just getting something from like I guess ethereum to salana it was often like a few years ago it was transferred to coinbase and then to salana to a large degree maybe there were other ways around it but that's what most users were using so I think

this cross chain Cosmos ecosystem almost just seemed too complicated for uh for a lot of the aggregators um and then I guess Cosmos itself hasn't picked up enough tvl over the last few years to to actually um enhance the cross chain or or incentivize the cross chain ecosystem I think something else also very interesting on that front that I'm just thinking about now and this is a problem we experienc building a cross chain Cosmos app is no ecosystem gives you grants or incentives to build it because they're all like well you're not only building on our chain so like we got we got turned down just from like grants all over the place because all of these

ecosystems are like well you're you're building a cross all the chain so why should we give you the grant kind of thing um whereas obviously a lot of early stage projects manage to get grants for the ecosystem that they're building on uh we luckily through uh I mean through people like you Seb obviously invested in us so we managed to still get it off the ground obviously you guys see the vision um so I think I think that's that's one of the reasons why we haven't seen an influx of aggregators into Cosmos um yeah and I I I kind of have along the building Journey have looked back and been like kind of looking over my shoulder being like no one is chasing us here like that's kind of weird um so I don't tell anyone about this I'm kidding

um yeah so uh yeah I think I think that that was something interesting for us um as you've you've sort of alluded to now is these these sort of cross-chain protocols um or uh aggregation protocols have been useful to you um you mentioned you've used them and I think a lot of users use them I think hardcore D DG don't necessarily use them because they know their ways around but I think if we do want to see Mass adoption in the crypto industry I think aggregators make sense I mean I've given a talk before on sort of aggregation Theory um which I often say I don't think necessarily

should be a theory because it's just what is an Aggregate and someone put the word theory at the end but aggregate have existed for like thousands of years from back in the day when there was a Marketplace and you got your ham and your cheese and your bread all at the same place and then like it's people like going to one place and viewing everything because it's convenient and I think if there's one thing that web 2 has taught us is like how do you just make things more convenient for people and right now web 3 is just completely inconvenient for the regular user and that's what we're trying to improve is is convenience I think if there's any shot of us onboarding the next billion users into crypto need to be significantly more uh convenient um some

of the learnings some of the other learnings on the ethereum side I think a lot of the people in crypto understand how to use crypto but aggregators I think often struggled uh historically to find Revenue um because crypto is obviously a very efficient industry it's like if you start charging a 1% fee people will just circumvent you kind of thing but I do see that as we onboard the next um the next billion people into crypto that this convenience fee will be given away because of the fact that it's more convenient people will be more willing to pay it as more and more chains come online I mean obviously we're sort of in this world now of you

know thousands of blockchains potentially and l2s and other forms of applications that are going to have their own um sovereign execu ution environment their own liquidity uh their own also tooling and transaction types right because we'll have say Cosmos app chains and evm chains and move chains and salana VM chains uh at which point does everything start to aggregate like at which point does the aggregation threshold get so high that things start aggregating again and move into the convenient because I I

I agree with you that right now like in this current state of things things are super inconvenient and it takes a lot of time and energy and effort to do anything in defi that involves more than just like swapping tokens on the Dex um yeah I think uh I think it was the the XO of I think it's Netscape the XO of Netscape has a quote around like all money or value is uh or a significant amount of money or value is attributed through un through bundling and then through unbundling and I think there's always this constant um in a lot of Industries sort of bundling and then unbundling so

yeah I think uh when do we start seeing this sort of aggregation um coming to fruition I think I think soon I mean this was one of my major learnings in in Dubai at token 249 I spoke with a lot of VCS and a lot of of different people who are just like how many more Bitcoin l2s can be funded you know like and what are they going to do with all of them um so yeah I I think I think the industry is sort of right for at least some degree of a of a bundling soon what's what is the the Catalyst for that like is it like the next bare Market or are there other catalyst other than just

kind of uh tightening of the uh of the screws that will launch this this aggregation yeah I mean I just like I think I obviously like adding what the fuel for the fire of crypto is like to a large degree we need investment in in these things to get to a good place where where they actually do become convenient and this fuel to the fire is or this Capital comes from VCS so at some point we need a narrative shift I would say away from another Bitcoin L2 or ethereum L2 and actually a narrative shift into

the ux space and actually adding fuel to the fire that U ux people focusing on crypto ux can actually um have enough financial Runway and security to hire the best developers to to hire the best product managers and actually build useful applications across across These Chains I think for that to happen we need to stop allowing potentially all of these sort of l2s or l1s to um to be launching token valuations at extremely high amounts where investors are incentivized to just invest in them because they can launch a token very quickly at a billion dollar valuation um so I think as soon as potentially and

this is just a thought if some of these l1s and l2s had to start doing these token launches or not finding product Market fit for whatever reason and actually failing that could result in a re attribution of capital yeah I mean the incentives in crypto are a little bit perverse and I think you know people people don't talk about this but you know there is this Capital that is willing to be deployed in projects at a very early stage at Val valuations that broadly don't uh reflect the value created by the companies um yeah those products launch and will s of rally other investors and and specifically retail

investors to also buy into these ideas and you know those who generally make out I think the best out of this situation are the are the investors in BCS and like I say this as a guy running a fund like who had access early are able to divest those tokens with the help of professional market makers and um and through like OTC deals and this sort of thing and and you know professional defi users to some extent but you know the valuations even even you know in the depth of the bar Market we still like quite high like you know if you look at any VC deal in web

2 you know valuations are like 10 times less right or more than in crypto um when you're talking about preed or or seed stage companies and sometimes even companies that have actual Revenue right and and we're talking about companies that actually are making money versus uh these kind of these kind of protocols that are basically you know still at pitch deck level or very little uh has been created what what do you think is the you know if we take a step back even further than that like what is the Catalyst you think for for that entire Paradigm to shift uh for these incentives to really sort of come back to reality I mean I mean I guess we're talking about more

macro level um uh sort of topics here where you know this liquidity is coming from somewhere like this this VC money is coming from somewhere it's coming from LPS it's coming from investors uh who are willing to take those risks and and deploy like large amounts of capital um yeah yeah I mean like how long can this go basically my question no it's interesting so it's like um yeah it's pretty much like how long will exit liquidity be around for almost you're asking but uh so I mean I think like my understanding at least um is that a lot of the sort of the the traditional web two valuations are less because of the long time to um a

liquidity event so this is I think on average it's like seven years to IPO or whatever it is whereas crypto it's kind of like one to two years almost on average or maybe three um so yeah I guess there it's like less than half the time but the thing is once these web 2 companies do IPO and have their liquidity event it's because these companies are ready to have their Equity or shares sold to the public they've made Revenue they've passed all the checks and balances they've had the audits done and they're actually ready to do it whereas crypto as as we mentioned is sort of like often times you have a pitch deck or an idea and you

can sell a token for a few billion dollars but someone is buying that token on the other side and that's why I say like how long will that exit liquidity be there for because these people that have bought all these tokens for all these projects which have failed or not found product Market fits are not going to be there forever so at some point token launchers are not going to be um as highly valuable or or will need to have found more product Market fit beforehand so yeah because the guy sitting in I don't know Africa or Bangalore is not going to be investing in every single token launch if he's sitting with a a worthless bag of tokens

that he's previously bought so yeah I think at some point either maybe through regulation um where cryp and and this pains me to say it I guess where uh potentially at some point all token launchers will need to go through regulation just to protect the end investor from these sort of um nefarious token launches um or or the people buying the the tokens um just don't have the the the money anymore to do it or we need to see more of an idea to do it and someone actually mentioned to me recently they said sort of something along the lines like the in 2017 you just needed a pitch deck to do a token then in

20221 you just needed a website and in 2023 you kind of need or 2024 you need a like a an app out there or and I I think it's sort of tending towards longer time Horizons potentially I'm not sure though yeah no I think that I think that makes sense and I think like investors have also become uh more demanding of of project so in 2017 you just needed a pit stack and you know people were just basically raising money by putting an ethereum address out uh and and then later came the Saft and then at some point investors started demanding Equity right in the form of a safe agreement with token warrants um sorry if this is a bit inside baseball for for people

listening but um but I think it is also uh you know to some extent um you know the investors demanding more and more out of the portfolio companies that they're investing in uh but yeah I I think if you compare that to web 2 the threshold is much lower in terms of valuation versus uh versus versus what's actually sort of produced at the you know for for the valuation so yeah I mean the liquidity aspect the the time to liquidity I think really is is a huge part of it and so people are willing to take that risk um yeah not to make this all about investing but uh wanted to

also talk a little bit about the stack and how 42 looks under the hood so yeah tell me a bit about the architecture and specifically your use of cosmism yeah so I mean I think we we men we spoke about this briefly I spoke about it briefly earlier in the in the call but um pretty much we're focused at the moment we've moved away from doing any km wasm ourself at this point in time we had deployed smart contracts on a few chains but for a variety of different reasons have actually moved away from that and are now solely focusing on ux um so we ourselves are not doing any km Wim we do have infrastructure providers that we're

working with that are deploying cosm smart contract okay that wasn't that wasn't clear so so basically uh 42 is purely a front end there's Yeah you mentioned this earlier but there there are actually no contracts that you guys are deploying or interacting with yes and I think we've actually found a lot of um Clarity in as a team in doing that it's like we we're not distracted by a variety of things we just want to improve user experience like that is our sole Focus how do we make user experience as good as possible and we don't need to worry about our own audits we don't need to worry about uh the legal consequences of managing users funds um yeah so when thinking about UI and ux and crypto I think one of the

main pain points is the wallet you know how do we get to a point where we can eliminate this uh additional UI component so that users are interacting directly with a website the way they would do in web 2 are there any real advancements uh on in in this direction or are we going to be continuously having to work with this sort of second Factor UI that generally is I think pretty bad and just degrades the entire user experience of using def so I think that there's a my opinion is that there's a few ways that this could go about um sort of evolving is one way is the wallets start building

towards defi themselves which um which we've already started seeing um a number of wallets are starting to offer all sorts of defi yield or swap opportunities however um what happens there is obviously as we know or at least in the current state of crypto there's a few few wallets uh or a few sort of I'd say brands or Protocols of wallets that hold the majority of the crypto funds um and those those wallets are in a significantly uh better position than than than the others what what we're going for is allowing any wallet to connect to us um to 42 so so just like we're aggregating across uh across defi

protocols we're also aggregating across wallet where any wallet can connect to us um and allowing users to to simply just sign transactions through through a wallet um through their wallet um where does this end up going I'm not necessarily an expert in the wallet space I know there is a lot of stuff happening there I've been speaking with teams that are doing sort of uh like Key Management Solutions etc etc and potentially at some point in the future there is an option for 42 to to offer like at least a key management solution or a our own native 42 wallet what do you think of the whole osmosis account abstraction idea and they want to build

account abstraction into the chain so that effectively every account is a smart account the idea is also for existing accounts to have the ability to be converted into smart accounts and then um I think there's even uh an idea around having the account being managed directly in the browser now I think this introduces some security issues because obviously like the browser um Dom is is not a sort of protected space uh but um but I think there are some um ideas there around how basically you could have a wallet UI directly in a browser and um and so not having to use a thirdparty wallet maybe for transactions

up to a a certain threshold and then the chain would enforce transactions with a higher threshold to be like double signed or like signed with a second Factor do you think this is something that that you guys could Implement uh to really improve the ux around using 42 I mean I think that that is probably the way forward especially as we start as we mentioned in the beginning of this call allocating more and more of our funds toward AI agents it's like we're definitely not at a point where we're just going to give 100% of our assets to an AI agent to manage so um I think that I think on that front that should s natively potentially within the 42 solution or within within the browser

itself and actually allow users to transact with a certain allocated amount without without a signature um and I think I think this is the case even outside of crypto with other sort of AI um based Industries like if we look at self-driving cars it's like we don't give self-driving Cars full autonomy to just drive anywhere initially because there will be deaths and there have been deaths um because there are mistakes but it's like we allow them to drive in these areas at these times to begin with and and slowly over time as it becomes a more trusted technology um then we start giving it more leeway yeah so uh 42 recently launched in beta

so how can people use the product today what is in what um is possible to do with the current beta product and uh what's the road map to kind of a main net production launch yeah so um yeah we launched in a closed beta few months ago and we've just been testing that out continuously we are just about ready for our open uh like our open Beta launch um and currently users can start uh staking across any Cosmos space chain with auto compounding um they can liquid stake any cosmos space asset through 42 uh they can swap across any Cosmos

chain um which includes we've also included in the swaps um uh swaps to etherium a bunch of ethal 2s as well as salana uh we've got lending being deployed probably today or tomorrow um then we've got uh some interchange strategies um also coming out soon we've also got Fiat onramps and um natively in the in the app and then the last product which we also just deployed recently was sort of an airdrop um an airdrop uh farming tool that allows you to become eligible for a variety of different air drops around the cosmos ecosystem so um um yeah we we plan on launching that imminently currently

we're in just in the process of um tying up some some legal things doing a re-registration and then we're ready to launch hopefully in the next 2 to 3 weeks so we're aiming to launch around miday um if all goes according to plan um yeah and if users want to jump on the the beta the Clos beta before then um reach out to me they required at the moment to submit a neutron address but yeah that's that's it I think that answered your questions yeah cool well Daniel thanks so much for coming on the podcast and um yeah working people go to start using the the beta what's the website yes the website is uh

www.4 2. Manny and that's 42 spelled out f o r TT wooney um otherwise check us out on Twitter we're 42 spelled out undor money um yeah look forward to to being in touch um and one more thing just by the way Sebastian yeah thank you so much for uh for taking the faith of in investing in Us in in our uh preed round it was a we managed to close our preed during the bare Market which was obviously super difficult and I remember having the call with you where you decided to invest and you sort of were like I can't believe you're still here you're still

building you've we're in which uh I appreciated that leap of faith and everything you guys and and the interrup team has done for us yeah well uh it's it's been a pleasure working with with you guys and um yeah like I think from the beginning one of the things that I thought really I felt was really attractive about 42 was this this is a product that I actually want to use and you know to the extent that it's you know the beta is usable today you know used uh uh use it to to do some staking and and this sort of thing but I'm really I'm I'm like I can't wait until this thing is fully in integrated into

all blockchains and it can just be managing all of my sort of portfolio positions and I can use an AI agent to manage my portfolio and not have to you know think about oh I need to move tokens from ethereum over here and then I got to move them here and it's just like you know the the the lift the mental lift required to do anything in defi has become so high just because of the complexity of everything and and I think we need products like this to move the needle in terms of how easy it would be to to use dii so yeah super super bullish on on

42 cool great thanks for coming on thank you bye bye