The Conflicts of Interest in Crypto | Roundup

Transcript

the most important thing about conflicts of interest is that it doesn't perceived conflicts of interest and actual conflicts of interests are the same thing it doesn't matter if I think you're conflicted you can't change my mind whether or not you accepted the bribe or whatever you want to call it hey everyone this episode is brought to you by NADA the shielded asset Hub rewarding you to protect the multi-chain so not only can you protect your own data across any asset and any chain but you also get shielding rewards for strengthening data privacy protections for everyone so you can check them out at n.net and follow the domain net launch stick around you're going to be hearing all about them later in the

program hey everyone this episode is brought to you by real a new permissionless L2 built on the arbitrum orbit stack buy defin natives for defin natives for tokenized real world assets it's very cool chain highly recommend that you go check it out and they just started their Rewards program so you can type in re. al/ rewards you can use the code in the show notes below all right thanks everyone home with the show all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's

jump into the episode hey everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve in today's episode I've got Jim pillo of figment cap friend of the Pod subbing in for the framework Lads uh this was a great episode we spent a lot of time recapping SBC from Jim's perspective we spent some times on the uh some time on the apps versus infra meta and we talked a little bit about prediction markets and futarchy um so that was very interesting and then we spent basically the entire last half of the podcast talking about the igen layer airdrop uh Saga which coindesk reported on earlier this morning and at the time of recording all we had was the coindesk perspective to go off and just for the sake of fairness and Reporting the entire story uh the Igan lay team

launched a Blog so I wanted to just I'll drop that in the show notes for people to get kind of the other side of the story and I'll just summarize it for 30 seconds here which is basically you know from Igan L's perspective look there were a bunch of abss and teams which wanted to reward a whole bunch of different people um some of those happened to be Igan lab's employees they actually linked to blog post where alt layer specifically mentioned igen Labs um but they recognized back in May that this could potentially create a conflict of interest so they rolled something out called the igen layer ecosystem Network back in June which was inspired by the protocol Guild and they made it so that you could only airdrop to the foundation and so you know some of the discussion later in the podcast was a little bit

critical and so I just wanted to make sure that we're accurately displaying both sides of the story here I also want to say all of this news just broke today I'm sure there's going to be a lot more information uh you know that comes to light here so just take all that with a grain of salt and wanted to make sure we're representing both sides of this issue fairly all right guys hope you enjoy the program all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup edition of bell curve uh today I'm joined by Jim pillo of figment Capital he's been on the show before Jim welcome buddy GM sir um not the topic I thought I would be asked to come and talk about uh but um like next the next the next intro the next visit to um you know the bker but like uh great to great to see you sir um

how was SBC you as well I actually missed SBC because I had a so my my parents have this uh cabin in Canada I grew up going there during the Summers and uh we were this has been on the calendar for like a year my mom was like Hey you know they moved out to Montana um last a couple years ago and they're like this doesn't make sense anymore we're going to sell this place so my parents have been up there for a couple months and then when I went up to visit they were like my mom's like yeah we really love this place and we're probably not going to sell it so so she's she's reneging on her uh what she said but it was really nice to be up there but I missed SBC did were you able to go uh yeah we were there uh

douge and I were there the whole time um it was good it was uh got to catch up with a lot of the teams that we've like invested in which is usually the most valuable part of these things um I was there like searching for applications and I saw mostly infra so you know good and bad and I've got a lot of thoughts on like that part of things these days like I've been writing a little bit about it and I need to like post it somewhere but so it was good overall um got to catch up with the mega eth team a lot who they like hosted like a there's like a internet cafe across the street and so I kind of just hung out there for a couple days and jammed with the team and but it was good yeah no and I've

never been to Montana it's like it's on the list like I I've heard amazing things dude it's awesome yeah we got to get you out there at some point all right so before we get into the topic of the day and the reason you know we brought you on outside of your uh deep knowledge and uh a penchion for SAS is what I'll say I I also I'm curious to get your uh and you you did a great presentation actually at ECC about conflict of interest 101 which is what we're going to be talking about today but before we get into that actually I do want to get your take on the apps versus infra meta and sort of vibe shift that we've seen because I listened to the The Chopping Block episode and they were talking about look uh and this was my feeling as well at ECC and a lot of

people you know my D Haven gone to ECC this year is like look my sort of highlevel take around this is that a lot of the talks at ECC this year are the similar to the ones that I heard at ECC last year except there hasn't really been there's been some progress in the road map but we haven't seen the requisite users and if anything it almost feels like there are more problems than there used to be and we're kind of you know resorting to these I I don't want to say crutch because that sounds a little pejorative but you know we're sort of aligning on these solutions that it's like hey we could have just figured this we we knew this existed from day one and it just feels like this kind of stagnation and you know I'm not here for the nth me te talk

uh and I think everyone kind of wants to see applications do you feel that way as well or where where are you on that yeah I think so I mean like so the one thing you did Miss was like Max resnick's like uh you know New York City Tour about uh mCP that was like on full display like yeah I think I heard him talk like three different times about it um some really interesting conversations like it's it's interesting um where and how that would like how long it would take for that to actually ship on ethereum is like if ever uh would be an interesting conversation to have um five years maybe 10 years like I would love to know more about that but like it's interesting um I think like yeah the application I think is like where people are kind of

starting to hope for a little bit and and and seem to be hungry for I think like so I I work at figment Capital it's a venture fund right we call ourselves like an infrastructure fund and even us are even we're looking for like applications now um for a lot of the teams that we've invested in and some of them are doing a better job at like finding found Founders and teams that want to build applications I think like here's like the hot take which would be like I think it has to do something with like tokenomics um and like I think VCS are kind of like in a weird don't feel sorry for us number one um but like number two is like I think we're in kind of this weird spot where like the low float High fdv thing is like I think caught a

little everybody a little bit off guard um and at the same time uh you know okay so I don't know what's better so what's the alternative is the alternative like low float low FTV is the alternative high flow High fdv because like look everybody wants high flow to high FTV like that means everyone made it and I so I don't know how that I don't know how we make that that a reality like from day one I don't think it makes probably a lot of sense and I think with like applic so you start to talk about like these like lockup periods that exist and if you tell me like there's an L1 and the lockup is like a year and the vesting is three years um I understand that it's going to take a long time for like an ecosystem to develop and like

and ultimately like if it's a proof of stake Network I can maybe stake the tokens and I'm like earning additional tokens like the blockchain won't won't shut down in a year it won't shut down in two years it will continue to produce tokens like there will be some value that like sort of accr to like the L1 even if it's like just more tokens and no transactions and a lot of these exchanges like are essentially requesting like lot longer lockups right they want the one-year lockup they want the threee like they want the one- year lockup for sure and what we see is like kind of like Le a lack of like Innovation I think even on tokenomics generally so what do applications do a lot of them have like the same lockup periods right they have like a one-year lockup they have like a three-year vest

and other than like the very like like kind of like foundational applications that exist on ethereum a maker Unis swap like name an application that existed from like like a salana application that like still is like the leader um today that was the leader in the last cycle and I don't think you can name one and so we're and and CH the reason why is is because like as soon as pumped off fund becomes like one of the reasons I think why is because as soon as pumped out fund comes out there's like and it has success and it has some sort of product Market fit like all of a sudden there's like 20 pumped off funds that launch next um and it's like just

this like SWAT swishing and swashing of like the same Capital trying to like aird Drop Farm now pump off fund's been able to keep its lead which is awesome and I love to see it it's like it's been great like the revenues numberers look fantastic but like maybe there's like you know maybe there's not like a one-sized fits-all for for like these toonomic models like I'm not I'm not suggesting like full unlock like on day one but like if the if the ideas like iterate on the application layer but the lockups are like four years long for like these applications like we either need more Innovation on the on the application layer which I do think we need and newer applications to come out um which necessitates potentially newer and better and more Innovative infrastructure down the road but at the same time like I think it's a one-size

fits all like kind of onee lock up like it makes it scary for for like I think some investors to like think okay I'm I'm investing in like this application that like could maybe lose all of its users in like seven months or eight months like and be in it for like four years like I think it's like the cost benefit maybe isn't there um and there probably needs to be some like thought around it a little bit more like Nuance I think kind of like in how we think about it okay so I have a lot of thoughts on this here's a here's the here is the way that I've been thinking about it when we were just getting into crypto block works when we started it in 2018 2019 there was actually there's sort of something similar that was

taking place which is all the companies that were getting funded were essentially infrastructure but they were CI infrastructure so this was the era of prime brokerage and custodians and things like that and that was the hot thing to fund and all of this VC money got poured into that particular category and then what ended up happening happening over time was just this sort of Natural Market correction because the number of customers to support those infrastructure companies simply wasn't there so there was a massive wave of consolidation and frankly that part of the market is still hurting pretty badly I think we are a decent way through that chunk uh or that same cycle for onchain infrastructure and eventually what needs to materialize here because you know to

just say something pretty obvious none of these infrastructure companies are worth anything if there aren't if they don't have any customers and the customers are the applications right so I haven't really bought this idea that you know one you're essentially taking the same bet uh which is that customers are going to come into the space and actually use the onchain infrastructure that said I do think an enormous part of this has actually been really unfairly focused on VCS and I think that the putting VCS in the Crosshair here and moralizing to them about what types of Investments they should make is pretty ridiculous actually I feel the same way you know from a media seat of people saying hey the media should report on this Medias are businesses you know they you know we we our job is to try to

get a sense of what people want to see and to to give it to them and and at the end of the day I I I really you know people complain about media all the time I don't think it's actually a fixable problem uh most people just aren't honest with their actual uh content consumption preferences like you are being served what you actually want to see um but and I sort of feel like VCS are unfairly in the crosshairs here I I'm not actually sure I'd push back with you a little bit on the unlock thing I actually do respect uh Chris goes at at aoma you know triy just an unlock from day one it's a bold experiment I actually think it might work out um I I'm I'm and and I just respect anyone trying anything new so huge shout out to the team atoma uh for taking a shot on

that and it seems like he's got a lot of push back which I just don't think is deserved the but I'm of the mind that the fouryear unlock here isn't what's broken and I actually think that works pretty well that's how I feel about most corporate governance stuff like the modern Corporation is actually an extremely effective way of organizing people and we've figured out this stuff about unlocks and how long these periods should be I don't think we really need to innovate on that that much the issue as I see it is one there's there's an over supply of capital for one part of the market and then two the initial price Discovery is not correct here um and I actually don't think that's VCS everyone's like the VCS are dumping the VCS have lockups I I do think there are two actors here which don't catch nearly

enough flak which is the market makers and the exchanges and there is a lot of black magic that happens in between market makers and exchanges and anyone that has listed a token maybe on some large overseas exchanges knows what I'm talking about because these guys actually have uh someone you know should look into what's and like it's not clear that those tokens are locked up that like these exchanges are receiving which like I've heard that they maybe they aren't sometimes um for the bigger ones and so like I agree 100% And like yeah maybe the lockup is actually isn't the problem maybe the airdrop farmers are the problem maybe like you know VCS are not dumping like the first year VCS don't the tokens to dump um and and so I I actually like I respect the the

rebuttal and like and yeah also huge shout out to enoma we're investors in enoma um I think there's some challenges around specifically the enoma like full unlock that I maybe it's better for different different like podcasts or something but like I think there are some challenges there um that that I that I see but like I think generally like any sort of like look like you say low flow FTV doesn't work right so okay cool we're just going to keep it unlocked like everybody can do whatever they want um I think it's like and now now they're getting Flack for that and so it's like okay well then what's your solution like why don't you give me a solution that like actually works here's the barbell here's the Spectrum like we've got both ways um and let's let's let's see what happens in this example um so I agree I

think I'm doing a lot of research right now on like two areas that like I've kind of not paid as much attention to um just to understand how it works and try to understand how this Market actually works the first is like I'm talking to a lot of like OTC desks um because I don't understand how that process works and like I think these people who are in the intermediaries have a huge insights into like how the private markets work like we generally just like Buy and Hold um and the second thing is like market makers interestingly and I have like a whole ddq and I ask them a bunch of questions and they like Jesus Christ you're asking so many goddamn questions like you could probably start your own a I'm not starting my own I don't know how to do those things I don't want to do those

things uh but be like what I've found is like market makers are a lot lot less open about what they do and how they make money and like how they how how they operate within the space and I understand why um but like it's it's it's it's fascinating to learn and so like what I wind up having to do is talk to like people who used to work at market makers because they're a little bit more yes willing to discuss I've gone down this road before too and it's not just crypto actually of all of the disciplines that I you know tried to teach myself when I first got into the space the market making corner of trafi is the most opaque by a landslide you know people often come to crypto and say oh it's very complicated very it is much easier to learn what's going on here in

this industry than it is in Market making in traditional finance and yeah I mean the reason why is they make a ton of money and and they have no incentive to make that transparent and available for everyone that's their Edge but yeah I think that I I do think the point is I do think that VCS are really unfairly in the crosshairs here and if anyone listening to this podcast we just reorient a little bit the uh you know the pressure around you know kind of exchanges and market makers I think that's probably who who deserves this little bit and regul and US Regulators were who who have basically made it so that the early returns are just acre to VCS instead of retail and I I probably flipped a little bit and I'm more on the the train of icos for just a better

format but last thing about just appliations versus infra in general I have a theory I want to run by you so if you look at all the major applications that are working today they have to do with they H there there's kind of this um even in traditional Commerce as well there's this relationship in between uh sort of money and commerce and what I mean by that is like or originally like our modern form of banking was um was uh trade Finance right where you had a bunch of people who were like Millers and stuff like that and they were like hey I've actually got these order receipts but I need some liquidity in the meantime and Banks issued you know very safe deposit receipts and so there's the sort of

evolution of money and commerce going hand to hand and if you look at crypto I think it basically every application that's taken off there's a connection there in between the growth of these like commodity things like ether or Bitcoin as money and applications that support it so the examples that I'll give you is you know what are the biggest applications in ethereum today Unis swap maker a right and what what are the use cases around that well for for maker it's people that want to get leverage on their e for the most part um it's basically the same thing for a and then Unis swap exists because there's this uh me right sort of Arbitrage thing around the price of uh ethereum onchain versus offchain and so these things are related and and and I do think that the

the larger these um sort of token ecosystems grow and and the more complicated the underlying Machinery becomes that is where you're going to see apps um and so you know everyone sort of calls apps these consumer type applications I'm not I'm sure that those are coming like Blackbird there are some examples right like Blackbird or even poly Market but my guess is that we see more you know Unis swap or a type uh applications in the future than not and those are those are also interrelated with all the infrastructure conversations as well so um I don't know that's just my theory about what drives applications in crypto for the most part but yeah I agreed I I think like you know the one kind of innovative thing that's finally kind of making some mark on the on the space that's like some

combination of all of those is like a per Dees and like the second thing is like uh prediction markets and um I I think we might be seeing like um I hope that that this is something I'm saying and then I can look back on this and say this correctly but like I actually think that uh like prediction markets might be one of the most interesting things like that's coming out of crypto um particularly because it could like kind of just reinvent like what a market is um and like you know in I think Frankie had like a really interesting tweet about like it's about what you do with the information once you have it like that's and how are these applications going to like consume digest and like you know organize that information in like valuable into valuable insights uh investment or otherwise um but we could

actually be seeing like a pretty interesting transition of like how markets operate um like fundamentally how they operate if we have like kind of group think on on some of these like esoteric things and then kind of are able to apply what that means um to maybe financial markets as well so I don't know yeah like I think like I agree so like I think the infrastructure stuff is is obviously very interesting that's why we invest in a lot of it and and then like I think other things that kind of are tied to the the financial kind of flywheel that you mentioned um and and how it contributes to that is going to be probably the next set of Innovations before we get these like consumer applications and stuff because like it's all information so how do you how do you gather this information and

another interesting thing so this is all stuff I wrote about holy like yesterday um was like um how do we like change human behavior actually interestingly enough like I think prediction markets can change human behavior in very interesting ways like I think a lot of this stuff has been around like a lot of the bets on ply Market have been around like the the the election and we were talking with uh a friend of the fund like Nathan warley about like information uh markets and what he had mentioned was like you know like hey there's like there's statistical Arbitrage here as well right like so Cara Harris was like at like 20% and like pretty good bet that like it's probably gonna be closer to 50 by the by the election time and so like you could make a bet that just like whether you

care or not about the US like like you know politics like you could just make that bet because you think it's interesting and you think it's like statistical Arbitrage but at the end of the day like what what what winds up happening to you as a result like you start to consume more political news you start to pay attention and like pay attention to like maybe you're looking for certain maybe have you clearly have biases financially on the outcome but like you're kind of looking for bad news about Trump you're looking for good news about Harris or vice versa right and but meanwhile you're actually educating yourself in some way right you're paying attention to a new thing if you're investing in Tesla maybe you think because like Elon Musk is a genius or something and um and then all of a sudden you start paying attention to

like green energy maybe or the stock market or you know and like you you you wind up like growing as a result of like as a person or like maybe even intellectually based on like and your interests grow as a result of this and and so modifying human behavior through incentives is something that's like really interesting it could be used for good certainly be used for bad as well um and like one of these like interesting projects that we we I don't we're not investors in but I thought was really interesting is like this like Vape to earn um like project because like what you hear when you hear Vape to earn is like cool you're like you're you're incentivizing people to smoke more but actually like the way that the model is works that is that like the the less the nicotine is in in

like the the pods the more you earn and so with that information like you can if you gather that information right like like there's like a ton of health information there that's never been available to people before um like how much how much do they how often did they smoke like how like how strong do they smoke and you could potentially incentivize people to kind of like quit addictive substances through incentives so like I think there's like some cool things that like are kind of on the cusp here of how do we modify human behavior for like their own benefits like their own health benefits or otherwise steppen might even be a good example of this right um and early example of this yeah there's a lot okay there's a lot there so on the I actually heard uh she's one of the founders at Mega eth her her

handle is brother bang I think it's Shu ya uh but she was actually saying that one of the things that they're looking at is some of these old failed Ico era type ideas and maybe they were just early but not wrong necessarily and I actually heard someone talk about this in the I think this was a Fred Wilson blog actually from 2018 or 2019 something like that so I might be misattributing here but he we referred to this there was a there was a game back in the day called do bomb and it was every dumb idea that got tried in the early 2000s that ended up being massively successful later on so was like web van to Uber or pets.com to chewy or whatever it was and I I I do think that some of those old ideas that you heard about you know coordinating

people around these incentives is super interesting prediction markets does feel like something that's very new and super it's well I'll say it's not new actually there are lots of other countries like you can bet in the UK today on uh you know prime minister elections and stuff like that it used to be legal in the US credit default swaps and options are arguably prediction markets yeah and arguably actually crypto is trading like a big prediction Market based on this election at the moment uh basically Bitcoin is a trump win uh coin at the moment but okay so there are two it's it's pretty interesting because I I actually I'm gonna pull up this tweet from hu um and he you know he's he's a pretty you know I I generally enjoy his takes he's got a obviously a very he's a

very smart dude with a good head on his shoulders but you know he actually tweeted the other day that he thinks that prediction markets are threat to democracy and acceleration towards plutarchy um and I think that in a sense it's almost like maybe the difference between proof of work and proof of stake you could right this is the big criticism around politics and money that you know uh it's it's too easy to influence outcomes and you people have made this this analogy between proof of work and proof of stake that you know proof of stake is proof of work but without the extra steps and it's like well the extra steps are actually important because you actually have to do real stuff right and there's an additional stakeholder and it actually is a pretty different system and you know you could argue that politics today

already works like prediction markets and there's already a ton of money but when you make that relationship more direct you can just bet on these outcomes and it actually makes it more likely to happen you know there are definite negatives there and where this is being one one of the interesting Concepts we had a long debate on this section in the blockwork slack last night about futari so futari is a and this is I believe being tried out mostly in salana today but futari is a form of government uh yeah metad uh proposed by an economist Robin Hansen in which elected officials Define measures of national well-being and prediction markets are used to determine which policies will have the most positive effect and so here I'm going to keep drawing this analogy of proof of work versus proof of stake which is you know

in a in in today's the way that it works today is you have to elect all these people um and then they actually actually have to go out and prove to you that like hey I'm this uh you know credible you know very qualified person that should be doing this and then they actually have to get laws passed and now if if you once you define the parameters it just becomes a game of money and it's just much more easier to directly you know you could make this the the bull case for this would be hey you're gonna have a bunch of people everyone's going to be influ like um influencing these policies based on actually having skin in the game and you know you eliminate these sort of personal relationships like if you could imagine something like the like the relationship uh Dan Smith

gave this good analogy in our our chat uh between a a board and a CEO right okay the board elect the CEO and maybe we're friends and we're not going to do that but if this was like a fut tarkey type situation where everyone could just vote on it uh maybe you'd eliminate some of that bias but on the other hand if you are a negative actor in this situation it's really easy it's just much easier to influence outcomes if you have a lot of money and so I get hu's point about everything converging on plutarchy at the same time and so it's just interesting it's we're already there right so I mean I guess like one there's always gonna be gameable ways to do this right like you could argue that like you could look at like the amount of money that's being spent you could

also look at the number of like wallets that are actually voting in both ways um I don't think we see that like type of data um but you can always gain that as well um maybe there's proof of personhood and some or some in some manner where like you can't have the same person and now you have like a bunch of people in some other country that are like being paid to just like put $10 on something um so it is proof they are proof they are a person but maybe they're not even like US citizens right and so I I imagine there's like ways around this I don't know if ZK Tech or something like that solves this I'm sure they'll find a way to fit that in but like you know I I'm or te who knows but like um but like you know what

that's just me being ridiculous but like um I I don't know I I think like we should test it out in certain ways and and see what the outcomes look like um and yeah I think on politics stuff it's it gets it gets dicey but like packs exist in the United States like nobody knows who's contributing to what nearly as much and like money does rule the world already like in in politics as well as in like policy um there's a lot of lobbying going on this feels like another form of lobbying um in some ways but for public opinion and like you never know what happen when like somebody when you see something you don't like happening and you see the prediction like it may not make me go on

to poly market and change and like put1 dollars down on like candidate B but it might get me out to vote uh because candidate be seems like they're they're losing or maybe it makes me apathetic because I think it's a foregone conclusion so like you can have it both ways and I think that's more of like a personality thing that it is like a um you know get out and vote like if you look like you're losing by a like I imagine you know you have a lot of money in your like Treasury and you probably start spending it to try to like ideally not to make people bet on like who's gonna win but like to make sure that the voters actually do come out and you can use it as like an underdog scenario as well like we're we're underdogs here look at this like

we need your vote like there's worlds where this like can be a motivating factor for people the I I do want to actually just call out this one strain of argument that I've seen around specifically the election odds and poly market and you know not to get political here I've been talking a lot about politics on this show lately but you know when the Trump election odds were way on top you know poly Market was the future of media and look at how bad the mainstream media is and poly Market got it right and now that the odds are reversed it's like anything that can be manipulated will be manipulated and that the Democrats are pouring money in to influence the odds of the election come on guys you can't have it both ways you know you either got to say that the system works or it doesn't work but

you it doesn't yeah that's crazy a little bit of intellectual honesty here uh we could all use a little bit more intellectual honesty in what uh in our everyday lives hey everyone this episode is brought to you by NADA the shielded asset Hub protecting the future of the multichain NADA is a chain that's near and dear to my heart because in previous seasons of B curve we've talked about how the Cardinal original sin of most blockchains is not thinking about privacy from the beginning but also because if we want to onboard a whole bunch of applications it doesn't work in a default transparent setting so the ma not only brings about hey everyone this episode is brought to

you by real re. they're a new permissionless L2 built on arbitrum orbit for tokenized rwas so basically they've got this portfolio of real world assets that actually exist out there that generate yields they import them on chain and find ways to reward your users very creatively uh so one of the cool things about real is that it's the first L2 where 100% of profits from transaction fees and fees from protocols deployed onto the chain acre back to the L2 governance token and currently I mentioned this at the top of the episode but they have a reward pray program going on for early users of the chain where 10% of the rwwa tokens are being distributed which is very cool so you as a user you can go over there and provide

concentrated liquidity trade borrow and leverage tokenize rwas including T bills real estate and tokenized basis traes so again head over to re. SL rewards and you can use the code found in the show notes here tell them that I sent you thanks real for making this possible that Jim I think is a good transition to the the main course of this episode which is uh conflicts of interest 101 so this is actually something you and I been chatting about for a little bit you gave a great uh presentation that unfortunately I missed a lot one of these days I'm going to catch your um catch your presentations live because uh you do a very good job with them but uh you talked about conflict of interest 101 at ECC this year and and maybe just to tee this up

there was obviously there was a sort of a bombshell report that coindesk put together so shout out to Danny Nelson and Sam Kessler from coindesk for compiling this but you know the let me actually just grab the title of this I had trouble opening it on my computer right now for loading reasons but uh you know the title of the report is top crypto startup drove other projects airdrops to its employees and so it looks like there we don't have a ton of details around this yet but there were lrts um a couple that were named were uh Renzo alt layer that actually gave pretty significant airdrops so about 5 million at Peak prices one million also ethery also um gave airdrops to specific employees uh at I believe the igen layer

Foundation they might have been at labs and they moved over to the foundation um and so you know this just raises conflict of interest concerns because Igan Lair is you know is going to have an enormous effect as the marketplace here in terms of who is successful for lrts and so even if it's just optically you know tipping the scales towards one versus the other you know it's it's not great from a credible neutrality standpoint and I I think this this sort of builds towards this conversation of you know how should we think about conflict of interest within crypto in general because recently there have been a couple of you know I don't want to say scandals but actually another sort of igen layer ethereum Foundation you know where dunrod and and Justin Drake you

know revealed to have pretty large uh you know advisor shares in Igan lir they've since said that they're going to donate these to to other projects uh and then also something happened around this as well with uh poly chain one of the poly chain investors uh Naraj uh taking personal shares uh for sourcing the clips um investment and you know the the old founder Neil it was very close to nage and slept on his nj's couch for a number of months when he was coming up with when he was coming up with eclipse and so and it's a little bit weird because poly Chan actually backed nj's new company um ritual and so all of these things just you know everyone in the industry kind of looks at them it

doesn't make you feel great but you know Jim you're a conflict of interest expert here so walk us through what what inspired you to create that in the first place and and how do you read this this most recent news with with aan yeah so I'll start by disclosing some conflicts of interest um I'm going to try to be as like unbiased as possible here or as neutral as possible here but like I'm I'm only human so don't crucify me on Twitter or whatever um and so we're investors in Renzo which is an LRT that was named in the article we're investors in Igan layer um which was also named in the article and when you look at like the airdrops it looked like in order of magnitude right Renzo alt layer and ethery Renzo I think air dropped

somewhere around at the time of aird Drop Like 16. 666 like, to each employee like the employees on this like list alt layer I think was around $33,000 and ether fight was around $8,000 per person recipient um so that's a lot of money in total right that's over like $120,000 to each one of these employees uh it was noted that like suram did not receive that um so he he was not on that list which I think is a valuable thing and I think like this is like probably something that is like pervasive and this is like obviously igen layer has like a bit of a Target on its back because it's like the biggest project that's launched um in a really long time

with a lot of hype so it's important that like light is shined on the biggest like most promising projects like in the space um what's not clear is like you know there's a lot of weird things that happen in the airdrop space that like we just don't know about like we don't even know how we could know about it it's probably pretty easy for an employee to like you know unless there unless like there's levels of VI here it's probably pretty easy for an employee of like a that's going to get an air like that's that their company or their team is about to launch an airdrop to just like add their own new wallet address um at the bottom or in the middle and give themselves $150,000 or a million dollars or two million dollars of unlocked tokens so they're getting investing they're

they're incentivized to like work really hard um and to make this like Network as successful as possible and there's these like there's like a poll to like you know for self-interest or over team over Pro protocol over the network like the place where you work that always exists right there's two wolves um and I think we don't know how pervasive this is um and presumably it's it's pretty bad is what I would imagine I I think generally speaking this is probably a [Music] learned uh like a learned action from people um this is a learned like thing that people do and I don't think like pen L was the first one to do it um or the employee or employees there I think

this is probably pretty pervasive um with every large and maybe even small project that launches a token um and so maybe it's like better to just like kind of like take back so I've done this talk did ECC at a project at a event called unaligned layer where we talk we did our our most unaligned takes that we could think of um we did something similar in New York uh called Heretics uh which like I did like I did maximum viable issuance explaining that like minimum viable issuance has no viable reason to exist and that like we should actually think about why we should maybe increase the issuance rate versus like reduce it right now for ethereum um but conflicts of interest in general right for those of you who are not familiar with it or or anyone working at a protocol right

now like listen up uh a conflict of interest is a set of circumstances that creates a risk that professional judgment or actions regarding a primary interest will be unduly influenced by a secondary interest and conflicts of interests are a clash that most often occurs between personal responsibility for the like where you work and your own self-interests um that is what a conflict of interest is um and so it usually exists when there's like unequal access to information impaired objectivity or there's some form of like biased decision making that could occur um and the most important thing about

conflicts of interest is that um is that they can it doesn't perceived conflicts of interests and actual conflicts of interests are the same thing it doesn't matter if I think you're conflicted you can't change my mind whether or not you accepted the brive or whatever you want to call it and so it's important in the eye of public opinion that like you appear neutral that you appear not conflicted and that you essentially do things that don't raise like concern about the fact that like you maybe are

acting in self-interest over the interests of the betterment of like the network or the protocol um so that's sort of like kind of like a good maybe base of like why conflict of interests are important and you can be influenced like to make a decision because of like potential gain of power of prestige of wealth and they can occur when an individual makes or influences a decision um and does so for some personal game that may be unfair it may be unethical and it might be or it might be illegal um and and there's like ways to manage conflicts of interest it's actually pretty simple like so I come from before I worked at figment capital I worked at a company called KPMG it's a

public accounting firm they a a lot of the publicly traded companies like in the world like all over the world and I started as like a lowly associate and then I worked my way up to senior and then I worked my way up to manager and then I worked my way up to manager 2 and then I worked my way up to senior manager and I worked my way up to managing director and I was up for partner and then I left to do this uh which like shoot me um sometimes I think about uh no right decision I think I made the right decision I'm much more passionate about this than I am about other ledgers uh accounting ledgers I guess distributed ledgers more so um and what I realized like during

that period of time is like there's a it's like a it's not linear but there's like a scale right that that exists like the more responsibility you have like in fact like comes with like the more seniority in the position you have and so like they're not created equal when I was in when I was an associate I I was like able to like hold sock in companies that like I didn't work on or that like our office didn't like work on um and then like as I moved up the up the ranks like all of a sudden I wasn't able to like hold any stock uh I had to hold like ETFs and they had to be like in a like Partners need to like hold ETFs like in a trust that they don't control and they don't have visibility into they don't even know what they're holding um

and so I I think like and and why do these exist and like how did I even know that these are like things that like are problematic or or that because there's something called conflict of in conflicts of interest policy um and it's a incredibly important thing it's like there's a Code of Ethics and there's a conflicts of interest policy and essentially what that does is you know it like essentially requires me to like disclose what my conflicts of interest are for someone to review what those conflicts of interest are above me and then to tell me whether there's a problem here um that I need to like think about and maybe even remove myself either from the engagement uh or I need to remove or I need to like sell maybe

the stock because I feel like I have to like alleviate remove even the perception that owning this thing could potentially lead to me making poor decisions um yeah that would impact the The Firm it's at the at the at the interest of my own like at the cost of my own self-interest um so that's sort of like I think what we were what I talked about the like for the beginning of the talk and then I kind of went into like crypto stuff a little bit and so the you know one one other thing as well from an organizational P standpoint I really like this point about you know the larger you it's like you know uh the bigger you get the more responsibility

that you should have you know from a media company you know in in the beginning right you're you're really small and it doesn't really make sense to draw these like strict walls but as you get bigger and bigger and you know as like blockworks reporting has become more influential you know there are very strict firewalls that exist now inside of our business and so it actually is kind of the bane of my existence a lot of people were like hey we we got this thing we want to report and it's like I've actually got no influence over that uh I'm going to direct you to one of our reporters and it's not not my say uh and so the these things exist for a reason and so I think that one of the challenges actually and like look every industry goes through this right like

all all of these you know all of this regulation that exists in finance now happened because there wasn't strict regulation in place and people broke the rules there there are now divisions in between different branches of investment banks that didn't used to exist right in between the S&T uh you know the sales and trading arm and and the research Division and yeah there's a really good reason why those things should be super separate now are they really that separate I don't know uh but but at least they're more separate than they used to be and so and the other point that I that you made that I really like is that it's sometimes it's just about the Optics right it it doesn't even really matter if if you as a person are actually compromised Ju Just the Optics that you could be are really are really

important here as well and so you know I think that I think that there does need to be a little bit of a look in the mirror and a change um both at you know companies that are operating within the crypto space but but even for you know frankly a lot of the governance processes of these big l1s is really opaque and you know everyone says we don't want to replicate what the Federal Reserve does and different central banks do look maybe this is a heretical take but those central banks are actually pretty transparent you know you can put your foil hat on and you can say that they're owned by treasury whatever I don't think that they are and at least they have minutes right they actually record what is said in meetings uh and Jerome Powell gets up and takes questions about you know sometimes very

adversarial questions from reporters about why he made the decisions that he made and why everyone is voting the way that they are and the world has a really good understanding of why the FED is operating the way that they are you know you just don't really get that transparency in this space and again I know that's going to sound heretical and people are going to say check the chain look everything on chain being on chain is a massive massive improvement from a tech standpoint but it has to accompany real world human processes that everyone agrees to follow you know I've seen uh some of the steakhous guys tweeting about this you know Adrian uh is on a crusade to figure out you know how much stake uh coinbase has and she's like look guys you got to do more than just checking the chain here if if they don't

flag it there's no sleo thing that's possible to figure this out and so I do think that some you know the actual technical Improvement of things existing on chain has given everyone a little bit of cloud cover to say this industry is really transparent when in reality we just need much we we need you know as we have ascended to the world stage and as we become an an an a an issue in the US presidential election the stakes are higher and this type of stuff that maybe flew a couple years ago it can't fly anymore it just can't I agree I mean like it like the solution to conflicts of interest by the way is like disclosure like right that's it right like just disclose that you have it and

like you're G and disclose it in a in a manner in a in a in a uh a venue that is like know knowable right I think one of the things that got a lot of flack for Justin Drake was like he like is like yeah I disclosed it and it was on like some website obscure website called like or. land where it was like a response to a question about like what do you think about Igan layer and he's like hey I just want to let you know like I was an adviser I'm an adviser now and I was like what the what what do you you are like this and be like hey yeah I disclosed it guys I disclosed it on this like like you know in Reddit somewhere like oh cool like you're fun guy for 2069 I I didn't know that was you um

like it it requires like a little bit of like common sense um and and like ultimately like I think where I where I really went into to town on this is like look like like yes I layer is in the news today right um and what I've noticed is that like you know they they announced something yesterday about like hey we have this like repository where people can put their addresses and like these are the addresses and the the identities of the of the people that are working like within the igen layer ecosystem if you want to air drop to them like you should air drop to them if you don't you don't have to um that seems like a good response to this and like it's completely like up up to them um what to do I think there's some there's some challenges to that

particularly around like the the personal side of things and like the people talk and like you know there's there's ways to do that but at least it's like at least like people can check the chain right now they can check the chain like if there's an air drop to those wallet addresses and it's $80,000 or 16 or 33 like you can like you can pour over it you can like scrutinize it and coindesk reporters did coinus reporters did they actually checked to their credit to their credit yeah coinus uh shout out to again to Danny Nelson and Sam Castle it was really excellent reporting actually it was great reporting like Bravo right like that's the type of reporting that we need and we need more of it um and I think it like helps uh you know self- policing we have to self the police like

if we're gonna be the future of France right like we have to be at least as good if not better than like traditional Finance if they have these rules in place like we should be holding ourselves to those standards especially when we're becoming like when we're raising at like a hundred million especially if we're raising at $500 million or billion dollars like you have to operate and act like a hundred million 500 million dollar billion dollar company like that's just sorry like some of the fun is over essentially um and I think like what you do is like you have to disclose but the question then is where do you disclose it and like there's probably two places and it depends on like what type of company you are if like if you're a for-profit company right like you don't disclose that I own I don't like if I'm a

for-profit company I don't have to disclose like publicly like all of my Holdings I do need to disclose that with my boss though and my comp the company I work at like there has to be somebody who has like some record of like what I'm holding and what advisory I have like are you advisor like like are you an angel investor like where are you on this thing like how did you get what you got like did you actually invest did you just get free money and we can talk a little bit about advisory because I have like a whole rant on that um and and like the most shocking thing that came out of like the last eight months of or six months of this is that like you look IG L has been around for a year and a half right like and they've been big for

like a year the the etherum foundation has been around for nine years they're about to celebrate their nine year anniversary like that tweet or article that came out that was like the ethereum foundation is like due to public judgment personal Judgment of some of its like employees or or or researchers or whatever we call contractors like we don't have a we don't have a conflict of interest policy like we we're looking at it and we're thinking about building one and it's been like months they still don't have one like hey go on my go on my Twitter account I just pinned it um I I posted the the the uh the slide deck so you can look at it and hey EF like

all the way at the bottom the last page is a link to the Carnegie melon conflict of interest policy it's for it's for researchers it's for like academics use that as a rough draft and like do what you will with it but like it's been nine years and you guys are like the second largest cryptocurrency like Network you have leaders in your foundation like lead like vocal leaders that are flown all over the world that speak at all these events and they're advising on a bunch of projects and they're receiving arguably free money and there's conflicts of interest here and you don't even know what they are and like this is a wakeup call to the EF more than anyone um I think about like getting their house in order because

like this is unacceptable in my opinion quite frankly and like that's like step one on this process like get your house in order get a conflict of interest policy post it publicly and then what happens there is like people have to go to you and and like get approval or resign and like from their position because it's it's too valuable it also protects them it protects them right I mean that's from the from a from an organizational standpoint you want to have this type of thing in place so that you can point to it and say hey my my employees violated this and and and we're going to you know deal with them appropriately or or whatever but you know for I or the flip side which is like I got approval for this right like I I I raised this and

they said go ahead and do it and I did it and so like I'm I'm I'm okay I I have a feeling that details are going to come out around this igen layer situation obviously there's been an enormous amount of reporting done already I just based on the initial reporting here here are the questions right how big is this list how many how many employees were involved in this type of thing how much information filtered back up to the top um of igen layer and then ultimately someone is going to have to be found responsible for this I just actually can't Envision a situation where heads don't roll for for this type of um infraction and look I'm not I'm not throwing it I'm not throwing any stones but you know it's it's only you know

we're recording this on Friday I'm sure by the time this comes out you know people will have remembered this but you know there is a member of the team at igen layer who previously worked at a fund called Divergence who's relatively senior and used Insider information to farm you know his own port Coes ribbons airdrop and so you know there there's going to be I'm sure that there's more information that's going to come out around all of this stuff um again none of that like just because someone has a past of doing that doesn't mean that they're necessarily involved in at this time but I would have to imagine that the board uh and Ian just raised hund million from a16z is looking at the team with a microscope here and there is going to be a big change of house within

I how could there not be I think we've already sort of seen it a little bit right they just acquired the Rio team um I I know a few of the folks on that team I respect them highly I they come from like I think a slightly different like not from like the research arm as much as like from other areas of like the industry um I think like they they've been putting I I know a few of them I talk to them and it sounds like they since they've gotten there they've like really kind of helped I think with a lot of like the operational side of things and like really try to button it up and I think like gener what we're talking about is like buttoning things up here a little bit right um and like just to your point like we were talking about we

were talking about like market makers and exchanges like this applies to you too this conflicts of interest thing is exactly what we're it's all related it's also conflicts of interest right and I think like um so so so number one there's there's that issue right and I think like another thing to since we're on this topic right I think another thing that I really want to talk about is like um a like advisory because I think advis and also just so you know like we're talking about projects right like funds have conflicts of interest too right like uh Mike Michael you Mike you me mentioned like you know block Works has like you know like policy like funds have a policy right like if I'm gonna Angel

invest into something like that's that comes like after the fact that the fund either gets its full allocation of like what it wants or it passes on the investment and then I have to get approval to like invest in that project um like even if it's outside of our thesis I have to get approval from that and then we record that and we have like a log of like every investment I've made ever um like within the time I've worked here um so like we're not like I'm not pointing the finger and saying like you need to clean this up and this is your problem like this is a industrywide problem and it's things that like everyone has to deal with um the the other thing that's important here is like you have to think of like so let's talk about like Angel Investing and

advisor and like how the conflicts of how I think those are both conflicts of interest that can be perceived as but they're slightly different and I talked to like a bunch of people uh at ECC before I did the talk and I asked about like what is advisory right like what do you think about it what do you think advisory is and the general sense you get is that it's like free money there might be a little bit of work you do you might do a couple intros you might do some like once a month call or something like that maybe I'm on call whenever you need me but like roughly it's free money and the difference between Angel Investing and advisory in my mind and I would love to be I would love to be like educated here so if someone disagrees like my DMs are

open um is that like when you Angel invest in something like I am putting my own capital on the line I'm risking Capital right that my money um and I have like upside on that and the upside is that like the investment does well and I have appreciation on that I did made a good investment decision downside is I lose lo my money the risk is that I lose money um when you get advisory so like when there's like those announcements of fundraising announcements like what's on the page it says like Jim pillo but under it might say figment Capital nobody is thinking like I don't think people look at that and go figment capital is endorsing this project right they're saying Jim pillo believed in the project and Jim pillo

invested his own money in this project and wants to see it do well um that's one thing advisory is slightly different right what is like the question is like what is the benefit the benefit is the upside right the the appreciation of the asset actually just receiving the asset is the benefit and then appreciation is like the the cherry on top what's at risk though I didn't put any money in and so what you have to think about is that what's at risk is like not is your social like you might think that like your social capital is so high that you personally like are signal that you are supporting this project I'm I'm happy for you I'm really happy for you that you have that such a

high opinion of yourself but presumably what they are doing is that they are actually like but what they're more interested in in that case isn't Jim pillo they're more interested in figment capital or Justin Drake they're interested in ethereum foundation and so what am I risking I'm risking the reputation of the organization that I work at that's the risk that's the cost the social capital not that I've built but that the organization that employs me or works with me has has spent years building um and the neutrality or The credibility of that organization and that's what I'm putting at risk which is not actually something that I own um and

so that's why advisory is such a weird one um because you're risking something that you don't that doesn't belong to you um and you get all the upside I.E conflict of interest you know the you know the funny thing too about advisory is that this is also one of these Concepts that's very prevalent like having a board of advisers uh so blockworks like for a long time you know we were bootstrapped company we didn't have like a formal board because we never raised money we never needed to we have a board of advisers and most of them aren't uh crypto people actually they're people like uh you know Sean Griffey from industry dive and it's just people like hey we would love to have regular meetings with people that have like built something that we are trying

to build really typical for startups or companies and just this is very typical of crypto where you take this concept and and you weirdly mutate it a little bit and uh and suddenly you kind of give out these advisory shares in ways that feels a little bribe I think there's a lot of like legitimate work of people like hey I'm you know I I've got some stake in this company this is me giving my time and so I want to participate as an adviser I'm going to do actual work here and and that's probably maybe an in between of of these two different models and and then there clearly is just some hey I'm trying to sort of Curry influence with you based on your position so I'm going to give you this free uh option here so that I've got you incentivized and and that's

the part that does feel a little bit um uh you got to be careful with that and let me hedge here a little bit right like so it's not just Justin it's also Don receiv yeah I also yeah we got defend Justin Drake here I'm gonna give him a break here for a second like the other side of the fact is that yeah friend of friendly with him on telegram a little bit but like um follow him on Twitter uh but like the other thing is that like you know he does he has contributed a ton to both like the igen layer research side and he has been on podcasts with bankless and stuff like that talking about igen layer security and making sure that this is safe for ethereum and so he has a vested interest to make sure that this works like part of his job at

probably the EF if assuming he's an employee or a contractor or something is actually to make sure that like ethereum works like it's part of his job like it's part of their jobs and like there's a world where like it is very value it is valuable to like have them and have access to them um a lot of companies do this right like maybe it's like they pay them something in salary or like a like a or some sort of like some sort of like retainer um maybe they give them some shares as well like this is this isn't something that's like new or or different in crypto I think and I'm not I'm just saying like you know the problem here again is like it's not just like in fact it's also in perception and the perception is like actually is reality perception is reality and so you

have to manage both um and and not just like brush it off because it is actually quite quite important to the credibility of like both the individual but then again like also the organization that you represent like full-time yeah that's very true um so basically I you know I would treat this as a uh look this is the big story of the day and uh my my I I think my like zooming out of all this stuff conflict stuff is extremely important you know my my sort of take on this is that igen lay ascended extremely quickly right I think even I think even the the internal team would have said this the amount of tvl and the amount of lrts and the ecosystem they were able to bootstrap in a relatively short period

of time everything just happened faster than our wildest dreams right and so there were all of the that's really great when that happens to you as an organization but you know if you listen to we've experienced obviously you know not quite at the scale of Igan layer but like we've experienced periods of time of rapid growth at block works or you know if you listen to guys like Olaf or Brian um Brian Armstrong talk about some of the the crazy growth periods of coinbase it actually it's good but it produces all of these problems because all of these you know you don't have the infrastructure of the processes needed sometimes to service the amount of Revenue that's coming your way and it creates its own type of stress and burnout and fatigue and Things fall through the cracks and uh you know I I think that this is is probably one of

those one of those things where product of that yeah yeah yeah so I think it's just uh something to be aware of for crypto companies in general where yeah and and and and there's there's some weird stuff too about I mean look this is also it's also very possible that this was some this never filtered its way up to management and these were frankly like Rogue employees who were uh you know who were doing this stuff without informing a management although it did seem like based on the reporting that this was a list that actually got circulated to one LRT who wasn't didn't want to make that airdrop and felt pressured to do it so if that's true that's actually a little bit more damning but um you know I guess we'll have to wait and see how all the facts shake out on this particular yeah that I

have I I don't I have no knowledge on that whatsoever I I think like like there's these like so like is there is there are there other lists out there right like what are those lists like how are those lists created who's on them how how is it distributed I think like one of the question that I've been having like in back of my head is like I keep seeing like not the beat up on the EF right now but I guess I'm going to like is the protocol Guild like I don't know a ton about the protocol Guild like I and I've asked a couple people and they don't really have any real understanding of it but like generally speaking there's a lot of money that flows into it um and the question is just like okay cool like there's no conflict of interest policy right so

like how does this Capital get DIY up like how how buttoned up is it again right and like and and how does it work um it'd be cool to know more about it um and maybe some sort of like quarterly or annual like sort of like report on like what you did with it and like how it went like it is a foundation and like the way I I view the ethereum foundation out like which is like you know to its credit is like a public good um not like a privately run company um it's trying to be like the global settlement layer for for world the world right and for finan Finance in the world ideally um and so like what are the disclosures

that are necessary to like have public trust and I think these are things that are like growing pains that probably are long overdue um to be addressed and like I guess this is going to be the cat ideally this is a catalyst for change right these are learned behaviors and they which is good because it means that like they can be unlearned um and it's going to it's harder to unlearn a bad habit than it is to like learn a good one um but like I think that like we're here for it and like I'm happy to if anybody wants to talk about this like privately or publicly like I'll do the talk again but like I also happy to happy to help people think through it because we've we've had to deal with it ourselves here right like I think

everybody has to deal with it like at some point and it seems like now is like probably a pretty good opportunity for a lot of people to look in the mirror and teams look in the mirror and Founders to look in the mirror and make sure that like this kind of stuff is like buttoned up and like you know measure twice cut once right and and and you know L it feel like we're picking on the ethereum foundation or Ian layer here obviously that's just these are these are the news stories that have broken but I'm sure that this is uh you know I'm sure that this is an issue for many different corners of crypto and uh I think it's just a this I I agree with your message there like let's use this as a wakeup call uh I'm sure this has been a wake up

call for Igan layer but you know for for other organizations where this might be a challenge and you know you just like many many organizations in crypto are going to need to deal with this uh so just you know take the time to do it now rather than later again it's a way to protect your organization and to make clear rules of the road for your employees and just make sure that you avoid this type of thing because you know no one likes seeing these types of headlines everyone's invested in this industry and you know I'm assuming that if you're operating it have like a deep uh fundamental belief that it it produces good and so you know these These are the type of things that just set create optical setbacks especially during a period of time where crypto's moving into the world stage and and yeah

I would Echo your belief like I think ethereum is going to be one of the most important platforms maybe to ever be created um I think that you know salana is in the running for that as well Bitcoin has probably already moved into that uh phase and so yeah you know the stakes are high this is this is the this is what we play for you know this it's a great problem to have that there's a lot more eyeballs now just in terms of how everything works and so yeah I think it's good thing for everyone to just be super aware of but um yeah deep breath Jim H what do you have J you have any fun plans this weekend are you uh yo actually I think the last time that we talked I was talking about fish right

yeah yeah um so guess what they're hosting they're doing a festival this this weekend in Delaware it's called M green which essentially means like messing up lyrics uh is like a word for messing up lyricss and it's like one of the these like it's a 4-day festival it started like it starts today I'm obviously not there I'm going to go for Friday and Saturday with my best friend Sam we're gonna drive down um we're GNA spend two nights like on the campgrounds camping like we're 20 year olds again um and then I'm coming back on Sunday my uh so um my wife was uh my partner was like very generous and like like kind of like gave me the approval and you might be like why are you asking for approval like you're you're Sovereign person um

but we're also expecting our first how Sovereign are you if you're married really at the end of the day you're interoperability tradeoff that people like to talk about it's inner subjective sovereignty uh and so but like you know we're expecting our first kid in October so this is probably like sort of like one of the last things that like I get to do with like my my best friend like without any sort of like attachments to the hip literally um and so we're going down there um they're doing four nights it's going to be pretty awesome they've been playing all week all summer um and the the jams have been Choice uh so like we're really excited about like going down there and checking them out I haven't seen them

all year what about you you got anything going on uh I'm going to visit my girlfriend and I are going to visit some friends of hers in Michigan actually so I've been I've been out I don't think I've I think I've probably spent one weekend in New York since June I've been doing a lot of I was in Ireland I was in uh uh Martha's Vineyard I've been I've been bopping around all up those miles like I mean those miles not just crypto conferences you're also doing personal stuff that's good to see like you're mixing up try to try to mix it you know uh have some non- crypto people in my life uh and by the way it's I would recommend that because it's it's very easy I would say that crypto Twitter right now is at an all-time low in terms of both Vibes and Signal uh to noise

ratio so a good reminder to you know build a life outside of there and go touch grass and and do all that it's it's not just a meme and thing people say it's you know go go do your do a a fish uh fish concert so that's going to do two nights if anyone's there message me um I'll be on hopefully I'm not on Twitter too much like over the weekend uh at velvet Milkman and uh if you tweet I'm gonna be in your I'm gonna be in your replies just saying get off this get the heck off of here like I I don't think it's gonna happen so I got the day off my first day off in a little while uh tomorrow so like I should be off like by noon yeah all right well give a give Jim a follow he's velvet Milkman on

Twitter criminally under followed uh and Jim I appreciate you hopping on here and uh yeah we'll have to do it again sometime soon man hope to hope to and uh see you in the next couple weeks probably would be great to hang out I'll see you around brother all right see you hey everyone hope you all enjoyed today's episode wanted to give a final shout out to namada again a team that is near and dear to my heart they are building the shielded asset Hub which is protecting the future multi-chain talked a little bit about how that works in the mid roll but for now what I would highly recommend that you do is go check them out they're in their main net launch phase you can follow along with everything at n.net you can start rewarding Yourself by shielding your actions and strengthening data privacy

for all across the multichain so thanks again to M for all the great work that you're doing