Blockworks: The Future of Crypto = AI, Memecoins and DePIN - Jason Yanowitz Live @Permissionless 569

Transcript

what started happening is all the protocols would come to us and say Hey you spend more time looking at incentive programs than anyone else we want to build an incentive program can you help us do that biggest takeaway for mission list is that the apps are actually coming like if the first wave of apps in defi was like speculative ways to do things in finance this wave of apps is going to be speculative ways to do things in culture and society and then most of them are going to be dumb and gimmicky but a couple of those will become the next Unis swap Ops and a and compounds every conversation that I have at permission list ends up coming back to three things AI crypto meme coins and dpen welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects

and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm Sebastian I'm here with my co-host FR Ern in Sunny agal we are very pleased to be with Jason yanowitz co-founder of block works and of this fine conference we're at permissionless in Salt Lake City but first here here our sponsors for the week if you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence look no further than course one more than 150,000 delegators including institutions like Bido Penta capital and Ledger trust corus one with their assets they support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake is responsibly managed thanks to their Advanced me research you can also enjoy the highest

staking rewards you can stake directly from your preferred wallet set up a white label note restake your assets on IGA or symbiotic or use the SDK for multichain staking in your app learn more at kus1 and start saking today this episode is proudly brought to by nosis a collective dedicated to advancing and decentralized future nosis leads Innovation with circles nosis pay and metry reshaping open Banking and money with Hashi and nosis VPN they're building a more resilient privacy focused internet if you're looking for an L1 to launch your project nosis chain offers the same development environment as ethereum with lower transaction fees

it's supported by over 200,000 validators making nosis chain a reliable incredibly neutral foundation for your applications nosis Dow drives nosis governance where every voice matters join the nosis community in the nosis Dow for today Deploy on the evm compatible nosis chain or secure the network with just one gno and affordable Hardware start your decentralization journey today at nosis doio all right great cool Jason thanks for doing us thanks for having me how you doing man you guys liking the event it's pretty good yeah it's uh it's my first time in Salt Lake and my first permission list and uh I was expecting a good conference

and I got a good conference nice so good yeah Sunny is not saying he enjoyed it but that's okay I had a great time um I'm sure everybody says this by the way when they come on epicenter but it's uh it's actually a very special thing to be on here because this is the show that I listened to for years when there weren't like 50 podcasts in the industry and there was just one I could listen to so it's a I really appreciate you guys having ma are you excited to have your little polygon picture yeah yeah exactly yeah um so yeah tell us a little bit about this event like uh what's what's going on here yeah the event is good it's um so couple thousand people here um so events are interesting because they basically L they're a indicator of what the industry was

feeling 6 months ago um because you sell a lot of your sponsorships and a lot of the tickets actually the tickets happened in like the couple weeks before but a lot of the sponsorships happen and you kind of pick the size of the conference like 6 months before so uh the event's really good though like we're we're very happy with it um a couple thousand people here the there's like a lot of Founders and uh the I think the conversation is like I don't know a lot of talk about like apps rollups uh our you know unisoft just made their big announcement this week like with the uni chain like what's going to happen there so I don't know I think it's a good event what's your goal for hosting a

conference okay so blockworks has three sides of the business we have the media business where we own a lot of the podcasts and the newsletters uh we have the events side of the business where we own two different brands there's permissionless and digital asset Summit and then we have a research and data business so three sides of the business actually we just launched the fourth fourth which is blockworks advisory but uh all of those kind of sides of the business serve different functions so the media business um serves the function of owning this big audience and owning the distribution and the relationship with like millions of people then the events business uh is here to make money candidly like it spits off cash flow uh and then the

research and Data Business does two things which is it like builds our deeply like crypto native brand and then it drives Enterprise Value because that's where the like AR and subscriptions come from so if you take those things like there are some media businesses there are some event businesses there's some like research and data platforms but they all I think you have to bring those three things together to have actually a viable media information business in crypto so they all serve different functions how did that evolve historically kind of did you start with all those different facets or did you kind of add uh to to the offering a bit by bit yeah we built a media company ass backwards so the way

that you're supposed to build a media company is you're supposed to launch a substack or launch a podcast and then maybe you build an audience and then you wake up in like 18 months you're like oh my God I need to monetize this thing so maybe we should host some events or maybe we should get some advertisers for the podcast uh maybe that's what happened with epicenter you host a podcast and you're like oh we should make some money and we start getting advertised kind of a classic Model we didn't know what media was we didn't know how to do media so we were just trying to solve one problem in the market which was in 2017 in New York City there were all these events but there were really scammy pretty crappy events I'm sure you guys went to some of these the like really Ico events in New

York so we were just trying to solve the events in crypto we were just trying to make better events in crypto and these weren't even big conferences they were just like to 10 p.m. happy hours so we started with the happy hours turned them into a big events we initially had this Outsource podcast model where we would like sell ads for other podcasts for epicenter for we sold ads for epicenter we during during like 2020 2021 yeah exactly we launched some other shows we launched the pomp podcast which was called off the chain back then we did a show with Ryan cus we did a show with melum and Jill um called what grinds by gears we did a show with uh Scott milker we did a show with Charlie shr so we had all these shows and then uh Co hit and 80% of our Revenue got wiped out

overnight so that was the basically existential crisis for the business we were like do we sell it we talked to coindesk we're like do we maybe just sell this to them for a couple million bucks do we quit like do we pack it up basically and we just decided we said look there's all these media brands in crypto there's like the block and coindesk and cointelegraph and decrypt but we thought they were all kind of doing a decent job but not an except exceptional job and the way that we saw it is they're all kind of catering to these like big audiences they're they were shooting for page views and going for like 100 level content or 200 level content and we said hey look what if you built a media brand just focused on this on the crypto native audience like really just focus on like honestly like

the three of you in this room as our target audience instead of the random retail person and so that's what we did we decided to go all in and bet on ourselves like launch this deeply crypto native media brand uh that was 2021 so that was when we quit all of our other podcasts we brought podcast in house we launched bell curve and Empire and those kind of shows and then uh a year later 2022 we launched the research and data company so you you told us just before we started the recording that you were that you were kind of debating internally whether to kind of do it again next year um tell us why you're off to Minds about that yeah so yeah we actually haven't really talked about this publicly I guess we

should make some Public Announcement about it that we're debating this but we can we can also cut this no no no no no this is good this is good we yeah because I'd love the audience's feedback on if we should do this or not you had to you know just how we get better products I'll just tell people how we're thinking about it and someone will give us good feedback so we have two conference paranal we have digital asset Summit which we called Das and it's a very buttoned up institutional event it's like traditional you know JP Morgan Goldman KKR Black Rock comes to learn about crypto and there's a very clear uh the way that I think about events is you're creating a Marketplace for 2 or 3 days and then you're tearing down the marketplace it's actually a pop-up Marketplace so to have a successful

event you need to have a really well defined sides of the marketplace so you need buyer very clear buyers you need very clear sellers so for das a very clear buyer which is like anyone trying to get in front of an institution fire blocks Anchorage bitgo you know ZK sync anyone trying to get a polygon trying to sell to Enterprise uh institutions then you have the sellers or the excuse me the buyers which are like I don't know bny melon looking for like a solution or something like that or the funds maybe allocating Capital all right so that's Das beautiful event tickets sell out once in advance whatever we'll always do that event what we're debating with permissionless is you don't really have that well-defined buyer and seller permissionless it's

just like I'd be honestly curious to hear how you guys think about permission list but it's just um we I've always thought of it as like hey consensus is not that good of an event because it's just not very Crypton native uh eth Denver is kind of chaotic but I do love eth Denver uh token a it's just Asia it's not in the US and so I've always thought a permission list is like a deeply crypto native big conference but it's not a very clear who's the buyer and who's the seller again going back to that Marketplace idea so we're debating do we keep doing permission list and because if permission list is really successful in its strategy today it ends up becoming like a token it ends up becoming like a consensus it becomes like an e Denver and I'm debating the value of big conferences today um the

other option we could do is I think there's a real Gap in the developer conferences uh in the developer market so if you look at some of the best developer events um you know eth Global does amazing work uh let's see Devcon obviously incredible but they're very ethereum focused and I think some of the coolest stuff happening in the industry is actually outside of ethereum right now but nobody's built events for that market um so that's what we're we're debating do we just keep going bigger with permission list do we turn it into more of a developer conference so that's a little look behind the scenes and a lot a lot of the developer events I think are more kind of like Foundation run or they're closer to the actual change than run by like you know sort of event

companies or media companies right um yeah you're still on a break point and you've got the right because like they have an incentive to you know fund a hackathon and get a whole bunch of people on their chain I think there's I think I think you know it's it's complicated I me unless unless you're writing some kind of like hackathon you know as a service s of business it's uh is hard to create that sort of like momentum around your kind of developer event like our our thesis for a developer event that the thing that I think we could do better than anyone is we have an amazing event operations team so sometimes if you go to these developer conferences they're not the most well organized events I would say we and we we know how to run a very buttoned up event um and the other thing I think we

could do is like so right now there aren't many new developers coming into the industry our thesis is that the number of developers who come into the industry is going to 100x over the next couple of years and those developers will want a place to go that's a little more open than something like just this is the ethereum you know developer event so like my vision is like okay you put like Toby from Shopify uh on stage with like you know toie from salana and you put uh Patrick cison on stage with like I don't know Alex from zky like those would be some phenomenal conversations uh the counter is like you know look at all these sponsors developers don't love having overly sponsored so you need to make money

somehow I don't know what what do you guys think about that well uh I mean you run a developer event I I've tried to do one for the last 3 years have been like mildly successful with it you guys run one of the best develop I mean their events really really think yeah so I mean it's it's been kind of the main event um besides East Berlin at uh Berlin blockchain week since 2018 when we did it for the first time um I always regret doing it kind of like the the weekend before I like ah we're such idiots why are we putting this on again why are we doing this to us to ourselves same exact feeling literally we could go like screw permissionless I hate this event but then you get there then you get there and it's actually

super nice and kind of like keep it come and it's kind of like um it's a pretty lowkey event so kind of like there's there's pretty high signal to noise kind of the way that we achieve it is kind of like I mean we're very much nosis is not an events company right so kind of like we run this because we think it should exist and kind of we want to go out kind of with a black zero um and that's kind of the goal so kind of we we don't collect enormous sponsorship um kind of I think our top tier historically been like €25,000 um our our um tickets are pretty cheap I think they're like two or300 um for three days and kind of it includes food and everything um so kind of it's it's not it's not a revenue generating

event for sure um but it it does actually create a lot of atmosphere and people love coming and there's a lot of people who actually who are repeat uh attendees yeah um and I think that's for reason we always have a super nice sight event dinner with kind of like uh the our BFF uh you know friends from the ecosystem and so on and it's it's um it's a thing it's super nice and for the first time we're actually organizing a site event to um to deathcon this year the two days ahead of it called de conflict um and it's kind of like the yeah it's kind of like the six biggest debates in in crypto at this point so

kind of like for instance the first the first debate is my co-founder Martin um against viik about whether noses should become an L2 and kind of like um debates like that that's a good debate yeah that's a good debate what would you do with permissionless would you keep doing it as we're doing it or would you get to the developer event game or I actually quite like this so kind of I enjoy coming because a it's very um it's fantastic for meeting State site people so kind of like most of the European events or even token you don't get to see all the Americans and I don't usually at these events I I I I think as an event organizer you never like hearing this but I don't go to a lot of

the talks um so kind of because those I can watch on YouTube later um I kind of I I literally just Network and kind of uh when I don't have meetings I sit in the lobby and I run into people and like we I actually love hearing that because my thought so the content just pulls people in basically but I mean we do all these event surveys and stuff so 78% of attendees attend our conference attend permissionless specifically for networking not for Content so and then it's not that 22% intense for the content there's all these other buckets but 78% attends for the networking so like it's it's like um you know you you you said that eventually like this Marketplace and you know I think like you said permissionless style events are not actually a two-sided Marketplace

they like a one-sided marketplace where people are coming to network with each other and then there's this like problem of like you know you only want to go if other people you want to talk to want to go and there's a bootstrapping problem and I think speaker slots are what you how you solve the bootstrap that's the bootstrap problem exactly you get the bigname speakers and then you get the big VCS and then the other VCS who are smaller like oh my God these big name speakers are my VC partners are there I got to be there yeah yeah what do you think about permission Hy should we keep doing it how we're doing it now and just make it bigger and better I mean you could say that the US you know it's all if you look at the event landscape too all the big events have pulled out of

the US consensus is going to Toronto they they're going to Toronto so there's this massive Gap in the market for a huge us conference um so I'm curious are you I feel I don't know I I I feel like okay so for some contexts I've been conferencing for the last 3 weeks I'm sorry to hear that yeah and so cuz I was in Singapore first that so I didn't actually go into token 2049 but I was like you know outside it um I was there for break point breakpoint was exceptional yeah um then last week I was at mainnet uh misari mainnet which I felt was I know a little depressing honestly there was no one there right that's what my team told me that there

was like literally no one attending and then here you said it not me sorry I feel so here I just feel like I think this is more well attended right now than meet was but still nowhere as close as like per uh uh as uh token token and breakpoint um and I feel but I feel like you know I just feel like right now it's like the third event in a row where I'm like okay it's it's a little too generic I feel that's maybe the the the challenge where it's like I and maybe what break what like I like to my breako was it was actually very very unique and very specific yeah so one of the things is like yeah I mean there

nowhere there's probably one sixth or 1 sth the attendees that token had yeah um let's see I could you could do the math I mean token had 20,000 yeah about one six the attendees so uh but if you actually look back like our if you look back at 2022 that event for us had like several thousand attendees that was massive what's the big difference mhm uh the US Regulators smashed crypto into the US right so last year 40% of our speakers dropped out because their legal team wouldn't tell them they could speak and most of our big sponsors even this year so this year we were able to get the speakers that we wanted but even our sponsors who sponsor our podcast our newsletters our London conference their legal teams won't let

them sponsor a US conference still so that's why you see these events like consensus consensus doesn't want to leave the US I I don't actually know but I would guess they don't want to leave the us but they're they're feeling it just like all the other us conferences including ourselves or you know we we feel the impact of the regulatory landscape too yeah I I think what you were saying about um the event being events being generic is something we've been thinking about also with with with nebul you know because like I think one of the takeaways from nebul this year was was that it was a conference that didn't really know what it was it didn't know whether it was like a modular conference or a cosmos conference and um and and the takeaway is that you know we want to

create something that's a little bit more uh Target and focused on a on a theme right I mean we're not going to do like a ecosystem specific conference cuz that's not like of you know our strategy but doing like sort of more thematic conferences probably also smaller um so you know we had a 500 person event but even like a two to 300 person event I think um makes sense for us but you know we're fun so like we're not running an events business we're running a different for you guys yeah fundraising business the other the last thing and then um the last thing on conferences is one thing you're fighting against as a conference organizer is the fact that all the ecosystems are launching their own conferences so everybody saw the success of salana breakpoint and they said well we need one of those for our

ecosystem so you got an avalanche hosting their event in Argentina you got to imagine ZK SN optimism polygon you got to imagine all these guys are going to do the same thing so uh and like you said breakpoint was an amazing event like I I also thought it was amazing uh and so you're fighting against that uh momentum or inertia depending on how you look at it as a conference organizer yeah yeah well we um oh yeah let's talk about blog Works advisory you guys just launched that uh yesterday I did I did uh some some people did say that they didn't like the name because uh advisory is like go get an advisory tokens on the side uh so so that is I was like oh we should have thought of that uh no so so

basically uh so the story of block works like I was saying so like for 5 years we just did media did media and events and good business whatever and then uh May 2020 2 we similar thing to when we launched the media business we looked around and we saw yeah I'm Masari and uh you know I actually don't want to name too many names but we saw a lot of like research and data providers like these are solid but maybe six out of 10 they're not exceptional platforms we think we can do it better um we don't really want to go build this thing cuz it's a lot of money and time and you have to hire Engineers that's hard to do as you know very well uh but our customers are in our client and our audience are really requesting it so let's go do it okay so that was May 2022

we launched the research in Data Business we have like 20 25 like analysts and engineers and stuff like that and the byproduct of that is that our analyst got so our analyst got super deep into the weeds we're the one of the largest delegates in uniswap top five or 10 delegate in arbitrum I think the fourth largest or third largest delegate in Wormhole one of the largest delegates in ZK SN so we're like big we're very deep into the weeds of all these protocols now what started happening is all the protocols would come to us and say hey you're you spend more time looking at incentive programs than anyone else we want to build an incentive program can you help us do that hey you spend more time looking at Grants programs uh and you you know can you you know we're arbitrum we we just

you know we've got this huge grants program we're worried that we're going to waste all this money can you Analyze This grants program to see how we should do it uh hey we're salana we there's no one creating dashboards on us can you like can you help us like get our DH dashboards out into the and analytics out into the open so there's all this stuff like Foundation creation incentive designs grants programs uh that we started helping people with over the last year and that's what we just launched this week was blockworks advisory which is like I guess in one line it's helping protocols with growth that's it and uh any any exciting like launch Partners or teams are you working with uh the initial batch was uh Unis swap Athena Labs arbitrum poly on

optimism and Avalanche okay so these are like you're not like trying to like help like small startups these are like big projects that kind of your like these are the big projects who are sitting on a boatload of capital and have no clue what to do with it um we're also working with some people who like not publicly sharing their names yet but who have like tge coming in the next couple of months and they just have no clue how to do it like you know you're you're not taught how to launch a token you're there's no there's I mean there's no there's no course out there on how to launch a token so what you usually ask these teams to do is just like study all the other token launches but that takes away from your other work right you have to go launch products and keep doing BD

so what we've done is like we know how to launch a to like we've studied all the best token launches we've studied the incentive programs we studied the grants programs we've studied the go to market strategies and we can help these protocols be more successful I so that's yeah and um like are you also working with say like with funds that have portfolio companies that want you know can benefit from this Ro G yeah exactly so I was speaking with one uh Venture firm they have 14 portfolio companies launching tokens in the next 5 months so November December January February March 14 tokens are going to launch just from their portfolio companies and you multiply that by the you know 100 plus funds or whatever

funds are in the industry you're going to see the you're going to see hundreds of new protocols and apps and whatever launch tokens um and so we're working with what who we consider to be kind of the tier ones of of those groups to see if we can help them yeah be be more successful and like do honestly do what they do best which is like build good products and BD and stuff like that we're trying to take some of the the heavy lifting off their plate well that so you mentioned the unit swap so like unit chain was announced this morning were were you guys involved in that at all did you uh participate and uh we weren't involved in uni chain but we're helping them with some some other governance stuff yeah okay yeah maybe we can we can switch

gears a little bit and talk about apps and and infra this was like uh one of the topics here at the conference um yeah what's your sense of where we're at right now so yeah I I kind of went back and forth on this all year because you know you you go on Twitter and it's like oh my God the applications are coming and and I don't know about you guys but I was like are they are they are they really though they are they are are they I was like are they really though and and uh my big honestly my biggest takeaway for mission list is that the apps are actually coming um and I think there's a couple things leading to that so the first thing honestly like a lot of things in crypto a lot of it comes back to not the users but the funding

mechanisms so the first thing that's leading to this is uh the there was this model that worked from kind of 2020 2021 up until 2024 which was you go raise a seed round a series a a series B and then you launch your token and every round is higher and then your token launches even higher and that just worked like it you know it kind of worked for everybody and what's starting to happen over the last couple months is your tokens going live at a valuation that's lower than your last private round y that breaks the cycle that breaks this model of of doing this so when you raise your private round at three billion and your token goes live at 2 billion that's not good um and that and that starts to you know kind of make

the VC's question should I keep investing in infrastructure okay so that's the first thing that's happened happen the second thing that's happening is the apps are starting to get funding for the first for kind of the first time actually I'd say the second time the first we already we already have we already had a big wave of applications right it was Unis swap it was a like it was it was uh uh compound right the these were applications they were just defi applications um so what's happening so the second thing that's happening is like folks like infinex and other applications are starting to be able to raise money like infinex raised what 54 million in like a week or two I think uh that's the second thing third thing that's happening is um the applications are launching tokens so I think you're

going to start to see some of the big applications and the one that kind of everyone has been talking about recently launch a token soon um and there's a fourth thing but I I kind of forget what it is so uh yeah I don't know what do you guys so anyways my my takeaway is like there's going to be a an actual proliferation of applications um some will be hyp I think a lot of them will be hyper financialized ways to do things in society and culture like if the first wave of apps and defi was way was like speculative ways to do things in finance this wave of apps is going to be speculative ways to do things in culture and Society like bet on Taylor Swift and

you know Travis Kelce getting married or bet on will Mr Beast say the word chocolate in his next video and then most of them going to be dumb and gimmicky but a couple of those will become the next Unis swaps and AES and compounds so but you you were saying you agree that there's apps coming well I I think so so I think if there's no apps coming um there's really no you know right to existence for this space because kind of you don't need infrastructure for infrastructure sake right and of you want to build applications that are in some respect legitimately useful and usable to real people because otherwise there's no point right um otherwise this is going to be become or

stay super Niche so and I think in principle we have so much infrastructure that kind of allows us um to uh to offer the kind of user experience that people are used to we from web to yeah um and I mean it's I mean just with keys and kind of like account instruction and kind of like um you know ZK proof and whatever so there's so many different parts that you can put together to make something genuinely usable and useful to people so basically I think we kind of have to take a step back and actually look at why did we start building in this space

in the first place right because kind of like building on a truly decentralized stck it's hard slow it's expensive so why do you do it right and so the ultimate value propositions that kind of we were thinking about at the time and I think that should really come into play now are agency and ownership and ultimately also user experience because kind of like on permissionless platforms you can build better user experiences than you currently have but I think kind of that that's still a little bit away but I think the agency and the ownership this is something we can do now and I think this is going to be the the first wave of apps that really are going to hit the mainstream yeah yeah I remember the other thing by the way which is um

the fourth thing was UN like you mentioned before Unis swap launched their uh uni chain right is that what they're calling it yeah they launched uni chain this is like the start of all of these I mean I guess you could say TDX was the start of this but like this is the start of probably hundreds and then thousands of these app chains happening so what what happens when uh the the funding is okay so the funding is rolling over for infrastructure applications are starting to raise money applications are launching tokens and applications are launching chains I mean that's that's the new that that is the incentive for venture to start investing in applications which you'll get a crazy speculative bubble in applications which is and then that pulls good Founders

into the industry it's going to be like Google and pets.com you know they they came about in the same cycle it's going to be the same again and um yeah absolutely 100 % uh and I think what we'll also see this cycle is kind of a much more nuanced approach to kind of what part of the stack actually needs what level of decentralization security guarantees because kind of those are things um kind of like when all the grants run out and so on those are things you'll have to pay for right so kind of really um looking at it from an engineering and security perspective and evaluating what parts your sack should sit on what um on what chain I think

that's something that's going to happen for sure too s what do you think about this I don't know maybe a little bit more bearish than you guys on this um I guess for me like I think there's a handful of applications that I'm like very bullish on um and like but I would say I could probably count them on like two hands like what Bitcoin prediction markets pers permissionless per taxes which is like payments apps like especially private payments apps yeah and then I think you know that's probably like and I guess like dexes and like Bitcoin related dexes social media not bearish very bearish gaming very

bearish more bearish less bearish on social media I can see it I just I just don't think that decentralization on its own is enough I think like you need to crack some every soci social media is like new social media Paradigm like cracks something that like a different form factor that makes a difference in everything that came before right like Twitter like oh okay short form content you know Tik Tok short form video you know Instagram photos right like I think like I just feel all the Social Media stuff today has just been like decentralizing or tokenizing existing form factors and I like until someone figures out a new form factor then it'll work but then I don't see why that

discovery of the new form factor necessarily will come from crypto all all of kind of existing Alternatives become even more horrible so kind of like I mean I'm the only social media that I use personally is Twitter and it's it's it's gone down here so much it's terrible it's it's a really bad user experience so kind of like the um for you real is basically just Tik Tok like random random videos you can't you can't look away but it's it's horrible and then the the following that's just there's no curation at all obviously and then kind of like that's is unusable for me MH um yeah I feel it too you feel it too so kind of I I I want a platform where kind of I can have different

different curation algorithms that kind of show me content that I actually want to see I don't want to I don't want to um I don't want to have the choice between uh you know this one curation algorithm or no curation at all I want curation I just want the choice of different styles of curation here and I think um being able to offer that and I think everyone's really grieved with Twitter so I think there is I yeah I think um like maybe another way of boiling down is my my take is like okay I think at the end of the day almost all of crypto is about trading um and so either you're doing like you know uh you're either building a way of trading

asset asss that like bringing in existing assets that maybe are not accessible everywhere and then making them accessible on chain for trading and I think that's what like things like you know permissionless purpose markets will end up doing right you'll be able to trade US stocks on chain right and like give Global access to these things right so I think that that's one and that or or you know people being able to trade stable coins like in countries that don't have access to US dollars or the other is you have to invent a new asset type that people can trade and I think like Bitcoin was an example of inventing a new asset type I think these current meme coins are a new asset type I think prediction markets are this like tokenization of something and I think

it's a new asset type so I think you know it really comes that's why I kind of agree with your take of like okay a lot of it will be speculative around you know culture and society and so I think a lot of like the new growth will come not from necessarily from I guess maybe that's the where it's different where like I don't know if a lot of it's going to be necessarily new I think the base action you're going to do is still trading but it's going to be new asset types that are going to be invented H I think the thing that we're all forgetting is how much regulation has handicapped the applications so like how how amazing would it be if Unis swap was just able to turn on the Fe switch and do things like if you could play with things like that and like we're all

forgetting that like we're just we just can't do some of the most Innovative unique things not just in like the social ABS or prediction markets but like even back in defi like there's all these things that we can't do because the regulation is really tough in the US in the US or even like uh you know I was thinking about this when the when the banks blew up like svb in First Republic blew up and everyone was like moving into Bitcoin uh and the and the trading and then like when when trading stuff gets halted as well and like some of the trading platform shut down then as well and you couldn't trade stocks it's like if we could just trade equities on chain what would that unlock like I I would just stop using my TDM air trade or my JP Morgan account and I would just like

sit in I don't know I'd like buy my coin stock or I'd buy like my Tesla shares on Unis Swap and then put them into a and then take a loan out on it like that even that alone is a massive unlock and we just can't do those things because the the the administration is not allowing those things to happen and not just the administration the SEC and cftc and stuff at this start of the conf conference um you and Mike were up on stage and you were talking about like the kind of three big topics this year ties into this which was a institutional regul regulatory change uh a shift from uh apps from infra to apps which we talked about and new tech um yeah maybe just dialing in on this institutional and and Regulatory change

um what what is your sense of like institutional adoption right now and what is what is um kind of leading institutions to adopt crypto even though the regulatory uh landscape is at least in the US is not favorable so there was this idea this notion that the ETFs came out and the institution started buying up all of our Bitcoin and eath and we were really happy and I got to spend a couple days with um Samar Cohen who's the CIO of Black Rock CTF business before this conference and she spoke on stage here as well and she she she uh shared this stat which is somewhere between I I I'm going to misquote the exact number but let's call

it 70 to 80% of people buying black Rock's Bitcoin ETF right biggest Bitcoin ETF out there 70 to 80% of people buying black rocks Bitcoin ETF that was their first ETF that they had ever bought so what does that tell you this wasn't the ETFs this wasn't the institutions buying Bitcoin for the first time these were crypto people buying ETFs for their first time and then they can toen ioniz toonize them and put them on chain and then you can buy them on Unis swap again there you go yeah exactly there you go wait why why do people do that why do crypto people buy ETFs I have no clue I have no I have no idea why they bought thef is there a

tax advantage of having you put in yeah you could put in your Roth IRA 401K something like that so maybe maybe that's a reason um there's probably a lot of people like I don't know my dad or something who like likes Bitcoin but like just doesn't want to deal with the hassle of like I don't know private keys or something like that or even like maybe a scared of coinbase was like oh great I can buy through my Charles Schwab account probably a lot of people like that self-directed uh folks but I still think this idea that like oh the institutions are here I mean there's there's only two public pensions that have openly bought Bitcoin it's uh Wisconsin and and one other we're like 1% of the way there and I don't think it's because they don't and you know you

ask me a years ago it's a couple years ago it's cuz they don't believe in this stuff now it's because the regulatory risk is too high for them to take the risk but if there was different regulations and it was clear if these things were Securities or Commodities then then I think there's there's there's a massive flood of capital that comes in that's why I think people are really underestimating just how crazy 2025 can get like if there is a administrative change or even if you know comma gets elected but like shows that she's Pro crypto whatever uh the I like you know Bitcoin could be at 150k before we you know before we know

it and what does that do to alts and to mem coins and to the industry like I I think people are really underestimating how quickly that could happen yeah I I I tend to agree with that I I think that whatever happens after the elections I mean you know we're fundraising right and like as as a VC and I've talked to a lot of VCS there there's a um a lot of Institutions and LPS are reluctant to deploy right now just because of the kind of lack of clarity I mean not it's not because they don't want to deploy it's right it's just there there's like uncertain uh in the markets right now and and I think whatever happens whether it's Trump or Camala um at least like okay now there's no more uncertainty we know sort of what the kind of you know

road map is moving forward and that will lead more investors to you know sort by the way Republican or Democrat cryp crypto I think will boom in 2025 I think crypto is going to have an extraordinary year in 2025 a year that will look very similar to maybe the middle to late half of 2020 or you know early 2021 I think it will be really crazy it's just does it happen in the United States or not is the question it to me it's not a question of will 2025 be good for crypto bad for crypto it's going to be an a I think a really crazy amazing year for crypto it's just will that success flow through the United States or will it throw flow through you know Dubai and

Singapore and Hong Kong and other places yeah it's not playing through Europe sorry sorry the pendulum has swung to Asia and it's going to swing right back to the US by the way as it does for as it has for years like this is a new thing like remember is US was super hot then it went to China then China shut down Bitcoin mining they went back to the US and then regulatory space now it's in China it's going to come back yeah and E Regulators are twiddling their thumbs with regulatory Frameworks I'm also big exchange I mean like look like I think I'm I'm curious to get your thoughts on this but I I think the EU framework will MAA will enable to like binance and coinbase and

large players to come and establish their offices in Europe and like start selling retail in Europe but for startups and projects that are just launching or you know even semi- established like decentralized projects like noes the compliance cost is like super high right like I mean we're talking about you know half a million to a million a year possibly just for compliance well it depends on how you build your adapt right kind of like so we've we've traditionally and are still doing that have built our adapt such that um they are maximally decentralized and they fall out of scope for this sort of Regulation except for where it explicitly had to fall in scope um for

instance kind of because you have uh you integrate with off-ramps like visa iban and so on mhm and so the last thing uh we didn't talk about is the new tech and so um I think you know you mentioned ZK and AI um what are you most excit about um so ZK I'm a little torn on so I did I spent the the weekend before we got here with um the ZK sync team and we had a lot of ZK conversations at permissionless and it feels like it's just starting to the products are just starting to hit the market right like you saw optimism uh and the who who they partner

with cinct um you know you got to imagine arbitrum is racing to do either probably build vers by question like I don't know what they're doing but probably some Racing for some sort of ZK thing ZK sync is like obviously making a big push you've got polygons like zkm like it feels like they're starting to finally push live products I'm a little more skep like I think we're probably a year a year out from I think if you take this if this stuff starts hitting Market too quickly you're probably making some compromises that you don't want that you shouldn't make um but I do think it's getting closer to being real uh AI crypto I have no intelligent takes here I'm like i' I'd be talking out of my ass I think but

it does but I what I will say is every conversation that I have at permission list ends up coming back to three things AI crypto meme coins and dpin for some reason every conversation and historically conferences uh you can if you have a you can kind of see where conversations flow to and like usually every year there's like two or three things that things float every conversation eventually gets to and this year it's deep in AI crypto and meme coins so the other thing that's interesting this year is um that is happening right now under our noses that nobody seems to be talking about is a change in the stable coin markets so right now there's tether and usdc and uh really I really

am curious to get your guys' takes on this so there's there's uh kind of three buckets of stable coins actually there's really two buckets of stable coins right now there there's folks like usdc and tether where they kind of keep all the yield and then there's uh another bucket it's called this bucket number three which uh they folks were thinking about passing the yield on to directly to users the there's a new bucket that is starting to emerge where they are passing the yield onto the businesses that hold their stable coin right exchanges and custodians and saying hey you figure out the yield and the reason this is uh super interesting is the problem that's happening with folks like usdc so the problem with tether is a lot of folks are offboarding tether right

now problem with usdc is that a lot of the custodians uh and exchanges uh basically there's two problems one of one of them is the whole industry competes with coinbase and if you hold usdc you know whether you're an L1 and L2 and you're minting it or a a custodian or an exchange you're funding your competitor in coinbase the second thing is um if you let's say you're a I don't know you could be an exchange and you hold like billions of dollars of usdc you usually don't get any of that yield right that goes to Circle and sometimes to coinbase as well and then the problem with the third bucket of these stable coins that pass on the yield directly to users is you know I'm not a lawyer but probably a security it

s it sounds like so there's this new bucket you know you saw bitg go launch a stable coin called I think USS um Nick Vanek launched aora I think it's called so what they're doing is uh and all these new stable coins are doing is they're passing they're they're basically saying hey we get 5% on this but cuz stoian or exchange you decide what to do with the yield we're going to take like 25 bips or like I don't know 100 bips or something we'll pass the other 4% on to you you can keep the 4% you could you could pass the 2% on to your users keep 2% you could pass all of it over to your users and I think that is uh that model is either going to shake up the market share of the stable

coin Market or it's going to force coinbase and tether's hand to change things coinbase and tether do actually pass on some of the year to um to the exchanges that kind of um would that kind of hold um the I mean not not everything but 25 bips by like half or so so uh yeah so like yeah if you like if I hold USC in my coinbase account I'll get some of that I think the bigger problem is that everybody competes with coinbase sure so if you're Anchorage or your bitgo or your fire blocks or you're copper or you're an exchange and you're holding a bunch of usdc you're you're inadvertently funding coinbase why would I want to do that should I am yeah and I think yeah like

you know I I hold usdc on coinbase mostly just because it uh like it's easy and indicates that yield I guess other thing though but the nice thing about usdc on coinbase is it's one to one transferable to my bank account and it's it's usdc it's it's what's already most liquid in defi as well so the usdc is in a pretty like strong yeah they're sp there so it'll be I think what'll end up happening is it might end up forcing uh I think it probably forces their hand I think usdc probably their market share remains massive it probably forces their hand yeah and it'll be interesting to see how quickly that forcing of the hand happens with their race to go public

right there's this so it's an interesting Dynamic that's happening in the stable coin market so you think that like they'll be forced to start giving up some of that yield to more of the yield I would say that's what I would guess how how and the the countert take on this is that fees can remain high higher longer than people think so for years people have been saying coinbase's fees on retail are going to come down coinbase's business is going to get crushed because fees will come down I can assure you fees have not come down on that thing right like you go you know go trade on the retail platform on coinbase fees are high so fees can remain high much High much longer than the market thinks that they should yeah I want to talk about podcasting a little bit um you a little while back I think

maybe like a year or two ago you put out this tweet which was I'm G to like butcher this but like basically the lessons you learned from launching a successful podcast and do you remember this no but we could talk about it always did always dangerous if you pull back my tweets longer than like two weeks ago so um yeah so I mean like block works and you know as a company has been really successful but you your podcasts have been also enormously successful I think block works or Empire is consistently in the top two or three crypto podcasts now um that's huge um that's that's a position we want Health S A Tear falls out of his those the days yeah but um yeah so I mean

what's what's your key to success here yeah uh I mean you first of you guys know that with the podcasting game the only way to grow a podcast is just doing it over and over and over again for a very long amount of time and we've been doing that yeah check check check uh 10 years 11 11 years you guys have been hosting this for 11 years that's remark that's remarkable uh yeah so you guys have gone on to the difference is you've gone on to bigger and better things we're still stuck podcasting right you guys figured out that podcasting is a tough business um yeah so we I mean we own for those who don't know like Empire bell curve on the margin Ford guidance light speed uh expansion like all all podcasts we have X thousand X love that

podcast Jonah and a are going to get mad I didn't mention them um sure I'm forgetting some others too but we have a we have copied basically the barol sports Playbook um so bar stool I don't know if you guys do you guys know bar stool M no no wow you Europeans that is remarkable do you know who Dave portno is no no yeah wow wow that was that's that's fascinating okay they are actually I don't even need okay we copied a a a successful podcast model of another Media Company where basically the model is you have a one

host who's full-time internal and one bigname host externally and we've so the hardest part about podcasts is growing a show because a lot of other uh mediums and content mediums you have native growth baked into it right you have native ways to grow a channel and there's an algorithm that will promote you there's no algorithm in Spotify and app or there is a Spotify and apple algorithm but like you don't get native growth inside of those platforms maybe sometimes Spotify if they see that I listen to Empire so they're going to promote Empire to me but very very very minimal um compare that to something like YouTube where you can just get in someone's feed uh very different right so the hardest part is growth with a podcast the way that we've kind of hacked that growth is with uh it comes

down to the hosts so we have one full-time host internally they're basically the p&l owner they're the operator of the business they they run they run the podcast then there's another host who's the KO we could call it in crypto right they're the influencer they're the big name so let's uh let's look at a couple blockworks podcast so you've got for Empire you've got me I'm the boring guy who knows nothing then we've got but I can run the show then we've got Santiago who is the you know the KO we've got light speed right we've got Jack cubic who is a reporter for Block Works he's the host he kind of runs the whole show makes the wheels run on time and then we've got Mt right this kind of K we've got uh B curve podcast Mike is my co-founder he

runs B curve but then we've got Michael and V Vance you know big name investors at framework Ventures they help Drive growth to the show and you know put that put that model on repeat um and and you know kind of the the list goes on with our shows so that that's our model um that's been really helpful for growth and uh the other the other thing is I think we have a a hack basically which is once you get one podcast that successful it serves as a Launchpad for the other shows and it starts to build this really nice uh flywheel effect of the shows growing other shows and like cross promoting other shows and Mike will come on Empire and I'll go on light speed and light speed will come on expansion and creat this really nice uh feedback loop how do you make sure you

have enough like content differentiation amongst them between them uh great question so eat so the way that we actually have structured our whole content business is uh come it comes back to a thesis that we have around media which is there's two ways to build a successful Media Company super Niche or super big so super big would be like New York Times very successful Bloomberg very successful Fox very successful um uh even someone like Business Insider doing very well right now then there's very Niche which is uh you know crypto uh basically like deeply B2B media um where you're targeting really really really Niche audience the dangerous place for media companies is when you fall in the messy middle when you get too big that you're no longer Niche and you start targeting

a generalized audience so that's what was happening to blockworks right we'd been around for like 5 years so we launched internally we call it kind of like project House of Brands where we're where blockwork sits up here and it's almost like an lvmh model where we now have sub brands that cater to a unique audience inside of crypto oh the other podcast I forgot was ZX research I knew that was for um David going be mad yeah sorry to the research guys uh so what we've done is so let's say there's a who who's a strong Community inside of uh inside of crypto the research analyst the analyst crowd the research crowd kind of nerdy like loves getting into the weeds reading the long reports we

have a newsletter for them called Xerox research we have a podcast for them called zerx research that's a brand XX research brand uh who's another community salana community really strong Community we've got the light speed brand for them uh the founder Community right that's Empire um the kind of like modular like expand expansion Community that's the expansion brand right podcast newsletter so we actually build we think of these as actually many media companies under the broader umbrella of block works it's super funny because Empire is the one I listen to and uh kind of I I I I'm adhering to my category you are in the category yeah son do you listen to any of them uh I listen to Z research and b crove sometimes nice that's what we want I

listen to Empire mostly yeah I do I do listen to THX and then realize like just how much of a horrible traitor I am uh you know but like I just always learn a lot listen to those guys I really like this you know this idea of having sort of the the host and then like the K and you know we were talking about this earlier like when you're hosting a podcast like I I was thinking about this recently in in 11 years of podcast in I've retained surprisingly little information because you know when you're when you're hosting a podcast at least for me you're very much in the weeds of trying to make the show engaging and interesting and you're sort of like thinking about what's my next question how do I bounce back on this Etc and

having two people um really helps because and especially if you have this role right like these roles are clearly defined where one person in in case of Empire you sort of direct the conversation and then Santi can go he can just like you know do his thing he doesn't have to think about that and you sort of like reel things back you know take the conversation in another Direction and you're sort of you know curating the conversation not to say you don't bring good insights but you you do have that role of kind of acting as the host with this other host and perhaps like a guest that's exactly so I don't know if people listen to the all-in podcast but Jason calanus gets a bunch of yeah because he's not as interesting as the other guys but that show wouldn't exist if they didn't have

a Jason gcis so you need someone to drive the conversation forward and basically moderate it yeah anything else you want to talk about no all right we're done driving the conversation forward yeah let's let's button this upks but up I appreciate you guys coming to permission list it means a lot and yeah honestly uh very fun to be on this podcast as uh someone who's been listening for not 11 years but probably yeah eight eight or nine years now so very cool that's pretty OG yeah yeah thanks Jason appreciate guys