Friend.Tech or Foe: Are Progressive Web Apps the Future? | Round Up

Transcript

all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-hosts today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode thanks everyone we've got a great episode here but before we do I just wanted to give a quick shout out to permissionless this is the biggest and best conference in all of D5 it's the one that we do with bankless who's a great partner for us last year we had almost 7 000 people there in West Palm Beach we are moving this year to Austin Texas so I'm

September 11th through the 13th and if you're a listener bell curve any of these last five seasons this conference is basically custom made for you we're going to be talking about liquid staking the theme of this season we've got a bunch of great panels on Mev if you listen to the app chain thesis we've got a bunch of Cosmos folks out there in full force we're talking about the converging architecture of Solana the roll-up space in eth and Cosmos so I would love to see all of you there and to reward you for being such great listeners to bell curve you get a special 30 off code it's bell curve 30. that'll get you 30 off tickets click the link in the show notes and then head over to the permissionless site and make sure that you get your ticket today again that is bell curve 30 click the

link in the show notes all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup edition of Bell curviat Michael Juan Vance you know gentlemen it's been a minute I thought we're gonna have the whole crew today I was very excited for you know Michael's one and two you guys are taking a lot of vacation days these days Vance man time to get to work you know yeah yeah Massachusetts a fine State though we can we can excuse him if he's in Massachusetts we'll we'll let that fly yeah all right you guys want to just get right into uh friend Tech I feel like that's the that's like I've never seen my feed taken over by something more

than friend Tech has been um probably the last year is it it's kind of died down it's dying down it's dying down and I can actually share this Dune dashboard like if you actually look at the transactions the transactions have completely died down as well here let me share this it's uh back to where it was pre pre-hype so if if uh so if you look at the transactions for anyone who's listening not watching on YouTube pre-august 18th transactions were about a thousand transactions a day when it started taking over Twitter about a week ago started climbing you know three thousand four thousand five thousand transactions a day and then uh on August 21st earlier this week it peaked out at 40 000 transactions in the day uh now just a couple days later the

transactions are all the way back down at about 1500 transactions and if you look at the protocol inflows I mean this chart looks very similar you can still see that net flows are positive but only barely we're looking at like 100k of inflows so this thing could could quickly turn negative so interesting yeah so they made Advance on half million so far they've made three and a half million so far and base I mean the impact on base has been that base is now I think was processing a 1.16 transactions a second past arbitrum and optimism um and did more yeah so uh it's had an interesting impact on base as well but

Vance I did notice that you are not on friend Tech man I want to go buy it but uh can't couldn't get those keys why aren't you on front Tech I mean first of all I want to wait uh and you know build up the anticipation and the the desire for something like that second of all I'm just not sure that it's like fully blessed from a regulatory legal perspective so you know I'm not I'm not I'm not gonna pull a Nate Chastain and you know have one eth be the thing that really me over from something like this and I think that's probably what a lot of the influencers that are you know even outside of crypto think about this it's like it's very cool but you know the current crop of friend Tech uh

people it's like this weird amalgamation of crypto people e-girls like only fans girls as well like it's it's not necessarily the uh but like that's kind of like the biggest one probably so you can see what people you can see people's Holdings and I saw one of the blockworks research analysts was just loading up on some like e-girl only fans I was like oh buddy for an investment for an investment doing research doing research yeah it's uh it's always weird when you see something like that on the internet like one of your uh one of your colleagues doing something strange on Facebook oh buddy but it's not private he's up I

will tell you my thoughts actually wait hold on before we get into the takes here could you just briefly I'm sure most people listening will be familiar with it but you know could you just give us a rundown of like what is friend.tech like what what is the app yeah friend Tech is um friendtech is a platform that basically lets you so uh it lets you buy and sell shares in in people and I know that sounds kind of crazy so he's brother he's yeah shares keys keys keys um the way that it works is you uh I would actually recommend people download it not to go use the platform but the user onboarding the user experience um and setting it up is unlike anything I've ever seen before in crypto um so you basically download so you go to the website friend.tech on your phone

you have to be on Safari you then add it to your home screen I don't know if you've ever added a like a website to a home screen um but you do that you then um uh you then connect your Twitter and then you uh you deposit eth and you deposit each just from from like from the ethl1 you connect your metamask and it does everything for you so you only sign one transaction the whole time uh you sign one transaction at the beginning and then you don't have to sign any more transactions as you're using the application the next thing that does that's pretty cool is it auto bridges over to uh to base for you so when the app came out it you actually had to send like base eth over um but now it actually does the bridging for you it's a really cool like

user onboarding and user experience so you buy your own share for like zero dollars at the beginning and then you uh it recommends you upload or you you add like 0.01 each then you kind of get underway and you start buying and selling and the Mania was like last weekend uh last like Saturday and Sunday prices were going crazy like you know you know I think it was like Jeremy allair joined and like his he went to like half an eighth and like you know ansem was that like two Ethan Kobe was like Untouchable at three eth or something and now prices have come back down a lot what what's how does utility or value flow the other sorry I'm missing one other thing which is there are group chats so the group chats are like one of the more interesting things about it people probably are like the

way I described it sounds very much like bitcloud there are like three main differences between this and bitcloud I would say one is that bitcloud had this like kind of scheme scammy uh growth strategy at the beginning where they Auto added everybody to the platform um you didn't have to you weren't able to opt in it auto opted you in so like anyone from like Balaji to like like I was on the platform one day I woke up and I'm I'm on bitcloud even though I never opted into bitcloud uh friendtech you have to opt in so if you don't want to be on the platform like bands you don't have to be on the platform uh the next thing is that you're actually able to withdraw you're able to withdraw from frontec whereas you weren't able to withdraw in bitcloud but the third thing are these

group chats so the group chats are really interesting so like I own a disclosure key because I like disclosure and disclosure has been like posting behind the scenes of making hit some of his favorite songs like there's no that that like the video he posted today has like never been seen before Blau posted like a unique uh a song that he's like cooking up that no one no one's heard before uh like Rob leshner is just kind of like talking about cool D5 stuff um yeah so there's these like little group chats that are interesting one thing um one thing just on this volume by the way I would belong that uh the volume ends up returning you know what this chart actually reminds me of that you showed in the beginning you

know was you ever looked at actually can I share a screen here the or the chart of ordinals actually it kind of reminded me of a little bit where there was a super intense peak in ordinals to begin with it looked like the entire thing retraced um and then it just went all the way back so if you look at that uh the inscriptions over time there was this like super intense Peak it dipped back down but then there's been sort of steady growth and the thing that's still coming up for friend.tech is there's there's gonna be an airdrop right so I think they announced that they're doing the point system similar to margin Phi over on Solana where I think they're dropping 100 million points it's unclear what the monetary or token value

associated with those points will be but there'll be some sort of gamification thing there so they haven't even started to pour on the incentives yet really really what they've been relying on is this sort of viral hook and I and more on in the camp of asking whether or not this is a necessarily like a good thing to be trading trading your friends and whatnot outside of just whether or not it's legal but I do think one of the things that I think is cool is there's a guy named Nikita beer uh who I think is pretty good in terms of thinking about product and it's always talked about designing product with a hook or or a distribution in mind and I think this is one of the best examples we've seen so far in crypto of designing something that meets the

market where it's at today with distribution directly built in like it's it's pretty cool I think but the question of whether or not this is like good thing longer term I don't know if you guys want to get into that but I think that's probably a question worth asking I think too here's a funny example like he is famous for building his history yeah building social apps that have more hype than like anything in the world and then selling them super quickly before like the hype dies down so of course help a Sizzle baby not the steak exactly I did did that Playbook with Facebook and then he just ran the exact same Playbook with gas and sold it to Discord so um the uh the really interesting thing that at the beginning was like buying

and selling people um and like almost the drama that came from that is like if you guys were on MySpace like the Myspace top eight it was like yeah yeah exactly I'm buying Ryan Sean Adams and he's dumping a meal from Delphi and like there's this whole like everyone was like watching that because you can see what your friends are doing that that actually excitement has like very much died down already but what has stuck for me is um like I was checking it like you know every like three minutes I was like oh what are people doing like awesome like yeah yeah everyone's dumping my shares for some reason I don't know why they were doing that must be confused I was getting used yeah but what has stuck are the group chats um and that makes me think that there's something there because the ux of the

group chats is so remarkably bad it's only one to many so when let's say Vance you owned one of my keys you can message me but other people in the group can't see your message and I think this is actually not because they want it to be like this but the engineering there's a really tough engineering problem to solve there so everyone can see when I basically send a message and then when people respond to it I have to be like Vance responded quote this here's what my response is to Vance but even with that horrible ux I find myself going back into the groups um and I think it's a cool like you're starting to see what the future I think of like you know artists or musicians or like

yeah I don't know there's like some EDM people who are starting to join like that's the model I think the like fan connection model of the future is what is happening right I don't know if it's gonna be on friend Tech probably not realistically but like I think that's the model that's going to play out in the future what do you think is next in terms of feature set that's coming images and audio image images and audio and um like more of a telegram style group thing instead of a one to many here's another one that's not necessarily a feature set but I saw this announcement from Aerodrome so Aerodrome is the I think it's the dominant decks that's on base this is built by the team over at velodrome which is the opt uh the I think it's the go-to dexon

optimism it's actually a fork of Andre cron Hayes solidly but they announced that uh so this is the Tweet the friend Tech Revolution is coming to Aerodrome that means friend.tech keys can be wrapped as erc20s and can be incentivized traded and lp'd on Airdrome day one and to get things started we'll boost any Epoch zero voting incentives with arrow so I don't know I think it's like even uh the ability to wrap and then trade fractionalized uh shares uh you know I I don't really buy the value of this thing is the group chats this is the ability to speculate on people like yeah I think it's more critical that people get exposed yeah yeah I mean but let's call spade a spade like if you can

wrap these things and you're incentivizing them and financializing people like that I think people will do it um but it is it is it is is it as a desirable outcome so yeah like it totally I'm sure it is about the speculation and stuff but like something about it feels less Ponzi than some of the early like are you more defy summer like everyone's like I know this isn't Gonna Last I know this is like Ponzi e but like it's like hidden Ponzi under like three layers this is like very speculative out in the open you know I don't know there's something about him being more like surface level speculation that I think uh and that's why it Spooks people that's why I think people don't like it but like do you think this gets more or

less fun if the prices go up 10x oh man such a good question Less Fun okay what do you think way more fun um people I think I think it gets way more fun and then way less fun it gets it gets really it gets really crazy and everyone's like aping into the market and then the user the user base dies down because people can't afford to buy people's shares I I think so yeah you can because there's always going to be new people joining I think there's a psychological element to this I listen to the Santi episode that you did Jason and I sort of found myself nodding along with what Santi was saying which is on the one hand some there's there's a

concept in Psychology called cognitive dissonance there's a really famous study that people did where you you gave that these two groups of people a Mindless task to do it was like spooling a threat around this complicated bit and in one group you paid them one dollar to do it and then another group you paid them 50 bucks or 20 bucks or something like that and then at the end of the study they asked them which one they which which group had more fun like which one overall scored that they enjoyed the task more and the group that caught paid less uh reported that they enjoyed it more and the the rationale is that because I didn't get paid I still had to come up with a rationale for why I did this thing and it must be because I enjoyed it so on the one hand I The

Optimist in me wants to say man look at what social media companies have done just by playing with people's dopamine receptors over time like imagine if you added dollars onto that that would just be supercharging it but it could human psychology is weird and it could have the opposite effect too where now that you're getting paid for something you subjectively enjoy it less and it could decrease engagement I it's this that's one of those things where you just won't know until you test it out but there's the opposite of that so I agree with that like that's a good cognitive dissonance thing like I've always thought that uh about media companies that offer tokens or payments when you read a newsletter I think decrypted this they're like we'll give you one cent every time you read open our newsletter and I'm like that is a horrible model

because now you're attack like now you've just attached the reader's time at like one cent it's like it would make me want to read that thing less you know so you get you get points on friendtech based on things that you've done and that's supposedly leading up to this airdrop and I hadn't actually thought about it those points at all I really hadn't and then it's Friday and they give out the points every Friday and I didn't get any points and then it actually made me be like why didn't you get any points I don't know I've been buying and holding people I'm out of here yeah I'm a razor I know they uh I was talking to the Paradigm team about it they're gonna come on the Pod but they're doing a media kind of quiet on the media front right now but um smart

smart very smart very smart very smart I think they need to have a plan for the prices of this going up 10x and then what happens next because there's gonna be resentment towards the early people that have keys there's going to be this disenfranchisement of the you know the lower cast that couldn't get you know the keys but want to interacts with their creator and that is kind of like what ultimately is the big risk to a price downfall which like once these things go through the washing machine of price Discovery it's harder to get people excited about them what maybe you should take the opposite side of everything that I've been saying so far I feel like at post ECC which is an amazing conference I was definitely

on the train of is really infra heavy it'd be nice if people were taking some risks on some apps and it is refreshing to see a team take a shot at something it's a shot on goal and I actually think it's a good shot on goal and the fact that it's inspired this much debate and engagement and some people love it and some people hate it probably means it's bullish I would guess I think if everyone loved it it would weirdly be less bullish the the app so I don't know I respect it's a really it's a four-person team too that's doing this so respect to this team I can't wait to see who eraser looks like like I I literally his profile is still on private I'm pretty sure on Twitter I

know I was I was in early on racer on Twitter nice nice did you look at this deal Vance what's the backstory of the of this fundraise like did they raise from a bunch of people was it just like a new paradigm no I think I think uh I think the backed racer just doing multiple things like they did steel Cam and they did this so I think like if steel cam took off they would have probably like put resources into that but like it just ended up being this and it kind of explains why the app is so not shitty but just like primitive and like rushed that's kind of like my understanding at least hmm I there's an interesting thing that might happen here which is so friendtech is what's called a progressive web app which it's just like a mobile app but

it's not but it's not through the App Store and um I could see all I could see frontec dying all this dying but friend Tech kicking off this huge wave of progressive web apps because the experience has been so nice it skirts the Apple 30 feet um I mean this it feels like an app like it's an app um and now that the full like Safari engine is just inside of an iPhone you can write these amazing like apps and Ajax apps that like behave exactly like an app does but it's not through the App Store so you this could be the like start to be the downfall of the of the App Store Monopoly you know I mean it's so awesome that you get access to Apple pay as well and I don't know what the fail rate is of crypto

transactions but it seems like it's a lot better than like moonpay so you know I think a lot of this is what crypto games are going to look like it's like our version of side loading except you're just pinning a web app to your home page yeah yeah you know who I Jason getting back to one of the other original things that you said I have been thinking about uh the impact this has had on base as well and sort of the business model of what uh what an L2 wants to do and I don't know I've been thinking more recently that um you know ethereum tries to be this very decentralized I think that what they're producing is a commodity-like thing right which is what ether is and they're they're selling block space that's associated with that but I think l2s their business model really what

they're trying to do right now is they're trying to get that one runaway app that is going to onboard a bunch of developers and people and in that sense it's more like being a publisher or a VC where you're like looking for that one investment that's going to pay back for your it's like a power law type thing and I think I think that's probably how a lot of these L2 teams are thinking about it they're thinking how can I attract the the app that people are going to want to use and yeah it'd be interesting to see how much staying power friend Tech has but I'll be really interested to see what happens to base and their uh you know the revenue that this brings into them and by the way the Mev stuff we could do a whole episode on the Meb stuff that's playing out on base

and front Tech Guys now as well I think the Bots are they're printing they're they're eating I mean you can't like the second someone signs up they their price just shoots up like it's you can't that was like the fun of it like I'd be like oh I just saw that he signed up like but I know that before anyone but like I mean that's all been that's gone that's gone I mean it just continues to also reinforce the point that like the cosmos narrative is now playing out on eth and I like just talking to Cosmos teams they're like man we thought we were gonna have usdc a year ago you know we thought that all these things were gonna happen getting validators up is super expensive you know 14 inflation probably yearly for your token people are just gonna launch l2s on each mostly on op

stack and then go to their own version whenever they they feel the need to but I I posted that basic you know summation on Twitter and John Charbonneau replied to me works at a different fund he's really smart he said that the 4844 spec will support a hundred TPS combined across all roll-ups so let me say that again say that number again that's 100 TPS combined across all roll ups so roll up you know takes a bunch of data yeah that's one so like what happens when there's a thousand Roll-Ups because like every pitch that I'm sure you see this too everyone's like you know it's a game but also it's our own roll up

like it it's good I like I don't think uh I wonder if he's really counted for that when they were thinking about their scaling road map where it was like What if everyone wants to have their own and there's like side chains and layer threes and stuff like that but dude this is I feel like I've broken record on this but like Cosmos ran into this exact same issue right there was scalability challenge I saw Alex glukowski tweeted about this as well but he had a slightly different TPS number but it's like 4844 is not gonna fix costs on eth especially if you still need to post if you're still using e for data availability like that's that's the majority of the expense for Roll-Ups so pretty tough you're gonna need these for that yeah

for sure you will you will yeah the cosmo story is playing out in a good way but also like to your point a lot of the resource constraints are now we're not like hitting them yet but like in a year I think people are gonna be like why why do we have 400 roll-ups because some of them are just you know like I don't know if you've ever tried conduit it's like an SDK for deploying both a roll-up but also like you can one click deploy uniswap and you need to bootstrap liquidity but like the point is you can just deploy these things instantly there that whole thing I think Michael and I talked about this the last one we did just solo but that is also because I like the analogy for conduit and

optimism is uh like red hat and Lennox where I think what they're discovering is that the optimism created a lot of value with this open source stack that anyone can use conduit might be might capture a lot of that value uh and that's why I think you're seeing law of chains uh and like hey like anyone can be part of the op step if you want to be like super chain you have to do these have these sorts of parameters nobody wants to be a super chain nobody wants to be an L3 yeah because you want to create your own version of op stack because you are not the standard I gotta be honest I'm starting to get confused but what is the difference between an L2 and an L3 in these like stack architectures change the definitions so much

if you use eigenlayer unl2 like you know if you're using Palladiums or unl2 I think the point is like you're gonna need youth for all of that and probably scaling is not entirely fixed yet yeah at this point I'm scared to even overturn one rock in the roll-up ecosystem because I'm gonna not understand like uncover this can of worms I have no idea what people are talking about the I I actually think um there was an interesting discussion about this on Twitter the other day about what creates value for eth I think the most bullish thing eth would be the and I think there's good evidence to suggest that it's going to play out like this that eth is the gas token for these Roll-Ups instead of their native token

um yeah I think that would be if I had unilateral control of eth I would make it so and my my sole purpose was to um because I think if you want East to be a currency or a commodity there's like two two ways that you can make the price go up uh to reduce the supplier increase the demand and 1559 takes care of half of that equation you burn eth so you reduce the supply but you want a structural bid for demand too so the dollar did this right like the dollar was like Hey we're trustworthy right we've got all these great resources and that's why you should want to use the dollar but we also went out to Saudi Arabia and was like hey uh it would be great if you only let people

buy oil in dollars uh that'd be tight and by the way you can only pay taxes in the US based on dollars so if you live here or if you want to do business here you have to use this currency so it creates a structural bid for the currency that kicks off uh a virtuous cycle and I don't know I think I think roll-ups that's that's like the easiest through through path that I see for for eth otherwise if you don't need to use it like on ZK sync you can use they leaned into account abstraction you can use whatever token you want for gas you still have to pay data availability in in eth but you could eventually you could just use Celestia for that and you could bypass a lot of the cost so you're just gonna have like does maybe more

than dozens hundreds of Roll-Ups paying these stakers eth every day per day plus all the ethyl one demand like that that's the eth could be a trillion with that economic model you know if the price is all relative to the price because it's like you know it's either worth 10 grand or is it worth one grand but like assume these things reflexive and you know the amount of heat spent per day holds you know roughly steady that makes a lot of sense it's an economic model the other thing on your point Mike my point my my calculation of burn teeth is all of the burn teeth from eip1559 but also all the eth that's been bridged to arbitrum

optimism in my mind like that's not all price Discovery happens on centralized exchanges whether we like it or not that is not like coming back like two hops to centralize exchanges to fill a bid that in my mind is like basically locked to eat Supply so you know I have never thought about it like that that's a good I like that yeah I mean the further we I like I think of these as like you know blocking Ethan D5 your youth is now locked in an L2 removed from the supply yeah look at all you know what else too price and ease as long as we're doing everything denominated Neath that is

that is the main thing that I care about in terms of like what is the digital commodity that everything interesting is priced in it increasingly continues to be ethereum one thing that might be bullish for Ethan on the demand side as well is more weirdly like more corporates launching l2s that people actually use because bass doesn't have a token I'm assuming they might have a token eventually but probably not until regular story stuff gets cleared up in the US and so they're using ether's gas so I feel like maybe that could be another catalyst I don't know but it'll be interesting to see how all this plays out did you guys see I I put I know it's kind of a nerdy subject but I

find it interesting um that starknet is considering rolling out tendermint for their chain so tendermint is the I guess now it's Comet bft but it's the consensus protocol that's part of the cosmos SDK so that's how consensus works it's like an out of the box solution that Cosmo chains Cosmos chains utilize so one of the big open questions is how um something like consensus or transaction ordering is going to happen on Roll-Ups right now everyone's got a centralized sequencer some people I think think that's okay and that'll be how voloups think about monetizing others are like they're going to be a decent a decentralized sequencer set or

a shared sequencer set but as soon as you start doing a decentralized sequencer set you need to get uh some some way to do simple resistance and you need some sort of ordering uh protocol to switch in between different sequencers so that's where you they are proposing using tendermint consensus which is pretty cool um I don't know how that's gonna work and I think the big question is what the sequencer landscape eventually ends up playing out as but I thought it was pretty cool validation of the cosmos Tech but not Adam right it's not no it's not no not basically nothing's bullish Adam unfortunately like yeah that's the big problem Walkers interns are in shambles

as a result I mean it's uh just tough sledding honestly for them just giving everything happening on eth that's just hard just I like I like that you think all the analysts are bold up on Cosmos it was one of them they was one of them yeah they were they were talking all sorts of garbage to me I was just like no this is I'll make it easy but wait let me let me just do one more uh push back on the cosmos thing and then we can and we can move on from this but the I think there is a sequencing element to this I think we've talked about this before but right now like okay the app chain thesis is playing out on ethereum but to your point fans even with 4844 that's not going to solve the

scalability issues to support all of these different Roll-Ups and there aren't really any Roll-Ups with product Market fit yet so right now it makes sense from a cost perspective to uh launch a roll-up on ethereum especially using something like conduit but in the future if there was an app like with product Market fit that had five or ten million users uh per day then maybe the the the economic shift for a roll-up and it's like maybe actually we want perfect control over our over our block space and actually we don't really want to be paying rent to ethereum and we're gonna go launch our own chain because getting 100 validators would be a trivial yeah trivial exercise but what do you think about that I mean whether these things

have product Market fit or not I think firstly like they're probably going to have some sort of token farming or like they'll need to post some sort of data on chain so like 100 TPS in my mind is is probably like 100 roll-ups you know no matter how much or how little they're being used and they may fight for priority fees to be included in the call data but like kind of is what it is on that front um just like building your own chain is such a pain in the ass I can't enough like we have teams that have been at it for like a year and they're now saying like you know what like it's just it's just too tough we're gonna go on ethyl too that's where the assets are anyways we're planning on just like interoperating that with them

if we're going to be a tenderbent chain so I think it's difficult it's expensive from an inflation perspective um I just really wonder like if dydx is going to be big enough to really bring it back that would be the one way I could see this working in Reverse but we'll we'll see you know it's gonna be it's going to be interesting I think dydx launches in November so not too far off part of the reason dydx is an interesting one because the reason that they moved off of they were originally on Stark net I think but they moved to Cosmos was because there are limitations there are limitations there are things you cannot do as an eth roll-up that you can do as your own chain so for dydx what they thought was

really important was to decentralize the order book and the only way that that can work is in Cosmos if you make each of the validators run their own order book because they run the consensus and then they also run the application code and even on an eth L2 like if dydx was still there and you decentralized the sequencers you could get them each of the sequencers to maintain the dydx code assuming they had their own app specific roll up with multiple sequencers but it still has to settle down to ethl1 and those validators could just change it up and extract their own Mev like they don't have finality yeah I understand the dydx problem it's also like more off-chain than most systems that we're comfortable

with so that would be a constraint kind of almost everywhere but I hope I hope they do well I respect what they're what they're trying to do I respect people that are out here trying to take risks which is why I also respect friend Tech I mean at least it's a swing you know it's going back to at least taking swings here um let's talk tornado yeah speaking of risks yeah all right that sucks yeah it's very sad brutal Vance you want to get the overview yeah uh tornado cash is a non-custodial mixer and relayer uh for mostly eth assets and eth itself I think

the eth is actually the biggest pairing and there's all this stuff that happened with tornado cash it you know it's it's code they they uploaded it to a blockchain there is a relayer system there is also governance so there's like a few different factors to this um but the founders were arrest or charged one was arrested and they were charged with money laundering you know for North Korea which I mean it just sounds terrible like a billion dollars right it's like a billion dollars of money laundering and I think there's good arguments as to whether you know is or isn't money laundering or if it is or isn't centralized um but you know kind of that will be what the courts decide ultimately and I

think there's good arguments on both sides what's shitty is that Roman you know storm at least you know is now in jail and he's a guy that you know in my mind is like stands up for the right things in crypto stands up for Developers for privacy you know censorship resistant technology and now he's just literally in a jail cell I've known Roman for a long time at this point so personally a little bit sad about it um but yeah you know I think there's going to be a lot of Road on this to go where he goes to trial he goes to court fights it please you know whatever um but it's just shitty you know there's like so many people in this industry that you could go after and this is certainly a product that we would not

you know invest in or or use uh but it's just shitty that it's you know it's him and it's the team and it's it continue to you know enforcement spree on crypto Founders privacy is one of those things where I feel like more people should care about that one but clearly demonstrictly many people don't and there's a fight back in the 90s when the internet was coming into being about whether or not encryption should be allowed on the internet and it actually won not because of Any ideological battle but because many businesses would not be valid on the internet and that's the type of logic that sits with U.S policy makers if you can monetize it or not or make more money I

think actually crypto should probably adopt that same line of reasoning but yeah it's it's it's a bummer it's a huge I mean the question there is like the same question today which is there are some people who believe that technology is either good or bad whereas technology oftentimes is just this neutral thing and it can be good used for good or bad depending on the intentions and the actions of the people who create it and who use it right so like I think the responsibility here lies with those who choose to use technology unethically not the people who are actually developing the technology oftentimes and if you go go you ever seen Thank You for Smoking no I haven't dude that's it that's uh everyone should give that a watch but

there's something the premise is that he's a lobbyist for big tobacco and he's friends with someone that is obvious for the NRA yeah and he's like I was the NRA guy I think that made this argument at a at a dinner but it's like you know if uh if an airplane crash would you blame the airplane would blame the pilot you know they're I do think that like I don't so I I see why that's ridiculous but I also see it's like it's new like nuclear like Oppenheimer just came out like the scientists who created nuclear energy are not evil even though nuclear weapons are capable of immense destruction um because like I don't know you can also create nuclear like use nuclear to you know I don't know energize the city or whatever or

like algorithms like algorithms are not evil but like if a company uses them to like hack your dopamine like that's probably another thing not a great thing you know and I think uh I don't know in the case of tornado cash I don't know if you guys actually read the doj thing but like I think they said only seven percent of their transactions were used by Bad Bad actors like North Korea or whoever it may be that means 93 of people who are using it are good actors they're people who need the product yeah I mean it's just it's another instance of like if you are not really excited about crypto this is going to be something that deters you from getting into the industry at the developer level um which is good and bad it filters for the best entrepreneurs but it cuts out a

lot of the the top of funnel ultimately like we just wait years you're saying that because it makes you if you're a developer it kind of makes you and you're kind of agnostic to the use cases that that you're building it kind of makes you think twice about whether you could potentially be like a scapegoat down the line or totally if if a bad actor ended up using your technology for evil yeah I mean ultimately the calculation on this stuff is political in most senses it's like you know what is a uniswap LP doing in a pool that has no kyc do you know exactly who you're trading against probably not um that's like you know like you can you can extend the logic as far as you want I think it's just another scary point for developers where the people who are left in this industry right now or the

True Believer die hards where the stakes are high they are the incumbents you know they're going to keep winning um and this is just something that will deter competition because like one of the factors that we just ask entrepreneurs is like you know if you're building a game nft whatever you know infrastructure like are you ready to live in somewhat of a gray regulatory Zone most most people the answer is you know maybe to know which yeah and don't blame it yeah for it um but like life is risk and like the tornado cash risk is obviously different than the uniswap risk but like it definitely is one thing that keeps

entrepreneurs up at night as it would yeah I don't know it's this is one of those things where it's very like Oppenheimer is an interesting example you know would do you think the world is better or worse off with nuclear technology I think it'd be better off if we actually use nuclear technology for energy me too but weighing the pros of nuclear energy versus the cons of being able to end the entire world like that's where I think it's I think it's a tough Nuance argument right it's hard to be totally inclined so then you have to zoom even farther and then it's like if you I am Pro technology like I think technology is making the world a better place and it makes like I don't know

it's just good technology is good for many many reasons and so if you're like shutting down nuclear as it's getting created you that means you need politicians and regular Regulators who are smart enough to recognize that like it's just nuclear we're going to shut down and all the other Innovations we're going to let go but really how it works in practice is they're just like they turn into anti-innovation you know um that's why I think it's dangerous to shut things down the craziest thing about Oppenheimer that I found out in that movie was when they detonated the first atomic bomb as a test they thought that there was a chance that it could light the entire atmosphere on fire and those humans yeah like I don't know I haven't seen

Oppenheimer or Barbie I saw a sound of Freedom though foreign it's a film uh well it's based on a true story about child sex trafficking and a guy who you know he's like this uh FBI agent that you know is only responsible for finding kind of like the the pitos in the U.S but he then kind of has this like come to Jesus moment where he goes off and starts finding the actual kids and he's you know he's like in a Riverboat in Colombia you know going into the jungles like no weapons unarmed and just like with vague plants like get these kids back it's awesome it's a true story and uh it has sold

more tickets than Indiana Jones and you know this is entirely not on topic for this podcast but two million kids a year are are in this type of slavery in the U.S it's wild two million yeah sex trafficking destination for kids it's it's who is um who is hiring who who is like who who's the money behind this like who's moving there's a whole supply chain of these things it's like the movie is pretty long it's like almost three hours so you get into it if you if you really want to know some it's honestly hard to watch but um and I've I've a up question which is who who's at the end of the supply chain is it like just all creepy old dudes who want to have like it's it's people manipulating parents into

giving them their kids for talent shows or auditions or like you know stuff like that and and you know a lot of these people are not fully educated so it's a crazy movie recommend it Jim cavazil the guy who plays uh the main guy was Jesus and Passion of the Christ so nice you know he's going from strength to strength with his career nice let's talk about the uh the debate no everyone came for vivec basically everyone kind of identified him as like the shadow candidate that actually could be real DeSantis is great I just think he just

kind of has lacked a personality and he he just showed more of that and everyone else was kind of just a sideshow Chris Christie looks ridiculous up there ridiculous I did like when he called Rebecca chat gbt Canada so Vivek is now plus 1500 to win behind Biden and Trump it's vivec is now number is the leading candidate behind Biden and Trump who was Viv I I do not follow this stuff at all who is vivec there's a there's like you know he was a biotechnology entrepreneur and there's been allegations that like what he did in biotech was kind of like the equivalent of like flipping an Ico I don't know if that's true or not that's kind of the brush that people most

biotech Investments though right most biotechs are so so volatile anyways they're based on the earnings and the or the the trials of the drugs and what they mean for future earnings versus any current business today so like I think there's good arguments probably for both sides of his background but I don't know some of the he says is just completely out of left field like kind of worth like a billion dollars oh he's very I mean he was at a hedge fund like he was very he's very like Pro very Pro Martin shkreli um he started getting into so he made a ton of money Mike and then in 2019 he I think his political aspiration started he published a book called woke that basically was like one of the first big critiques on woke culture in Corporate

America and his argument was that companies have embraced social justices to make profits not because they want to make meaningful change and I think you're starting to see some of that probably come to life now and maybe he's more right than wrong he's also been pretty critical of like ESG investing standards um is advocated for more like what he calls like stakeholder capitalism instead of just like from the top-down ESG standards he's 38 too he's a young guy young yeah he was like 16 when he got into Harvard got his got his JD from Yale it's Marco I don't like a lot of what he says like him calling climate change a hoax is like not helpful in my opinion um but he is one of the guys in the Republican party that you're like man

like I look at Mike Pence like what what do I have in common with Mike Pence not nothing that kid's like okay there's some common ground he knows what I'm talking about you know he's rapping Lose Yourself at the Iowa Fairgrounds uh you know primary early event like he's he's got something there for for younger people which is nice I actually forgot I was going to wear that off to wear this tomorrow but uh I actually got served a shirt which is it's like one of those presidential shirts it was just anyone under 80. like instead of like Biden 24 dude and the gerontocracy um I that is one thing I am 100 behind we it's just so depressing to see these ancients on stage like talking about

this stuff and is that the those are these odds yeah it's Biden at 200 Trump at 270 the back at 1500. dude we need a we need a JFK candidate is who we need we need someone who's young and like seems like they have their mental you know plus a thousand here I'll give you one better myself replace the J with an R yeah you got RFK yeah this guy's got a vaccine he wants to sell it I'd like someone who's young who also like you know I'll think it outside of the Orthodoxy but yeah you get too far outside there too I just I just like a nice normal person who like felt

reasonable on stage is that too much to ask for does that I just don't want someone who believes exactly what I believe I wonder if anyone's ever thought bought that before why can't we get some of that that would be that's what I would vote for Pence Pence's hair reminds me of my grandmother's haircut it's like the short way if you got if you got Grammys you know that short white haircuts yeah yeah he's Barber he's working fine guy yeah how old is JFK JFK was like 43. yeah I think he was one of the youngest uh Teddy Roosevelt was 42. but he came in after get after McKinley got assassinated damn you know your presidential history

McKenna's a history major you know it's a history major I got history facts on Deck it all made sense now I have a history I have a history staff for you then we'll move on a presidential history stat for you there have been 45 presidents most people in the world or in the US their eye color is brown we can agree on that it's like I don't know some crazy Stat or percentage it's like 80 or 90 of people are have uh brown eyes do I know how many presidents have had brown eyes out of 45 none only four or five of them uh four or five they've all had like blue or green eyes I got I got blue eyes but I'm from Canada so I can't run you know one day one day soon I'm I'm Jewish and I got

brown eyes no shot I got it um actually before we go all the way back to crypto do you guys see Nvidia earnings came out yesterday yeah it's not bullish that they blew out earnings and that they're now tanking uh I missed that I didn't even look at the stock today it's pumping funny last night yeah it's after hour print but I think people would be expecting a lot higher like I mean it's up it's up from 120 less than a year ago I mean totally but look at look at the last like

three months it's been basically the same price so Nvidia I I just same chart yeah the last three months the last three months you're saying I say okay yeah yeah it's no it's been doing extremely well it's so nvidia's they've largely what they're cashing in on is the AI boom and they've got these chips that are extremely valuable very limited there were stories we're probably talking on this on this pod uh probably a month or a month and a half ago where I think Vince you were saying right that there are companies that were raising off of the ability to get their hands on these chips and this was around the time that all the thought pieces came out

from the VCS on Chachi BT and how AI was going to drive this whole big thing and I mean I was telling you know a couple months later I do think those llms are real and I think they'll be significant but I do think they were extremely over hyped in terms of the short-term impact the question that I have for you guys is would you guess the sales cycle looks like for chips like how far in advance do companies need to purchase these things I would guess far in advance so the question is are these sales that Nvidia are talking about on this last earnings call is that like a reflection of anything relatively recent in their business or were these sales locked in many moons ago because that's what I

would sort of guess I have a dumb I have a dumb accounting question does that do their sales get recognized when they deliver the chips or whatever orders delivered I mean I I haven't looked at it but yeah it have to be delivered it should be delivered okay yeah so like in my mind it's the exact same thing in terms of like hype cycle versus sales cycle um as Bitcoin you you know mining chips like gpus and and you know custom mining chips that we that Nvidia used to sell Bitcoin miners which would be you know you have the hype of Bitcoin going up and everyone rushes to order and there's no chips available and so they say you know we don't have you this quarter but next quarter or the quarter after that we'll get you in and so you have like this natural lag effect of you know once

like the Bitcoin price pops Nvidia sales of Bitcoin miners are still really strong for the subsequent three or four quarters but you know eventually they come down and so there's a lag effect and I think what you're seeing is business that's already been locked in but like if these llms don't start producing real use cases at some point like this is all all charts ultimately meet the same fate big up big down yeah if I'm looking back at 2017 Nvidia so 2017 Nvidia sales to bitcoin miners accounted for over 10 percent of their revenue and 2017 Bitcoin obviously pumped Nvidia their stock Rose 225 in 2018 when obviously Bitcoin crypto crashed

Nvidia missed earnings targets uh because excessive GPU inventory built up due to uh overlooked crypto mining demand their stock fell 54 then that year so it's actually pretty correlated it's pretty correlated to this Boon busting Krypton I wonder if you'll see it like pretty strong correlation with what is an inevitable some point collapse in AI not long-term collapse but the difference is you can see the Bitcoin price going up you can't see the amount of money these VCS are being or aping into these you know llm companies that are trying to buy gpus read hopping raised a billion to go buy gpus on a three billion valuation and yeah and that that chatbot I think

has like 3 000 followers on Twitter like not not that bullish what do you think about it uh and you guys know anthropic right anthropic so I I actually think their product Claude is like the best of all dllms that I use like you can upload PDFs and spreadsheets and all that kind of stuff they have a minimum wage at their company minimum wage it's three hundred thousand dollars there's people that are million there's a million dollar AI job in Netflix too you know like this is this is an inside bubble this is like the Venture Capital bubble that bubbled up with wework except there happens to be this massive public company selling them the inputs that they need

so I don't know like I think the temperature on AI has gone down considerably in the valley just like the use cases aren't as immediate as people thought but we'll probably cost for the full year and then I think 2024 is like delivery time if we haven't figured out a new app other than chat gbt it's on it's hard to see the business model remember there were these takes a couple months ago there's a this was a VC who shall remain nameless but it's again comparing crypto uh you know everyone that I know like wants to work on crypto but there's no use case everyone that works in AI everyone's like trying to sign up or something like that is the paraphrasing of this tweet but yeah there were a bunch of people

that were very interested in trying a free llm uh sustainable business model that leverages this it's a little bit harder to squint and C actually and I sort of just feel like AI is just going to be a great cost center reduction for Gigantic orgs like Google or Microsoft is what I sort of feel like but how investable is that I don't know it'll give it'll give companies air cover to fire people in a way that doesn't seem ruthless and you know cold-hearted like oh we cut we fired half we we let go of 50 of people because AI you know could do it better like that makes more sense so I think that'll happen but like my experience of using chat gbt

is typing something in getting an answer cross-referencing it on Google it's like half wrong I edit it you know I put it back into the email I copy paste and the last time I did that was like three or four months ago we'll see I don't see a lot of jobs being automated here let's let's end on crypto quickly I I'm not sure how much on this podcast we've talked about eigenlayer but there was a bit of an announce so slowly eigenlayer is moving ahead and they talked about increasing the cap on um their portion of uh lsts that they accept so here's a little dashboard this happened on August 22nd so a couple days ago and they capped the inflows to 100

000 each so you could see just exactly how long that took before they capped it again this is the balance for anyone who's interested in uh Steve uh arith which is rockpool eth I guess they expanded it as well to Sea beef I didn't realize that seabeath was going to be included but mostly Steve but a healthy mix of CB Ethan arith seems to be about split um there's some cool uh you can see this is just a nice dashboard actually of um you can see withdrawals as well but yeah eigenlayer is it does have the potential to be a little bit of a catalyst that I think people are sleeping on the other thing I

think people are sleeping on I was thinking about to see their day Celestia is going to launch their main net soon so I would imagine we're going to get a Celestia token out of here soon as well yeah I think people might be on that as a catalyst to be honest with you like a big token like that that's a project that everyone believes in it's pretty l1e you know like I don't know with you I'm with you and it's like I have no idea uh I have no idea either I don't have any I have no Financial stake in it at all but I just thinking the other day like man it's gonna launch and people are gonna yeah people are gonna wanna buy that I think um we need we need like the degens to be

recapitalized basically you know there's not enough for like the funds to really eat here but like the z-gens can can you know spin up some trading Capital the question is it like is it from somebody else in crypto or is it outside of crypto or is it at the sacrifice of another asset so I don't know we'll see I don't see like Celestia you know like being Mass Market I don't have to bring in the the normies but maybe yeah yeah well bull markets don't get kicked off with normies like it's not like D5 summer was a normie was a normie thing no it was it was like the d-gens getting capitalized yeah for the Run yeah yeah maybe that's enough here there's not as many djans as there used to be so we

have less mouths to feed uh I don't know man there were many d-gens at like the end of the 2019 bear Market I was d-gening I know yeah I feel like it's like the same crowd yeah it's good it's good it's good I like I like the people who are left it was actually a big week for a circle would love to give a shout out to one of our favorite balds Jeremy Lair who the uh I wanna I just wonder what these guys think he is the goat yeah he's great we're calling Circle and coinbase have been murdering the bear Market you know what I just heard from our head of Finance yesterday that circles uh

customer success team and like customer relationship team responds instantly or sorry uh coinbase sorry coinbase's team I've never heard coinbase having good customer support in my life they're now now they've got like I feel like just coinbase and circle been murdering the bear Market I'm really interested to see how coinbase evolves when the ETFs are a thing and it's one percent fees to trade the ETF versus like a hundred on coinbase I think retail will still do coinbase but I think it'll bring a lot of liquidity that isn't on platform or or maybe is on platform Downstream but like something will happen there but yeah their respective Corp Dev teams are just murdering it a lot of good

Acquisitions a lot of good new Partnerships and usdc is just printing I do think usdc is vulnerable the longer that rates stay this high um but I don't know he got some tricks because people will bring treasuries on chain and things like that no just swap to die stake it in the DSR earn five percent you know and uh every time you do that in some ways you're deleting usdc Supply yeah but swap to die in the get five percent you know it's easier than that Park your usdc and coinbase and get 4.5 percent yep yep that's for 99 of people yeah yeah

um the the actual details from Circle this week was there's a new there was some sort of increased partnership where coinbase took an equity stake in circle uh centers the Consortium that they have that's a separate governance body JV of circle and coinbase that ended up being dissolved um so a circle is taking control of usdc issuance and governance um and it looks like coinbase encircle equally share Revenue in the interest generated income from broader usage of usdc which is expected to be pretty sizeable I don't know what equally means I would be sort of surprised if it was a complete 50 50 split but uh it's interesting I mean it feels like they're the circle and coinbase or the

it's like the Allied Forces or something you know they're like the good guys joining joining hands and yeah they don't oversell that statement though like the revenue let me read the revenue will continue to be shared based on the amount of usdc held on each of our platforms additionally we will now equally share an interest income generated from the broader distribution and usage of usdc like that is pretty damn bullish for coinbase I agree they're building a nice little business for themselves yeah at some point it's going to be profitable and it's going to be really interesting as a public company maybe that's like a year or two away but I mean this this thing combined with base having like a monster week and the stock not moving at all I'm like man Wall

Street is sleeping I think I think people are just starting to listen to macro podcasts again and get themselves freaked right out like that that feels kind of like where we are a lot of the progress like there's real work that's going into crypto right now on a lot of different narratives a lot of different levels like at some point that will be realized in in the fundamentals and the price yeah last thing about Circle there's so the they also announced that there was going to be they're expanding to six different chains they didn't mention which chains but there's a partnership with Shopify and circle they're using Solana pay where now Merchants that are using Solana pay can offer a cross-border usdc payments token gated offers and nft based loyalty programs so

the average cost per transaction using Solana is like 0.00025 cents as opposed to between one and a half and three and a half percent per transaction Shopify is not nothing they account for 10 of total us e-commerce and 444 billion dollars worth of global economic activity with 4.3 million online Merchants so yeah that's 17.2 times the amount of seven day moving average addresses on Solana today so bullish Solana and cost aside cross-border payments is miserable um like truly horrendous be kind of cool that would be I feel

like usually I'm bearish on these sorts of things but I actually think this sounds like a pretty cool you remember when coinbase actually launched this coinbase launched the ability to do this it might have even been with Shopify the big difference back then was um nobody wants to pay an eth and nobody wants to pay in Bitcoin and anything right and now that like usdc like stable coins are tens of billions of dollars like there could there could be something here I do think this is the return of like this and we saw we saw a couple new like wall wallets like beam had something like I think payments narratives is starting to come back which is exciting right because like I mean Mike was saying this it's like moving money from country to country is a nightmare wallets like cash app venmo it's crazy those aren't connected uh the

existing networks like Swift and like ACH they're built in the freaking 1970s right they're close to Outsiders I think payments are just very broken and it's cool to see this coming back I do have a counter take for the CR for the circle thing though which is um if you look at a so the I think the the argument and even I tweeted this like oh you know usdc will bring fees down I would bet I need to talk to someone who understands fees better because I don't understand it really I would guess so what we're all arguing is that like there's these imp there's this fee like two percent fee on Shopify and uh paying with usdc will bring that down or what we're arguing there is that the fees go to cover uh infrastructure those are infrastructure

fees and the crypto infrastructure is cheaper I bet though what a lot of the fees go to are risk fees and that's like covering costs uh related like fraud prevention verification reversals uh chargebacks things like that um and that's like that's not necessarily something crypto solves it isn't and and speaking of Solana I guess it is because there's finality but like you're still gonna have yeah yeah I mean but just a lot of the conversations we have with traditional asset managers are that especially at the fun level this isn't cross-border payments but like there are so many different collection points fee collection points you know places where expenses get stuck that

just doing things on chain allows them to save so much money like there's no there's no wonder that Circle has like 30 or 300 people and does like I think like probably like half a billion a billion in Revenue per year like it it's just because it's built on blockchain Rails but the last thing I was going to end with is apparently they found three billion of assets to sell in crypto for the FTX estate and uh unfortunately Solana is 1.3 billion of that oh I didn't see this it invests over the next like three or four or five years but it starts in September the sellers found more coins basically and oh there's one other coins and the borrow

rates on Solan have been spiking over the past week so someone's kind of trying to get ahead of this at least it seems probably Galaxy yeah uh Roman storm is out of jail shout out Roman nice that's good all right guys yeah peace foreign