Go-To-Market Strategies in Crypto | Jim & Myles

Transcript

all platforms are token economies however small or big and so you need tokens on your platform you need more more the more tokens you have the bigger the economy and I think salana has proven that more tokens equals more better uh just based on like the success of Pumped out fund and then what that does for transactions trading volume today's episode is brought to you by Ledger the global leader in digital asset security celebrating 10 years of innovation Ledger is trusted by 7 million users secures 20% of the world's digital assets and Remains the most secure Hardware wallet for your crypto and logins follow the link in this episode's show notes to grab your Ledger today hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Unis swap Labs who is

launching the largest bug Bounty program in the entire history of crypto it's a $5.5 million program this is aiming to be the most rigorously reviewed codebase ever deployed to ethereum so if you want more eligibility on the scope rewards payouts Etc just click the link in the bottom of the show notes tell that I sent you you'll be hearing all about Unis swap Labs later in the program hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Moro the sleeping giant of defi is what some people are calling them that is me I am some people I am a huge fan of Moro the protocol and the team you've heard Paul frambo one of the founders of Moro on the program before Moro lets you earn borrow and build on your terms with better rates for lenders and borrowers and an immutable design free from

upgrades or parameter changes you're going to be hearing all about Moro later in the program but for now let's get on to the show show hey everyone quick disclaimer before we get into today's episode nothing said on bell curve is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice our guest and I may hold positions in the companies funds or projects discussed all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve today I'm joined by two friends of the Pod uh miles uh of I guess Delta I we've unveiled that and also Jim pillo of cap guys welcome great to be back thanks for having me it's been a minute miles it's

been a minute since you and I have been uh doing anything I know I know I think we should do we'll do a few more this spring I think uh yeah had to had to learn how to product there for a while but now that uh you know I'm about whatever six months in um yeah I think we get back into it all right cool well we can take some of the lessons uh that you're kind of putting into into use in real time here because I want to talk to both of you guys about a subject which I think gets discussed a lot at a high level but we don't go into the weeds off and on which is go to market in crypto and there's a little bit of kind of dark arts magic uh you know marketing and positioning Etc uh but there's also an

element which is very tactical uh and very execution oriented and I want to talk about both of the components of go to market on this podcast with you guys maybe start with the higher level positioning type stuff and then I want to get into the Weeds on kind of the different buckets of what you need to do to tactically execute a good go to market strategy in crypto and actually use some examples of folks that we think are doing it well um and maybe some folks that could potentially be doing it better just Lessons Learned Etc and for listeners I think we're going to approach this mostly from the perspective of a new L1 or L2 or just call it a developer platform in general where the idea is you want to attract developers who are building applications that will ultimately make things that are useful for users so um that's

largely the perspective that we're going to be approaching this conversation from but maybe we can start with that first big bucket and Miles I'm going to Tee It Up uh to you here where you know when you're thinking about going to Market there's outside before you start doing all the things that you need to do to actually onboard users developers Etc there's kind of a goals and consideration of how do you want to position your product so walk us through the framework of how like a developer platform L1 or L2 what are all the different considerations that go into positioning yeah totally and so as you said like I think this is a distinct work stream from go to market execution sales but they're obviously extremely interrelated and and you know one a lot of the work should inform the other and

vice versa um but from a positioning side this is you know at a high level how you present yourselves to the world how you present your platform to the world um it's the messaging it's the narrative it's you know basically who you are and who you're not right who you're counterposing against um and I think at a very high level like regardless of the nature of the project you kind of want to put yourself into the largest mental folder possible right in the eyes of the audience um you can think about like when you pull up you know your folder on your MacBook and you've got you know you click one drop down and it says like crypto right and you've got Bitcoin eth alt l1s um and

then within eth right you would have another drop down it's like rollups okay and then within that you've got like e M or optimistic ZK and then like alt VM rollups if you if you're and no no hate to like alt VM rollups I think we need them they're great but like you are putting yourself in a pretty small folder as you know okay within eth a rollup and within rollups this you know alt VM which we think is better than you know evm performance right there's a lot of context that your audience needs to have to even like understand what you are um and so I'd say like to the extent that's possible um you want to present yourselves in a way that you know lands yourself in a much bigger folder right um ideally it

can be like well there's Bitcoin there's eth there's Al alms and then there's this right um or you know within rollups there's like the big guys and then there's me um so I would say that that is like kind of a highlevel objective um for across all all platforms right and then okay then you get into like the the how you do it um a little bit more like a click of detail um and you know I think your your positioning and your messaging is an opportunity to present like a a POV that draws out like-minded developers right like-minded customers from wherever they are and say like oh wow like what they're putting

out there really resonates with I guess my view of the world like um you know I resonate with this ethos and and this long-term Vision I think you know you ideally want to like evoke a reaction of like oh this is like basically what I've always wanted to exist and you know people that I I feel more like-minded with with them than I do maybe where I currently am um and last thing I'll say here is that I think specific to you know who you're kind of targeting for that reaction you definitely want it you like need to think about okay who is our like Day Zero most likely customer um and you know craft the message for them but in a perfect world you can thread the needle

where you put out a more like Evergreen message right that resonates with those Day Zero customers that you need but will also resonate with let's say like day two day three customers um something like you know the crypto curious fintech that like is looking at crypto and a new light because you're you're putting out sort of like differentiated messaging right that's not always possible frankly and sometimes you can get stuck uh there's a risk of like not appealing to anybody if you're trying to to to do that too aggressively but yeah I think I think that's that's like a I'll pause there but um a bunch of considerations all right so to sum up there there are a couple of different

buckets there's the how big is the folder or the bucket that you want to put yourself in so there's the Bitcoin eth folder rollup folder and kind of Imagine different subfolders Etc then there's the values alignment um and then uh I actually want to start I've got a follow-up question for you on that first like the how big of the bucket you want to put yourself in how much of this has to do at least in crypto with this relative valuation game that people like to play and this maybe the good example of this is hyper liquid while you got a people that are pretty upset about whether or not it's an L1 or an L3 and this is an actual debate that people are having and calling everyone mid curve and I would guess the reason for that is because you know if you're in the L1

bucket valuation wise your ceiling is $2 trillion dollar which is Bitcoin and then if you're suddenly an L3 and you get bucketed with dgen you know you're looking at I don't even know what their valuation is yeah totally so like I'll like respond to that with like a contrast right um like I think I don't think Atlas has even like referred to themselves as a rollup right they kind of called them it's a chain right and and that is I think tied to kind of the the line of thinking that you were you were just describing on on the polar opposite side of the spectrum Bas and optimism they have you know are Pres presting themselves in a way that like their goal is basically to say oh this is like an extension of ethereum right

this is ethere exactly ethereum but cheaper better faster um and you know coinbase has made all these nice features that I can use you know only here right so it's like they're just trying to like basically export as much of ethereum activity as possible to them um versus Atlas is you know I think and a bunch of other new ones have just kind of presented themselves in a way that like this is net new this is a chain this is a product um you know sure great like if we get a bunch of eth users because we're also an eth rollup that's awesome um but that's not necessarily how we like want to present ourselves to the world Jim I want to tag you in here what do you think about

this yeah we're seeing a few rollups now like to say like we're blockchain right um we're chain like that's what we are um and I would say that to your point Mike that like the entire Michael the entire Point here is like the valuation that you can achieve by being a platform versus like an everybody wants to be an on L1 valuation but maybe not everyone's in L1 and so the more you can like blur the lines like the the the more the higher like the potential upside is and like that gets investors interested it gets holders interested it gets retail interested and like buying your token holding your token um buying more of your token holding more of your token um

and and kind of like just the ceiling is just higher right so like and we see a number of change like we see a number of applications looking to become like you know application specific chains or rollups um aena just made an announcement that like they're going to be building their own chain right uh so like there's the I guess the Assumption there is is that the more control you have over like transaction flow um the more control you have over like Pro processing your own transactions the more valuable you are because like a bigger platform um just to talk a little bit more about like the platform side of things like I think like one of the questions that people have to ask themselves when they're building a product is like where do you fit on like the B2B B to C B2 B to C or

B to D which is like what most like uh chains are is like they're business like they're actually two things like we I did a bunch of research last year or not research I had a conversation with uh Zen Lama um who was like one of the uh devell as up until recently at monad and I realized I didn't know anything about devell and so I like hunted him down at one of the events and I was like like what is what do you think devell is like from your perspective how does manad like handle devell and it was really it like it was enlightening but it also just told me that how little I knew about it and so I wound up going down this like crazy Rabbit Hole trying to read books on devell um and if you ask people about web3 devell they'll tell

you like they have various feelings and like emotions and uh like they'll tell you that it's like partially Business Development it's partially like it doesn't really exist um but essentially I was able to read a few books that like I thought were really helpful I've actually recommended a number of them to like portfolio companies and people that I've talked to on web to and then you just try to make like some sort of like connection or correlation between web to devell um where there are books about it that you can read and you you come away with like quite bit of like education and learning that you can say oh yeah this this team did this right this team read this book probably and like executed on like three chapters three four and five um one book that I would like just strongly recommend to anybody

it's a very easy read it's like probably less than 150 Pages was the developer facing startup um it was so good that like I did Cliff Notes for it and I like actually posted it on my Twitter um like the cliff notes so if anybody that doesn't want to read just wants to like read the notes uh I just found it to be like wildly insightful and gave me like so much like information that I could share with portfolio companies um on just like how to think about um a business which is like I think what we could we could argue like a blockchain sort of operates like um or a platform and like how do you Market to developers and one of the things that you come away with almost immediately when it comes to web 3 versus Web Two is that you have

two sets of customers at least in crypto where you only have like arguably one set of C customers like in a corporate setting like in web to um if you're a business if you're a developer facing platform you are just marketing to Developers for a very very long time possibly forever if you're a public company or a private company um web 3 has this like kind of like challenge which is like they they have two products right um they have the platform which needs to Market to developers and marketing to developers is like very very like no like they don't like a lot of fluff they very much want to talk about like technical things with technical people and they want to like they don't want to be marketed too so

like that's like you can't market for developers like they will sniff it out and they will like they understand it very quickly they're very smart um the second thing is that like you have this other product which is the token which goes live very quickly and so now you have to mark it to another category of people who are more interested in like speculation and investing from from blanch right like a lot of these companies don't start talking about like share prices and how to like optimize for like share price uh until like much further down the road in like their their corporate Journey or their like business journey and so you're kind of no offense to retail here but like you're kind of having you're kind of stuck in this weird place where you you have two products the token and the platform you have to mark it to like

the left curve and the right curve and uh it's a very kind of like difficult needle to thread um where you need like both people both parties to be very interested in you keep their attention and like somehow not piss off one uh in in hopes of like attracting the other it's it's it's really wild it's really cool it's a great experience I mean I I think it's a great industry and I think that's like a part of like what makes it so challenging and so fun for so many uh developer like so and why do you see so many different flavors of it um and why marketing is like really kind of an art not a science uh thus far in web three yeah it's a very interesting the the other reason I think that's such an

interesting point in terms of how do you Market the asset is there's kind of like what levers do you really have to make the asset go up maybe we can talk about that this is where you get into you know not Financial advice you know what's got but it's it's an interesting thing about what you can even do but the reason it's so important I think as well and where It ultimately ends up connecting to developers is that the total addressable market for apps that are built on your platform often directly correlate to the market cap of the asset so the direct examples that I would give you are on ethereum in the early days where you know what were people doing they were depositing Ethan looping it in a or they were basically getting leverage on their ethr maker or they were swapping ethereum with other ERC 20s on uh you

know on Unis swap or at least by V2 so you know the actual market cap of ethereum the fact that that was a very large asset created the opportunity ultimately for a whole bunch of applications so they are end up they are ti together and there are other businesses by the way and I'm curious Jim if if any of these books talked about this where the analog that I would also give you is there are lots of businesses in the real world where you have a long value chain maybe just take an example of someone like a like a manufacturing value chain like John Deere right or something like that so there's often the the create like the OEM the creator of something like John Deere is separated from they've like a lot of these big companies have outsourced their sales forces to

Regional Distributors um that actually have access to the customers and so often times what you end up seeing is there's some kind of specialization right where you have John Deere that makes these uh tractors they send it out to these Regional sales forces and those like Regional Distributors actually have the relationship with the customer and then eventually John Deere says hold on a second I want a direct relationship with my customer and so I don't really know how you do that as a developer platform is an L1 or an L2 right you you what you can influence and who you can speak to is the developers that are building on your platform it's a little bit more difficult to say how do I Market my token correctly what messaging can I do and what levers can I pull to have it be a successful token or not I

guess this is kind of the design like the tokenomics the design and how transparent it is and all that type of stuff but it's kind of an open question for me in terms of how you actually even do that yeah um yeah I think it also gets into like the um the design of the economics right do you are you trying to get as many people as possible to come buy your token and stake it or do you want them to go you know use it and jym you just we were just talking about this you were telling me about uh so's um sort of approach here and yeah I think the only other thing I'd say is just in terms of the um you know using the token as like um kind of a a go to market tool um it really does depend on like the

nature of the platform um I think if you are especially with like rollup Centric platforms where you're selling Whole execution environments you know wholesale to to developers rather than getting everybody you know in one shared State um you know they may not want like your token to be the center of attention and like that may not that might actually hurt your ability to get really ambitious projects right if they are um you know trying to be like their their own Shilling you know use the token as their own Shilling Point um but there are definitely tools you can you know if you want to incentivize certain types of behavior the token as a tool um it's also an attention grabber obviously

right all platforms are token economies um however small or big and so you need tokens on your platform you need more and more the more tokens you have the bigger the economy um and I think salana has proven that more tokens equals more better uh just based on like the success of pump out fund and then what that does for transactions trading volume uh realize uh reev right um it's it's a flywheel um and and I think one of the other things that's like worth so like you do need a lot of tokens like you need more tokens like trading and that's how you get the fly wheel that's how you

battle test like even the infrastructure to make sure that it can handle you know like surges in trading activity and volume um getting developers to build on you is like I think probably like so number one you have like the tokenomics within the plat let's I'm gonna lean on like l1s here for a second but like you have tokenomics where you're providing economic security you're staking the token you're earning more to like you're receiving tokens in exchange for like providing like locking up your token and providing some sort of like Economic Security so that the token the the blockchain produces blocks on the flip side like there's this there's this other community allocation that we keep seeing on these pie charts and generally speaking the foundation has some like control over the treasury and that's

proba the most relevant like your example Mike where like okay we have these tokens like what are we going to do with them like are we going to sit on them are we going to stake them with other validators are we gonna have some sort of like staking program or delegation program for the tokens are they all going to be staked don't we want this to be used as like a gas token don't we want there to be an economy don't we want our asset to be like at the at the Forefront or at like the base and Foundation of that uh economy and if we do need that then we need these tokens to be out and we need them to be like being traded and we need them to be like we need people using the platform we need people to have these tokens in

their hands if you give me a very high inflation rate then like the incentive for me to ever not stake the token is like lower uh fundamentally and especially when there aren't a lot of applications so I think what we're starting to see which is like something that's kind of probably a lesson learned like when you look at Cosmos in 20121 there were like inflation rates that were like 200% plus right and like that was great until it wasn't anymore um and like people held and held and held and then they just dumped the token and a lot of these tokens are down like 90% or more um what we're starting to see is like inflation rates that are start off like much lower like somewhere below 5% frankly like sometimes it's two and a

half percent sometimes it's 4 percent and you could think to yourself like oh this is like the the network being stingy or something like that but I think a different way and like a different like kind of perspective on it is that like maybe we're going to use those to incentivize like people actually using the versus just like sitting holding their bags and like never doing anything with it if you have a 25% inflation rate like a lending protocol can never offer more yield than 25% right on like on like depositing collateral unless it's like some sort of like LST so I think what you kind of want to do is like have like this kind of this sweet spot where like there are some whales there are some token holders that just like prefer like low risk lower risk like rewards like in in

incentives and will will stake their tokens but you have this whole other group in category of people who are like actually more interested in like hey 2 and a half% really isn't that good I think that there's like better opportunities out there for me to make more money um by like by speculating a little bit or trading or buying some other new token new thing that comes out right and I think in those situations like the foundation does does actually have quite a bit of like Leverage if they want to use it to like incentivize type of use use cases um you could have kpis um or metrics that you you you talk to like the early developers because like you have when you first launch how many applications like ideally you have a quite a few applications launching on your network

but like presumably nobody really knows what's good and what's not a good application on day one and so people are going to try a few things but like you have to give them some sort of carrot to try these things and if the foundation can maybe subsidize the usage maybe like the interest rate that like you would receive for posting collateral is 5% and you the foundation like kind of incentivizes another 2% so now all of a sudden you're earning like 7% interest like for for just providing collateral and then when you borrow like maybe the interest rate would be 4% instead like because of the 5 perent is being charged like sorry maybe it's like 6% right because like if you're giving depositors 4% then like

presumably borrowers are actually paying 6% maybe you can subsidize some of that with like an offset or some sort of incentives that reduce the interest rate to 2% uh or 1% or zero% or NE or negative percent and that's really going to like incentivize people to borrow um and just try that try the platform and then it's like up to the platform and up to the application developers to build a really great experience that like makes it sticky that like once those incentives sort of fall off and and stop that you have this like flywheel where like hey I actually really like using this this is like one of the best experiences I've ever had like I put this in like the category of chains that I use like whether it's I'm using Bas a little bit I use S like every day I I've been

messaging on on Twitter with a few different folks I've been using S every day and I'd be lying if I didn't say that the incentives are great but like I actually see myself using it quite a bit um and like also like bridging USD like borrowing against some of my my tokens and like bridging those to other other chains to use them um for trading or for investing or something like that so I think like there's there's ways to do this there's creative ways to do this and it's about just like being creative and being open to experimentation so I think like with a foundation having some access and like ability to do these things you can also like sort of like optimize for like what your what Your targeted goals are like you need to have goals as a foundation of like what kind of usage you want to

see maybe stable coins are kind of like maybe stable coin Supply is really low on your chain okay well like can we incentivize people to Bridge Over uh stable coins and a lot of these applications aren't going to launch the token on day one when they launch the application they're going to have their own process of like trying to figure out who who are real users and who are not real users and so like I kind of think it's up to the platform to like subsidize that usage early on to get and Kickstart the token economy after which case like eventually those incentives fall off but then you have all these applications that are like rich in users and like transactions and volume and they can start to subsidize their own usage through their own tokens um it seems like maybe obvious I don't think

it is and I think like we're going to see a bunch of different like experimentations with it I think bar chain has bar chain and Anisha are the governance like I think governance is going to play a big role and like how those incentives are distributed um and allocated um there will be kpis is like my general understanding for for inisha um I don't know about for bar chain but we're seeing experimentation I think it's pretty cool and I think like it's 2024 it's it is a or sorry it's 2025 it is a bull market and so people are on chain and they are doing things like 2023 we had a conversation about this before like I don't know what were you guys doing on chain in 2023 like I was just cry I was mostly just sad and not doing much of anything to be perfectly

honest with you but right now I'm on chain every day like the whole team is what I would say is just I agree with all that Jim I I think that that there's like just tactically um that sort of um that like exercise and those decisions come are all like Downstream of a bunch of more like foundational sort of decision decisions when you're you know in the earliest stages of go to market like in order to know which sort of you know uh behaviors to incentivize with you know the foundation right you need to know okay what sort of use cases are actually on the platform and then before that you actually have to get them right so it starts really with understanding

like okay very simply like who problem are we like most acutely solving today um given our properties right um what sort of projects will best highlight these differentiating properties um what sort of projects will like highlight basically you know the the sort of ethos that we want to to create here like a culture that we want to create because that in itself can be you know a GTM hack as well um and then I think from there you can decide how like targeted you want to be with your go to market um like if it's very clear what these use cases are and like you a a very coherent plan right like I want an app for this this this this this and

they're all going to be complimentary share users um then you put together a team that like is you know best equipped to execute on that and like or maybe you want to be uh either you don't have necessarily a great idea of what you want to um the use cases that you want to Target and you don't want to actually limit these sort of use cases by your own imagination right um and you want to go as wide as possible um then you kind of take like a you know open up the community as early as possible get everybody in regardless of whether they like they're um you know a meme maker or like a blue chip app developer um let's just get a bunch of people under this

tent right and then at the very least we can you know when a project looks at us they'll say well there's a bunch of users in like kind of an active Community right that cares if I go there I don't you know it's not maybe the most coherent like mix of people or like applications but there there's something there right um I think this goes into the sort of like uh this should inform your hiring the sort of people that you want to hire right um in the form I think like just generally like the the strategy that you use and and this goes into devell right or like devell you know is both top of fun is like actually Cooper wrote a great piece on this the

other week um I think it's called devil like sales in the trench coat um it's like yeah these guys you know are a combination of top ofun funnel evangelists um you know as well as like Community managers and and then also like you know Solutions Engineers um to to some extent and the which one of those three you know you really want to prioritize like I think matters on if you want to go super targeted or super wide if you want to go super targeted then you want like Solutions Engineers right that are going to actually go super deep with these these customers make sure that their implementations are as successful as possible if you know you want to go as wide as possible and you need like Community managers and

evangelists hosting events hackathons etc etc just kind of like opening up the tent um so yeah I think and then you get down to like okay what else can we offer and then we've got this token we can use right and and like once you kind of know who your launch you know cohort is and what they look like you can kind of back into you know the best way to support them with your token Ledger is the global leader in digital asset security trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital Assets in recent years Ledger has built a comprehensive ecosystem of products and services making digital ownership more secure and accessible for everyone Ledger's newest devices Ledger stacks and Ledger Flex introduced the world's

first secure touchscreens making it easier and safer to manage your assets alongside Ledger stacks and Ledger Flex they have also launched The Ledger security key app offering a safer alternative to traditional password management follow the link in today's show notes to get started with Ledger today all right everyone listen up like I said at the top of the episode Unis swap Labs is rolling out the red carpet and launching a 15.5 million doll bug Bounty this is the largest bug bounty in the entire history of crypto to anyone that can find a critical bug with the Unis swap B4 protocol this bug bount aims to make it the most rigorously reviewed codebase ever deployed to ethereum now the Unis swap name is basically synonymous with

security $2.4 trillion in cumulative volume has passed through Unis swap V2 and V3 without a single hack so Unis swap V4 is dedicated to bringing that same level of security and transparency to the V4 protocol so if you want more information or eligibility or scope or Rewards or payout or any of that good stuff there is a link in the bottom of the show notes I highly recommend that you stop listening right now go to the show notes click the link head over and tell them the I sent you start earing money today hey everyone this episode is brought to you by Moro the sleeping giant within defi as I like to call them I am a huge fan of both the team behind Moro as well as the protocol had the CEO on Paul frambo earlier this year to talk about moro's architecture and the part

that I really love about it is the modular design that gives you the user either the lender or the borrower much much more flexibility so I'm actually going to share my screen what it looks like to go on to Moro but as opposed to other barland protocols you basically just have one option you get multiple different vaults which are curated by the industry's leading uh risk assessor so that could be a vault created by spark me Capital Gauntlet Steakhouse Financial Etc you have all of these different options depending on what risk return you want to use anywhere from 9% apy all the way up to uh 16 or 177% so you've got a whole bunch of different options there the other thing about Moro is that they got the simplest code base in the entire industry very very few lines of code which means it's a very

very secure protocol so again I am a huge fan of this team if you are a lender and want to earn interest or you want to borrow in a capital efficient way I highly recommend that you click the link at the bottom of the show notes head over and tell them that I sent you all right cheers so I have another consideration maybe to make around just incentives and I I actually want to double click on something that Miles said as well which is that sometimes it's hard to know especially at early stages what you should be incentivizing and I actually want to maybe try to defend some of the very early iterations of yield farming and you know it got it end ended up getting knocked quite a bit because everyone said oh look at the CAC that you're paying and it's way too much

and y ya it's mercenary liquidity the one of the benefits of yield farming that I don't think got discussed enough was that it was actually highly simple it was very very simple in terms of what you needed to do you just needed to lock your tokens up that was something that most of these projects needed because they were based on attracting uh supply side liquidity at that point and there is a I have this lesson from just designing sales comp plans where sometimes when you get too granular in terms of incentivizing things you they combine in weird ways to produce weird incentives that you could never have predicted and there are kind of these design philosophies and principles that I have around this which is make it really simple everyone should clearly easily understand what you should do and you should almost assume a paperclip

Factory uh where people will just take it to far um so I think there's it's a little bit challenging actually when we like blockworks has kind of evolved over the years where we started at as a conference business and then a podcast business and editorial and research and data and every single time we spin up a new part of our business we don't have any kpis for the first year because we actually don't know what we should be measuring at that point and I want people running in some random Direction and splattering heads in a wall right you kind of want to almost give some more autonomy and optimize for flexibility and choice at least in the earlier days um so and you know it's funny like as as you guys were describing kind of the the challenge around uh staking like the where how much you want to play with

inflation and whether or not that incentivizes people to stake versus also uh the token uh it's it's kind of like both of the lessons of Cosmos right like this is uh this is Cosmos RIT large which is they had extremely high stake rates on all the early chains and Ione just kind of locked it up and airdrop Farm especially for Adam but miles I kind of want to push back a little bit about I really do think the best thing that you could do for an ecosystem like L1 or L2 like salana or ethereum or Mega ether whatever is to prioritize the L1 token otherwise you end up with this weird tragedy that Commons where there's no shelling point and I think actually uh D we we put together some some interesting data on this as well like one way that you could judge the success

of an L1 uh or an L2 or developer platform would just be how much application revenue is being generated on that um so people like to use the stuff like chain GDP or whatever just straight up measure application revenue and this is um ethereum an ethereum L2 like the application that or the total aggregate application Revenue that's being produced on salana versus eth plus eth l2s and you can see that it's been flipped uh salana versus ethereum so I don't want to make this a salana versus ethereum no no no no but just just to just to poke on that a little bit because let's look at and not to not to you know be too harsh on avac here but um avac that kind of was I mean they were one of the pioneers of of yield

farming with incentives right on the C chain it's completely incoherent with the strategy of like the last three years which is really B2B sales for subnets right like all none of that activity like translated to new subnets it was hiring a big business development team right that's going to go get like the California DMV to um launch a subnet and that's all I'm saying is like if their goal was to create like a you know basically the most popular like single state machine you know execution environment with tons of apps that share state that you know that and like that that's pretty straightforward I I

totally agree with you but if the token itself is more of like the users may not if you're on a subnet you may not ever see the token ax right it's a B2B token um that doesn't make as much sense and um there's like I don't know there just one it's a Nuance but one of the things I would say is that like B2B is not coming like the B isn't coming if the if it hasn't been tested battle tested a little bit and that like the tech doesn't work and so I think like the ends might justify the means Fair eventually right and so like I do [Music] view so when you have this first Network like you need to have people using it

and so like I think this comes into use cases as well I think uh Toy had a really good like point on I think of block Works podcast which uh was where he was like look there's like six things that you can do on chain that like are like the tried and true it's like lens it's trading it's you know yeah I don't know what the other liquid staking and like I don't know what the other two three are he said like six contracts actually okay six contct SM contracts yeah that's right and so like you build those out I I think generally speaking like the question of like whether you King make or whether you have a general sort of like open economy and say like hey does everybody come here and build or do you want to King make a few projects and I think for where we are

and like how mature this industry is I mean it has a long way to go but it's pretty mature is like you're competing with chains that have a ton of users and a ton of applications and a ton of a ton of DieHard like zealots right and so like I think what you generally have to do is like you have to have a gamble like if you look at the wild west right and you look at Nevada or you look at California like sure California is like about Silicon Valley and a bunch of beautiful homes and uh a lot of like development but like when you look at the wild west and why people went out there to begin with they went they went out there and covered wagons looking to get rich and trying something pretty risky to like to make it right and like

that's the first use case was the Gold Rush and running out there doing crazy things like and like what were like the three businesses that existed out in like the wild west initially it was like pixs and shovels farming uh saloons and like gambling right like I mean there's like sin businesses and you do that you get people to come in you get more and more people to stay and then like then there's an airport later on down the road right then there's like a hotel that that's like really nice like the Four Seasons or something like that but the Four Seasons doesn't just go up and build in a place where like nobody exists right now right golf courses

don't exist on day one they exist over a much longer period of time and like you have to go through the process and like we talk a lot about building civilizations which I think me e just posted something on or build building cities and like it would do people a lot of good to like do some like history research and see like how were cities first built and what were they built on and like my general sense is it was like mining farming booze and gambling you know yeah um so I agree with this maybe let's talk a little bit about now we're getting into some of the execution of go to market which is identifying your customer and sequencing so there's often

times you know you want to especially as a Founder I'm very sympathetic to this idea of you want to build and sell a big Vision right and a big compelling Vision often isn't I want to get a bunch of degens gambling on my chain right but I also think that there's a way that you can have I want to be you know I'm building towards being the Goldman Sachs of crypto in 10 years right you can't really actually say that that's a realistic goal on for year one or two and so I think one of the ways that you can do this you can actually sequence out you know in one or two years this is what I want to be in three or four years this is what I want to be in five or six years etc etc and what are the customers

that I'm going to what are who is my ideal customer going to be at each phase of growth and so totally the reason I like this fiveyear road map is because it's focused on the user yeah it's focused on the user and also I I really think this is one of the things that trips Founders up in general is you your ideal customer the vision of your product ultimately can and should change and evolve over time and this goes a little bit back to what category do you want to put yourself in and you know I sometimes I see like a couple of different there are a couple of different approaches here where let's use the example of an AVS right like AVS is kind of an interesting little subgroup where you can say I am part of

this AVS uh category and immediately what you get is some amount of attention right like some amount of people just care about abss people will immediately kind of know what that is that's the advantage however you might be putting a ceiling on yourself over time that would be the the disadvantage to being an AVS I've always been of the belief that you can evolve the category that you're going to be and it's a little bit better to be known simply for something right if people have to think too hard about what you are I think that's a disadvantage and you can always kind of use it as a you can almost think about you you catch on to one narrative here today I'm an AVS and then in two years you say actually I'm this other thing right like this is what hyper liquid did

I'm a per deex now I'm a L one you know you can change and evolve the Market's perception of who you are so how do you guys think in general about this kind of identifying your customer different phases of growth and um sequencing so I would say this um like you can't really get away with uh the ethereum GTM approach anymore of just like kind of putting out values right and being neutral and kind of saying like if we build it they will come I think in general you want like projects these days are just you already see it they're more opinionated about the use cases that they are saying that they're you know they're differentiated for they're proactive in their targeting and they're

proactive in first-party development right we see this with either first-party apps or infra like Atlas or Anisha you know even things like putting out um you know what's it called like a block explorers and and you know first party like wallet adapters and things like that amms order books um um but you also want to be like you don't want to be so opinionated about the use cases that you're good for that it you know puts you in kind of a narrow category right um that you can't grow out of over time and so I would say you know there's you know this kind of concept of like backcasting um you need to do a combination of backcasting and

forecasting backc casting being like this is the future that you know we think we can enable right um what once there is critical mass you know of adoption after like two years what sort of apps you know in use cases can we can we F facilitate and like you know going backwards from there figuring out if those are the sort of use cases that you can also Target on day Zero or if there's actually you know sequencing and path dependence to getting there right in general you kind of want to go after your like lowest hanging fruit that's highest leverage in terms of if you convert them this could make a big splash um I think there's very real uh

and it will be like more and more common to build apps yourself especially apps that you know grab attention right and potentially like go viral um everybody wants to have like their own pump. fun or like their AI agent thing um but you also want to be careful that you know you're not competing with your customers you're not turning off devel Vel opers because you're putting out they think like oh they're just going to clone me right um I I like did a ton of work with with osmosis when I was at revery and that was always a challenge um you know there is the the canonical amm the canonical front end right how do you um you you it's great that there's

liquidities and and users there that you can plug into right away but you don't want to be like a second class citizen forever right um so I think that's that's those are the sort of tensions it's like the more opinion you are like the easier it is to identify that that low hanging fruit but you know um you don't want to like put yourself into that narrow sort of set of day Zero use cases long term I guess just to like add to that um one of our one of our portfolio companies Euphoria Finance just did like a like a coming out of stealth uh reveal on on Monday and they have like 200,000 web uh emails on their weight list right now now we recognize that those there's not 200,000 people using

crypto today and so we know that there's like been some farming of weight list right now but like I think the one thing that was really interesting when we had a call with them yesterday is they were like look we thought that it would be important just to make sure everybody can join the weit list and we're pretty sure at this point that we know where our first 10,000 users are coming from like that we know that they're on this list and that's super exciting and we can we can then like identify them over time and we can grow from there and we can like kind of build out having some assurance that like we have our first 10,000 users that is super important um and then from there you start to grow I I think like hper liquid is a good example of a team that built a really

great product and is now like gonna gonna go wide right um You can go wide or you can go deep and I think like to my's Point like there was this I didn't realize it was like a it was tweets about why like a meme coin called like Y2K but everybody was talking about Nostalgia and like how powerful Nostalgia is and like me checking into Twitter for five seconds and seeing this tweet like I like kind of was like well here's the thing about Nostalgia you're right it is really powerful um but it like generally can like what it does often times is it like paralyzes forward momentum um and so like it kind of predisposes individuals and organizations to have an unhealthy skepticism and a reluctance um to take

risks that require necessary change and so like I think you want to like have firmly held beliefs it's like it's like I have strongly held beliefs that I hold on to uh like softly or something like that right like you want to there's something like that I know I messed that strong beliefs weakly held that I think strong beliefs weakly held and you want to keep thinking about like what where are the next us is going to come from what do we need to be thinking about two years down the road three years down the road five years down the road and even like the things that we hold we hold really valuable today like maybe we don't hold them as valuable and maybe it stands in the way of like actual progress or growth down the road um and I think we can see like several examples

of that over the last 12 months of like organizations and foundations that like people are questioning or like the decision-making and whether we're holding on too strongly to like beliefs that maybe don't make sense anymore um or don't make sense in this current environment right so yeah yeah I've have um unless Mike do you have do you have something yeah did you have a question lined up there uh I was just you know one thing that I would love to get your guys' opinion on is you know when you're talking about the big the the generally speaking the two buckets of customers that people talk about is are we going for crypto natives or are we going for institutions and this is this is what it almost always comes down

to and um you know I would say that you know on the Crypt native side it's very like the pros are it's the lwh hanging fruit right it's who's going to adopt your pro your product today it's what you can actually look and see that people are doing stuff on chain for but on the on the the downside is that you often see there's startups and they're small and startups are shitty and super procyclical especially in a you know Mega procyclical industry like crypto um and they ultimately don't have large budgets right and this is kind of the lesson of categories like SAS over the years is that don't build a retail product build something that's enterpris and institutional um and so people look at the institutional customers and say I think probably correctly that's this is the end game right and so why you know

if we're if the endgame is the institutions why don't we just build for them today the downside of that would be extremely long sales Cycles there's not large buying uh for institutions for the most part yet and um you also might need some amount of critical mass to actually offer a value proposition you know I think Jim this might have been your point with uh they're not the bees aren't coming unless you can actually offer them something and you know businesses don't really care about vague like settlement assurances right like they'll try to actually sell into uh Salesforce on the product or something like settlement assurances and transparency they're like what are you like what are you talking about um but you know what they do actually want is users and liquidity and things like things of that nature so I don't know I think this is the be wants the

be the bees wants sees to be there right like they ideally you go to a market because you think there's more customers there not that like Hey we're bringing on the businesses and also by the way can you bring your customers because we don't have any that's a pretty Terri sales proposition to any be like you want to hope that you're growing your like the be wants to make sure that they're getting greater exposure than they have today if like the the exposure is just like you know better settlement faster execution times maybe maybe you'll find a few businesses that like that really resonates with but generally speaking like they're probably they probably want there to be sees yes yes and and this I think go even goes into like um more into like I was surprised to learn that even even on the rwa side

you know a lot of these larger institutions that are dipping their toes in and looking at like this menu of chains are actually looking at retail activity um but this is no different than you know even outside of crypto like open source software projects you know of many of them are like now integrated directly into the largest Enterprises in the world but it started off by seeing like you know how many downloads they have on GitHub how many stars they have and then that somebody's attention you know then the the the maintainers of like the OS Project build some sort of you know hosted product around it right that they can sell to Enterprises but it starts off with like the organic usage um I think every every

time um what I would say is that there's more Nuance today than ever within like the crypto native side um and it's really like the casino versus everything else um and you know I thought it was interesting with bass like I think onchain summer was did not have like a when they when they came out with that it was like we want you trying like real world stuff every day you know checking in for coffee and things like that and then it felt like you know they're kind of fighting the market right the market like where was things taking off it was taking off in like the salana casino area and then you just see them like you know from uh even the leadership sort of

flipping the messaging and being like if you buy a token you know buy it on base or like something like that um and I do wonder you know like that's it's clearly like uh a risk maybe to the more Miss missionary or like you know missionary Builders uh in these in these ecosystems um if you're kind of if it's seen as like capitulating you know to like the short-term market and the hype um does that you know alienate the the longer term Orient Builders um I don't know I I maybe I'm I'm like a little conservative here but I I do think that's happening hopefully this can serve as a message to

those conservative Builders which is that you need to have the left curve and you need to have the right curve uh Citadel I would say is Right curve on trading Securities and guess who they trade against the left curve guess where they make their money the left curve um and so my general sense is like you have to build for both and like if you if you think that you're going to you know if you think that you're going to just be the you're different I would say okay like what about what you built is like any different and if it's a tech if the answer is the tech like that just does not work that does not land like what experience do you have in like

speaking with Enterprise businesses um and like how are you going to get the first one in the door to like choose you over X Y or Z that has you know 10,000 users or 100,000 users a day um with like volumes that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars like it's a much easier to sell um and that's like a that's a that's a call that the CEO of like XYZ Corp is absolutely going to take and listen to because that's crazy amount of volume and I wonder if we can like slice off a piece of that for like what we're doing as well I don't think that it starts with like I think you have to really have like a the great thing about crypto and crypto natives is that they are willing to try things out and do things and either make

money or lose money doing it um and like you should use that as like you should view that as like a superpower to really test your product in an environment that is like both highly experimental very creative um and adversarial at times and like that could really solid solidify like the product that you're going to sell down the road it is a long it's a four or five year step process and you don't get the year five and have those conversations with like actual Enterprise grade and institutions without going through years one through four totally I would also one I would push back on this I know in crypto we like to talk about mercenary versus missionary Founders I think you have ambitious Founders and you should be

optimizing for ambitious Founders that are going to be end up being successful and maybe in the very early days of crypto actually you definitely had a lot of extremely ideological Founders but over time that is is going to change just by virtue of the industry maturing in general and it's also going to change because often times the idogs that were the really early people that started something in an industry which made no sense because they had such conviction around some of the early ideals of crypto might not be the ones that ultimately end up succeeding over long periods of time and none of these Founders are going to get on a podcast and articulate this idea right they're not going to say I don't care if my volumes are coming from pump fun or you know pick whatever I can't even think of

super legitimate stuff that's happening on chane at the but like they I guarantee you behind closed doors they don't care um is what I would guess over long periods of time so true yeah but if you're trying to Target developers that are have not entered the crypto space yet right that that is like the legitimate sort of claim here where you're saying I'm not trying to go like like beat a trafi institution right off the bat but frankly like you know 99.9% of developers out there are not in crypto and look down on crypto because of the casino and they see like you know they are like have spent the last five years like working day and night at some product that like adds value to the

world and is trying to get rich the slow way and then you've got like fcoin Millionaires and they're just like there's so much noise here like I have a lot of they like I've heard it before like I have Smart friends that work in crypto but yeah that's like the worst industry ever like um and and whether or not you know there is like a way to I think salana actually presented themselves in a way that did appeal to the Silicon Valley types A couple years ago um I don't know if there's you know a viable strategy to do that again today but no one has really tried it in a long time it feels like we're moving into like application developers uh and talking about like you want you want to build an application that like serves like an underserved

Community or area or region like you can absolutely do that like I don't know whether that should be like the focus of like a general purpose smart contract or like a general purpose chain like that's it's general purpose it's going to be used for a bunch of general purposes some of which you're going to be like these are really great um and these have like really high like moral and ethical reasons to have exist and other ones that have lower ethical or moral reasons to exist but they should both exist and you should give them both time and it should be based on like where you are and like what you're focus on I think like the missionary versus like capitalist or whatever we want to call it like kind of example like the in the one of the books that I was reading there's like there's three types of

like let's call it entrepreneurs but like three kind of big business types the the first are inventors the second are innovators and the third are hobbyists and I'm GNA lean into like inventors are someone who creates something brand new that's never existed before and it could be like one out of like it could be one out of one innovators take inventions and they make them better um and they generally are probably I'm going to assume the most successful out of these this group hobbyists are people who do something because they love to do it like maybe building I don't know airplane models or something in their basement um but they don't make money for doing that and my general assumption here is like if

you're a Founder um you started a company you decided not to join a company and my guesses is that you did that because you looked at like the opportunities that were available to you and you thought to yourself I think this is a big opportunity and like somewhere deep down inside of you however much or little you want to admit it I think I'm going to get rich doing this and I think like that I think I can get really rich doing this um and hopefully serving a better purpose but like generally speaking like let's not fool ourselves here right like you're a Founder you took on Venture Capital maybe you didn't take on Venture Capital but you saw the market and you thought that there was an opportunity there so like don't be afraid to make Mak money you got you've come this far

um and and don't become like if you want to be a hobbyist be a hobbyist like go ahead go into the basement and build model airplanes for nine to five but like I don't think that's what you're trying to do and like I think to like kind of then take that and go okay this is the this is like the vision and you're like that Vision doesn't quite align with like how you're gonna achieve your the goal that you set out to achieve um I just think it's like I think it's like let's let's be honest here you're trying to innovate you're trying to invent something new and you're trying to like ideally become like relatively successful financially well the other thing too well also it's very hard to separate I think as a Founder the drivers in your

own mind um I think that often times I mean first of all there's a massive incentive right for Founders to get on podcast and say I'm doing it for XY and Z reason right like I'm not saying people are like you should probably take a lot of that with a decent Siz grain of salt but even in your own head in the average human's head it's sometimes very hard to separate why am I doing this am I there's probably some element of I think I can do this there's probably some element of this is massive Financial opportunity for me and I think there is actually I think every founder is a little bit of a hobbyist right like you wouldn't you wouldn't be successful at what you were doing if you didn't enjoy it to some degree and were successful at it or had some Edge in it

or something like that so I think it's very just difficult to disentangle all of the different incentives that that come into play in anyone given person's head just honestly doing it to yourself in the mirror but I also think it's difficult or I think over time you know most technology Cycles are like this right maybe maybe a lot of the early founders of crypto were hobbyists but eventually the ones that are going to every apple right is going to evolve from uh Steve Jobs into Tim Cooks at some point and that's probably the archetype that is going to be most successful in this industry over the next 10 years I would say Founders end up looking very different 10 years from now than they did previously and um you know I guess one thing that I want to ask you guys as well in terms of if you

are the spokesperson or head of an L1 or L2 or developer platform how should you how opinionated should you be here and I think there's there's two elements to this there's the messaging um and then there is the also we we I kind of want to get your guys take on um uh first-party applications like an actual L1 building their own uh you know roll up as a service like vertically integrating that basically and um you know it's it's interesting to see you know the the maybe some of the messaging and approach that the ethereum foundation vitalic um have taken in the past like I would say they're very optimistic I would actually say they're a little they haven't been they've never discouraged defi but they haven't maybe been as warm or welcoming or open to it

um at least that is the opinion of a lot of the def5 founders we've had Mark Zeller on this podcast uh in the past talking about this Kane Warwick has been very expressive about this idea some of the maker folks Etc um which I think maybe has come back to bite them a little bit um you know on the other side you have kind anatol and mert and salana basically saying come one come all I don't care what you do do whatever um and then you actually had Bas maybe Jesse has it miles exactly it was kind of an onchain summer and like pay for your coffee in crypto and now you know they pivoted a little bit more towards accepting the fact that there's mostly what people want to do is Gamble and there's a casino they have the additional consideration of coinbase is

a public company and there's maybe a little bit of challenge there so I mean how do you guys think like what are the Lessons Learned in your guys opinion from the stewards of this ecosystem what is best in Cas like Best in Class how opinionated do you think from a messaging standpoint uh these leaders should be what do you think about that so I'd say um the easiest and best way to do this is um you know this doesn't apply necessarily to to pre-launch companies is but it's just a show and to to showcase the the case studies of success with apps on your platform right showcase um you don't have to come out and say I think I want this kind of you know

Builder uh this with with these values with the these types of use cases you just you basically can implicitly say that by showcasing and Champion championing like the applications on your platform that reflect that um now before you have like actual apps on the platform maybe you can do that at even at like a open test net stage or something like that um but yeah no I think I think it's worth showing the world like telling them okay what is this product what can it do um highlighting like basically use cases like companies that should exist right

like I think Ian had a great blog post in the leadup to launch of like you know 12 abss that should exist um I think you should you can you can take that even further um and and ideally you're not saying like we want an amm like or like we want you know a to come over like you're you're do so in a way that highlights like the unique properties of your platform why they're differentiated how this thing is you know like what you're showing them is only possible um on on on your platform uh so in general yeah I think it starts with like values definitely be opinionated about values but then at the use case level like to the extent that you can not U explicit say like this is

good this is bad but just implicitly like you know Point people to what you want to see more of that's what I would think yeah I guess what I would just like add is like it seems like we're talking more about like what you do when you're about to right or like a pretty new ecosystem versus something that's like a little bit more has been around longer like I and I think maybe established and maybe Salon is like actually an outlier here like the only other two really that anyone uses are are ethereum and and I guess you Bitcoin I don't know how I would say people use Bitcoin but like um they hodal they they hodal um but I think like one thing I would like just lean into a little bit and like we have examples of of I think actually Shu ya

has actually done a pretty grading job at this which is there's a guy named Nick Martis and I think I might just have executed his name um at Paradigm and he wrote something about like a crypto Founders guide to hiring BD and in the book I read plus what he wrote like in the book I read it was like the last chapter um but in his thread it was the first point which is founder Le sales um and how important founder Le sales are for new companies like you get a lot out of like understanding sort of who Builders are what their personalities are like what you're like kind of actively looking for and you have to go out and you have to like pitch yourself you have to pitch the

company you have to pitch the network and that you're trying to convince people sell people that this is the place where like they can make an application that's going to make them successful in life right and this is like where they should bet on like you should bet on me and you should bet on our platform versus them and their platform and when you figure out how to do that successfully and you can repeat it then you can hire a BD person I think M even Mt even had like a a tweet I think yesterday about like hiring a CMO right like do not hire a CMO when you just start like you are the founder you are the market you are the CMO like you are the s you're the head of sales um lorian Gable at figment like the validator when I started there like in

2021 um he was on all the calls right he was the one selling figment to their very first customers him and the CTO which is like co-founder um and I think like there's such a value in that and like I think you generally have to like I'm not saying you have to like pick winners but like I do think you need to if if there's something that like your platform does exceptionally well and serves your plat like your and it's done better on your platform than anywhere else then like you should you should really take the time to like find all the people who are building that thing and convince the one that you think has has the highest potential to build there and that comes from the founder that's not going to be like hey just come on over and check it out and like here are

the docs and like if you're interested they want to be like valued they want to feel like they're they're wanted right and I think you can do a lot for yourself and for your network if you if you put yourself out there and you kind of say like we're behind you we're going to support you what do you need do you need help do you need like engineering help do you want to talk to the engineers do you want to talk to our BD team we're a big team we're in L1 we probably rais like at least 10 million you're a small team that's maybe raised $500,000 you don't have the same resources that we have and we're going to lend our resources to you to really make you stand out and we'll we'll do things on like the marketing side we'll do things on like the promot

side will help with incentives um to get people if if you build something incredible we will be right behind you and we will be supporting you 100% of the way for like the first six months or 12 months or for whatever for whatever period of time that seems like a pretty like high Roi time spent from a Founder um and ideally that's like you probably need to have multiple Founders you probably need to have like a technical founder and a non-technical founder and the non-technical founder spends more time looking more like a CEO and the technical founder probably spends a little bit more time looking like the CTO and maybe those two jobs are like different for a very specific reason because like you're going to be talking to very different like parts of the organization and like and strategies

within the organization yeah you also just learn so much right it just creates this great feedback loop of information talking to even in the earliest stages of like an engagement with a prospect like you will very quickly understand like what they value um which should then inform like you know core protocol road map like items right um you'll get a sense of on the messaging side what like what made them like what got their attention right you can see that with like just body language um and that can help inform your broader external messaging and then you know I think exactly to Jim's Point like you are also you're not just selling like a a platform there's you

know and like a like technology and a there's also you know credibility that you can offer like that project you know implicitly to the market right by by kind of like uh showcasing them there's like attention if you have attention as an L1 right now like you try to grab a ton of attention and hype for your infrastructure and then you can kind of lend that right to the apps um we see that think that's why there were like 50 avss right um not all of them needed to be as's but but like that was a ton of free you know mind share right that they could grab um and so yeah I think all of these things like if you're a Founder

just get as close as possible to the customer um last thing like Mike you mentioned first-party apps you know I think I would definitely um differentiate first-party developer facing products um because most of these like platforms are just completely open source and free to use right but you can sell products like this hosted version of a rollup right that makes it like easier than you know maybe an application wants their own execution environment doesn't want to like do all the devops right so you're kind of increasing your target market um increasing the size of the funnel with these products but also that's another

way to stay close to the customer which then should inform a lot of the core protocol development um so yeah just get close to the and stay there find find as ways as possible to do so one other thing that this might be different for l1's versus l2s and I can't it's hard to really assign a reason as to why this is but it feels different is I think the most successful l1s have a type of guy associated with that L1 and a very specific personality and like for Bitcoin you can very clearly say what is a bitcoiner It generally the characteristics are you're a bit of a Doomer um maybe you eat a lot of steak maybe you Sun your butthole or whatever it is but that's like generally the kind of the perception right of like if

someone who identifies a hardcore bitcoiner you know exactly um you know exactly what that person looks like then version two like ethereum also has a very specific kind of guy or gal uh you know and it's very optimistic it's it's a counter reaction to Bitcoin in a sense it's uh very like um almost quixotic maybe a little bit uh maybe too optimistic about what the world might look like like kind of a dreamer is right like roughly very research oriented very technical like that's who I kind of picture and then salana is almost maybe a counter reaction to that there is a um there's it's very pragmatic is the word that I would use very engineering oriented very wearing wearing those salana sunglasses exactly and I think to

connect to the point that you guys were making about Founders the importance of the founder is it's large like where does this come from where does the culture and a company come from this is the one thing you can absolutely 100% never Outsource it is the founder and you know all of the good attributes the positive attributes about the average etherion and some of the challenges come from basically vitalic as a leader right he has shown he's like the beacon for you know he's still I think the main attraction right to what makes someone join ethereum versus somewhere else there's like a technological perspective around it but there's also a type of vibe thing and it's the same thing with Anatoli I think in salana he is the face and he has demonstrated these types of developers you know these types of

values they should come in and built um and so I don't know you see it you kind of see it with like maybe the web two equivalents of this or Tesla or apple there's a very you can kind of picture what an Apple guy or gal looks like you can definitely picture what like a a Tesla stand looks like it's very definable um and I think you might need that for at least l1s it's it's very difficult to point to like a basically you know those are the most successful l1s and there's it there's a very specific type of person that's associated with it um and maybe that's true to a lesser extent for companies but it seems more relevant for whatever reason for these developer platforms um it seems like you might also know what

the be chain uh user kind of looks like right um and I think an interesting I I H sat down with James hunsaker last week at the manad office and like we were just talking about like users and actually developers and like the developing like who the developers are like not just of like the applications but also of of the of the protocol itself the network the L1 itself right and I I think like I I walked away with like a better a better kind of like perspective on who salana is like going after which it feels a little bit more American I would say an American user uh like an American process of engineering versus like

ethereum which goes after more much more like kind of European style of like the de the cord de right the cevs are a little bit more European they sit down they pontificate and think a lot and like maybe things will will move this like oh I'm on vacation this summer so like maybe it'll be Q three or a little I don't know if you know this J it's not a little critical here uh no no but like you know we we sit we talk we debate right like and I think with salana it's like a little bit more American where it's like we're gonna we're going to push this out we're going to like we're g we're going to go fast and we're going to see how we're to see if it breaks and if it breaks we'll we'll figure it out fix it then um and I think like Manet is

trying to sit somewhere in the middle where like a lot of the research is coming out of Europe and a lot of the developing development is coming out of like the engineering is coming out of America so it's just like an interesting facet to think about which is like where the core devs sit and like how are they thinking about things and like a lot of it com maybe is cultural frankly as well it's super interesting I I think that crypto has rewarded companies that actually don't necessarily find an optimal point on the trade-off curve and instead of like there's definable brand and we had uh Alex Watts you know throw guard a fast lane come on and he was extoling manad because they actually do find sort of this point on the trade-off curve in between something like ethereum

and salana which for him is very attractive I guess maybe the downside of that is if it's not as strong in any one way shape you almost you might get lost in the messy middle um and I think there are a couple of l1s that might be at risk of not having quite a well-defined enough brand perspective that someone would feel like yes this tugs at my heartstrings I am this um so that's a that's just a tough thing because they're not an infinite type of there's not an infinite number of words right there's kind of like Doomer Optimist pragmatic I mean there's not infinite words that will tug at people's heartstrings so yeah and it goes back into like the folders thing right like whatever whatever like you know people think of you you want it to be the biggest you know mental folder possible

not like you know kind of like this but kind of like this but you know a little bit in between but to be fair like that's the nice part about being early to any industry like you can kind of claim those big buckets um and yeah I think it's increasingly challenging to like create a new category like Celestia did it pretty well with with M right um don't think we've seen it since yeah I agree all right a last question for you guys just in closing actually maybe a prediction question for you how many significant l1s do you think there's going to be on a 10-year time Horizon like if we're doing a Paro of l1s by market cap in the year 2040 say 2040 um what does that distribution look like how many

significant l1s are there can I ask a question yeah is XR is is Ripple considered a significant L1 [Laughter] today uh that's a great question I mean yeah I think you have to I I'm sorry I think It ultimately probably comes down to market cap at the end of the day yeah so if Ripple's in the Top If Ripple's in the top three in 2040 then I think you kind of have to consider them successful right yeah and and we're we're saying rollups are not l1s either they chains I I'm I'm yeah it's a very hard question because I I just see

two very different products like base layers with no execution versus everything where like you're fighting for execution right I think there'll be likely fewer of these you know um canonical base layers that s you know act as the source of Truth more of more competition um on the execution layer yeah more execution on the execution layer but also higher Network effects on the execution layer so like more of a winter it's still probably Winer take most there um yeah so I'm gonna say 10 or fewer but more than five I think so too I've always had six in my you know I had this number six is there are really six currencies in the

world globally that have much trading and wouldn't it be so poetic if we create the same number roughly of significant on as you have currencies um that would be that would be funny all right guys this has been a ton of fun we got to wrap it here but uh appreciate you both uh coming on and yapping and hopefully some folks uh I think we got most of the points that we wanted to about go to market across and covered some pretty interesting ground so hopefully folks found this valuable yeah I appreciate both you guys coming on and chatting yeah it was a blast thanks for having me I I recognize now that I have to go up for drinks with you and then the next day I get invited to a podcast and so that's like anytime I'm feeling like I want to Y I know what to do now

you gotta be I have told people I can be bribed with swag and drinks so I live in New York so uh yeah hit me up uh ply me with with booze and uh yeah maybe we can do a bell curve some all right Fells appreciate you both [Music]