Crypto's Dual Worlds with Kain Warwick

Transcript

Is there a world where like either some insiders at Twitter like hacking accounts or whatever? Like maybe. Yeah, I Yeah. Um, it turns out that wasn't the explanation. It was just bribes. Before kind of getting to where we're going and some thoughts there, how much of this situation do you think is a Solana culture problem from the top down? What happens in a permissionless environment where anyone can turn up and do something? What happens is people go, "Oh, there's money here. I can take it." Welcome back to the Rollup, your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future. Nothing on today's show is to be construed as financial advice. You can see our full disclosures list at therollup.co/ventures.

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Uh, are you having a good week so far? Yeah. Yeah, it's been uh pretty good conference so far. Way different than conferences in the West. This is like one of my first big Asia conferences. We're trying to expand our brand, expand kind of the networking, kind of get a feel for what's happening over here. It feels way It feels just in in a way more speculative, in a way more like community-consumer-oriented. Um, and also just a ton of different ideas and projects here that you don't really hear about on the Western world side. Definitely like, you know, crypto's bubbles within bubbles, right? And this is a a different bubble, um you know, than than you see at a place like Eat Denver or even ECC, right? Um, so yeah, for me, um when when I heard ConsenSys was going to be in Hong Kong,

I was like, all right, it's been it's been a few years since I've been here pre-COVID. So, um so yeah, very excited to get back. I met a bunch of people, um bunch of projects. It's been really cool. Yeah. Well, I brought you to today as the spokesperson of many hats you wear, DeFi Ethereum multi-chain UX builder orientation, founder, and there's a lot going on in the space right now. Uh, we kind of went through the whole high FDV, low float, hate of VCs, all the way to the other side of the pendulum towards now the entire industry knows how how absolutely insider meme coins were were real. When people pitched them as the purification of the problem space of the VC meta, you've got Portnoy

saying that he's not going to dump launching coins and then dumping publicly on his wallets. You've got Libra and Malaya coin. You've got Kelce or sending his sister money, getting into their uh politics via bribes, which Vitalik somehow called out uh in a blog post a couple months ago saying that uh political coins are very ripe for braggery, and I'm seeing him be kind of vindicated there. We've got the Ethereum ecosystem, the Ethereum Foundation. A mean is a prominent guy absolutely going ham on the wokeism aspects of some of the Ethereum stuff.

Solana's getting outed now as kind of this crime fight shame. FTX first, now this. There's a lot going on. It's been a week. It's been quite a year that Yeah, yeah, Exactly. All that happening while everything else had Bitcoin is nuking. Yeah. Nuking hard. Like everybody's down Yeah. on any position basically, especially on-chain only. So, maybe just bird's-eye view from your uh perspective. You've You've been in the space for a while. What's What's your take on all of this? Why is this happening? What's the rhyme or reason? How can we explain this?

I think it I I think what what for me is very interesting is um the last like 3 to 6 months has been the continuation of the decoupling of everything, right, within crypto. Uh, it used to be that everything was correlated. You know, Bitcoin would go up, maybe Bitcoin dominance goes up a little bit, and then, you know, people rotate out of Bitcoin into other stuff. Um, you know, that wealth effect flows down. Uh, we're just not seeing that anymore. And And it's been a while. I think, you know, we had DeFi summer, which front ran the last bull market. I mean, here was 2020. All the DeFi coins well, they all peaked in Feb 2021. They were down only from there, but the rest of the

market, altcoins, everything, you know, ripped, including NFTs. So, you got these cycles within cycles now. Um, I think there is still a macro cycle that's playing out, and I think the macro cycle is still bullish because, um you know, Bitcoin is the the determinant of whether we're a bull market or not. And if you look at Bitcoin, we're in a bull market. So, then you go, okay, we're still in a bull market macro-wise, macro red dough. Um, what the [ __ ] is going on? Still away SAS play. Uh, and I I think the answer to that is that, um you know, the response to the VC low float um games, right? Um, was check out. Opt out. Correct. I can't win this game.

Yeah. You know, people were were waiting for all these projects to launch. Um, all of the price discovery was happening in private. And you know, you get your face ripped off enough times, and you're like, I'm going to opt out of this. This is not a game that I can win. Um, and it doesn't matter. And And the irony is, it doesn't matter whether you like the project. You know, there are many people um who are um you know, influencers, educators, whatever. Um, you know, even Sasano, who he's like, "I love Ethereum, but I can't recommend you buy it at a 20 billion dollar FDV, right?" Um, not that it can't grow into a 20 billion dollar or 50 or 100 billion dollar um you know, uh project, but um today where it stands,

that's a very high risk play, yeah, right? Um, he's like, "If this were the ICO meta, and it weren't, you know, these these low float games," and you know, guy hates this because he's like, "It wasn't that low of a float." And it's like, I get it, but it's still different to ICO meta. Yeah. Where 30, 40, 50, 70% of the tokens, sometimes 90% would be unlocked. Yeah, yeah. It would be sold, and it would be unlocked, and it would be like, let's do price discovery. Yeah. Sometimes price discovery is bad, sometimes it's good, but like we're going to do it, right? You know, 8, 10% uh especially for a project that people were excited about, right? Can just really distort the price discovery process. So, people were like, "I like the project, but I can't buy it." That's That's really frustrating,

right? And so, I think it pushed people into this um mindset of like, "Where am I going to go?" People want to speculate. Where? They do. They want to speculate. Um, they believe that if they do the work, do the research, this is a uh you know, a a marketplace in crypto where it's low information, Mhm. um very high variance, very high volatility. Um, you know, there is a lot of information asymmetry. You know, if there's your willing to grind in the trenches, you can find out things um that will let you up on the market. It's a very casual market. If you think we can have it, try it. There's a chance, there's edge, right? Um, but the the VC, you know, tokens, the low float tokens, there was

no edge. It didn't matter what you knew, it was going to be down only. Launches at 20 bill, comes down to five. Yeah. So, people were like, "This is not a game I can win. I'm out." Okay, cool. Then what do you do? Make our own coins. Yeah. Right? And so, you know, the we saw And it's not like meme coins were invented 20 minutes ago, right? Yeah, Doge has been around for a long time. Um, there was this organic process of meme coin discovery that would take months or years, right, for a community to form around it organically. Um, and if you saw that community, and you believed that that community was going to be self-sustaining, buying early would work. And now, I'll you know, I'll I'll put my hand up and say I didn't

play those games, right? Like I didn't buy Pepe. Um, you know, I was I was around. I read about it. I was like, "Eh, whatever, right?" Um, I never held Doge. I didn't right? Um, it wasn't until later in the cycle, probably late '23, that I was like, "You know, I should really check out meme coins. Right, I I need to I need to figure this out. This meta, you know, I I'm I'm not necessarily always the earliest adopter, but once I see something that's like moving, I'm like, "Okay, I need to look into it." So, you know, I started checking out meme coins. I did a an airdrop of a meme coin to the Synthetix community, and you know, did this cross-chain stuff, tried Solana, tried Base. Like, you know, I really I I like to get my hands dirty to to see how things work. Um,

and I was like, "Okay, I get this." I get why people like it. Um, all the tokens are out there. It's not much liquidity for the market Right? So, it's very volatile, right? Um, and and so, we had something similar, I would say, over the course And a year's a long time in crypto. Yeah, you know, a lot of damage can be done in a year, right? So, we had something similar to what happened with ICOs. Yeah. Where people went, "Oh, okay, master coin, Ethereum, you know, um There were There were a ton of uh early ICOs that have people doing really well off, and they're like, "Okay, cool." But the trajectory of ICOs from, you know, 2014, 2015, 2016 through to 2017, through to 2018 Ew. was very dark.

It was early cool capital formation into uh speak rates. Speak rates, 100% scams, right? By the end of, you know, when when the the DAO report um came out, and it was clear the regulators going to crack down, and and, you know, the the meta shifted, uh it was 100% crime. Yeah. So, we probably compressed that whole ICO little Yeah, we just speed ran that. we really just compressed it down to like 18 months, right? So, what happens in a permissionless environment where anyone can try to open and do something? What happens is people go, "Oh, there's money here. I can take it." And so we saw the emergence of all kinds of different players, right?

Snipers, bundlers, launchers, you know, but these guys I think have taken it to a level of industrially industrialization. Like the ICOs got to an end. The end of the ICO cycle, there were ICO mills pumping out ICOs on a weekly daily basis. These guys have done the same thing. They're like, "I can launch." And the funny thing is all you need is someone with attention that you can bribe to post a contract address and then say, "Ah, I was hacked, right?" And you can replicate there's millions of people that fit that. And that's what happened to it. They would have it. They paid them up front to act like they got hacked to post a contract doclet they the person was likely sniping or had a had a lot of supply.

Exactly. And then they were going to dump all over that person's audience. Yeah. And bonkers. It's bonkers. You think like as the person, you know, okay, fine, the first three, sure, right? Like the first three. And like I was watching this being like, you know, as as someone who pays a lot of attention to opsec for reasons, right? We had a period of time where people were 100% getting hacked. They were definitely getting hacked. They were not because this was not part of this meme coin meta of like launch meme coins. They were getting hacked and they were oftentimes posting weird scams, right? Like, you know, "We tell you it was it was that link still, right? It was leaked to you, right? It was leaked. It was daily coin address." It was always fishing. It was fishing links. There was it was some scam,

you know, linked to drain your wallet. You all right, it was mainly drainers, right? And so it's not unheard of for people again, the Halik, right? You know, SIM swaps, like things happened. And so as this started accelerating, I was kind of looking at it and being like, feels kind of crazy that so many people are getting hacked. Like I'm surprised that but, you know, there's also and this is this is the other thing that happened is there's also this kind of thing that you go, "Well, you know, Elon fired a ton of people. We've seen good stuff happen to Twitter and some bad stuff happen to Twitter, right? Like, you know, moderation, the bot proliferation, all that stuff. So, is there a world where like either some insiders at Twitter are like hacking

accounts or whatever?" Maybe. Yeah, right. Um it turns out that wasn't the explanation. It was just bribes. It's completely So, again, you know, without perfect information, you kind of have to make an assessment of like, "What is going on in the market here?" And it was just bribery, right? These guys got, you know, they industrialized this down to its most pure form of find a person with high follower account, get the thing ready, get the bundles ready, get sniper bots ready, it is pay them and bang and bang. And then after like a couple weeks of this, it was like, "No, this is now something else is going on, right?"

And then obviously we had Trump. And then Melania. And Melania was like, "What the" Melania destroyed everybody. It was that was everybody. It was like remember I was there and I and and I I bought Trump early. I woke up in Europe. I was buying like 10 bucks, but everybody else was already up like 5x. I was like, "Damn it." Thing ripped and I was like, "This Okay, this could actually end up sparking like a thing." Like a a real thing. Yeah, I think this could be like what they say like Dogecoin runs first and then everything Yeah. I remember like prominent guys that I followed from Twitter that I had seen were saying like they were really, you know, reflecting it to like when Ripple pumped or something and then it was like and then it was like Melania I had this feeling in my gut when it

launched and I was like just like the floor kind of fear. And now candle is Trump and it was like, "Oh, [ __ ] Yes." And this is this is the thing that I think from a market structure perspective is not as obvious from the outside, right? That the total liquidity across all of these coins is still very small relative to the market caps, right? So, you know, you add up the top 20 tokens ignoring the ones that are already on centralized exchanges, right? Top 20 meme coins not on centralized exchanges, you know, it's a fraction of the market cap. Yes, the liquidity a couple billion dollars, right? But if you could rug all of them, you know, you pull out a couple billion dollars, but it looks like 100 billion right?

And so so I think that there is some constraint on how much money can be extracted from this, but clearly a lot of money was being extracted. Probably not as much I would still say as by the end of ICOs. You know, by the end of ICOs EOS 4 billion, Telegram 2 billion. You know, obviously they have evolved and they're still around that might stay in ecosystem, but there were a bunch of things like Propy, 150 million dollars gone evaporated right? And so that's really 150 million dollars worth of ETH that was just pulled out, right? Which is different to a 150 million dollar market cap coin rugging, right? Cuz that probably had a million

dollars worth of liquidity. So, this this, you know, history rhymes, doesn't repeat. And so I think that we got to the point where with no constraints, these guys just kept accelerating. They had more funds to bribe more. They just ratcheted up and they were like, "We are untouchable." We're untouchable. They're giving interviews being like, This is this is like fine, you know, this is how business works. It's business, baby. And it's like first of all, you got your degree from Melania University. So, that's a miss here. There's no business here. This is crime back right?

And so it's it just it I think was one of those things where it just kept accelerating, had no constraints, and then it had to reach some crescendo, right? And that was the bribery of some kind of a president of a country of 50 million people and like the stock market's nuking. It's just like, "What have you guys done? Like you're so fucked." Yeah, I mean like the scale just goes way up. Like ruined from my playing a little game to like, "Whoa, we're busted out of the casino and like the whole city's burning."

So, yeah, exactly. So, so I think I think that, you know, it it sort of speaks to how quickly things can escalate. Like it is so reflexive and how the incentives can be skewed here to to incentivize bad behavior. And so and there is, you know, a lot of information asymmetry. It's not 100% clear what's going on. We're So, I was sitting there watching this acceleration happen and in my mind what I thought was going on is you had multiple groups of people, right?

That were competing with each other to do this, right? That was the sense. What actually I think was happening is as a few winners emerged, they started colluding with one another, right? And then it was there was bigger bigger exactly to make it bigger and distorting market further. And and what collusion does in a normal marketplace is it increases profits. You raise raise prices, increase profit margins. Increase profit margins in this kind of game is maximally extracting value. And so it went from you pulling out a million dollars to 10 to 100 to then the case of it's much 200 now.

200 200. So, I'd like to talk about where we go from here, but I think there's an important culture question to answer here. Two meme coin chains in in Okay, so you did a really good job of saying where how it went from this kind of left side of BCE all the way to this right side. I think where we go from here is probably somewhere back in the middle, which we which we can kind of discuss. I've been pushing this idea of like return to fundamentals, but before kind of getting to where we're going and some thoughts there, how much of this situation do you think is a Solana culture problem from the top down? Because it was it's primarily Solana and base. And people were going at Mert and I saw him last night at the club and I was like, "Dude, like just

don't let these idiots get to you." Like these guys are blaming things on totally calling him a scammer and blaming things on you guys. Like but there is definitely a social layer difference in the way that for example I saw a screenshot today of like big some four unnamed Solana influencers and they all said the same thing, "Keep clicking." You got it. Just keep clicking. And it's like this kind of like culture that is very strong there. And base on the other hand was the kind of the Ethereum meme coin chain, but also ETH itself. So, what's the dynamic there that you think that's the Solana social layer is is that what's to blame? See, here's the problem right?

You know, again, if you know your history and you look at ICOs, you had people like Ian Balina. You had you had, you know, Ran NeuNer. You had all of these guys that were like grifting ICOs. They're getting bribed. Yeah. Talk about bribery. They were being bribed with tokens to shill ICOs, right? And so, you know, is that a reflection of the Ethereum culture? No. Grifters are going to grift. They're going to go where the the, you know, going is good, right? And so meme coins are happening on Solana. That's where the activity is. Why would they go to Optimism?

No I wouldn't have. No, this is over. No grifter is going to Optimism to be like, "All right, here's what I'm going to play, right?" No, you're going to go where the money is. Of course, right? They just follow the money. So, the fact that Solana had the most activity and you know, why did it have the most activity? It had a reflexive loop of, you know, some activity kicking off. The initial meme coin stop before even the grifting or whatever it is. The initial initial run, right? And then it rolled from there into slower price appreciation. People had more money, they're spending more money, and and you know, it's the same loop as Ethereum. But it was but it was also about reality. There's TikToks, there's Twitter, the whole thing. Everybody was

like, "Oh, it's so easy to onboard Phantom. It's fast, it's actually It's there's no approval messages signing that they like the UX is good. It's just It had all the recipes for enabling something like Exactly. Exactly. And and so, you know, I don't look at it as a reflection on Solana. But the issue with Solana and Ethereum had this issue as well. Yeah, Ethereum was the underdog. Yeah, right? And there was this kind of social consensus of um don't let the Bitcoin maxis criticize you. Right? Don't listen to their fud.

Don't listen to their lies. Everything's fine. As an underdog, you're you're like the world's trying to You're always to me like you're always under and so you're like, you know, your immune system's like ready to go, right? Um and Toly said this. He's like, "Yeah, I got triggered by Mitch from Curve, right? Because the guy's just like rewriting history." Mhm. Now, the victors write history. And the victors in Ethereum were the DeFi founders, right? And the DeFi founders are like, "Yeah, don't worry about all that stuff." But look at this beautiful thing we built, right? And it's like there was crime. There was crime, guys. Like your history is all about crime. Yes, you know, a lot of us as the ocean they come on and lay There was There was all kinds

of wild [ __ ] right? Edits everything right? But you're saying because there was victors that they are the ones who get to write history. Yeah, Bitcoin had that. We're like, "Look at our beautiful thing that we built. We are great men by the years. Great DeFi sucks." This is All that stuff, right? And so so there was this shift, right? From Bitcoin maxis and then no one was listening to them. They went into their holes and they just disappeared, right? And Ethereum became the thing that everyone was talking about, right? Like of course you hold Bitcoin, but like the Bitcoin influencers just lost their way. Right? And so you know, they're [ __ ] having weird meat festivals and [ __ ] And But they actually came back to Solana as a means to like Well, this is This is quite interesting, right? And in Miami as my friend sort

Yeah, right on. So you had Ethereum with this you know, underdog mindset of defend everything, right? And then it was like all of a sudden we're not the underdogs anymore. Now we're the dominant smart contract platform. Now we have the dominant mind mindshare, the most users, the most activity, the most engineers. And look how amazing we are. Yeah, right? And forget about history. Solana has the same effect, right? They went from, you know, post-FTX collapse it's a scam chain. Low float high FDV was invented by Sam on Solana, right? Like that's where that [ __ ] started, right?

And so so they had this this situation where if someone criticizes them, and who's the someone? It's the Ethereum maxis, right? They're like taking potshots, throwing hand grenades, right? And they're like, "We don't need to listen to you. We're going to do our own thing. We're good, we're fine. Don't touch us, right? And that's the rational emotional response to, you know, if someone who's the underdog feels like they need to defend their position, right? And so of course Toly was triggered by OG DeFi guy being like, "Yeah, your DeFi sucks. OG, you're bad." Like, you know, and so so you know, there's there's a lot of history that goes into that. But the thing is Solana is no longer the underdog.

No. That's the thing that I think the social layer of Solana needs to realize. And the problem with underdogs is it is very easy to manipulate them. Because if you turn up to someone who's been underdog, who's just been looking for someone to pay attention to you and say you're good, people will take advantage of that. And so you have the [ __ ] LA Vape Cabal and all of these guys turning up being like, "We love Solana. Yeah, cool." They don't give a [ __ ] about Solana. They're just trying to grift, right? And so someone who is a deep Solana builder who went through FTX, went through all this pain and suffering, right? Is like, "Oh, these guys like us. Cool. Yeah, like we're all friends here." And it's like, "No, they're extracting value from you, right?" So you need to eventually shift

out of this mindset of underdog and be like, "No, we're the dominant platform. People are going to come and try and steal our [ __ ] [ __ ] because we cuz we we we are winning. We have We're valuable. We're worth it." Got insecurities and insecure teenager thing and it's like this realization. Solana has to get past that and be like, "Bad people, get the [ __ ] out, right? You're a bad guy. We don't want you here. We have enough good people. We don't need anyone. We're not just taking anyone, right?" And so the the shift in mindset that I think is important that this will cause. I think Solana will get this, right? Is we need to, as a Solana person, right? The Solana people need to look at each project, each person, each, you know,

whether they're KOL. There's good KOLs, good influences, bad influences. Some people, you know, there's it's a There's just a spectrum, right? You know, some people are a bit pumpy, some people are dick rifty, but you know, if they're like still in it for the tech, it's like, "Okay, cool." But someone who just turns up who's just like got shoveled just like Yeah, throwing money in the casino is a problem. It's not great, right? And so they need to be able to distinguish between those two people. And Ethereum figured this out. Ethereum was like, "Ain't Belina, get the [ __ ] out of here. You're a scammer." Yeah. "We don't want you here, right?"

And I think Solana will do the same thing. Okay. It's just part of the evolution of a project and you have to go through the ups and downs. And so this I think is a very good process for Solana to to realize how important it is and that there's reputational risk if you invite You have a You have a great party. Everything's fun. And you you invite some cracker who's, you know, with the cops called and it's then it's ruins everyone. Ruins the purpose done. Exactly. So there you got to You got to be like, "Sorry, you can't come in here. You're a bad guy." Interesting. Innovating finance, global, institutional, and on-chain. Deep liquidity to drive capital efficiency.

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And what's what's what's funny is that Ethereum's gone through this process itself, as you said with Bitcoin. It was probably more of like a 20 2018 to 2021 type of process. I think where I've been the I would maxis were doing victory laps all of 2018. But after DeFi, even before DeFi started, but after the After Ethereum on-chain exploded, it was very clear that like there was a new winner in town. Yeah. But so you know, if if Ethereum if Solana can then learn another thing from Ethereum's history that Ethereum is now in a more peculiar spot than being the underdog or being the winner. Yeah. It's like, "Oh, [ __ ] We're the winner, but like there's a lot of really high-quality innovative competition Exactly.

that is fed up with our social layer. Mhm. We're We can't even We can't solve interop. We can't solve our social layer dilemmas. We have a lot of voices in that We We have a lot of chefs in the kitchen. And um the competition's rising quickly. Yeah. And they're more specialized than us. They They want it more. Yeah, and they They're willing to go to war because they're not complacent like Yeah, some of us are. Yeah. And so, you know, I would even kind of put you in this camp. Like you're you were like the Ethereum kind of like you're one of You still are one of the faces, I believe, Sure. of the chain. And I know that you have kind of agnostic views to this. I'm sure your portfolio represents that. But from your perspective, like what is going on with the Ethereum

social layer? At what stage of that lifecycle are are What's the psychology with Ethereum right now? Yeah, the psychology with like if Solana needs to kick out the bad actors out and put a fence up. Yeah. Well, where is Ethereum Where is Ethereum in its growth Yeah, phase? I I think it's a it's there's a level of frustration increasing frustration because um you know, to some extent Ethereum's washed. Ooh. Right? Like to some extent Ethereum's washed. You got a bunch of people who made too much money, don't have the fire, don't have the hunger, right? Um and that doesn't feel good. No. You know, you got a a boxer who should have retired. And you

know, it's like I'm going to I'm going to keep going, right? Um and the guy keeps getting knocked down. It's frustrating. You're like, "But I was the best. I was the best in the world, right?" And they're at the match and you're betting on the guy cuz you love him. Yeah. And you keep losing money. And he loses money and you're like, "Why do we keep betting on these other fighters who are doing way better?" So I stopped betting on that. Exactly. And so so, you know, um the good thing is that Ethereum is an athlete. Right. Athletes have a finite Yeah. life cycle, right? Like they you know, you eventually your body breaks down and you got to retire, right? And some people recognize it, they retire early. Some people push it too long and I There's comfort in that and that's it, right? So Ethereum is not a person. Um

it it has the ability to course correct and and fix some of these things. Um and you know, startups are hard, right? And Ethereum is still on some level a startup, right? It's this giant huge startup, but it's still a startup, right? So Ethereum has some kind of existential questions to ask. Ooh, right. And and I think the people are asking them. And some people don't like it. Mhm. Like you got a bean who's like, "You're asking them." And he he's like I he's like, "You know what? [ __ ] it. I'm just going to ask the questions. And if you don't like it, get the [ __ ] out, right?" And so there is this kind of fight for the soul of Ethereum of like, "Is it going to be hungry? You know, um and and this is one of the other

interesting things about Ethereum, right? It's like you it's easy to sit there when you are worth, you know, half a trillion dollars, right? And be like, we're post money. Money's not a problem. Yeah. Whatever happens, it's all fine. Yeah, like, you know, let's just let everyone get along, right? That's very easy to do when you made it. Yeah. Meanwhile, we're the people in the trenches they're in Solana. Yeah. Right? And this happened in in the last cycle in BSC. Right. People left Ethereum cuz it was too expensive. And I as an ETH maxi was sitting there being like, "200 gas is not bad. It's in a 200 bucks, right?" That's like [ __ ] It's a good chain. It's high security, right? You know, the amount the amount of cope was in the saying, right? And

meanwhile, everyone's like, "I can't afford $200. That's my network for I've got to be a C. It's like 0.0002 cents per transaction, right?" And so we lost a lot of people because we didn't respond fast enough. I mean, we were a little bit complacent and you know, we were trying to solve the problem, but a lot of us were trying to solve the problem in a very ideologically pure way, right? Even including up to you know, Polygon transaction. Yeah, and we're like, "Side chain, piece of shit." "Piece of [ __ ] side chain, don't do it." And it's And it's like the alternative is they're going to go to BSC. Yeah.

Right? It's just Which is the right person. So like, would you rather go, "Okay, not perfect." Right? And And we did learn this lesson because then we rolled out, you know, all of the roll-ups and all the layer two solutions, you know, Arbitrum, Optimism, etc. And and you know, they were very centralized centralized sequencers, all these things, you know, you could switch them off. And And we were all like, "Okay, this is actually a crisis. We need to solve this if it's okay for us to progressively decentralize this." It's But we could have done it earlier with Polygon easily. So, these are I think the the interesting thing is that Ethereum is in this position where it's like, "We need to get hungry again."

Yeah. Because we are no longer as relevant as we used to be. We used to be the place where everything happened and now we're not. Yeah. A lot of like good stuff's happening. You got Base. Yeah, Base is kind of saving Ethereum from the They Base is doing a really good job. You know, there is definitely some incentive misalignment there for sure, right? You know, Coinbase has different priorities than Ethereum. I think there's a lot of alignment, there's a lot of overlap, but there's different priorities there, right?

Anyone who tries to tell you there isn't is [ __ ] like selling you a dream, for sure. And so so the situation I think is that we have a We have a group of people that's like, "Come on, let's get hungry, right?" And then there's another group of people that's like, "Uh Yeah. It's fine. Right, it's fine. We've got a road map. We're going to get there." And they're a little bit oblivious to the competition. You know, you point out there's a lot of competition and I think that you know, there's still people walking around with the mindset of like, "I'm the champion of the world." Yeah. No one can beat me.

Yeah, it's kind of pissing me off, actually. Like it's like, "No, no, people can beat you now." Yeah. People can beat the [ __ ] out of you now. Like You hear You like you're not what you used to be. We support these teams that probably do a podcast and stuff, we get shamed for it. Right. Teams people like ETH people won't want to come on our show right? Or if we have Merton. Yeah, or if we're promoting Celestia. Yeah, it's like, "Oh, nope, you know, this is the problem." And I'm sitting here like, "Okay, I dropped out of college, started my own business, made like 100 grand or so, paid a bunch of taxes, put all that money into ETH at like 80 bucks or 100 bucks. ETH made me." Yeah.

Right? Like I wouldn't be here without ETH you know, a lot of my assets are on ETH. I won still Right? You know, I don't custody most of them, so pump up with me. Very Coinbase custody, don't worry. It's all right. The future of Ethereum was not Coinbase, but [ __ ] it, if we don't do something about Base, it might be. It like it can't be our only hope, right? And so to finish that loop, like I I'm now being more I'm more intrigued right now by innovations that are happening in terms of user experience tech that aren't necessarily happening within deep within Ethereum. Ethereum has a lot of like in terms of consensus execution, data availability, like there's there's a lot of innovation outside of Ethereum that is actually like really interesting

that that is not that is it takes so long for the ETH to ship. There's one hard fork a year. And there's some soft forks, but it's like from my perspective from like the social layer, the the trying to create a credibly neutral objective platform for education and information sharing, it puts us in an interesting spot where we we're loyal to Ethereum because that's where the money is, because that's where we originally Robin that kind of started and that's what kind of made us. But there's a lot of interesting things happening outside of it that are that are driving a competitive pressure on Ethereum that I've never seen. And so I just want to share that perspective from like my shoes and ask you guys from yours.

Yeah, and and you know, this is the interesting thing running Infax, right? It's like my job is to go and find all the cool stuff and introduce it. Correct. That's it. My job is to find all the cool stuff. That's And talk good and and like not scammy and talk about it and learn about it and so I can teach others about it, right? Yeah. And it's just not all happening on Ethereum anymore. Not in the way that it was. It It was only It was only happening on Ethereum for for a while. And so you know, what does that mean? It means the like market is you know, is maturing and you know, it would be weird it would be really bearish if only good stuff happened on Ethereum. If nothing good happened outside of Ethereum, that would be really bearish, right? Yeah, there's

people that want that to be the case and there was a there's probably timelines where that is still the case, right? You know, where Ethereum did different things, path dependency, you know, whatever right? But at the end of the day, I think that there is an element of [Music] like just this is the this is progress, right? Right? Like this is progress, this is what's happening, but everyone it's still a marketplace. Everyone you know, it's still a marketplace, it's highly competitive. Ethereum cannot be complacent. Right.

And I think when you see someone like a mean losing his mind on the timeline, it it's because of the sense of complacency. Yeah, he's still got his heart. He's trying to bring a sense of urgency at the social layer, which I think is what we need. Like cuz I think we've accepted the slow pace of shipping, well the slow pace of movement in the name of the core ethos of immutability, of and what you said on our first podcast which I thought was I kind of reshaped and tweeted and it pisses the Ethereum people off, which is this decentralization lurk. Yeah. But like that's what always brought me back to to Ethereum. It's always what does it. It's this core ethos of immutability, yeah, permissionless, the most decentralized secure smart contract platform. I can trust it. I can put my assets on it.

Everybody can use it. It's It has all the properties that you want in a smart contract platform, but we accepted this lack of of like the complacency is almost like not even acknowledging the competition. Yeah. But now it's too so obvious. The competition looks It looks crazy. It looks bad, but looks crazy. You can't be like, "Oh, you know, we don't have to we don't have to worry about Solana." Yeah. Right? Like just to dismiss something out of hand. Correct. But okay, let's ignore Solana for a second. What about Hyperliquid? Yeah.

Right? Hyperliquid is like you know, Solana is like, "Let's add some centralization see what happens." And Hyperliquid is like, "Hold my beer, yeah." You thought you had thought you had a validator set. I'm going to validate your set for you. So so you know, there is this there is this reality where users just want utility. Yep. Users want utility. And for a period of time, people were ideologically aligned, builders were ideologically aligned with Ethereum.

Yeah. And I think most of those people are still in Ethereum, the ones who are ideologically aligned. And therefore, most of the good building happened on Ethereum, you know, the vast majority. Well, because these these people care about the crypto ethos. They care about the very early I don't No, no, no, no, no. I love Ethereum. Yeah. Same. And that ethos is so important. Yeah. I don't condone three validator set on Hyperliquid. Sure. But I'm also I can't just push it off and say it's not pretend it's not winning. Now, you could if no one was using it. Right. But unfortunately, that's not the case.

Yeah. Like a lot of people are using it, right? Yeah. But this is also true of centralized exchanges. And this is my job. I my job at the moment is um acknowledging and and even to like people I say this and people are like, "Oh, yeah, I hadn't really thought about it like that." The last 15 years of crypto history, right? And we only had like two years where this wasn't the case, has been dominated by centralized exchanges. Since the rise of Mt. Gox, it has been centralized exchange land. We've been doing crypto transactions inside someone's database. That's what's been happening. Okay.

That's not a sustainable equilibrium and yet 15 years later, here we are, right? But we finally got the tech now to transition out of that period. To transition into a new era where we do everything on chain. To your point, you know, Fantom's got better UI. Like a lot of stuff's gotten better, but there are things that are still challenging and if people are willing to make compromises on decentralization and censorship resistance, etc., they're going to give a better user experience. That's Binance. Yeah, Binance makes all those compromises and it's huge because it is the best experience. It's the best cross-chain tech that we have, right?

It's a harsh trade-off cuz you got to handle your assets to a guy, right? But once you do, everything else is great. You click buttons, things happen. You get all the assets like I need your ledger. No, it's like it's magic, right? And you And you could sit there and say, "But you shouldn't." Right? But you can say to people shouldn't, but they will. They will because they want utility. So, if you're going to take down centralized exchanges, if you're going to get to a point where you can highlight the best tech, you need the best UX. And that's what we're trying to do. We are trying and it's one of the things that I think will level the playing field, right? Because all of a sudden, if you have the best execution or the best liquidity or the best liquidation engine in the best lending market,

Yeah. we're going to make all of that available to everybody. To everybody, right? And now it's actually about the infra for infra safe, not about infra with weird branding and tokens. As I know how to do it in travelism as well. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know now Okay, Camino and Ave can sit there filing on the timeline all day. Well, if it's hilarious, I'm here for it. I didn't say anything. That is amazing, but one of them is better. And one of them is better than the other. Yeah, right? And if you put both of them into a single aggregated interface that abstracts which chain they're on, which assets, all of that stuff, right?

And you say, "Give me a quote to borrow against USDC." Someone's going to give you a quote. One's going to be better than the other. Yeah. All of a sudden, the travelism evaporates, yeah, right? Cuz the person that that used the ledger does not care at all what chain is all the best is the best execution is right is. And so so what we have been living in is a database, right? That does not touch the chains. Yeah. It it it pulls the tokens out and lets you do stuff inside of a database, but the tokens are disconnected from their on-chain reality, right? We are building a thing that is connected to the on-chain reality. So, if you have better depth, if you have better execution, you will win. You'll be rewarded.

That's it. You especially the distribution platform for all anxiety of activity. Exactly. And what you want we need It levels the playing field for everybody, yeah. It's not now who is the best tweeter now is going to get the most liquidity, right? Or you know, who's the craziest on the timeline. It's like who actually is the best execution. In many ways is In many ways is great for Ethereum in terms of protocols with depth, order books with depth. In many ways scary for Ethereum in terms of if you want low fees or if you want to buy different tokens, like there you know, often times the on-site in me eight eight out of nine out of 10 prior to 2023, new users were on to Ethereum.

Yes. Now it's like with Infinex with other with other Or at least you had to be on mainnet, right? Yeah, actually like there first everything you know, like NFTs were there. You couldn't help being on there, right? And that's not of the case. But I I mean I I think we we exist in this world right now of a chain centered view. I think we that eradicates quickly into more of an application centered view. And then you can even go all the way to like intent centered view and then go to you all the way to like, "Okay, I'm just going to type in my natural language model to get an AI to go share XL and do this and they'll be in there and do it. Anyway.

So, we we like quickly speed ran this whole chain abstraction intense narrative idea to like I'm not even sure if I'm ever going to interact with a chain anymore. I think we should talk to my agent or if I don't want Infinex, I can just click a couple buttons and um And that's it. And you don't care, Right. And you know, I was talking to someone who runs a centralized exchange while I was here this week, right? And they were like, "Infinex sounds kind of bad for like Yeah, you but feels like a bit of a side up, right? And I was like I was like, "Well, here's the interesting thing, right? Infinex is not a trading venue, right? We do not make markets. Yeah. So, if you have good liquidity and you have solvers connected to the blue liquidity on your exchange,

we'll take that too. Yeah. We just want the best liquidity. I don't care if it's in a centralized exchange because guess what? All of the people that are sitting in that centralized exchange subject to a custodial system, right? Are creating a market, but a solver is just reaching in and pulling liquidity out of there. Yeah. The person sitting on Infinex doesn't care about it. The custodial nature of that It's just execution, right? So, I'm like, "Listen, if you got good liquidity, you're going to do well. If you don't, you're not, right?" Like you can't hide from it. So, I think that we're just we're moving to a world where we abstract away all of the kind of trappings of like, "I'm the best protocol. Look at my you know, I have sort of the best parties. I do all this stuff, right?" It's like you're the

best protocol cuz you have best build or not. Yep. Or you have the lowest interest rate or not. Yep. Yeah, and I think this is this is this is how I feel about Ethereum right now about Solana about the space. It's just like we should just be prioritizing the quality tech, the innovation over like uh I get the decentralization arguments. I really do. I think they're important, but like the market is telling us otherwise and we refuse to not look at the objective reality as it is and create a plan or a system that adheres to the objective reality that we live in now. Because if we if we want to try and make everybody adhere to our our version of the world, then we're going to be

stuck in a very rough situation when it when others effectively are doing things not our way. Like the authority is already been proven out. Yeah, it's already been proven out, right? Like people, you know, traders, especially perps traders, they just care about execution. Yeah, that is so Yeah, so I believe it feels like freaking money anyway. It does. It's it does. Like, you know, it's the similar stack as Y, right? Like, you know, it's the it's the similar stack that they've done a really good job of vertically integrated everything, right? So, you know, it's good execution and you know, a clawback is still the winner for now, right? Uh I I will be very interested in the price and we like to get So, we've got that So, all of a sudden it's like, "Okay, now you can do a clawback on

Monad, right? Okay." Let's see how that goes. That's going to be drawn. We're going to have the clawback wars on like, you know, five fast chains, right? So, so it's it's it's a rapidly evolving landscape. It's very competitive. I think competition is good. Yep. Um having one platform monopolize attention and and demand is not good. Right. Um you know, we we we should be fostering highly competitive markets and I think that we are and I think that the the launch of a bunch of new chains, Monad, Mega E, Fogo, you know, with different approaches is and you know, even UniChain, right?

Like let's really get some deep deep DeFi liquidity going on there, right? Um The launch of all these different chains while it fragments things, I think will create very direct competition, which is super bullish for the space. I agree. So, the lower barrier to entry to launching tokens and chains is going to accelerate the bifurcation of quality builders, quality teams, good innovation with mid and bad teams and it like the like the market will show us that quicker than if we if it was if you still had to raise 20 million to to launch a chain. Exactly.

Because in that world it's like the the I'm a huge believer in the acceleration of the pace of experimentation. For sure. And lower barriers to entry are better. Yeah. But the thing, you know, I say this all the time. Lower is a barrier to entry or else I have to go to It enables grifting and you will have crime chains. Like it will say, you know, Solana is a crime chain. It's the activity chain right now. So, that's of course crime's going to happen on the place where there's most activity, but someone will launch a crime chain. Yeah, it is designed just for crimes. And they like they can because it's lower barriers to entry. Costs 50 bucks to launch a chain now. Yeah. And and like it's it's in fact more than one probably, right? Will happen.

But at the end of the day, if you don't have people extracting value, then it means that there's no value to be had, right? So, it's just cost of the world. So, let's go full loop here and then we'll close out. We'll do just just have a couple minutes. We start kind of talking about this this seesaw that this pendulum where on the left we had the VC coins when all the way to memes. We talked about how we speed ran some similar ICOs. How the culture is at play here. So, where do we go from here? Are we meeting back in the middle towards I've been saying return to fundamentals, but I'm kind of coping cuz I'm like I hope that we as a cuz when I first got in, I was like, "I believe that if I do research, I can find a good project."

Like I found Synthetix and I was like, "Okay, look, this is the beginning of a massive like bubble." Yeah. Right? But like I was like, "Okay, this is a new primitive. It's very cool. On-chain is awesome. I was using Ave. I was like, I'm early to all of this. I did the research. I learned about it. I learned how to do it. I can now make money. I can now You have the edge. You have the edge, Jared. You have the edge, yeah. And we talked about how that kind of has just gone away because it's just been like I mean make the core capture your attention to it on the VC coins. Exactly. So, I'm like I'm kind of coping when I'm like, "Please return to fundamentals." Because I I I'm quite technical now. I think I have a good understanding of what is good in the

market, what is not, what may win, what where the space is heading. I I have my own thesis where we're going. Sure. So, I can allocate accordingly. But that thesis is determined on kind of these fundamental coins, this research. Yeah, not memes. Not memes. If the fact Yeah, like memes is a different game. Yeah. It's just just again like am I coping? Are we returning to fundamentals or like are we going to go in the middle or or like is it are these worlds going to coexist where we go from here maybe like 6, 12, 18 months? I think Yeah. I I I saw you were talking about cycles within cycles, right? Um And a lot of people even in 2023 were asking like, "How long can this meme coin cycle last, right?" And you know, my my view is cycles and and

irrationality can last longer than you you expect, right? But we've seen multiple different cycles within cycles over the last four years from DeFi, DeFi 2.0, NFTs, meme coins, you know, ICOs, all of that stuff. And I think that there is a momentum to these things. And I'm not I'm not ready call the top on meme coins yet. But I do think that there is a momentum to it and that people will rotate out to a new game.

And and they will feel like they got an edge in that game if there is a new game to be played. But it's not 100% clear what that new game should be or if it's a rotation back to an old game, you know, people rotate back to NFTs or something, right? We even had AI agents for a year or more. It was I was a matter. It was like a combination of meme coins and AI and you know, weird stuff, right? So I'm I'm not one to predict what people will do next, but I think that there is a decent chance that this could mark the top of the attention for meme coins and that you know, there will be a sort of slow drift down from here.

What comes next? Yeah, I've got no idea. Me neither. But that's the beauty of it. Yeah. It's going to be interesting. It's it's always it's going to be interesting and there's always an edge in like paying attention. Exactly. Always like something. Whatever it is, I promise you this, whatever it is is already happening. Whatever the next thing is it's already it was three six months ago and no one's paying attention to it. There'll be something there and and yeah, it's just a it's a question of buying it early. Yeah. Okay, thanks so much. Amazing. Thanks for having me.