Cobie and Sassal | Crypto Ponzis, Bad VCs, and Spicy Takes - The Daily Gwei Drive Thru #1

Transcript

hey everyone so i've got a very special episode of the daily wave for you today it's my first guest episode on the channel i know that i've said previously that i wouldn't do guest episodes on the channel but i feel like uh this person is worth breaking that rule for and who i had on was kobe actually all of you will probably know kobe from twitter he's very famous in the industry uh and it was just a great conversation we talked about a lot of different things in the kind of like wake of the terror fallout talked about things like you know ponzi is in crypto you know bad vcs kind of like having our most spiciest takes kind of like put out there publicly and a bunch of different things so uh please do enjoy the episode it was really fun it goes for about an

hour and uh let me know if you enjoyed it in the in the comments section or on the discord channel thanks everyone all right hey everyone uh so something a bit different for daily grey viewers today or listeners as well today i've got kobe with me now kobe obviously doesn't need any introduction uh he's very famous on on crypto twitter he's been around for a long time and kind of like he hit me up uh on tw on twitter on dms after i put out my tweet saying you know i wish i had an anon kind of like alt because there's a lot of things i want to say but i can't say due to things like reputational risk right and we got to chatting and we're like you know let's record something in the wake of like the terror fallout let's kind of like just get on record something and

talk about like all the shady i guess stuff that happens in this industry and kind of like everything that goes with that so that's what we're going to do today uh we're just going to talk there's no real agenda we're just going to like talk about kind of like what's on on our mind but yeah thanks kobe for for joining me for this i think this is going to be it's going to be good i thought i was just going to bait you into saying all the things that you get reputation risk for i thought that was the plan you're probably going to tell me yeah you might get it out of me to be honest i mean i can be pretty honest if someone's baiting me for it when you say reputation risk what does it specifically let you worry about because i know that like um

there were emails sent from particular people i don't know specifically who but like the insinuation was a big fund and i've seen screenshots but i don't know if the screenshots are real and they did blur out the names basically telling people um where they should land on the ust issue in public do you mean like if you go against like the powers that be you are then unable to participate in things that are interesting and exciting in the future whether it's like fundraising rounds or um you know uh conferences or parties or or whatever or like even like they don't they're unwilling to create content with you or

something i mean there's there's an element of that and i think it's probably less less that just because i mean i think some people would consider me to be a power that be right just because like i have a large following and i'm pretty involved with the ecosystem but i i think it's don't brag come on no no no no flex on me yeah i mean you're much bigger than i am but i think i i think what it is really and what the what the core of it is is that like it's kind of like a funny thing in this industry where depending on what you do or depending on kind of like what you say um you know word gets around really quickly and you kind of like earn a certain reputation right and and for myself i think kind of like my reputation at the moment is is

pretty good i'm just known as kind of like this 8th maxi who talks about the merge a lot right um not really known for kind of like doing any anything shady or kind of like trying to to dump bags on people or anything like that right um and then yeah it's kind of like just it's definitely a weird thing there's a lot of like first and second order effects to it and i i don't want to kind of like make enemies that's that's number one thing right like with the terror thing i wanted to call out tara so many times publicly like i didn't really call it out like i would i would mention it to people when they asked me about i would say guys look this is like not gonna work long term like this is so obviously not gonna work um and i talked to like

close friends about it but i would never call it out publicly like the bankless guys did because you saw what happened to the bankless guys like ruthlessly attacked by these kind of like lunar moon boys over it and not just them like goquan right obviously was was in the trenches with them kind of like doing the same stuff and it's it's kind of like mentally draining to do that so it's kind of like negative ev to call these things out publicly and then also the a lot of the people involved with terror were legitimate kind of like vcs and big names in this industry right and so they'll probably get to talking and be like you know these guys are like you know going against kind of like tara they're saying all this stuff and and kind of like you lose some sort of reputation out of that now

whether you care about that or not there's a different different kind of like matter but i think yeah there's a lot of kind of like backroom chat that goes on right and there's a lot of kind of like uh i mean it's like in the industry there's a lot of like inside baseball that goes on and you kind of like don't want to be on the wrong side of that as you see you you put it perfectly once on twitter where you said you want to be the main character of crypto twitter ever right because if you're the main character they'll kill you off um you want to be kind of like the comedic relief and i think that's kind of how i try to position myself on twitter i am serious sometimes but i do a lot of [ __ ] posting and i think you may fall into the same

category with that because yeah you don't want to be the target of all of that it's just it's it's not fun right yeah i think like especially because they're financial products right so you can you can take an opinion on something and if the opinion like if you have extremely high conviction in the opinion then i think you can be compelled to share it even if it's unpopular um you know i wrote the thing about apecoin staking because i really believe that that is uh co-opting a like industry term for something turning into something else which is just bad for um uh the people that like fall for it with luna um you know you can have like a private

analysis you can think it's gonna um usd will collapse i think what i believed was that like in in luna's original pre-bitcoin reserves form um it was likely to collapse at some point but you just don't know when that is it could be now it could be in three years it could be in five so you don't know um and then when they started collateralizing it with bitcoin i thought the game seemed to be i thought they'd like revealed what the plan was all along which was um you know builder layer one blockchain which has value um has an ecosystem raise a bunch of money and over collateralize ust

um which maybe could have actually worked if they'd maybe started earlier or if market conditions have been different or you know maybe just in a different um parallel universe that they could have pulled that off um but because it's a financial instrument and because you you if you have um like a bunch of followers being like short this stuff now short it this is going to zero this is going to break i i think also can just create bad outcomes um as well and i i didn't have the conviction to to know you know this is definitely going to collapse in the next um however long and also you become desensitized to it

over time as well so like you look at how it works you go that doesn't seem sound that feels like it could collapse and then it goes through like harsh market conditions like may last year um and it does survive it and the peg is returned and you see all these people like these huge funds who you assume are smarter than you um bidding it and working on the ecosystem so you just kind of go yeah well i must be missing something i'll leave that you know alone where it is um you know who who knows what happens next um so i just think there's like stuff where you have really high conviction and it seems obviously bad you should talk about it and then in the stuff in this like middle area you probably

should talk about it because it can help people out and um but it's clear why um people don't and i you know know why i didn't i would have been talking about it collapsing way too early and then like bought at the top going clearly i'm wrong for some reason [ __ ] it but i'm buying it now um but like a big respect for the people that were willing to put themselves out there on an ongoing basis um uh against all the you know um attacks from uh community members and stuff um they like like they were just writing their analysis and they were right um they were writing in public and dealing

with a bunch of [ __ ] like the freddie and ungai and um everyone else so yeah i do understand why it is like other assets throughout history where you just there's no point really talking about them because you can't really add anything novel like people have done the analysis like you're you can't really say anything you might be wrong and saying something just invites so much um stress and drama um and like abuse into your life and it's just really not um not worth it but then something like this happens and you go yeah sure maybe i should have spent some more time writing something

greatly in depth about how this mechanic works and the success cases and the failure cases for it and blah blah blah but you know it's only so much time yeah yeah no and i i think like there's a lot that goes into kind of like pointing out things that you think are gonna collapse and then they don't right look look at the tether truthers as they're known they've been talking about tether collapsing for like since day one basically uh right about how shady it is how no one can redeem how there's gonna be a bank run and it still hasn't happened to this day and it doesn't seem like it's gonna happen and i mean tether just posted their kind of like new reserves report yesterday uh it seems okay people will hop on about certain things but it seems like it's okay so people i think looked at that as well

when it came to ust and they're like you know look at all these people that were wrong for all these years on tether i'm not going to speak up about ust because like what if i'm wrong then i'm just known as this crazy conspiracy nut in the corner and like people will kind of like attack me for it so so to speak and you mentioned like the funds and the vcs that are involved in this stuff i mean they and lended a lot of legitimacy to this project and and you're right there's a lot of people out there who think that these people that like vcs and funds are smarter than them when in reality a lot of the time they're not right they just have the money it's not necessarily necessary for them to have the intelligence like especially in the market we've seen in

the last two to three years where there was so much money flowing you know that it was easy to raise a fund right and then you just put money into anything really and it would pump right for for the longest time but and then you know especially retail investors will see that and just jump into it they'll be like well if these guys are saying that this is a good thing they must have done their research you know as you said this is this must be good and all these people who are saying it's going to collapse these are like evil people and they just don't want me to to make money and especially when it came to ethereum people people were just like oh they're just eat maxis they don't want terror to succeed because it's like a threat to their bags and i think that's come a lot from the

bitcoin camp because like it actually i think was true for btc max's and probably still is like they they spread a lot of kind of like just wrong information about ethereum and it definitely is like a bit of a bad thing for them so i think people just like take that and are kind of like well i mean it is for eth maxis too like i'm not trying to like in other ecosystems like if max is coping over solana for example i mean that's definitely kind of like oh we feel a threat to our bags but like because i know that him because i'm conscious of that i can see it from the other side too i can see it from terra people seeing you know the eth maxis as these evil people who just want to destroy our ecosystem and then obviously the conspiracies start where it's like

it was attacked ust was attacked it was like this grand conspiracy that it was going to kind of like they did this to kind of like destroy our ecosystem um which yeah i mean the way it played out to be honest i didn't think it would happen that fast like within three days it went to like zero and like i don't think we've ever actually seen a blockchain properly die and get like halted and like just completely destroyed like that ever before um and and it was just kind of like wild that that played out so quickly but there's still a lot of people who are like oh you know let's fork you know let's get tara class you know let's put the other one is terra classic let's get a new terra 2.0 and i think a lot of that's got to do with people lost money and

they just want to like get a free airdrop right and kind of like sell yeah um but yeah there's there's so much to kind of like unpack with all of that but i think what i would call out more i guess if i was an anon i'd call out the specific people uh that were kind of like doing this and i'd call them out a lot more aggressively than i than i normally would just because i feel like there's never any accountability in this ecosystem for the people who shield like just garbage and it wasn't just uh like terror that they shield and to be fair i don't really consider that terror was like built in bad faith so to speak or kind of like garbage i think dog quan's ego got ahead of itself because of the fact that it grew so quickly and he had

like a loyal following behind him and he kind of like probably had a god complex from that but i think in general there are a lot of honest builders in that ecosystem uh but there's a lot of other things that just kind of like aren't honest and literally like these vcs and funds they're literally pumping dumping on you it's not a meme like they they kind of like pump it up i mean look at the salina ecosystem tokens like it was the same vcs in every round high fully diluted kind of like value right and then ftx will list the perps and they just short the perp and then cover it with their vested tokens like people like oh they're still investing they haven't sold like you know what i mean like and that's the kind of stuff that i'd probably be more aggressive on um

but i i think that yeah as i said like i just don't feel comfortable doing it from like my doc's account so you know so to speak yeah like i think the salon ecosystem in summary you i started writing it writing something about this it's like a lot of the vcs they've come for the regulatory arbitrage and the like early public markets rather than like any high conviction belief in um like crypto or transparent financial systems or whatever and they originally if you go way back when the original crypto funds um including some that these days have you know really

lowered their quality of their thinking or their back their standards i guess but originally you had these like high conviction directionally correct people who had to have a thesis that stood up to a lot of criticism because the space was um dodgy it was like silk road money um like coins and the ethereum ico were like icos were weird ethereum was weird um you know like you paid for ethereum and then nothing happened for like a year or something from that from the ico um and some people never even got their coins like i know a guy who put like point one of a bitcoin into um uh the ethereum ico and they got a wallet and it was empty and then he like

asked for help and they just never helped him um and so like you know it was like weird dodgy stuff at the in those days but they had some there were funds who went i think these things are going to be important to the world for these reasons um and you had to believe that quite deeply in order to make that bet with your own money or you had to stand up to a lot of criticism in order to raise money from lps to to make those bets um and it over time it seems like those like those vcs have either completely degraded their quality of thinking like started drinking the kool-aid or whatever the the term is or we've been repopulated by um vc outfits who

are just coming because like the markets are dumb there's high liquidity for um there's high liquidity public markets on a very very very far end of a risk um uh sort of scale um and because the sec is kind of sponsored this anti-retail model of prioritizing or allowing private raises from accredited investors and professional investors and enforcing against icos because i i know icos were all like mostly bad because 99.9 of the products failed and it was a fundraising tactic for um felonious individuals but as a model for retail investors if the

product is good it's much fairer than what we have today which is you know these low flow high fdv models and in the short-sightedness or like it sort of feels like they have an erection for the like guaranteed gains generally i mean so like the solana vc ecosystem have funded several like no product or no user no metric um tokens that are worth multi billions they just go down no retail user wins the products don't launch or if they do launch no one uses them and i think they've set back the ecosystem

for like the d5 retail ecosystem in solana by a few years because they've done that because people see these products now and go that i'm not touching that either the chart makes them think something might be wrong with that product if you look at the chart and the charts only down they go is this safe um or they just think anything in the salon ecosystem is like apart from the nfts maybe but they have quite a booming nft ecosystem now but apart from the nfts it might be a scam because this model is played out and then you had the lunar vc ecosystem um where i guess people just assumed the perpetual motion machine had been created and it just happened to be on

the blockchain right like we've discovered um this infinite source of money and it just happens the missing piece was the blockchain um and in response to like critical um pieces about uh like how this might play out people would just get called poor or they would get called names or they'll get dunked on or they would say jump or prop it up you know jump all and maybe jump did prop it up a few times who knows um but i think it feels like the critical thinking has been significantly reduced um

perhaps because there's so much stupidity already so it's just like it doesn't even matter you can just fund whatever um and people's short term focus has really really really increased um people are very happy to fund something and then show up the perps straight away um i think the flip side of this on the good side is you do get to see a lot of much better active vcs who like don't do these kind of things like i'm not going to name names because i don't want to simp for uh vcs and they might do something weird in the future and then i'll be on camera saying they're great and they just might turn out to be all the same but i know

there are a couple of funds who raised funds in 2019-ish and they haven't sold anything um they might just suck like they should have searched but like like they haven't sold anything they're waiting they're on a 10-year or whatever um horizon um i think people give a16 zed [ __ ] for not being krypto native and you know i i don't know if you saw the other day but chris dixon who's one of the gps there was like [ __ ] on polyneia yeah i saw that saying he was like non-technical or something so maybe they're not very crypto native but one thing that's good about them is they just diamond hand everything with a 10 year old horizon i don't think they sell very much either i'm not a huge fan of them as a fund and i

don't think i would recommend them to founders and i think you should go with someone much more crypto native um and maybe they'll become more crypto native in time but one good thing about them is they don't treat the crypto markets like a hedge fund does they don't know how do we hedge our bags right we've put a 100 million dollar investment here so we need a short purpose or short bitcoin or short east comparatively to make ourselves neutral all time and like win in every single situation they do take on the risk and um yeah i mean it's not a huge risk because it's other people's money and they're buying massively discounted prices but um you know at least they're not um dumping on everyone the same day that they're buying um and you know the other crypto native big

names that um uh have not gone so profit maxi they still at least try and fund things that are successful or going to work um in order to to make money and it's still a bit of a rigged game rigged for vcs because of the sec's rules but um so i think that's the flip side like the a lot of these really like low tier vcs i think it's unlikely that in the future they will be able to get the same um uh like allocations and inclusion in rounds because people can just see how they behave they can see times um get difficult and the chart just goes straight line downwards and then your project struggles your community like starts flooding the developers and um

blah blah blah so i think people will want much more longer term ecosystem type partners so i think that might be the the good side of these these things like that those actors just gradually get washed out but maybe i've been too optimistic no i mean i think you're right and i think i could i can know which one which of the vc's you're talking about um but i would actually i mean i think it's it's a good thing that we still have those in the ecosystem but i would argue that some of them are just being dragged into the low tier stuff just forcibly um at some kind of like point like like the highest tier of vcs like they raise these massive funds but then their lps are going to be like why aren't you funding this or why aren't you funding this this looks cool this goes and then

they kind of like get forced into it just because like a lot of the other funds and vcs are doing it and they want to obviously keep the capital in their own fund so they might invest in something that they probably don't have as much conviction on as as something you know it's something that they would if they were retained kind of like their higher tier kind of like vc status so to speak but i i think you're just saying democracy sucks i mean it does suck believe it's the least sucky system right as they say but no i i think that um like yeah they do get forced into it but uh there are definitely um some of them still out there that really care but still the game is definitely still rigged i mean as you said they get discounted tokens they get discounted allocations they're

there from basically day zero but the thing is people will argue and say you know look they all get they get preferential treatment they're insiders and it's like oh look guys we did the same thing with icos for the public and look how that turned out um it wasn't even kind of like uh i guess like it wasn't even um a good thing like it actually was worse than probably what we have now right in terms of like how many people got screwed buying these kind of like sorts of things so i think you know when you kind of look at it from that perspective and kind of like take all that in into account as well there's no good solution to these sorts of things like the everyone tries to kind of like bring up their own solutions say oh if it was available to the public would have been

different but i i don't really think so i mean there are other tokens that have been available to the public that just like they do liquidity mining they get farmed by these same kind of like funds right like and just dumped anyway like the funds will find a way into it regardless of kind of like where they have to to enter so yeah and and i think kind of like on that note as well like the low tier ones the reason why they keep doing it is because it keeps working like it's if they can keep making money on it then they're going to keep doing it and that's another thing i was talking about like with regards to accountability no one really cares or holds them accountable over the long term it's kind of like a short-term exposure like you know zak xbt on

twitter does like an amazing job exposing all of this but like does anyone remember after like a day no like everyone just forgets about it right and there's no recourse no no kind of like accountability these these fun a lot of these funds still get entrance into these into these projects which may just be [ __ ] to your projects to begin with and it's all just like a kind of like a retail money fleece at the end of the day which a lot of projects are um so yeah there's a lot of that going on but yeah i don't have a solution to it unfortunately and i don't think that the crypto ecosystem has a collective memory of longer than like an hour uh because it just seems like we forget about something you know even if it's the most scandalous thing ever i mean no one's

talking about the terror stuff anymore and it just happened last week it's the biggest event probably one of the biggest events in crypto history and no one talks about it anymore and and it's kind of like it's kind of sad right um yeah cool yeah i yeah i do i mean i hope that um it will disseminate through founders i guess like you know a lot of founders want um other founders on their cap table and they often go to those people kind of earlier on um to get the lowdown on funds so i think it will hopefully disseminate through i know there's a few people that i'll like refuse to co-invest with now i don't do like a ton of venture stuff um like i haven't in the past i've done bits and pieces and i'm not doing tons at the moment either um but i i will

there's a few people i will refuse to like co-invest with because i just know that if they have a decent enough chunk it's like a blood bath or it's like mercenary game and i like it the project sort of struggles from day one or it gets set back at least a bunch um and i know that like what advice i would give to founders if people hit me up and said who um should i go with um but at the same time we've gone from a very founder friendly environment to a very to investors having all the power again um in the last sort of six months so um yeah for a while at the top of the bull market you did see a lot of things start doing like icos again and just saying like [ __ ] um sort of populist attitude to uh vcs and

um i i do think that model is so much better um and i think a lot of this blame like the vc problem i think is a symptom of the sec because if you're a founder and you are building for the next 10 15 20 years something that you deeply care about and is very important to you to um to build your vision and realize that vision in reality you don't want to do an ico unless you're anonymous and you happy with your opsec etc because you don't want to incur that additional regulatory risk for your baby for for building the thing that you you know really want to um care about so you get a legal advisor a regulatory advisor or whatever and you

figure out the safest possible way to get funding to build the thing that you want to build and they will always tell you go with accredited investors treat it as though it is a security when you're selling your soft or your safe or your equity or your tokens or whatever you're doing a straight token sale just imagine they are securities and comply with security laws like professional investors only um and uh at some point in the future through like decentralization through whatever um other people like contributing to it potentially then it becomes not a security and you can have public markets um but if you're a founder that's the model you

get pushed to go down because it's the least risky for you actually building the thing that you want to build um which means retail's left on the sidelines it means you can only raise money from these um like these venture capitalists who have been set up almost with the purpose of funding these things and then trying to sell it when public markets come available um and what i find difficult about it is that there is some stuff which is so obviously a scam it's just a scam token and then there's stuff which is very very very like obviously a legitimate project with people trying to build uh honestly and earnestly but then there might be that you know

it's an honest project but they've got something wrong so it's just going to be a failure but they're all trying their best but they've made some mistakes and they believe the wrong thing and then there's like things where well it might work it might not work we actually don't care all we care about is like blending in the middle area so that we get tokens vested and we can sell something it doesn't matter if the product works or not um and there's this big spectrum of like from outright scam to like golden like non-financial projects like bitcoin right like you can't say that satoshi created bitcoin for personal profit because he's or she's never um uh sold anything as far as we know and

they've probably died um to be honest and then you have ethereum which is like similar to bitcoin but they they kept some um allocation for themselves and they did do an ico for fundraising um so they pre-mined 70 or whatever the bitcoin max's talk about and then they sold it all for like 0.94 or something um and and those things like i think it's difficult to say that these things are not legitimate projects that are trying to build something important in the world when you get to like uniswap and i feel similar right like clearly they're actually trying to build a legitimate project their token model might suck they might not accrue value the same way ethereum can accrue value it might be a bad

investment i don't know um but it's definitely not a scam and then you can keep going and you end up with stuff that's like all right i can't tell if this is fraud i can't tell if this is a legitimate project that's just to fail i don't know how much they you know um they know about like if this is like economically viable and i think that middle area that observated um unclear what's actually happening here area is the most dangerous because out of that you get some home run winners you get like something comes out of it looks a bit shady looks a bit dodgy and it turns out to be a great project with great people um and they sold something you didn't think

they could solve but on the other hand you have things that just go straight to like okay that was basically a scam type type side um and i i think that's where the sec should be actually adding um value to um crypto ecosystem um instead of just enforcing against like people raising funds yeah so i i do think that like the sec just enforcing against um it really what they've done in the past is enforced against like fraud right so there was a lot of icos that were just telling lies about what their product was or what their product was backed by or whatever

like the diamonds one or the there's one about weed i can't remember um and then they try to take down big stuff like bit connect and they're trying to take that ripple it's not even clear that they will succeed um in um in the action against ripple um and meanwhile everything else is left in a state of uncertainty um and retail investors are actually losing um because the sec seems unwilling to force people to do basic stuff like disclosures like if you think about the big problems that have happened in crypto like ust um anchor uh the wormhole um

uh exploit ronin bridge exploit um recently um bit for next hat mount gox hack um token rug pulls bad investments uh down only like perps type things stuff where investors actually get harmed because these things are kind of complicated if you're new it feels like the right remedy is to address them directly so with bit connect and um ust and these kind of projects you the sec should just require these projects to clearly state where the yield comes from so for um

ust it's like we invent it as a growth mechanism it's you know it's printed um it's a growth mechanism in order to attract people to our ecosystem um you know it's not backed by anything these like usds are just created out of nowhere um and then some people might go hmm that sounds confusing how does that work and they might read more about the thing and the bit connect the um i can't remember where the lending yield came from you got paid in more bit connect i think so maybe they were just printing um more bit connect as well um for hex it is like token inflation right it's equity inflation so you get paid in more um you get paid with uh future emissions of the

the native instrument for eight coin staking you get paid with dow treasury emissions so there's the supply is capped but um they just pay you out of the treasury for for staking so that's where the yield comes from eventually that will run out um so the yield is unsustainable um but just having disclosures as to where it comes from allows you to realize that some things like ust inventing new dollars is very different to an r of lending rate which is a borrower paying the lender because they want to they would think they can make more money in the short term right so um

someone pays a rate and probably i have like sometimes juices it with some token emissions as well um and and but having like clarity around those things i think protects way more retail investments in retail investors than this um enforcement action which is after the fact and after everyone has already lost because people would be able to read these things and make more informed decisions another thing is um the solana ecosystem you spoke about these down only perps where things open at a 50 billion dollar fully diluted valuation and they have a four year vesting schedule and the chart just goes down forever um what could help here is a

uniform and clear uh emissions schedule graph on a per asset basis so if you um i think oxygen oxy is one of the ones that went like just straight down if you're thinking about buying oxy you want to look at the price you want to look at the market cap but then you also want to know um what is happening to the supply over the next three years because if the supply is tripling over the next year you need to go is the demand gonna triple to um to even just sustain the the price um and then you should probably have token projects um disclosing all private investment terms

um because they're public markets right so like if uh apecoin did a dow treasury sale um at a discount with some vesting lockup all of the terms of that i think should be public because otherwise retail investors are there's information asymmetry they can't um uh make informed decisions about uh what even happens when these coins unlock because they don't know what their cost basis is they don't know if these people are break even massively above water massively underwater um they don't even know necessarily know who is buying so if you're

uh lucky enough to be one of these vcs who gets a massively discounted um round um and then one of your other investments blows up like you know you you saw hash lost 3.5 billion dollars in luna i think it's useful for retail investors to know where else has locked exposure otherwise there's massive information asymmetry there and i think you can tick off on a like a case-by-case basis um what are the practical risks and how people are getting hurt and how can you inform um the public better with extremely light touch things um that also help people identify fraud

because if people are not complying with where does the yield come from you at least go why are they not telling me um and i think that if the sec took this like light touch um regulatory path more investors would be actually protected than them just like like post death enforcing against luna or post death and forcing against um bit connect or or whoever and sure they can still enforce against fraud like i think that they should um they can enforce against bad actors and blah blah but if they want to keep innovation on shore and they actually want to protect retail investment retail investors who are going to do crypto stuff anyway they're going to do it um

these light touches just seem like net positive for everyone it's like a tiny bit of work for a project to do um makes things so much more uh clear for retail investors to understand what they're dealing with who they're dealing with who the other token holders are what price point they hold these tokens at um and stuff and uh and yeah um i'm very like anti-regulation generally but i think simple stuff like this that lets people i i hate when regulators tell people what they are and aren't allowed to do um like i don't like it if they say you're not allowed to release a stable coin you're not allowed to build luna i don't like that people should be allowed to do whatever they want but people should be informed

sufficiently so retail investors should have the information available to them to make um fair good well-informed decisions i think um rather than just saying you know you're not allowed to build that building that's illegal you should have to declare in building this this is how it works and people should understand how it works before they put their entire life savings into a savings account that issues 20 that's printing it out yeah yeah i mean i pretty much agree with with everything you said like i'm not a big fan of kind of like most regulations myself but it kind of like all goes back to the proactive versus reactive and the sec is really just being reactive right like as you said they only come in when something blows up instead of actually forcing uh or not forcing or at least kind of like working

with these teams to kind of like do these disclosures and things like that and there's been a bit of kind of like stuff uh happening within the crypto ecosystem on that front like massari has their disclosures registry you know before coingecko was showing fully diluted uh market caps uh coin market cap wasn't doing it when coin markup was much more popular so no one knew like you would see the supply of the coin and you would only see the circulating supply you wouldn't see and that wouldn't even be accurate and you wouldn't ever say the fully diluted kind of like value you wouldn't see the the max supply so a lot of people would buy into something being like oh it's only you know such and such market cap but in reality if you take the kind of like rest of the supply into account it was

like much much larger so i think you know we've tried to do it within the industry but it just doesn't seem to be enough right because i think that you know i think it's it's it's enough to the extent of people that are already crypto native and aren't like totally new can like navigate these waters and i've seen over the last 12 months a lot of people that have been in the ecosystem for maybe a couple of years are much more kind of like sensitive to this stuff and they and they kind of like look at flu diluted market cap they look at who's who's kind of invested they look at kind of like what the token emissions are like but you're right like the average retail investor especially newer ones they don't learn this at uh straight away they have to kind of like

go through the pain to get to that point because there's no real kind of like i guess like authority telling them sort of thing so yeah i mean the sec like uh i mean as much as i don't want them too involved in the ecosystem them just kind of like working with teams to disclose these things would add a lot of legitimacy to those sorts of things and get a lot more eyeballs on it i think as well so yeah i mean it's kind of like a hard thing as well because the regulatory agencies depending on how they approach it they tend to overstep sometimes so the worst case would be like the sec making it so cumbersome for these teams to report these things that the teams either would just like not report anything or are they getting trouble for like not being accurate and

then it just again leads to them being like well why would i report anything if i'm just going to get in trouble for it like it's like how unisoft is so scared of their cc that they're not going to enable the rev share on the uni token right because the ssc hasn't given them any guidance hasn't said you know what you know what what what's going to happen if they do that so they're just like well we're not going to do it and that has resulted in the uni token being down only like i mean not the only reason but like a major reason i think um so yeah there's a lot of kind of like things to think about around that but i agree with you that just those like small touches as you said would would be a huge boon to the industry and i think

the small touches from inside the industry like missouri and coin gecko have already made a very positive effect but not for the newer people more for the people who actually like have been around for a little bit already got burnt and then go looking and like why did i get so burned why did i get so dumped on like why didn't i see this coming right so yeah i think uh yeah yeah maybe even rather than the sec i think it would be good if it was self-police like if exchanges um forced themselves to or forced assets to um like provide this information somewhere um before listing or the exchange provided the information themselves like what is this asset what are the like key investment like criteria you need to know um i think that like i think that's

much better than the sec getting involved because i don't think they're a credible crypto regulator i don't think they're a credible organization i think they're doubling down on a strategy that they've failed at i think they haven't protected retail investors at all over the last 10 years of um of crypto um and um yeah so i i think self-policing is is much much much better um which is why i was kind of happy to see the lunar proposal of like uh paying back small investors first i don't know if it actually works economically i i just saw it in a tweet but um that was what happened with the madoff um scheme uh the bernie madoff scheme like actually if small investors ended up mostly whole from that i think um and only like the

big whales that took the 30 odd percent haircut um in being paid back so i do think that um like adopting those things before you're told to adopt those things um is quite a good sign and hopefully will um continue a lot but we'll see i i wonder how you feel about um like the like in in bull markets i think it to what especially towards the end um it's really easy to just lose all hope and faith of like the point of the ecosystem um or the point of the industry um i wonder how you feel about you know uh d5 2.0 which is like a lot of ponzi

nomiks like on top of a fork of defy one um a lot of the um monkey picture type uh xs in nfts and and bubble uh there and the shiba inu doge um like meme coin response to like the meme stock um uh bubble um how do you find yourself remaining focused if like that's all that happened the last couple like last year or so was just stupidity so did anything good happen apart from that i mean the the way i kind of like stay focused is i just focus on like

ethereum i mean people call me an ethmaxy for it but like the i i truly believe that the most interesting and non kind of like financial first things are happening within the ethereum ecosystem and and specifically at like the core protocol layer and like layer twos and things like that right like that's where i focus a lot of my time because it's just it you barely hear about like the prices of things or like the financial kind of like aspect of it it's all really about the technology and um you know that's why i kind of like focus my attention there but i i think what i what i hated most about something like the dog coins was i didn't hate that people could trade them and it was basically like trading a meme right i hated the big kind of like figures like elon musk gave legitimacy to these

things like dogecoin for example obviously is his pet kind of like project um and kind of like he gave a lot of legitimacy to it and he kind of basically got a lot of retail investors to to kind of like go into it and to kind of like buy into it at the top especially as well and then they're kind of completely wrecked on that right um and and a lot of people actually believed that dogecoin was going to be like the currency of the internet and was going to be like integrated with twitter and all these sorts of stuff and elon musk is still doing this right it's not like he's learnt his lesson or stopped i mean you know i think illinois is a very divisive character these days and i think he definitely has a god complex um he's just kind of like not a crypto

native god complex right so people don't really make the make the kind of like connection but but i certainly do um but you know the funny thing about like something like dogecoin as well though is like vitalik also lends it legitimacy like he's but he's been talking about it forever and i don't think he he tries to legitimacy because he's trying to pump up the price or anything like that um he's just interested in kind of like dogecoin as a thing right like it's it's kind of like a an intellectual kind of like interest for him but at the same time like to be fair i kind of like sometimes see that i'm just like is this really the best kind of like thing battalion could be doing like yes he's intellectually interested in it but is it lending this thing too much legitimacy and is it going to lead to

people kind of like getting hurt which it probably does like people look up to vitalik and think you know wow okay if he's interested in this then it must be legit um but you know he'll obviously never tell anyone to buy it or to you know he'll never like say to someone this is more than what it is right he knows it's a mean fun currency and and that's it but you know elon musk doesn't say that he kind of like says oh we can improve dogecoin we can make it the you know the currency of this we can integrate it with twitter we can do tipping blah blah right um but and then then you had the derivatives you had the shear kind of like pump and then you had all the other dog tokens that just kind of like fall off of that which we see with

everything it's like that euthanasia roller coaster right like something gets really big and then you have it kind of like spirals out of control from the forks and that's nothing new i mean it goes back to the early bitcoin days where people would just create forks and it would just kind of like spiral out the same way so i think that i'm fine with people trading these things but going back to what we were just talking about as long as they know what they're trading as long as they know what kind of like it is it's a meme it's like literally i mean i wouldn't even call it trading at that point i'd call it gambling because it's really gambling on other people wanting to kind of like come in and buy your bags off you essentially which i mean you can argue that from any

investment but when there's something doesn't really have any fundamentals behind it it's easier to kind of like argue about um and i guess like the d5 2.0 stuff i mean i've been saying for a while that d5 2.0 was just a term used to mask ponzi's uh at the end of the day like it was just trying to let him kind of like take a legitimate term known as d5 and apply it to something that is pretty much illegitimate right in terms of kind of like there's not really much innovation going on there there's a couple of things that fell out of it but the biggest d5 2.0 projects are completely dead now right like the frog nation behind daniel sesta like everyone loved that like oh this is d5 2.0 this is awesome but like it was all a massive kind of like ponzi that required like

all this money to come in or as it would collapse and it did collapse like we saw it collapsing and um i think same is true for for a lot of different projects there so i i didn't like that term i think i thought it was just like a very heavy marketing term i actually think that the d5 the projects known as defy 1.0 is where the innovation is happening like there's a lot of work going on there but people don't pay attention to it because these projects are actually legitimate they don't use ponzi-esque mechanisms to grow themselves and attract all that attention and capital and they don't have shul armies like you don't see like an mkr army or a uni army right like you would see like a lunar army or a kind of like frog nation for example right and that's because and

you've written about this before about kind of like the attention game and the meta game you know with attention being scarce and things like that that's what it's all about too it's like people aren't really paying attention to kind of like these legitimate projects because they're boring at the end of the day like yes they're doing a lot of cool innovations but it's only cool to people who care about the technology side if you only care about making money which is what pretty much all retail investors especially the ones that come into this industry as like a first cycle care about then they're going to be paying attention to the things that are making them money and in a bull market these things work really really well right i mean we've seen this time and time again through all the cycles you've been through it more than i have but it's the

same story every single time so i i just i really hated that that kind of like defy 2.0 term because of that and i and i think that i don't see many people throwing it around these days which is nice and i think more people especially in the wake of the terror collapse are realizing the importance of security and decentralization and kind of like moving slower on these things and actually being boring for kind of like long-term health instead of just being exciting for three months and then collapsing like that's all well and good if it's if you view it as a gamble but if you're doing it as an actual long-term investment which i think a lot of people do they they kind of like take the three months of the end of the bull market and say well this is the way things are

always going to be and they they wrongly assume that and then they get just fleeced i mean even like everything's down like 90 plus percent other than kind of like btc and eighth at this point against usd and then even more against that and these people they get they get burnt and they just think kryptos are scam and they they leave and that's why we have those ball bear cycles that are so violent because we just wreck everyone when we have anyone coming into this ecosystem we just send them straight to the slaughterhouse instead of actually onboarding them into like the legitimate things but at the same time it's kind of like the incentives like people are gonna go to where they can make money as a first cycle or where they think they can make money rather than to the to the projects that maybe

you and i find interesting that are not making as much money and are kind of like boring as well so i mean i don't blame people like i don't blame the individual i blame the structure of this whole ecosystem and how kind of like the incentives are just all just out of whack especially during kind of like the bull markets yeah i think d5 2.0 was maybe a little bit like we were saying it's like blending in with d51 because the products are kind of similar but then they also end up as like a game of chicken an investment game of chicken where everyone piles into the thing that's moving it's late cycle so everyone's capital floods into the same thing they get really overvalued you know i i think danny danny's project spell mim or whatever i think it's held up pretty well like it there was a lot of

thought about it breaking peg for a while it didn't um i think it still operates and um it's still fine um it just topped at the same time as the actual macro bull market top um so it got it was wonderland though as well right the that collapsed pretty special yeah that's below down below the net asset value but even ownfox trading above net asset value is a sign of frost right like it like there isn't tons of additional value you can even argue they should often trade below because you can't actually claim the the assets um underlying um but i think he has done a decent enough job of like reconsolidating all of those um projects and he's still working them and i think the sifu stuff

was like maybe bad judgment but um didn't didn't help um didn't help but um yeah i mean like there were there were a couple of maybe things that came out of d5 2.0 and the f if anything good came out of it that's like net positive but i do think it became one of those um everyone on the train type vehicles and then people um people by the top of it and it's just hugely overvalued because it is the current like narrative and um uh and trend um and i think a few of these like d5 2.0 projects will um probably survive over the long term and most of them won't the same way d51 projects a lot of them have formed by

the wayside some have really stuck around because they were fundamentally important and some were trendy or got replaced by didn't have um didn't have a mo got replaced by better or more efficient protocols and um and stuff and i think that's normal and healthy um i guess one one comparison is like a lot of these things operate like really early stage startups so you have these protocols that worth a billion dollars or something a year or so ago or maybe two years ago even and they're basically a startup right it's like success is not guaranteed they get valued because it's a hot sector um and they're a lot of people using them um but

then they just lose their position in the industry because um a bigger protocol copies their product and then you know you don't want to use anymore like compound was bigger than r for ages and then i've just like kept shipping and outperformed them and is now bigger than compound i think um and you you have that happen quite a lot in the industry but normally with startups they're not liquid so they don't have retail investors speculating on them um and when they fail the people that lose money are the private vcs who cannot sell because there's no acquisition they're not being public it just winds up and it's over um so that's why i think retail investors in crypto get wrecked a

lot more is because they see something working briefly and i've made a more real-world startup investments than they have crypto startup investments and i've seen things working briefly where there is a moment of magic and then they can't turn it into a product they can't turn it into a business long term they can't capitalize on that relationship properly um and that happens in crypto all the time too and figuring out when something is hot or when something is like sustainable and long term as a product i think is very hard because they look the same at the time and people get excited about them and they develop cults as well um the interesting thing with the courts is like sometimes legitimate projects have them

too like chain link has a really big one um which is out of the ordinary because um a lot of the really really really big cults i think uh often mark the top and like the asset goes to obscurity but chain link it feels like the importance of the like project and technology is detached from token price maybe that just happens to every crypto project like the tokens are just like trending down to their real valuations um and not attached to like real world metrics for them or something who knows yeah yeah no i i think you're right and i think the problem as you said like the problem is that liquidity is like there for these things like much sooner than it is

there for like a non-crypto startup right like it's on average i think seven years to ipo for for like non-crypto startups right whereas in crypto it's like a year or less like yeah probably like even even less than that right so you you don't have a product and a lot of these tokens as you said like go live without like even a product yet they kind of tease that there's a product coming but they're like oh we'll put our token out there first it's like well that doesn't make any sense like what what's that what's the worth of the token like it's just a future kind of like worth this and and like the chance of this failing is really high like in the normal kind of like well it's like 90 percent in within five years of kind of like startups fail i think within

crypto it's a higher percentage because there's just so much kind of like uh things that i kind of like happen but yeah as you said like there's a brief period during a bull market where the token price will go up with everything else because it's just like a liquidity kind of like um injection but then and people and then especially because of liquidity mining people will be like oh look at all the tvl on this protocol because uh you know uh kind of like it's billions of dollars this protocol is doing so amazing them is going to buy the token when in reality it's because they're buying the token and because the token price is going up that the pbl is going up and a lot of people that are new will not make that connection and and that's why i think a lot of the tokens end up going down only

is because they get to these stupid valuations based on nothing and then the projects over the long term will just kind of like fade into irrelevancy and just fail to ever reach their bull market highs and and then people move on to the next thing so i think yeah it's very dangerous and and i think there are some kind of like projects in this ecosystem that have held off on doing a token for a very long time i think the layer twos fall into that bucket they're like you know let's not do a token until we've actually got like a product out there we've actually got people using it we've actually got a reason to do a token but that's not the rule that's the exception the rule is put a token out there get like some kind of like people involved because they're brought into

the token and then worry about shipping the product later and nine times out of ten or nine point five times out of ten that leads in ruin for like pretty much everyone and and uh it's kind of like really sad that that happens because there are actually some good projects that if they just didn't have a token and they just kind of tried to grow organically may have actually succeeded uh and because the token was a detriment to the to their project uh by by launching it too early so um but you could argue it is interesting it is interesting because a lot of people were launching tokens defensively right they were like like even eunice what was potentially even a defensive token launch because sushi was vampire attacking them um so they launched them with this like okay it's like kind of defensive growth mechanism

where if we don't have one someone else will just clone our work and have one um and they'll get all our growth because they'll be paid to go there instead but the product will be the same because it's open source and now that token model works in the opposite way where yeah it brought in a lot of people it was a good growth mechanic but it's unwinding because now the chart is only going down and people are less interested in that token so maybe they're even less interested in that product and you have some products like matcha um xyz or whatever it is um that haven't launched a token and have said they probably won't ever do one i think um and personally i always use that now because i'm like oh yeah don't like one inch they're like you know they're [ __ ] and

uh you know so on so on um and you're definitely not using power swap like they did the air drop for only ten people or some [ __ ] i always use matcha and it it reminds me a little bit of when unispot launched and una swap was bank or without a token so great we're just in a in a bear market we just like the products without tokens in a bull market we're like love tokens all right yeah but um the products that projects and protocols that did the method you spoke of which was launch the token after the product um i think like isomorphically or if you categorize them they often fit into these longer-term um focused more like uh

less hyped projects it's like arbitrary is very hyped i'm sure they'll do a token some point this year or next year or whenever um but it's very hyped because it's low to scaling people you know want ethereum to scale better um but it's not hyped in the same way like d5 2.0 was and like a lot of these token projects are hyped um and they're doing the product first method and because they think it's important to be around for a very long time and that's the the most sustainable way so like categorically a lot of those project products um that do that end up in this similar category in my mind where it's like they'll be around for a very long time they'll be important parts of the ecosystem or d5 for ages um but also i observe that none of the

price action is ever very good it never goes like insanely up you never get a huge win out of them they always open um much closer to their like realistic valuations um uniswork did a decent pump but it was uh it was launched right at the very beginning of the the bull market so um it just went up like kind of a market average with everything um so it's like it is interesting like those ones are like the legitimate ones but you the speculators don't have much room within them to get what they really want out of the like gambling game of chicken type investing um so it's interesting how do you feel about um uh

like token project team members like of off team members or whatever selling their tokens when should it be allowed that's a tough one because they all have like their own investing right attached to it um and like some people would argue well if that's the vesting schedule then they should be allowed to sell as soon as they've got like vested out tokens right i get that argument but you know and some people will view it as well why are these people selling do they have they lost kind of like faith in the project have they have are they kind of like bearish on it i don't think that's that's necessarily true because it's kind of like well these people join maybe they join the team really early on right and they were promised equity as part of their package and their salary maybe wasn't great because it was a

startup um and they're just like well you know this is a huge win for me like i made my 100x on my equity rather than my 100x on on something else in the public markets so why shouldn't they be allowed to sell right like if you make 100x on something on the public market no one's questioning you for selling that so just be well just because these people you know got it as for being part of the team like they've added more value than you have like if you buy a token on on public markets and it goes 100x you've added like basically not no value to that maybe you added some marginal value because you made the price go up a little in a little bit by buying but you know people who actually were part of the team building the thing and driving the most value then in my

mind they should be able to sell whenever they want like the vesting schedule is is made by the the kind of like executive team or whatever of the of the startup so they should be able to sell but in saying that if the vesting is like really bad where it's kind of like as soon as a token launches everyone gets their tokens like on day one well i mean that's just gonna lend itself to people selling right like especially if it's a hyped up token launch and you know if the fluid outlet value gets like way ahead of the actual kind of like circulating value um or kind of the float uh value then you know that it can seem a little bit kind of like scammy where it's just like well did the team just vest out themselves so they could sell because they knew that

it would go like it was so hyped and the value would skyrocket and then it would kind of like bleed out which is there's been a bunch of those for sure um but i think for the generally legitimate projects where team members have been there for like potentially years they're getting their kind of like package like you would like when something ipos you're getting your kind of tokens or whatever invested out then i don't think there's a problem selling and i don't think that means that they're bearish on anything i think that just means that they hey this money can actually improve my life maybe they want to go buy themselves a house or maybe they've been living frugally because they were at a startup where their salary you know wasn't very good i don't blame them for that at all and i you can argue it either way but i think

the argument that they're not all about to sell because it's barry she's kind of like a really weak one for for a lot of projects especially for team members that have been there for a while on the other hand if there's a team member that joined like a month ago and they're getting tokens like because the the the thing i kind of like tokenized and they're selling straight away i mean it's kind of like it can look a bit bit shady and a bit grifty but you would you would kind of like expect the actual team the actual kind of like ceo or the founders to see that and kind of like be like well you know if you're just kind of like here for money then we're gonna cut you off because there's a lot of clauses that say you know we can cut you

off at any time you're not guaranteed to get these things like it just because it's vesting out to you doesn't mean that it's gonna be set in stone we can actually change this we can fire you so to speak anything like that so there's a lot of that going on but generally i don't think we should shame the team members for selling their kind of like tokens and kind of like you know improving their lives from the work that they did and contributed to a project right yeah i'm very very i've been thinking a lot recently about like milestone based vesting for team members because like if you know curve's been out two years right also um and curve is clearly an extremely important part of the ecosystem it's fulfilled its role it's permanently got the number one tvl uh

like super high volume um and there'll be people vesting for four years on on the on the curved side so they have to wait uh another two years um so they were not even really able to realize the peak of um what they created right they built something it went absolutely insane um like a really crazy product in the times of peak bull market and if we enter a bear market now that lasts for a couple of years they'll fully vest at the bottom of the bear market and that like that kind of sucks for them um but it like what they built was very very very important for a period of time um and curve having accelerated vesting from milestones makes sense to me because they've built something that is

actually practically important um so they're not just dumping tokens of some vapor they um should be allowed to realize some of their net worth which is illiquid to liquid in order to de-risk working on it forever i think founders should be able to um de-risk that net worth number that fluctuates which can be distracting which can be um you know it can drive you insane if you watch it go up and down and you can't do anything about it um they should be able to sell it buy the house be very solid have a money in the bank so they feel good forever and that gives them the comfort blanket to go for the home run

like i'm gonna build curve into the [ __ ] biggest thing that's ever existed because no matter what i've got my house and stuff um and so i am supportive of um i support every founder's selling um in order to like go big what i get confused about is when you have like you know the maps token it was like maps.me and it's like yeah the tokens for like a d5 wallet maps app thing um and it's got like an ftx perp that goes down only and it was worth a billion dollars at some point or something and like their vesting will complete and they'll they'll be able to sell but they haven't hit any milestones or like you know the d5 wallet is that like a popular part of

d5 now like is maps like fundamentally important to the ecosystem so they'll just be able to dump tokens as they vest on a time basis which um you know maybe like as and when curve are able to to sell even though um the valuation is probably reasonably similar and they haven't built anything that's like that important to the ecosystem so i i struggle a little bit with like when it should be okay for team members to sell because i do think that team and founders should be able to de-risk and it actually makes them build better and more aggressively if they're not trying to just maintain a valuation for two or three years like it allows them to take really risky um ambitious steps to go 10x upwards

instead of just going oh let's just sit here and try and maintain market share and don't do anything wrong because i want to keep this number here so i can buy a house um i don't think they should be allowed to dump on public markets i think like these places should uh have like secondary rounds with big funds that lock um that honor the original lock or even extend locks um in cases like that but i think it should all be milestone based like if you create a d5 project today um and you have a team you have a normal vesting schedule for them and you have accelerated vesting based on milestones and that accelerated vesting just kind of says you can participate x amount in a secondary sale if we can

find someone to fund it um if we hit these milestones in this time i think something like that would be much healthier for the ecosystem so like people are not just unlocking huge bags all at once selling on public markets other team members not selling on public markets because they don't want to be the one that dumps and then you know causing infighting um but i like a lot of these projects where they don't build anything i like maybe they should get extended vesting who knows man i don't know all right so we at the beginning we promised people that you were going to you know release some of your and on account takes so we've got to end with sassal's spiciest i was going to try to alliterate the whole thing but i don't know so just like your spices takes what would you

say when you were drunk that you maybe wouldn't say it's me it's the daily way no one watches so no one's gonna hear it they're always gonna hear what you say you're not gonna get any trouble i think yeah i think this might be the actual the one episode that does get viewed because you're on it so um uh i think i i don't wanna i can give you yeah i'll give you some spicy takes but uh maybe not the spiciest not the stuff that i would say that like if there was no one listening um i i think as i alluded to at the start like i want there to be more accountability um and not just accountability from the community in this ecosystem i want some people to actually face legal repercussions for

the things that they do in this ecosystem i want the actual scammers to end up in prison um if i'm being honest i want examples to be set because i don't think that if if that doesn't i think if that doesn't happen we're just going to keep repeating the same thing over and over and over again because people come in and they say okay well there's this scam and this scam and this scam and nothing's happened to them why would i not scam as well right it's just kind of like a merry band of scammers and i think it's it's it's kind of like outside of the crypto ecosystem if there was no law against doing like certain things like if there was no law against theft people would just steal anything right they're literally like a lot of people think that people don't steal because it's

like just a morally kind of like wrong thing to do no i mean a lot of people don't steal because they they know that like they'll get potentially caught and they'll end up in jail so there's always that threat like looming threat there of kind of like enforcement but we don't have that in crypto like even um some of the biggest kind of like griffs in this ecosystem i i struggled to call it a scam but like the eos ico for example the year-long eos ico that went nowhere that block one did eos is obviously a dead project but block one converted all of that eighth into btc another one of the biggest btc holders the sec slaps them with a 24 million fine which is [ __ ] nothing compared to what they made and they run away you know with their with their riches intact

right uh you know brock pierce runs away to puerto rico and he gets to enjoy his life after having drained all this money right so if if if there's no enforcement at all like it's just going to keep happening and what's even sadder is that you mentioned the ripple case with the sec i actually think that ripple is going to win that case because they have unlimited money to spend on lawyers to start with right like they have so much money from ill-gotten gains to spend on lawyers but also i kind of like want them to win it because of the fact that the sec to me is such a legitimate organization that if they can't classify xrp as a security then good luck with anything else but you know the security stuff is a different ballgame i actually think the actual proven scams are people who that

you can prove in a court of law actually scammed people need to end up in in prison to set an example uh because otherwise we're just going to keep repeating the same stuff and that might be an aggressive take but look we don't tolerate scammers a lot of the time in the traditional world right like there are some enforcement there but at the same time there isn't there's a lot of grifters like a lot of grifters in the in the kind of like outside of crypto that that you know self-help gurus who sell opium like just like people sell opium in crypto but if there's like a verifiable scam that like everyone pretty much agrees is a scam except maybe the people who got scammed or the people who kind of like are still in the scam then there should be kind of like some

enforcement it should be jail time like actual jail time for for these people to dissuade future scammers um and like i guess that might be one of the spiciest states i can come up with like on on the spot but i also i liked the bit where you were like uh you like oh i'd steal everything if i wasn't going to get caught i'm looking at your room now i'm like is all this this this ill-gotten games is this all theft you're running into stores and running away no no i mean look i wasn't talking about me personally of course like none of this personally but uh no i just think generally people are a bit naive to think that that people don't do bad things because it's just like not morally right to do bad things rather than there's a law against it because in lawless places people will do

bad things right and they'll do them because they know they can get away with it so i think that is what's happened in crypto for the longest time now people know that they can get away with it so they just do it they just say [ __ ] it who cares like i'm not gonna go to jail i'll just make all this money and i'll just exit and no one will care because everyone forgets because within a day everyone forgets like there's there's no people make memes about it like doe kwon what people remember about their quan is the memes like he's he's [ __ ] posting on twitter um and same with like big connect right what do everyone what does everyone remember about big connect the carlos whatever his name is on stage singing yeah exactly so no one ever remembers the the bad bits i just remember the

memes so i yeah i just that that's probably one of the spiciest decks i can come up with people need to go to jail for this stuff to stop otherwise just going to keep continuing yeah so my my take was going to be that a lot of these people especially the vcs i think they're not fraudsters they're just stupid like i think like i think some like you know there are a lot of obviously like scam projects and um i think eos have quite literally like observated where which entity the money belongs to and now they're doing this bullish exchange and i think they're you know trying to make sure that that money stays in intact in their control uh or you know to build it into

more money and it's definitely not being invested into the eos blockchain right so i think there's deliberate steps taken there but i do think a lot of the vcs um are extremely dumb i think they're not smart i don't think they can think critically i don't think they can evaluate one project from the other i think they rely on social signaling like who's in this round or like paradigms in the round that means it must be good how much can i get um and um they just see like i can buy 66 discount 66 discount good that means token can go down 66 percent and i can still break even will they go down 66 in one year that's quite a lot

probably not buy you know that i think that is how they think these things through and then instead of it being like malicious i think they go on twitter and go i like this thing that i own like i think they just dumb and like they don't really get it and i think there's like specific people in my mind that i can and i can think of um and you can tell because they haven't really done anything prior to like this fundus bc they like you know it's not like they had a reasonably successful career building something or contributed to like you know jobs that have a high bar to get those jobs or um whatever and i'm not into credentialism um i'm just saying there is a trend where if the first thing that they've done that's had any

success was um to fund like insider guaranteed win projects um they might not be super smart they might not be like you know excellent critical thinking individuals who are seeing the future they might just be along for the ride on uh euphoria i don't think they understand how most of their projects work i don't think they've ever used them um and um i think it it there's a concept um uh in i think it's mostly in germany of a rat tail which is a bunch of rats they get their tails tied together and then they die and you find like um all these rats spread out with their tails tied in one

normally it's like hair or like a gunk or something that gets or sometimes they just get tied together and i think it's going to end up looking a little bit like that when they realize they were following someone who was following someone who is following someone who's following the original person and none of them actually know what they're talking about none of them do due diligence they don't think critically and 99 of stuff is going to zero um because they funded trash um so i don't think they're all egomaniacs i think there's definitely some eager maniac founders that these people can follow and um and riff off um but i think a lot of the vcs are actually just extremely dumb and they have been caught up in the like i've got

following people like me i'm a genius i'm making money um yeah type thing um and i think the actual people who are malicious uh um a need to be smart to be malicious um and i think they're less frequent they definitely still exist there all right dude that's fun i gotta go looking forward to future sessile spicy takes yeah yeah nah thanks thanks for the chat man this was good uh i'll see you later peace