Finding Consumer Gems in Crypto | Qiao & Imran

Transcript

but you know how they tip today they they buy some gifts like virtual gifts and they send those gifts to the Creator and there's actually a fundament there's actually a couple fundamental reasons behind it but but one of the reasons is it's it's actually impossible to do micro tipping today with credit cards because these are so expensive the whole you know virtual gifts as a as a way to tip is effectively a layer two if you think about it yeah it's Layer Two for taping hey everyone this episode is brought to you by NADA the shielded asset Hub rewarding you to protect the multichain so not only can you protect your own data across any asset and any chain but you also get shielding rewards for strengthening data privacy protections for everyone so you can check them out at n.net and follow the

domain net launch stick around you're going to be hearing all about them later in the program all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve today I'm joined by chow and Imran of Alliance guys welcome and good game I should say uh one of the best podcasts out there thank you thank you for having us

yeah thanks for having us um for listeners this is actually the third time we were attempting this podcast we tried once before we actually tried to do it in person in the blockworks office uh and I drastically underestimated how difficult it would be to record in person and now we're gonna get a studio going so maybe we can do some uh you know future bell curve good game crossovers in person in new york' be a lot of fun yeah um all right but today what I want to talk to you guys about is consumer investing and apps uh RIT large I posted a little while ago on Twitter you know who are the best investors in this space and basically everyone just commented you guys um and so I've got I've got a list of uh questions for you

but maybe just to begin with I would love to get your guys perspective on this meta of infra exhaustion and apps and I think to if I had to steal man on both sides of it it would be hey you know we've had crypto's now been around for a number of years um and we haven't really had many apps we've had a lot of infra tokens but they tend to be low fdv or high fdv low float tokens that kind of gets dumped on retail and they don't really have any customers and no one understands them and we're just sick of this right we're sick of people pontificating about auctions and tees and all of this stuff just just give me the apps um on the other side it's like well actually what we're trying to build here is an alternative Financial system and these our infra pix and shovels

businesses that take a long time to get created But ultimately they're going to be worth quite a bit and it's actually kind of mid curve you know to be uh this like focus on the apps and just give it time where do you guys sit on this entire meta uh let me give you an anecdote uh I was talking to one of our Founders in the current batch who's building uh deep infra but an infra project that's actually genuinely interesting uh I won't get into the de details of the infra or the the the project he building but he told me that like we talked about why there's so many infra projects today and he said uh it's because infra is easier to build than apps and and uh and his reasoning is

that infra today in 2024 is relatively uh a close form type of project meaning it's it's a almost a purely engineering pro project and Engineering effort whereas apps is way more than engineering right like in fact it's it's there's a little bit of engineering but really it's really about understanding users consumer psychology what is exactly the pain point that that they're feeling so I mean this this coming from an infra Builder just tells me a lot about uh where we are and honestly I I agree with him uh today I think it is actually easier to build infra to launch

a chain for example than to build a consumer product that millions of users use which wasn't the case a few years ago a few years ago it was actually really hard to launch a new chain like there were actually true innovation in terms of scalability for example um but but things have have changed what's also funny is um even with the outcry of infrastructure and consumer we're still seeing infrastructure projects being announced and so that was an interesting signal the other interesting signal that I've realized was the fact that uh a lot of our Founders that are building be uh consumer are pitching uh

Crypt BCS but the questions that they're asking makes them believe that they don't really understand consumer and so I do believe that a lot of the crypt VC's right now are more on the infrastructure side in terms of dilc in startups and I don't think uh they I don't think they fine-tuned themselves to start diligen in crypto consumer projects so you know obviously when when you're talking to a bright founder startup you know um you for the most part I feel as if VCS are leaning negative versus you know staying more positive and trying to figure out a proactive way to fund startups in crypto and I think CH mentioned this on our

last pod too uh which is a mindset issue as well yeah so I feel like one of the you know I see a lot of VCS sometimes get I don't want to say defensive about this but it's like look guys I I I can only take what the market is giving me most most of the founders that I speak to that are you know have the best track record and expertise Etc what they want to build is infro info products and I'm actually I'm pretty sympathetic to that idea right like you're kind of the only thing that you can really work with is the ecosystem of Founders that you have coming to you what I just heard you say there in run a little bit is like well actually maybe you know we've been building info projects for a long time and it would make a lot of sense to me

if the VC ecosystem adapted to being able to diligence that or look for that or you build up teams you know full of experts that are really good on the infra side of things and there could be this massive hole around you know how do I actually build a product with distribution right there's there's an enormous amount of of uh you know there's a huge amount of focus on infra and auctions and mechanism design and that's what you know everyone who gets sort of uh you know nerd nerd sniped it's all about that kind of stuff and you never hear anyone talk about go to market or how do I actually get a product in the hands of users you know what I mean so so it was funny because we had a a VC that asked a question to one of our Founders about like what is

their Tik Tok strategy and like you know and they weren't very happy with the answer and it just kind of leads me to believe that I think VCS are trying to figure it out I'm not saying you know not trying to be negative here in terms of uh how they diligent startups I just think it's a newer area for all of us and uh you know I think they just need to get more acclimated with how consumer is going to work I've got a question for you guys because people also talk about the relative valuation of something like infra versus apps and you know in one sense you know I've heard the argument that hey maybe it actually just makes sense that these infrastructure businesses are pix and shovel businesses they're really durable and maybe they do deserve a little bit higher of evaluation but I guess what I would say

to that is I I completely understand that I understand how infra businesses can be really durable over time but your customer as an infrastructure business ultimately is applications right so help me help me you know square that Circle and it doesn't really make sense to me actually the idea that infrastructure business distribu valued really highly if there aren't a ton of apps because the customers of the infrastructure providers are the actual apps themselves right how do you guys think about that sort of relative valuation question between apps and infra I mean there there's a couple points worth mentioning here uh one is that uh historically empirically in in the last call it 30 years of uh technology um it turns out it's the apps

that ultimately capture the most value compared to the infra and this was very evident in in the Doom bubble in the Doom bubble um it was the likes of Intel and you know the the Pix and shovels of of the internet the cable companies the internet cable companies the the chip companies that uh were uh among the highest most value companies in the NASDAQ around the year 2000s um but 10 years later uh 10 to 20 years later uh it turns out it was you know products that are consumer facing right like the Amazon of the world apples and Google and uh

Facebook of the world obviously right now there's like this whole new wave of of infra which is NVIDIA and and theux of and you know Taiwan Semiconductor Company but but towards the end of the AI wave I think we're probably going to see the same thing which is the AI user facing companies are going to overtake the AI infra companies and there's a fundamental reason behind it which is um if you own the user the end user the consumers you have a lot more bargaining power against Upstream uh supply chain right you that that's where the it's all about bargaining power between the different players within the supply chain and

owning the end consumer generally historically empirically gives you more bargaining power more pricing power power so probably in crypto we're going to see the same thing however that Trend might take five years to to a decade to right so in a short term yeah I mean the the infra the crypto infra tokens are in valuations are continue to to be way more overpriced than than the Consumer products but over the span of 10 years I think it'll change there's a an article I want to call out that was written WR by Nick Gman back in 2018 um and it's called The Myth of the infrastructure phase um if you haven't read it read it

it's it's it's very spoton but ultimately what he argues is that you know apps Inspire infrastructure that infrastructure enables apps and we're going to go in this for two to cycle where you know you'll have these apps then there's a bottleneck right then you'll see the infrastructure that'll build out to enable new Next Generation applications and it's just going to be this kind of like sideways kind of upwards trending uh motion and uh and then he also like kind of gives out lays out different examples right uh some of the examples he lays out is like apps like in the 70s and in the 70s it's messaging an email then you had infrastructure that was built out ethernet tcpip isps send mail then that led to Prodigy and

AOL right then infrastructure was built out again like Google search Alta Vista Etc then there's a whole next generation of apps that were built on top of that so I do feel like that is the era that we're in and uh I think we're Bing me out on the infrastructure side and we're starting to slowly kind of go up to absn so all right there's a lot I want to respond to there actually and I want to come back to this concept of value cruel and I don't know if you guys have heard of The Smiling curve but I found that actually a super interesting framework so one thing that I would also uh you know IM what I was thinking of when you were talking just there is there's been this chicken and egg problem around you know apps and infra and part of it is that you know the

infrastructure should be built to support the applications but we don't really have any runaway applications so what are we really building for here and I do think there's a little bit of a trend of some of the best app devs out there who are actually like Founders who are building their own underlying infrastructure right so they kind of get a little bit of a head start by building an application and they're like well the infrastructure that I actually need doesn't really exist yet and so they end up building it out and again maybe the exact example of the internet era is Amazon with AWS right which is hey I found this one little niche which is I sell books online now I sell everything online and I actually need this really uh specific bit of infrastructure to support that and maybe I think my competitors are ultimately going to need

that and I'm struggling to think of examples now but like Argus Labs I think is probably a good example of that um which is kind of like a game and then building your own L1 to support itth that type of thing but I'd say hyper liquid yeah hyper liquid hyper liquid hyper liquid build out his own infrastructure it's only one then build out a great derivatives platform and now it's building like consumer I mean like there's a whole ecosystem buil around hyper liquid actually the dexes are probably I think osmosis even you know I'm a little bit less familiar with it today but I think that's probably another good example of this right which is onchain binance and now it's sort of a platform for you know even a lot of the applications themselves I did a a whole season on dex's with Dan Robinson

actually and you know it's interesting to hear even Unis swap views itself as a platform and if you look at Unis swap over the years going from univ V1 all the way to univ V4 it looks more more and more platform like each time right in the beginning it looked like a platform because you know it's got a mutable contracts anyone can kind of U use it as a primitive but now they like really leaned into that with hooks right and the ideas for hey we don't really know what the consumer preference is going to be this is a liquidity primitive and you can actually do very fine-tune uh design features for whatever amm you want to build on top of Unis Swap and so it feels like there is this trend of app Dev like people starting by building an app but then also trying to build out the supporting

infrastructure on top um but how like do you view that as a sustainable thing I mean from a Founder standpoint man that's you know you got to be focus focus focus right I feel like that would be very uh tough um and demanding from an internal resources and focus standpoint so how do you think about this balance of Founders building out the application and the supporting infrastructure I mean you definitely can't do two things at once at least not in the beginning um even the the hyper liquid example um is one where the they build it really really good the best derivative trading platform before uh turning into a later one um and if we're going to see more examples of this they certainly have to

uh start by focusing on on one not both at the same time all right I want to get your guys uh take on this like ultimate this is one of those things that it's just very difficult um to predict but this idea of The Smiling curve and The Smiling curve actually was it was originally proposed by a guy named Stan shei uh who's the founder of uh Acer and this was in this was like in 1992 and this was just to describe the uh supply chain for personal computers and what he basically observed is if you roughly divided the value chain into three different parts there's the conception the manufacturing and then ultimately the marketing and the distribution he found that it there was value capture at the initial part which was the conception phase and that's where R&D

happens and patents happen that protect a lot of the value um and then there was a dip in manufacturing which ultimately was commoditized but then ultimately the end the proximity to the consumer and the distribution a lot of value ended up acing there as well and I actually I'm gonna share my screen because I I looked at uh there was a Mason nrom U who I believe is at variant has actually been sharing around this uh this fat app thesis and it kind of rhyme first of all it Rhymes a little bit with this idea of a smiling curve it also Builds on what I think was one of the most foundational texts around value cruel in crypto so far which was the fat app thesis which came from Joel monegro back in you know

2017 2018 sort of time frame wait fat protoc thesis yeah yeah fed protocol thesis I misspoke yeah okay so and so basically what this says is that yeah applications are going to capture value the layer one blockchains are going to capture value and things that are in the middle um which is kind of onchain Primitives and protoc those are the things that are going to end up getting squeezed and I I would love to get your guys take in general here do does this look roughly right to you I know um you know Chad you were a proponent of the idea that apps might capture a lot of the value it might be on a fiveyear Time Horizon you know it's very difficult to predict but what do you think about the rest of the stack below applications well it depends on what we mean by the

the the layer in the middle like what do we mean what do we mean by onchain protocols and um I'm assuming I'm assuming defi yeah I would think that I think this would be like an like an honestly like an A or a Unis swap kind of PR maybe maybe and I'm interpreting here uh from from Mason's post but you could almost look at this like Unis swap Labs versus Unis swap the Primitive right where there's an actual uh you know primitive for liquidity but then you can build applications on top of that like a wallet right and maybe the wallet would be the app layer and you know which would be represented by equity and then the token would be represented represent the uh onchain deck I think if we're if we're actually

referring to the D5 protocols here as the middle layer then I tend to agree uh I think uh I think most people actually misunderstand how unisoft actually captures value or manag to have to to be so dominant I don't think it's the protocol at all it's the fact that they own all the it's the fact that they own the end users and yeah in order to own the end users they build like remember we talked about they build the mobile wallet yeah in addition to the front end the the desktop front end uh their brand is great which brings even more users to them their brand is actually better than like all the aggregators on on on on ethereum for example by the way on salana is different salana is Jupiter

salana Jupiter is actually the a very good example of this as well because Jupiter doesn't own any of the protocol they own the end users and uh no one actually like when people think of salana Dex or salana def5 they don't think of radium or Ora they think Jupiter like this ultimately but actually could I could I poke at that though because there's might be a branding element to that but there's also gas cost which is super different so aggregators on eth don't make quite as much sense because you need to make a number of hops which just means the gas cost is much higher whereas in salana with Jupiter that's just not much of a thing right you might as well go through an aggregator if the gas cost difference is like. one cent versus one cent but in ethereum it could

be the difference you know just trading on Unis swap could be you know 50 bucks versus 120 bucks or something like that I agree with you by the way um but a related example is um is a metamask uh charging like I don't know 25 bases on every on transaction like that is like they're they they printed so much money in the last few years by doing that and they own nothing of the they they don't own any of the protocols they just simply own the end user right so so if we're talking about defi as the middle layer then I I tend to agree with that now um but there could be other things that can be considered middle layer right

like I don't know the I guess the bridges the the oracles the kind of middleware maybe you can that whole category in yeah yeah what do you guys think about l1's so you I this is where I was going to go get with this uh you know I have a a very different thesis um over time I do think the fat app these you know I won't say that this will be dominant but I I could see apps owning the entire infra right I mean outside of maybe some oracles or whatever um and and you saw glimpses of this already um which is one area that I'm fascinated with which is the ability

to verticalized D5 protocols and Primitives across stack uh and so and a good example of this is front Tech uh V2 so front V2 had uh you know they launched on base but they could have easily started their own layer to as an example um the the amm called bunny swap was completely in-house right and so the tokens that were or the keys that were launched on frch could only be traded within the app you couldn't trade it outside of the app the to tokens the front Tech token in itself could not be transferred outside of the app right it could only be used within the app and so people were forced to use bunny swap right um and so all the fees that were captured all the fees

that were cing to frch were captured by frch and the users behind it so we're I mean like I mean we could talk about the pitfalls of of what happened with frch but ultimately there was something special there with that right uh which is the ability to verticalized and keep everything inhouse and that could also be a threat to Unis swap it could be a threat to other amm as well so I do think that is an area where I if apps do it right they can own the entire infra I think it's a really I think it's a really interesting question um like the I don't know this theory that I've had for a little while is I mean even even when you look at where Val if you were to look and Bitcoin by the way might be the exception here I'm this is the thing

that I've waffled the most on is is Bitcoin an exception or is it not I'm probably at this particular moment in time in the camp that it's its own special Snowflake and it's basically the ultimate meme coin and I think it's probably just going to be successful at this point um but the rest of these l1s ultimately are probably competing in on some level on being able to retain some of the cash flows that their ecosystems generate and I guess any way you slice it every sing every argument that I hear from either the salana ecosystem or the ethereum ecosystem I just see it getting Whitted down over time right because even like this whole me as as a as a way to value l1s meev is going to get recaptured by apps just look basically

all the app devs uh you can see this most uh most directly in like amm designers they are laser focus on reducing leakage to the L1 and it's going to be the same thing there's like Oracle extractable value as well for liquidations all of these little sources of me which were cash flows which are getting paid to stakers that's all going to get whittel down right um and then it's the same thing for the settlement and da argument right like settlement it's really easy for me to imagine settlement just getting whittel down over time because you can just batch transactions into bigger and bigger batches is the simple example for L2 so even all this L2 activity that doesn't mean that people need to buy eth with it um and especially on l2s their incentive actually is to allow people to

pay in whatever currency they want and so I just can't really construct a long-term bull case for l1s actually um view I view them much more as like a trade uh but I I'd be curious what you guys think overall here of like the L1 like how do you think about L1 value acrel into the future personally I don't think about the longterm like when you say longterm you probably mean I'm talking like yeah yeah 10 20 years basically I don't care about it's five to 10 years yeah all I think about is what's gonna happen at the end of the cycle right like who's G to be the winner at the end of the cycle over the time span of five to 10 years yeah like the whole me capture Theory could very

very well be right on paper but it doesn't matter there's so many other factors in play over over that um time Horizon and if we're really if we really want to stretch the the time Horizon to to the extreme like call it 50 years what's going to happen what's what matters in 50 years over that Horizon it's it's store value it's not M it's it's whether or not this layer one can become the best store value and that goes to whether or not Bitcoin is the exception I actually tend to think Bitcoin Bitcoin today is the exception but over the time span of half a century yeah it could very well be the case that Salon or ethereum become the best store value because because this whole like

you know I don't know burning the the the supply with M or transaction fees which Bitcoin sucks at bit Bitcoin Bitcoin still has bitcoin's B security budget is still a question mark right over that so I mean on paper for me the the most correct value capture theory is store value but again that doesn't matter I only think about what's going to happen in two years in two years what's GNA happen in salana is going to outperform everything else it's it's very simple my only like addon to that is I also think everything's up for grabs for for a very long time like though Sol maybe the winner you know the cycle I feel as if

a killer app that's launched on another layer one you know it's still I think it's still up for grabs and I don't think there's any and I were were actually talking about this yesterday uh and we were like uh I mean salana seems to be winning right now but uh every ethereum layer 2 is probably one breakout app away from catching up yeah and dominate and and that one killer app could just come out of nowhere you know it's a pretty chart is the amount of eth that's flowing up through the settlement Bridge into arbitrum every month isn't it I'm not really sure actually I mean it is it is the craziest up only chart though it is pretty wild and I you're talking about from E to

Arbitron Yeah it's arbit you're talking about from arbitrum to to hyper liquid well um you have to well you use so the way hyper liquid works is they have a bridge that's an arbitrum bridge and uh all the money flows to that bridge and so I'm assuming that's what it is oh interesting all right I'm going to have to I mean they call Arbor from the hyper liquid Bridge so oh really yeah I mean I mean not knock arbitrum but U it's it's what I'm seeing on Twitter those those Network effects are really powerful uh I think for l2s um and and that that's probably the way the whole L2 argument ends up settling out is we definitely

don't need 10 El but if you probably had like three Big L two Frameworks that's probably fine and they they do really good interupt in between you know within apps and its own ecosystem and like okay interupt like maybe you have a cross or something like that which works for you know cross chain uh you know swaps which is probably 90% of what people want to do anyway that might actually be completely fine um and then it doesn't really feel who are the three that you're most bullish on um I mean I think you got to put arbitrum up there uh I mean Bas it's hard to really distinguish Bass from optimism at this point I mean is it is it its own thing probably um and then it just it feels like there's such a steep fall off after that um probably I guess

one of the one of the ZK U chains so like maybe honestly I could see yeah ZK sync um probably what do you guys think I'd say I'd put in potentially polygon cdk I mean there's some interesting rollups that are on there um they got poly Market on there too po Market um immutable X and a couple others that I think poly chain has kind of nailed the architecture they've got the cdk they've got their AG layer I think that like that's probably what the future ends up looking like so yeah I think they're doing good I feel as if the the rollup infra is going to be you know cross chain

coms um you know some sort of ZK element and then uh cheap and fast yeah all right this this this episode is supposed to be about consumer investing I want to get a sense from you guys you guys have a really interesting seat right uh at Alliance you guys get to see on the ground a bunch of Founders where they're choosing to build how they're thinking about things you get to hear them ideating about their um applications and their product years before it makes it onto market so you know without you know revealing any state Secrets or or anything like that like give us the on the ground view like what's this no cohort of Founders that you guys are speaking to interested in and where are they choosing to to build and what types of applications are they like roughly interested in

talking about from a high level perspective we're seeing some uh I mean obviously salana and ethereum uh ethereum is still dominant um specifically uh base has become very um like this batch and last batch especially has become heavily uh invested in um I'd say we did see some on blast last batch uh right before the blast launch um and then I'd say uh one or two onchain games one of them is using Redstone um but I'd say it's predominantly Bas and in in salana what do what are your guys views on ton you know I want to talk to you guys about

distribution team yeah so this is interesting we're recording this week if we had recorded last week it would have been a little bit of a different conversation right because the founder I think pavl durov has been arrested in France on a whole multitude of different charges and I saw that I don't really know the details of this but I saw that ton uh stopped producing blocks for a little bit I don't know if that was related to the RS but is interesting I mean it feels to me like this is the selling point of ton it is somehow related to telegram there are a number of daily active users I've seen huge uh variance in terms of the estimates there anywhere from like 600 million uh down to maybe it's the number is actually

closer to like 5 million ual daily active users so it's really hard frankly to get like good data on this but I've seen and and if you aren't in the US they actually have all of this other infrastructure that you wouldn't see as a US telegram based user they have a native wallet and things like that and so the idea is if you build on ton the blockchain you're going to build on an ecosystem that actually has distribution how much Merit is there to that idea so distribution is very easy on telegram um and uh it was funny we were talking to one of our Founders who's building who originally built a a web 2 game it took him an year and a half to get 1,500 monthly active users on his game 1500 uh and he he did a ton of AD spend on

Google Facebook Instagram and uh he launched the same game on Telegram and it took him three days to get to 1500 million uh 1500 monthly active users wow and he was he was shocked uh and so there is definitely something there with the with the with the network effects that telegram has uh and which is getting him excited uh he in fact said something very interesting which was this reminds me of the the period where Zinga first launched on or Farm first launched on Facebook and there was this small window of opportunity where you could get network effects instantly um and so whoever wins this

like part or this phase of the game of of building startups on ton or or could be one of the first uh dominant apps on telegram so there is a race to this uh element now there's a lot of different questions that still need to be answered which is the types of users that are using the app right are they using the app for purely incentives are they organic users or like organic mercenary users um uh you know like uh like the last one I would say is you know K telegram hand ton Network handle uh all the onchain activities because it is tend it tends to be slower and more costly so now we're starting to see

Founders build like hybrid infra where most of the game logic is offchain and some of the stuff is on chain just so that they could still use the distribution network of of telegram hey everyone this episode is brought to you by namada the shielded asset Hub protecting the future of the multichain the ma is a chain that's near and dear to my heart because in previous seasons of B curve we've talked about how the card original sin of most blockchains is not thinking about privacy from the beginning but also because if we want to onboard a whole bunch of applications it doesn't work in a default transparency setting so NADA not only brings about a better future that we all want but it's going to help onboard a ton of new applications so Nana introduces a novel shielding reward system the way that it

works is if you hold your assets in the shielded set you help strengthen nada's data protection guarantees and collect nonrewards in return NADA will initially support BC and ethereum based assets but eventually the idea is for this to expand into a comprehensive hub for all assets really really excited about what the folks over at NADA are doing I highly recommend that you go and check them out at n.net you can follow their mainnet launch which is zoom TM very exciting tell them that I sent you click the link bottom of the show notes my observation has been that Bas feels very it almost feels like an extension of eth culture in the sense that it's really positive and optimistic and onchain summer and you know come come build here we're all friends kind of thing and you

know the salana community to me has always felt way more pragmatic like pragmatic is their kind of word and they're very engineering focused and they're a little bit less like that you know does that also ring true or feel accurate to you guys definitely and and both can be traced back to the the DNA of the founder right like vitalic is is that vitalic is very idealistic yeah and uh and holy Raj are very pragmatic you I mean you even saw this in the be market right um it's very evident like you could see it throughout different parts of the cycle but during the bare Market the the salono founders were uh

more pragmatic uh they talked about chewing glass and you know working as a community like they they just became even tighter it was it was very interesting to see that and they kind of came out of the hole after the be market right whereas with ethereum community I mean what I all I saw was like spreading the gospel um and uh you know talking about why ethereum you know they had their own kind of uh uh like Bas was like a like large part of it the Comm different parts of the communities were large part of it kind of like singing the Praises and Etc but you know ether also had its own way of like keeping its Community happy like like this whole drama around like vitalic criticizing defi over the last few

days like that would never you will never hear that kind of stuff from anatolio Rush yeah I think well even even the bankless stuff is funny like I was looking at CH we were talking about this a little bit before getting online but I saw this post you know not to call anyone out but saying hey bankless has abandoned you know ethereum as a community and it's like guys come on I mean it's just a little bit of self-reflection here I didn't didn't we watch Bitcoin go through this as a community didn't we watch them go through this period of stagnation because they drove everyone out that had like one iota of disent or question I mean that just such a Negative it's annoying yeah and it just annoys everyone yeah I mean you just you just

end up putting those people on mute and it's like I'm just going to disregard your opinion now you know I I don't know so yeah I think there's a but but I do think also so here here's one thing that I see from new Founders that are building l2s or l1s and actually blockworks had a little bit of this when we were deciding our kind of editorial voice and what do we cover and someone gave us really good advice on this because I see a lot of a lot of chains try to position themselves it usually ends up being away from speculation they try to take this opinion on the apps and say these are the types of apps that we want and in their minds that's their way of differentiating right they're like this is who this chain is for this is not who this chain is for but I don't

know I kind of think that you should really just be like come one come all right we we don't care what type of app you're building we just well welcome any type of app developers and Builders at all because it is so hard to know especially in an industry where we don't really have any apps with like true product Market fit yet what's going to end up being useful and taking off so how would you guys advise you know these types of app platforms like how should they be branding themselves like what do you guys think about some of this I don't know the word I would use is kind of moralizing that gets done about certain categories in crypto you know it's a deep side because I you know I'm really disappointed with uh like some some ethereum core people they they actively shy Founders away of

building certain areas that they don't like especially the the the the I mean the stuff that that that are not aligned with their with their ideals um and like I said before like all these L TOS are probably one breakout app away from dominating y it's just it's just sad that that they're shining the the some of the best Founders away you know like you you see this also like from an ideological perspective um you know like uh the eth foundation uh giving a grant to Unis swap if you remember um and that was the only Grant they gave because they didn't know that uniswap was going to become a

commercial uh startup right they thought it was just going to be a a decentralized protocol that would give away fees and just offer the service as soon as they found that out they want nothing to do with it right and they didn't and even if you look at the grants and they the types of Grants they offered they try to stay away from that um also like if you look at like autonomous worlds which is um like an onchain mud framework where you could build onchain games they just release it a layer two on like a layer to infro for Redstone which enables anyone to build onchain games and they have it's very specific to onchain games they also shy away from speculation right um and right now on games is primarily just to play games like uh Dark Forest was one one of the most popular games but there's

nothing with speculation involved in Dark Forest so it quickly fizzled out um and so now the meta is you know could we take onchain games which has been kind of this Niche community and make it more speculative and it's gaining more and more community members and users that are using it and finding product Market fit so you know and they're shying away from it like autonomous worlds and At Redstone and Etc and the question is should we be embracing it and like bringing more users to use the products because this is one reason why retail likes to play these games is the speculative element and so you could kind of see this within ethereum foundation's DNA they just want nothing to do with speculation or uh or tokens or anything of that nature I've sort of

wonder how many people do you think came to crypto and then they ended up rediscovering Finance probably like a good number I'm in that bucket right like I didn't have a financial background before coming to crypto and I wonder if some of the allergic reaction that people in crypto have to speculation is actually just more of an allergic reaction to how Finance actually works underneath the hood and I think one of the the reality of financial markets in general is that it relies on speculation and gambling like a great example of this that I always like to give is the 30-year fixed rate mortgage is not an animal that you find in the wild the reason why Banks can offer fixed rate mortgages is because you have a bunch of Deens who want to gamble leveraged on interest rates

right like that's the financial Alchemy underneath the the 30-year fix rate mortgage is a bunch of people just degenerately Levering up and betting on interest rate swaps I mean that's what that is and so I get it but even the ur's comment you know from balic is like where does the yield come from borrowers it's like that's how Finance works you know that is finance is circular it it is circular itti Leverage is way way higher than crypto average right and they can bring entire economy down yeah has has and a lot of people have a problem with that but hence I think the allergic reaction is less a crypto

specific thing than people just rediscovering these principles of finance that have existed for a long time that they might have been ignorant too the other thing is like people always say okay you know the the S&P 500 goes up because there's a real economy behind it blah blah blah the reality is the US Stocks is actually in the grand scheme of of financial markets is the exception not the rule US Stock Market is effectively the only stockk Market that that goes up only look at all the markets in the rest of the world like look at Europe in the last 20 years look at Japan in the last 20 years look at CH even look at China in the last 20 years China economy has been up only and the stock market has been down only like it's absurd like Americans should feel extremely lucky to to have the stock

market that actually goes up and like everywhere else it's it's a pure it's a pure Casino uh have you guys seen the chart of the Nik this is one of the wildest charts uh here I'm going to share it here it actually just recently broke the all-time high that it set back in the 80s but this is one of the craziest cup and handle P like look at this oh wow yeah I mean this was I mean this was uh you know over 30 years of dead time basically where yeah there was that crazy bubble back in yeah I guess it peaked in you know ' 89 or 90 and it just only recently uh broke out to new

all-time highs so yeah it can take it can take a long time um and you know I guess my question to you guys is on this speculation bent uh CH you had a quote a while ago I went back to look for it and I couldn't find the exact wording but there was something along the lines of people in crypto tend to focus on all of the things that crypto can't do as well blockchains can't do as well as their historical you know counterparts but it doesn't Focus as much on the one thing that it can do super well and the analogy you gave was mobile right there's a mobile wave and everyone used to say well you know it the screens aren't as big as desktop you can't do as much stuff but the thing that mobile really nailed was the convenience factor right and everyone just underestimated

how much people were going to be glued to their phones going forward and how I mean even now I regularly will sit on my couch and watch something on my phone when there's a TV there just sitting off I don't even know why I do it I just maybe out of habit more so than anything else but what do you guys view you know listening to you guys talk and trying to in your opinion here it seems like one of the you guys view speculation as one of the you know core things that blockchains enable super effectively am I right or wrong or what are some of the other you know superpowers that are going to end up being you know the Alchemy for Consumer apps like I think speculation is obviously by defin by definition not unique to crypto but what crypto is really good at is creating new markets

that didn't exist before I mean mcoins is an example of New Market yeah um the Creator tokens like with eg and you know all these rappers in the like two months ago right um crypto is really good at creating new markets crypto is also very good at payment uh both in terms of uh you crossb payment but also micro payment like the ability to send small amount of money and uh which is effectively impossible with credit card because they charge a flat fee um and if you really think about it uh everything that worked so far in crypto

is Downstream of these two things including for example dpin if you really think about what dpin is it's creating a new market and it's micro payment the the the very idea of incentivizing people with a small amount of token that in itself is micro payment so I mean so far and perally these are the two things that crypto is really good at and and they're they're sitting at the two opposite extremes of the spectrum one is like hardcore Deen the other one is like no speculation whatsoever yeah I'd agree with that I mean you have other interesting you know um uh Tech that can enable like some features so like you

know with ZK you can enable uh you know like hiding identities in a dating app or if you want to do ZK TLS to verify offchain data onchain stuff like that but I think that's going to be part of a a bigger app it is going to be a product in in itself is the way I see it we're incubating a number of apps that people haven't even thought of yeah but but these app ideas are fundamentally Downstream of the two two broad ideas just talked about creating markets and micro payments so I saw you tweet this out um and I and I heard this from her name brother bing one of the Mega E Founders that there was this kind of graveyard of 2017 era Ico ideas that

might be worth revisiting this is something that I heard one of these big VC might have been Fred Wilson or one of the a16z guys talk about but there was actually a game called thought bomb back in the day and it was making fun of every failed idea from you know the dot bubble of the '90s early early odds and it was it was and it ended up being all these ideas that ended up working later right it was uh you know pets.com but then you get chewy and that that type of thing and I forget there was a mo there was an Uber uh it was like web van or something like that that ended up becoming Uber whatever so all these failed ideas and you know I saw you Tweeting about like earn.com actually as a relatively interesting idea um I mean that also feels like it's Downstream of

of the micro payment part of it earn.com is is micro payment and and the one of the fundamental reasons why you failed many years ago it was because blockchains were actually very expensive to use this one was was very expensive and very slow to use so micropayment wasn't wasn't if you know in all pra practicality um feasible at that point but today it is like micropen wasn't even possible two years ago because there there was no Salon there was no layer twos but today it is and haven't spent enough time you know tinkering around these ideas I wonder if it's possible that around some of the categories that people really excited about it's going to end up the the value is going to end up manifesting in sort

of different ways that we originally expected and the example that I might give you is uh onchain gaming and so everyone kind of took this to mean that every action in the game needs to get translated into a transaction that happens onchain and I think if you really look at that logic I don't see it I don't really understand why there's any sort of commercial incentive to do that but the m in integrating micro payments into games is super useful because if you ever been a little kid who's a huge nerd and like to play a lot of Xbox or any of these games you know getting your mom's credit card for something was a huge friction right I mean it took forever it's like what are you buying that's $7 absolutely not you know and so I think that honestly

getting young kids on you know on games where you could reduce a lot of the friction and not make them to have aedit card that type of thing that's the sort of weird intersection that I could really see hitting down the line you know like the the idea of putting all the gaming Logic on chain I I'll give you the the the argument four the argument four is is be able to enable people to create mods on top of these games to Fork the code and then create new versions of the game and if you really think about it I I I put the idea of of uh onchain gaming in the same category as data sovereignty data ownership permissionless composability like all

these things will matter at some point but it's not a carrot that will get users excited in the beginning in the beginning it's about speculation it's about micro payment potentially like the the things that you mentioned so we need to give the users what they want initially and then at some point eventually these ideals these you know idealistic things like composability and uning gaming all these things can't matter so like our internal thesis is ex what CH talked about the first part which is like un like speculation speculate like the reason why I got into Bitcoin was that I discovered Bitcoin very early and I'm like oh it's only 200 bucks like maybe there's something there so and I I think most of the people came in for those

reasons right and then obviously then you discovered all the other things that crypto can enable so similarly I think the the ideal that ideologies that balic and many others are are talking about is still in fact true we don't disagree with it I just think it's a timing issue and really and and I think over time people will be much more financially aware of of what their money is doing and how they're going to spend it and where what products they should use and ideologies right so I do think all of it matters is just a timing issue and our Trojan Horse into the world is going to be specul popultion but then you know why they all stay into crypto is because of all the

decentralized IDE ideologies that we have yeah I I think I was on a bankless podcast like a year ago or something and I've heard them ask this question a couple times like what if this next generation of people coming into crypto don't care about IDE the ideology that we do around decentralization and I think my answer to that is that they shouldn't have to they're not going to care they shouldn't have to because the text should just be built in such a way that it doesn't end up mattering right you offer something really useful and you Trojan Horse people in this is also the really classic thing that we see happening right early adopters super ideologically motivated no reason for people to be using Bitcoin or ethereum in the early days then actual

improvements gets made trade-offs end up happening you offend the early ideologists and they kind of churn and then and then the next generation of like slightly more pragmatic people come in you know aren't we just living through something this is like the most classic thing ever to live through this is all happening exactly the way that you might expect it if you're reading about it in a book all right so let's talk about this next Generation I want to get you guys just put out an episode you did a couple great episodes with the founder of FanDuel but also on gen z and j a uh gen generation Alpha um sorry that very oh over me to get that wrong if anyone

oh my God if anyone's actually J on this they're gonna be like Jesus Christ that was cringe Boomers freaking Boomers okay so here's my question to you guys do you think that that's an important channel for people coming into crypto one of the other trends that I see a lot is streaming people do stream like IM I know you were talking the other day about the stream that happened and there was a guy maybe doing a little bit of drugs maybe maybe hanging out with the lady in a slightly lewd way uh but but there was actually a prediction Market that kind of went along with it and talk to me about this whole like the Tik Tock streaming and where does that intersect with the industry if at all by the way uh I'll give you my my version and then you can give

yours the the streaming part is actually ties back to to micro payment if you really think about the the the current streaming platforms where the fans tip the Creator live but you know how they tip today they they buy some gifts like virtual gifts and they send those gifts to the Creator and there's actually a fundament there's actually couple fundamental reasons behind but but one of the reasons is it's it's actually impossible to do micro tipping today with credit cards because these are so expensive so they they the the the whole you know virtual gifts as a as a way to tip is effectively a layer two if you think about it it's Layer Two for taping like like the these this these gifts are in this sort of centralized database

where the transactions happen from the the the fan to the Creator and then at some point once the creator has accumulated enough gifts they can settle back to the layer one and the way they do that is to basically cash out right from talk so so micro payment is is one of those potential um intersections but you you have your version yeah um you know if you think about it uh the new generation gen Z gen Alpha uh they're more entrepreneurial um like if you just talk about um like you know obviously like the Millennials and others will see them as lazy which is exactly how the Boomers thought of

us um and and so uh what's interesting about them is that they're they're they're lazy in the sense that they don't want to work like a traditional job but they're smart enough to figure out how to make money and so uh uh like there's a really interesting stat around like watches like it turns out watches are you know Millennials don't buy watches they don't sell watches they don't really wear watches like high quality watches outside of a few but the data indicates that gen Z they buy and sell watches all the time uh and they do that for profit motives right like to make money um which I thought to be very interesting um creators so I asked my uh nephew who's 15 no sorry 16 years old so like borderline gen Alpha gen Z and I'm

like what do you want to do when you grow up he goes probably streamer I'm like why he goes well you know I just want to hang up my friends make money like uh you know it just it's just something that it was it came out like naturally you know if you ask me when I was like 17 or 18 years old I'd say like some regurgitated [ __ ] answer right like a doctor engineer or something like that yeah lawyer yeah yeah you know who would have been very well suited to this generation is my co-founder Jason yanowitz have I ever told you guys about our uh our ticket flipping scheme that he got me into no no no no dude I lost so much money chasing Investments that Jason recommended to me over the years so so he he had this he had a buddy who

did this thing have you heard about like the botting thing for Ticket Master where the bot immediately yes so he had a buddy who was running one of these businesses and making like 80 grand a year doing this and this was you know we just graduated college like [ __ ] that's a lot of money um and when his buddy gave him this tip about these tickets to buy this was for a Jerry Seinfeld uh live show in Manitoba in February but he's like sure thing I was like I'm in bought like 1,500 bucks where the Jerry Seinfeld tickets waited until the end couldn't flip it couldn't get anyone to go with me lost, 1500 bucks trying to flip Jerry Seinfeld tickets uh yeah so anyway J that also tells you that Jerry Seinfeld is more on

the skewed more older now right so like it's the older Generations he's going through a little bit of a bad Arc I feel like you know there was a little bit of a who is the Brady bich with him and um and Larry David and I feel like Larry David hands down came out on top on that one he kind of comes off as a little bit of crotchy old man now I think kind of yeah he's like old man shakes fist at Cloud type type Vibes at the moment but um I lost my train of thought here for yeah so so I was talking about the archetypes for jenz Jen Alpha so they're old they'll figure they want to be they want to find ways to make money so um you know sneaker Bots is in one like it turns out one or two of our Founders

that came into alliance was because they first built sneaker Bots we're talking genz and then they started doing it for nfts right and then nfts and some of them pivoted to which I know this for a fact like the the founder Photon which is uh doing about 300 million in annualized Revenue sniping different uh pools on pump is and example they built a an nft bot before and previous to that you know you see kind of that lineage uh of of Founders right so uh I do think that they have a very interesting Viewpoint as to like you know doing less physical mental work and easier like you know way to make money and that ultimately attributes to

finding a great startup or product to build right um and so streaming is one right as an example and oh sorry go ahead so here's one thing I was gonna ask you guys just about these Platforms in general here advice that people have given to us over the years you guys got to be on Tik Tok I think CH you actually said this last time that we're in uh talking here here's the challenge with that from my standpoint is that the content has to has to conform to the medium and so when you think about the type of content that's going to do well on Tik Tok like you know probably everyone listening to this Scrolls Instagram or Tik Tok at some point you got to do you know like kind of funny uh type stuffff and that doesn't really work with our content uh you know we are

naturally more financially minded and I just think the type of stuff by how much you'd have to transform something like this podcast to make it actually rep on Tik Tok everyone who's part of the core audience would be like that's extreme ex cringe you know and I guess I'm I'm just using this to ask a business challenge for blockworks but this is always the challenge when it's like we'll reach out around these like Instagram or Tik Tok platforms that's where the audience is but I feel like it would just be challenging because you have to transform the the feel of it so much what do you guys I haven't seen any crypto content really take off on Tik Tok at all yeah yeah I think there's a reason for that it's really Niche yeah it's really Niche um but when it does it's the sell signal

it's the top yeah um but yeah so uh going back to streaming as an example um we do feel like there's going to be interesting applications that could be built in on streaming so uh pump was an example right which uh uh had 6,000 views of a guy that's doing you know drugs or whatever um or whatever I'm GNA leave the rest under the whatever and you can find out on the internet if you if you want to find out but okay here's my thesis on that right like you have um and we talked about this our last P out but you know you have YouTube and then you have uh twitch and the con and they have a very high

standards in terms of terms of service so anything you do you get kicked out if you repeatedly do it so that's happened with major streamers right like Aden Ross is an example you got kicked out of twitch so then kick.com like sign them signed a deal for like $20 million to just stream but you could pretty much do whatever you want right and so that's like the next level but really like pretty much what you could do is just like curse and talk about stuff right but you know there's this new area of content which is like being yourself complete degeneracy which is where I think pump is starting to hit I wouldn't say product Market fit just yet but they're starting to hit that angle and then they could slowly work themselves up to to to the kick right as an example which is interesting right um and then

you know we have other streaming apps that we're working on uh where you can create prediction markets uh Etc so there's a lot to do with streaming and I think we're just tapping the we're just starting the scratch service so I think this would be a real like a very far out sort of bold prediction and I don't think that were're anywhere close to this but I do see a marriage down the line in between crypto and media in some way and here's here's what I'll paint you as a picture the opportunity that I think crypto is going to do really well on are the areas where there's institutional crumbling or lack of trust right like the still to this day probably the best use case is just money this is something I think the bitcoiners got right that probably is the biggest single use case for this stuff but

another huge area is media and by the way I don't think that's because the media is evil or there's some sort of conspiracy theory it's because their business model has imploded they just got smoked by social media just look at the amount of dollars that used to go to Publications now it's a smiling curve right like it goes towards the people that have access to the end users which is Facebook and Google for the most part and so they're just getting their business model imploded and there's this negative reinforcing cycle of okay well we don't have as much money to pay the talent so the talent is going elsewhere and they're just losing it they're just imploding I think um so there's this negative reinforcing cycle but a part of that is Media lost access to first-party data so now you don't have access to

who's actually consuming your information anymore Google and Facebook has all that when you look at token addresses that looks a lot like first- party data to me and just as an example let's say we were advertising you know I want to I want to Target someone for permissionless as an advertisement is it useful for me to go on Facebook and try to narrow in your you know your age or what city you live in or how much money you have or would it be more useful if I was targeting a bunch of uh addresses like crypto addresses and it's like how many times did you trade on Unis swap in the last 30 days that has 100 times more signal for me as an Advertiser than anything else and then you kind of look at these you know Chow I looking at this this tweet that you said around you know

tokens are the new content buy button is the new like button market cap is the new engagement metric and it is you I can kind of see these things floating around there it's like memec coins do look a little bit like a decentralized market-based algorithm and nfts do look like this it's this it's this very close tight-knit community and it feels like there are the building blocks for New Media being built around but no one has figured out how to combine them and maybe streaming and you know gen z and j ala are like a part of this story also uh and maybe prediction markets are too but I can see media being a big use case down the line for crypto 100% uh like uh going back to uh pump. fun it was interesting when the the guy that was

chatting with this community he would say hey chat should I do this and the chat was asking him to do something else completely different and he wouldn't do it and the price started to kind of go down so um there is this relationship so funny I mean what the chat wanted to do was it shouldn't be done anyways but but it was this there was an interesting dynamic between the token the chat and the Creator and essentially the token is the weighing machine as to what the chat wanted to do um and so I think you're I think you're spot on to see that which is I do think streaming and crypto and and a large media is going to become a large part of crypto uh in fact we have

another startup we're incubating called the theive dobet it's still under steal but essentially you could copy paste any streaming link onto this app whether it's kick YouTube Tik Tok whatever you copy paste the link you could create unlimited prediction markets on it and so there's a way to get create closer to the Creator in such a way that you could speculate and you could uh you know bring other people and and and and tie a closer Bond because what people are saying the feedback we received from people that are in these streams is the fact that the chat there's no way to communicate with the streamer nor the people because it goes a 100 miles per second so having a more of an enclosed group I think is where where the trend

is going I'll give you an idea to to think about I don't know where the the future lies but there there's a I realized there there in the last few months where I discovered new viral internet memes on deex screener rather than Tik Tok or Twitter so the the first example was hakua uh Michael you know Haka right I do I'm familiar yeah well I I didn't know so Haka first emerged on Tik Tok um but I'm not on Tik Tok like I I I I probably look at Tik Tok every day but I'm not like spending like an hour or something I probably spend minutes so I don't come across all these memes all the time but that day like within the

first two days of that Meme coming out uh I was on Dex scener I saw one of the the most active meme coin on Dex scener in terms of trading volume and I saw hog to I was like what the hell this is so then I went on Tik toon and searched for it then I found a mem so if you really think about it what's happening is you have these internet Phenom phenomena or borrow memes that emerge across different from different social media platforms whether it's Tik Tok or Twitter or or whatever but currently there's only one aggregator of all these informations it's it's it's like the mean coin because because the blockchain is is open to everyone it's it's not a what Garden so

like there there's like new phenomena like this that I'm seeing that just that ties back to you mentioned about uh there might be an intersection between media and in crypto that's what I think too and the meme coin stuff is I don't know whenever you're launching whenever something new there's something new you just want to make sure that it's not a nothing burger like if it wasn't evoking any sort of emotion emotional reaction at all you'd be a little bit concerned about it but the fact that it has such strong supporters guys like marad mad's coming on the podcast uh in like a a couple weeks actually so and enjoy because he did a hardcore conversion from Bitcoin Ma I G say that you should ask him about the conversion from Bitcoin maximalism to to mcoin so I was there I listened to

him he did this really great podcast on the pump we helped spin up the jon9 like the very early days of blockworks worked with PP uh and one of the First episodes that were recorded was this threeh hour Banger on bitcoin with marad and now I I haven't you know I kind of lost touch with him over the last couple years but then he just came back has been meme coin pumping but the the fact that the fact that it's inspired such positivity and such negativity I think makes it worth worth looking at and even nfts I might be on my own little island here but look the reason I'm still bullish on these things things is because I have an emotional connection to my and if like you will tear my bad kid you know BFB out of my cold dead hands and when I

look at some of the founders the guy who I really respect here in terms of his sort of vision and a guy who thinks about distribution is lucet uh for pudgy Penguins so here here's how would you guys maybe in starting to close down here you know we started off by saying maybe there was a competency that some of the early like you know crypto VCS that have been here for a long time it's a muscle they don't necessarily have yet and just a competency they'll need to build up around consumer and growth and distribution and things like that what about Founders like how do you guys see the makeup of a classic founder changing over the course of the next you know five five to 10 years so um and this ties back to the earlier discussion

around infra versus apps I think there there is a some fundamental difference between building infra and building apps infra is relatively speaking um uh lower frequenc lower iteration frequency whereas app is like you have to you know release new version like ideally every week and conly try to figure out you know that that uh the quotequote the truth about the users um so app Founders I don't know if there's a difference between between fundamental difference between infra Builders and app Builders but certainly we encourage the app Builders to aate a lot

faster infra Builders again like this goes back to to that comment that one of our our our infra founder made which is that infra is more of a closed ended problem whereas infra or whereas app is more of open form uh problem and the open form problem requires higher um iteration um I thing about the founder characteristics uh obviously the infra Founders are very technical the app Founders the ideal profile is someone you know IM and I were talking about this but is someone who's autistic and uh went through a or childood trauma and it's not or and it's autism and childhood trauma so I can give you a

perfect example of one too so after you finish I mean almost every founder that we back that's on the app that's build something that people love it has the combination of these two it was funny I was talking to I won't name the name but uh one of the consumer Founders we're working with and uh you know like if you look at backgrounds you know like not really prestigious colleges and and stuff like that and and they have a chip on their shoulder right they they have something to prove and uh when they see other guys that are more techn Tech coming into the consumer space you know there's a fundamental divide between like folks

that are building infrastructure versus consumer at least the consumer guys I've talked to despise the infro guys um uh and and and they despise Ivy League schools they despise all of that like you could like they tell me this um and and I think it's I think the archetypes are very different yeah I think so too I I think also for founder you know I have no idea I'm talking out of my but but I I have been hearing recently and something I've sort of thought about a little bit as well that I think the the death grip that the IV's had for so long on this is where talented people are coming out of is it's at risk you know I'm not going to make some hot take that it's like oh

it's a bad thing it's definitely not I mean I'm sure the matriculation for those schools is still top tier but it is a little bit of a different attitude of people that come out of and I I do think that in crypto it's like waterl I think Chia maybe you went to waterl in uh is a it's not it's not an elite it's not you know what else Georgia Tech is another really good example of that uh Georgia Tech is goated and I I do I think there's a it's it's kind of a hungriness and and for Founders what makes you successful is not is not like an intelligence thing at all it's not allence it's grit um you know do about things differently yeah yeah independently and

critically yeah also the ability to withstand extreme emotional and volatility for yeah volatility is probably better but for long periods of time you know um all right fellas this has been this has been really fun um for folks that want and if there are any Founders either on the infra side or the app side and they're interested in learning more about Alliance or following either one of you what's the best way to find out learn more Alliance Statics was sweet okay easy all right guys this was uh this was a ton of fun the next time we do this I swear to God we're going to have a studio we're going to do this in person maybe you know what I think would be really fun is to do it on like a Friday with some beers just like a more

even relaxed kind of I think that'd be a good a good V maybe while playing poker yes yeah maybe while playing poker yeah um on the fun note DAV has been released oh [ __ ] let's go that's great great excellent okay I actually saw that the UAE now we're really departing from this but I saw the UAE was withholding e planes and some sort of contract or something like billi billion yeah yeah so Money Talks Money Talks baby yeah all right guys this was a ton of fun do it again soon cheers hey everyone hope you all enjoyed today's episode wanted to give a final shout out to namada again a team that is near and dear to my heart they are building the shielded asset Hub

which is protecting the future multi chain talked a little bit about how that works in the mid roll but for now what I would highly recommend that you do is go check them out they're in their main net launch phases you can follow along with everything at n.net you can start rewarding Yourself by shielding your actions and strengthening data privacy for all across the multichain so thanks again toada for all the great work that you're doing