DeFi By Design EP#127: The State of Crypto Investing in 2024

Transcript

welcome back to the rollup High Roller Community as always nothing on the rollup is to be construed as Financial advice we are just an Educators in the defi space toss us a quick like give us a share a repost send it to a friend who may want to watch this and finally give us a sub or a follow it means the world to help support credibly neutral educational content in def5 we're here to educate Empower and enrich you and let's jump in welcome to D5 by Design we talk all things blockchain and cryptocurrency while striving to educate Empower and enrich what's going on guys welcome back to D5 by Design on the rollup we are here with a special guest Chia Wang who

is joining us for the first time since D5 summer 2020 GM man how how are you how you been GM good see you again Robbie likewise I mean dude so much has happened like like before you just kind of like you dive into into what's new and exciting now like kind of like Get Us caught up on like what what have been the highlights since 2020 that that like you can recall in like this kind of like speedrun from from defi summer up until now like how's your bare Market uh you know the I think the biggest thing that that changed since defi summer was that defi Summer by definition was just defi but these days there's like 20 different narratives and

there there's no way for you to keep up with everything right there's like modular versus monolithic there's depend there's nfts nfts really emerged uh in at the peak of the last B market uh there's even D side decentralized science right AI is a is getting a huge narrative right now um you know with benser all these AI coins pumping so it's for me right now it's impossible to keep up everything um that's the biggest change yeah yeah that that's been the thing and we even we even saw that going from defi slate to the rollup the idea there was to incorporate infrastructure more in into the content that we were producing and

um and now we're kind of like back like the users are back we're so back like everything is just it just seems like you know there's a lot going on again and it it goes from like you know almost kind of like boring like in the slow times and like you're you're you know really hungry for like that new thing that's going to be like really killer all of a sudden to like not being able to keep up with everything that's going on so like you mentioned a few things there um I mean AI is certainly exciting like balic launched a paper last maybe a couple days ago not sure if you had a chance to read that but like what's been your thesis as you see kind of like this this unbundling effect right monolithic is becoming modular and all parts of the

stack things are becoming unbundled and like more specialized what's your thesis when it comes to that as far as like the maybe the value AC Cru thesis of how value acrs to these different parts of the stack um long-term value of CR I don't know medium to shortterm it's always mind share that that's the that's the 70 IQ in me um things about uh about value Cel in the short term is really like Whoever has the greatest cult strongest mind share uh that Cru the most valued actually anom the other day so you know anom right the the new

main character of CT of course um want meme God yeah yeah exactly um he uh posted a poll asking his audience uh which part of the stack acre the most value and uh the options were layer twos uh the da layer the settlement layer and uh I forgot there was something else um the the execution layer is basically the rollups right like op ARB polygon Etc the sediment layer or the consensus layer is the uh is generally the layer what ethereum and then the da layer is like Celestia Ean da Etc uh by the way

ethereum is currently also being used as da for most rollups so then the question is which which one of these Stacks parts of the stack will acre the most value I mean like everyone has pretty smart answers like in the comments I was like you know I don't believe in any of those things it's just wherever everyone is chilling get Cru the most value um at least that's what I think in the short medium term over the course of let's say one to two years makes sense yeah it's cool to hear like despite how fast crypto moves short to medium term is still a year-long Time Horizon mhm uh and that that I mean that gives perspective as to like like like the the

longer term H Horizon is then is then on a scale of like decades which I think is a prudent investment approach um you know we all live for like a matter of decades so like you you'd like think so so make makes sense from uh from the time Horizon perspective and yeah I also saw the anom Tweet uh did some thinking about that and yeah without getting like too too like deep in it I think in the long again in the short run I totally agree in the long run I tend to think it's users I tend to think that like value gets squeezed back to the users who end up create like not end up they begin to create this value kind of goes through this whole Loop and ultimately

ends back at the users I mean we'll see if that plays out ultimately the users are G to like like get they're going to be paying something for their services it's going to get spread out to like all the tools that they use to fulfill their their orders and and kind of like execute on their on their ideas but yeah very very interesting to see like in this modular landscape it it's no longer like the fat application thesis or the fat protocol thesis now mon modular landscape kind of blows that all up and value kind of like just goes to everything that's like like a crewing mind share in the in the in the moment a as you say so like what is what is a

crew you know when you kind of like go to sleep at night what's keeping you up like what's what's living rentree in your mind um I don't really I don't really worry that much about the tokens that I hold or the the short-term price action I know it's cliche to say but there isn't much you can do I mean after after 10 years in crypto I just realize I have no Edge in the short term so I don't I don't really think about those things um I run an accelerator uh the leading accelerator in crypto it's called a lesty and uh what keeps me up at night is just making sure that my Founders are successful building something that people want uh

get to product Market fit and growing yeah I mean I'd love to just give you a platform to just like talk about your Founders and kind of like the the domains that you you find compelling uh that are maybe at product Market fit or close to it yeah I mean there there's really uh two ends of the barbell um the on the one end of the barbell is pure speculation which by the way a lot of uh you know VCS and you know philosophers living their Ivory Tower um really look down down upon um but it is the thing that obviously crypto has found prod Market fit uh so that's the I

can explain on it more but that's that's the one in uh one one end of the barbell the other end of the barbell is uh something totally non-speculative which is for example using stable coin for payment payment is is huge um people don't really talk about this on crypto Twitter because it's boring it's not sexy you don't make money out of it but if you look at the data uh usdt on Tron yeah is extremely extremely compelling the the the data is really compelling um and an totally if FAL to people around the world especially in Emerging Markets people use Tron usdt in their day-to-day uh they use it as a store value to hedge

against their local currency and they use it as a as a form of payment especially in crossb payment uh because when you make crossb payment in in stable point you don't incur the same kind of uh friction uh that the traditional Fiat rails have um so it's really the two two two ends of the barbell I can I can dive a little bit more into speculation because I think that's what people care about but you know we've um there there's many great startups coming out of Alliance uh tensor for example is the leading in Marketplace on salana uh originally there were like two guys uh fighting the pill battle against

the magic Eden that's a really great story magic Eden raised like $100 million with like 200 uh person staff tensor is two guys uh working out of their dorm and um you know they raised like very little money uh ultimately just by staying really focused and Nimble uh they beat magic un they became number one on Sal actually number one in all of crypto now very probably very close similar to blur but uh I would expect maybe a year from now salana inft trading should surpass ethereum in trading volum just because oh because trading Fe yeah maybe could expand a little bit on like your

your salana salana nft thesis yeah it's more thesis about salana than nft per se um but but let me preface by saying I am bullish on both the modular uh ethereum architecture and the salana monolithic architecture future but in the short term when it comes to speculation speculative products uh I think within the next year or so I expect salana to surpass ethereum in terms of volume okay so that's very important it's volume trading volume not necessarily price so if you look at the

the price of NL collections you know I don't I don't expect matad to uh surpass uh punks for example so mad is is the root chip on salana Punk is the boot chip on ethereum but I do expect the trading volume of salana n FTS to surpass the trading volume of ethereum ints and and there's a very simple reason which that it's much cheaper to trace to trade on salana it's two orders magnitude to trade out I'm not talking about ethereum layer one I'm talking about ethereum layer twos uh salana today is one to two orders magnit to cheaper than ethereum ler 2 when it comes to uh gas fees so this applies to nfts but also fungible

tokens right so like I don't know if you use Dex screener I'm sure a lot of the DJ that listen to P use um Dex screener if you open Dex screener today uh and if if you look at the top uh let's say 100 uh coins uh trending coins on De screener um I mean basically half of it is is Salon coins and and it's it's really simple why why that is the case is because it's cheaper to trade um yeah so I think that's what's going to happen and so as a result the um as a result of this I think the nft

marketplaces and the fungible token taxes on salana in my mind will Ur more value than ethereum their ethereum counterparts about a year or two from now here's Dex screener on the screen and it is just filled up with Salon yeah like P oh Panora is interesting uh I don't know if you followed Panora I have I haven't followed very closely but it's this new uh fible non-fungible mix uh but yeah anyway uh back to the original point it's filled with salot logos right it's all these are Salada uh coins yeah and you'll notice even even

something like Pandora which I'm not super familiar with but I'd love to I'd love to learn more about like Pandora on salana is outpacing Pandora on E exactly and that that's that's what's uh that's the whole thing um behind behind my cces and I think uh this latest meme coin season sponsored by anom uh is really look it's really like an inside look into uh what's what's to come and and you know the fact that Meme coins on salana are trending and like you know de by summer last time we talked was on ethereum now it's not on ethereum now it's on salana like that signals the

trend right for not only funable tokens but also non-f fbl um and speculation in general I think is is was kind of like the opening of this so that makes a lot of sense and I think that's an important distinction you made that it's not only cheaper compared to layer one it's obviously much much cheaper compared to layer one um it's also orders of magnitude um cheaper in gas fees than ethereum layer twos yeah okay but but let me let me uh let me give you the other side of the argument uh because I've been um accused uh to to be a salana shell salana Maxi even though in reality I am not I am

massively bullish on the uh modular architecture uh led by ethereum and to some extent Cosmos so let me give you the other side of the argument um so you might know mana and AO so Manta is this new uh Layer Two on top of ethereum that got 1.5 billion dollars in tbll recently and uh mana's architecture is very interesting uh it's not a rollup per se it's what they call a validium so what that means is uh it is it has a layer two on top of ethereum as the execution layer it uses ethereum layer one as the settlement

layer and it uses Celestia as the da layer so that that that's that's the definition of of a validium basically difference between a validium and a rollup is that they use a separate da the validium uses a separate da as opposed to ethereum as the da and the result of this is they're able to reduce gas fees on Mena by close to two orders of magnitude yeah and so compared to rollups not not even compared to it's two or mag cheaper than than a rollup and so um but but even then in terms of gas cost that kind of setup is similar

to Solano however I would argue that in in terms of security it's worse than salana because uh it is not using ethereum uh as as the da using a new uh deer like celesia which is obviously much less battle tested um so in that regard it's inferior to salana but but and this is where um the the the bullish argument about um modular architecture count intuitively lies which is that even if this thing is arguably is inferior to salum there is etherium devs that want to do this and

the question is why um and the answer to that is uh a combination of two things one uh this architecture is good enough for them it's good enough for their requirement in terms of fees uh and security they're okay with it they're okay with the gas Peak and they're okay with they're happy with the gas fee and they're okay with the security and the second part of the argument is there is actually a ton of developers that regardless of the technology they are they want to be ethereum aligned and they want to be ethereum aligned for pragmatic reasons not for ideological reasons the pragmatic reason is they get the users they get the E

users and they they get the the ethereum community to to back them that that's that's really important for them and and this is one of my my recent like on a broader point this is one of my um one of the things I realized recently just anecdotally talking to developers which is that if you're new if you're if you are a developer new to the space often times and then and you're you're in the process of choosing which chain to build on top of often times the most important factor in your decision is not the tech it's the interpersonal Affinity if you feel more Affinity towards the salana crowd you will use

salana if you feel more Affinity towards vitalic you will use ethereum if your friends are building on top of one versus the other you will go for that Chain versus the other so the the the personal AFF Affinity actually matters a lot and this is what's fundamentally um makes me think that both the monolithic architecture and the module architecture are here to stay in the next one to two years Beyond two years I have no idea but next two years both are here to stay very very interesting yeah we did a uh a conversation with Julian from AO um and he was he was speaking about the

reduction in gas fees millions of dollars per year that the protocol is saving in in gas fees from using Celestia da um the alternative da to to the layer one saves millions of dollars per year and that that savings get passed back to the users now I think that's extra justification for the value acrw will layer back to the users but um that's my own bias users will always um get benefited uh more and more over time because the tag gets better and things get cheaper scale gets gets higher yeah yeah and you don't have you don't have many many perspectives out there and I think it's is an affinity uh

orientation like you don't ha you don't have very many perspectives out there that create a scenario for both monolithic and modular architectures the camps out there are choosing one or the other they don't really have much mind space for both right so so I think that's a that's a very unique perspective and it makes sense let me try to articulate the argument see if I get it right here which is that the the model iic architecture saves magnitudes of gas fees while also creating a more secure environment than a modular one what the modular architecture creates this alignment and and allows developers to embrace their

affinity for certain communities yeah look look it history is highly path dependent if salana was born before ethereum right I think uh salana would be the def facto winner but the fact that salana was born four to five maybe six years after ethereum um means that there's now uh room for both like for me salana Tech is better than ethereum period but the fact that ethereum is the front runner is the first mover and actually has real uh Network effect means that it is also here to

stay let let's take a quick side quest on this path which is that like doesn't really get talked about very much but Sam bankman fre played a very important role in the development of salana and as you say I think I I tend to agree history is very path dependent are we now like totally past the era of his involvement will will his involvement have any lasting effects on this path for Solana no look we're we're P we're certainly past the involvement of of FTX and in fact a year ago when FTX collapsed uh November 2022 uh almost everyone got be salana because they thought that the the

collapse of FTX would lead to the collapse of salana uh I I made a very simple counterargument which is that if FTX is indeed a bad player which in h side it is um then getting rid of this bad player is actually that positive for Sal for salano and I think a year later uh that has been proving right so we're certainly past that salana has now a uh a very organic and and strong community of developers uh probably number one after uh you know number three number three most active developer Community after ethereum and

polygon um but but now salana actually has another really big supporter uh I think people are not really talking about it and that's jump jump is actually playing a really interesting role in Sal right now by building fire dancer so for for those who don't know fire dancer is one of the upcoming high-profile clients that uh uh jump is building for salana salana right now has one client and and by by the way that's uh the reason why you went down last last or earlier this week you went down right again after like 12 months of of up time but um the the reason for that was

because of the client bug and because salana only has one client the whole network um went down which by the way is is a is a thing that will not happen in ethereum because because ethereum has multiple clients but uh L of people have realized this problem for a while they're building multiple clients now fire dancer is one of them is being built by jump jump is one of the uh best high frequency trading companies in the world um and the reason why there such a big deal for Sal is because jump has one of the best high throughput high performance engineering engineering teams in the world because their entire

trading business depends on it and the fact that they're build either helping salana I think really is a big deal um I've heard numbers ranging from 2x to 10x performance Improvement uh performance improvement from the current um salana client uh upgrading to to fire dancer um so it's a big deal very very cool welcome uh modular to the uh stage GM the guy that I share all my thesises with on Twitter all sh's tweet and I'm like dude is this guy reading all my stuff

from for I just read all of his stuff what would I Ser was yeah so uh a little bit of uh ethereum modularity a little bit of uh salana mon monolithic ISM and uh Arguments for both um bullishness for both and a little bit of a littleit bit of a side quest with Sam and his involvement but I think we're past that now now more importantly is Jump's involvement in Solana and why that's a big deal um and you know like CH you kind of mentioned like you know why running only one client was a uh was a problem I think that's like the word

that we hear all the time which is centralization and now with and is is the idea that jump is going to add another client or are they just going to now just upgrade the current client to a better they're building a second client so fire dancer is a is a separate client from the current salonic client and that one apparently will help improve performance by a factor of two to 10 I've heard like all sorts of numbers I don't know what the I mean I don't think anyone knows yet fire dancer is probably still a year away maybe from go live but yeah it's a second client yeah okay so hopefully that that uh not only improves the throughput

performance but also like the redundancy so that if one client does have a bug um it won't go down right it won't break it'll it'll continue to run it'll continue to run that's so yeah yeah for like it went down again I I was shock I thought it was I thought Sana I don't know why in my head I thought like he was pass those days yeah I was like nothing happening did you know you know what's funny uh both uh ethereum Maxis and salana Maxis predicted uh this happening uh so in January I think the bankas guys put out a prediction for 2024 and they predicted

that salana was going down but also uh mer uh the the salana guy mert oh my gosh also also predicted that salana was going down uh that's really f funny was there like I don't know you guys touch us but it didn't happen during the juper drop it just happened like was some random morning it was mention yeah yeah exactly I mean um it's a client bug not a network bu bug um the Jupiter drop was really bullish for salana I mean I think uh some people did experience uh uh degradation in performance like they tried to claim the drop and you know it wouldn't work for

some people but overall uh the fact that the network didn't go down was pretty bullish yeah I think I saw something that the the founder just put a massive uh biow wall of like 75 million on off of token or something because there was quite a bit of thought with regards that J token taking 200 million out of the ecosystem yeah but that work very bu I put up this twet that was like I think the only way that athenium land competes with Seth and toana and it's paralyzed high with l1s is basically through like alternative D Adams Then alternative da layers I'm curious like look is there

any world where wups compete with Solan how do we how does a the yeah I mean I just thought about this in in the next one or two years in the next one or two years rollups can compete just by uh they they can compete if the rollup also uses a dedicated da uh that's not that's not etherum Lear one uh I think a number of rollup teams are actually building their own da but in the meantime the the app chain rollups can use Celestia as da as well so you guys talk to AO AO is doing that for example AO and Manta they're both doing it by the way AO and Manta are slightly different because Manta is is a is a is

is of the Lum and AO is is optimium so that's the distinction between using ZK proofs versus U optimistic uh fra proofs um but anyway I'm digressing uh rollups can compete in the short term in the next one or two years by just by offering a similar fees by leveraging separate da uh I think security is worse than salana but that's okay uh ethereum deaths some of the ethereum deaths will always choose to be aligned um and and they're okay with this slight uh degradation in in performance and maybe security after two

years I don't know I don't know what's going to happen I I think there there is a possibility where let's say monad or save2 uh goes live gets a lot of traction become the def facto uh evm layer one at that point maybe some of the ethereum uh uh dabs will migrate from ethereum to say or monad maybe one or two uh two years in two years time and at the same time uh people can still do rollups on top of U say monad and here's here's the thing that people don't understand which

is that they think modular and monolithic or or salana and ethereum are mutually exclusive the think that it's incompatible in reality you can't have a parallelized uh High throughput layer one with rollups on top of it so maybe there is a path for the two visions to to to merge um two years from now we'll see I don't know what will happen but it's a possibility yeah yeah you spoke about that kind of like combination Vision uh which is a very unique perspective uh to include both a bullish case for modular ethereum uh and monolithic salana now

the one and I think Andy's all caught up uh to this point so like the one thing kind of like new new ground that we haven't quite covered yet is Cosmos where does Co like Cosmos is modular architecture where does it fit in to this to this kind of like this space essentially between yeah I'll give you AR uh I'll give you first a an abstract uh explanation of Cosmos versus ethereum but then I'll give you some pragmatic ones the abstract uh difference between Cosmos and ethereum is that Cosmos you can think of it as horizontal modularity whereas ethereum is a vertical modularity meaning in

ethereum um you unbundled the three or four parts of the stack meaning settlement da execution right uh but in Cosmos you go horizontal instead of uh un balling the stack you just scale by adding more chains because every Cosmos chain every Cosmos zone is a new chain right um so Cosmos is horizontal modularis um that that's the abstract theoretical distinction uh which one is better I have no idea to be honest I mean you can make arguments on both sides but empirically what's happening today is on Cosmos Cosmos is finding a

niche uh pmf in uh you know middle layer or uh infra products right like celesia is built on top of Cosmos is using the cosmos SDK um by the way a lot of people don't know but polygon is using parts of the cosmos SDK they're using the tendin uh the polygon POS is using tendin consensus um there's also projects like um what's that bridge again uh I can't can't remember the name there is a bridge that's built on top of Cosmos Wormhole launched W or they announced W uh it's no it's not Wormhole

uh I Axel or Axel yeah axar is is built is built on top of Cosmos SDK um lava which is a decentralized RPC uh say V1 is buil using Cosmos bar chain is GL bar chain yeah so you can see you can now see a pretty uh uh a common denominator across these products which is that they're all infra infra products the only app product I can think of is dydx uh that's on Cosmos but most apps that are launching their own chain

their app chain are on ethereum right um and and yeah ethereum and Cosmos are starting to converge like you mentioned validium and optimium are now a combination of ethereum technology and Cosmos technology so you kind of get the best of both worlds in a sense with the modular architecture because you get the ethereum Affinity the composability with the community and the ideological alignment and then you also get cheaper fees right which is possible with uh like the modular architecture and alternative da so you don't get like the cheapest fees

right which is which is the argument for salana and and why speculation is starting to really really like Thrive there um like a lot of this argument has been like for making the best like environment for speculation meanwhile Trot is over there winning the other end of the barbell like do you think you think one end of the barbell is going to choose like one end of the infrastructure and and the other end choose the other end or do you think ultimately these these tend Toge so so I think it's gonna come R money again there's a there is a path dependency argument in here which is that Tron actually launched uh very early in the

2017 2018 era in an era where other EVMS weren't production ready or like the cheaper EVMS weren production ready and TR launch first for some reason they decided to to go payment which by the way really speaks to how pression uh his Excellency uh just just is um what a guy um but uh the where the path depend dependency lies is that um they launched usdt before everyone else and they got support of binance binance was a huge distribution channel for Tron in urging markets because in that

period coinbase was focusing on the US still is today um relatively speaking but binance won the rest of the world in the 2017 2018 Ico era uh because they're like more Wild West yo kind of exchange um so they they were a a massive distribution channel for Tron usdt I think that was that was ultimately the reason why Tron usdt became the standard today in a parallel universe if things happen in a different order things would have been different um and that that's the path dependency argument

but I think in two years time if salana continues to be really cheap um which I I think salana is cheaper than Tron um and if the salana foundation the team focuses on payment I can see salana taking over the the role of uh you know worldwide stable coin chain from Tron I can see that I'm not predicting it but I can see that happen yeah yeah yeah tell a guy uh earlier that um saw somebody new is much easier to go

to much easier to to bring into nfts on on Salada or even just def Salada um then then some these rollups that just a little bit more complicated which not as um and this guy just kind of like a d bad he's kind of mind welled and I was like yeah man I know things things have changed a bit um but it's it's uh I don't know this the the LEL thought is a good one with regards to where will go and I think generally it it's it converges into the best you know the best effect but it also feels like there's so many roofs being built um

people are still building l1s and and different chains and like this we're in this era of like abundant boock space but if we're if we're predicting convergence we're either predicting like a couple of winners or like some sort of chain abstraction where you almost don't even know where you are within this blockchain let get um yeah I'm curious you thought this this block space infra M chains every week every day kind of situation like are you getting a lot on the on the market roll up like Hey we're raising how do you think about the the private Market about these things too like we just start on the yeah look the the other day that there was a really funny

tweet that uh uh investors are pushing their their uh portfolio companies that are building apps that can't find product Market fit to uh Rebrand as a leader too uh it's it's funny but there's actually some truth to it uh there's truth to it because the moment you Rebrand as a layer to you're just going to get infinite bid from the market because the market will now uh price you against other layer twos um so look I mean there's going to be a proliferation proliferate continued proliferation of leus in the coming years uh at the equilibrium I don't know

what when the equilibrium is maybe five 10 years at the equilibrium I think there there's going to be a handful of generic clears like Arbitron optimism polygon but not too many maybe a handful maybe five I don't know what the number is but maybe five plus a very large number of app chain rollups so rollups that are dedicated to a particular app such as Avo right um I think that's that's what's going to happen yeah and so on the on the private Market side now how do you kind of I don't know how much ear stage investing you were Alliance sub

and but but I feel like the deals were so good in Q2 2023 Q3 Q4 now I'm starting to get a lot of on my in in Telegram and here's how you're think about balancing your like private portfolio in you know these types of info plays or wups or new chains with like okay well let's take advantage of the activity in the liquid Market air dropsy of things like I'm just curious how you think about your liquidity and also about like the fro and the private markets and do we zo and um so I do public markets on my PA and the private Market with

Alliance um so just put that out there um so at Li we exclus exclusively focus on private early stage first checkin supporting startups from the beginning when No One Believes In them sometimes when the founders don't believe in in themselves yet um so that's what we do um I would say that uh in general um last year was a great year for mry investing because the the valuations were so bad so low last year everyone was um bearish by the way VCS the average VC is to me they're no more sophisticated than the average retail um actually be

worse with they are know they are slow they they're slower to cook the the switch of their bias they're they're they're fearful in the bear and and greedy in the bull and that's what's happening right now in both liquid markets and and uh and Venture Market so VCS are are uh are now getting really bullish feeling fomo running a lot of checks um but add valuations that in many cases don't make sense to me already I mean like public market hasn't even made alltime High yet and so I'm really surprised that some of these deals are are getting done at like such high

valuations um but the nice thing about what we do is we have standard deals we first check in with believe in Founders before anyone else do and uh we often have no competition because no one believes in them so so our the structure of our program um basically self- selects into the most contrarian deals so we're able to invest some really great Founders uh at at uh Fair valuation no what you say is a is the overpriced valuation in today's term for an entprise like 200 million ftvs 300 million 500 100 or less or

more I mean it's PR dependent but like you know let's say you're run-of-the-mill da ler you're run-of-the-mill L2 you're run in thee Mill you know give an example but preferred is just I'm just curious of what like because I don't own 23 you know it was all between 10 and 50 million for pretty much project no matter what it was yeah I me obviously I mean right now pre-product infr products um you know I've seen anywhere between 100 Mil to one bill yeah pre pre-product so do you what is your

thesis is your are you like I know there's this big sway between crypto uh B investing infra and and say and kind of disregard it because of like you know infix the money is basically the that's like the Mantra in in crypto so like what is your thesis with Alliance in the early stage and then you to talk a bit more about kind of what you're up to or kind of at least some of your thoughts on some of this modular stuff in the liquid Market as well yeah I mean we'll we'll do we'll do INF our projects if valuation is fair but most of them now are not um and this is a really annoying phenomenon to me I

mean a lot of these infa projects will make a lot of money for VCS but uh there's there's a massive overinvestment into infra for the last few years and I think it's net net negative to our space to be honest but there's a huge incentive for everyone to play this game because infr projects get the most mind share because you can dream big about infra projects there's no limit ition as to how much spe it's speculation retail will will find all sorts of narrative to pump their bag they will talk about it there will be a lot of drama the various info products have Nemesis and there's just continued drama

and and you know hype between them and so exchanges knowing this they will list infr products they prefer to list infr products because they get lot of story and therefore a lot of speculation a lot therefore a lot of volume and therefore a lot of revenue for the exchanges and if exchanges list them then valuations will go up that's why infro projects can command much higher valuation than app products and as as a result VCS will prefer to invest in infra versus ABS it's it's a vicious I mean you can call it virtuous but or Vicious Circle how depending on how you view it but it's a it's a self-reinforcing

circle and everyone has so much incentive to play this game and that's why ultimately infra gets over invested and and I think is it's bad for the for the industry yeah is it like holding us back in a sense like it's like keeping us early because we keep investing like collectively we keep investing in infra which doesn't it keeps the dream it just keeps like postponing the like this killer app a little bit later down the road because they don't get as much funding as the info that it's y yep yeah the other side of the cor would be like well you couldn't have built a killer app without priy and somebody funded priy in as an infer project back in the day y y but like ultimately yeah

I mean yeah you get a gaming deal of I got sent this this pitch for horse racing game I was like dude like I just like there's no there's no way that you can like think about this logically from like a early perspective compared to something like I don't know any of the projects that you had mentioned in Cosmos it's just like there's so tough to see the value there and a lot of that infra stuff is like B2B so um I don't want to get too deep in the private markets I don't think too many people I mean people get Shia is the is the thesis necessarily contrarian like you mentioned like the the thesis on the on on the Alliance side is like you know investing in

projects for first check when even the founders don't believe in themselves and like you know you tweet that you're going to launch an infer project all of a sudden everyone believes in you all of the VCS are you know throwing money at you so like is it necessarily contrarian is it is it necessarily like early is that kind of like the the differentiator what is the like the fact like like an an an application that's raising is going to be like contrarian to like the rest of the market when everyone's doing infro so the idea is like to kind of like position um exposure in places that the rest of the market is really looking at

you would look at the applications is that the main focus yeah I mean it's not necessarily contrarian it's just uh again we'll do infra if valuation is fair MH um we we'll do whatever but uh we we tend to shy away from uh more hyped up sectors yeah cool um I would ask you directly if you're staking your tea for air drops but we'll just leave that for another day um I I'll will ask you in a way which is I have a thesis that we're doing this shorter cycle so we're doing these like speculative bursts rather than these fouryear Cycles this is due to Market maturation it's due to uh

again kind of a contrary perspective with regards to everybody thinks that we're we're in a two-year bull followed by a twoyear bear I kind of have this thesis that it's possible that Bitcoin could absolutely just rip to alltime highs in like the in like the coming weeks to months um and we can see actually a cycle at quotequote top um on like Majors sooner than people expect um you know this is all very shortterm speculation but this would this would be something align this idea of shorter Cycles like I'm curious where you think we are in this cycle I know this is our thir cycle so you're you're also trading the in Coran and doing the highest ta fourth you're already pass the third cycle which is where we are which your

Tweet was very applicable to me this time around of like last time I was like no no weed corns this time like it's it's gonna happen yeah Fox got to go to the mood so Like Somebody's gotta buy it uh but yeah where are we in the cycle what look I don't necessarily think it we're in the shorter Cycles or longer Cycles forever but I think we're no longer in a four-year cycle regime and I think people are still stuck in that fouryear cycle regime mindset and I think the the the sooner they get out get out of that mindset the the better they are that the better off they are because right now they have so much pdsd they think the market has to go down to 30k because you know that's what happened in the last

cycle you shouldn't use last cycle as one data point the one data point to to uh to predict what's going to happen this cycle you have to look at the the prevalent circumstances this cycle in particular is my base case I don't again I don't know but my base case is that it is in fact a shorter cycle and it was uh arguably uh pushed forward by the Bitcoin ETF well not arguably it's certainly pushed forward by the objectively pushed forward by the bit Bitcoin ETF I would not be surpr surprised that we see an alltime Time by Summer and then a top at the end of the year or maybe

early next year which would put this cycle 6 to 12 months ahead or shorter than the last one and then the next cycle could be shorter longer but I think if if if it turns out to be a four-year cycle it's more of a coincidence um than than a continuation of the four-year regime the the the market has changed right uh uh used to be the case that Bitcoin having had a pretty outsized impact but now over time having percentage goes down so that should have less and less of an impact on the market anyway uh I have to jump great

chatting with you guys thank you for going on