Hivemind: Fate of ETH, Initia with Zon, & OpenAI's Deep Research

Transcript

I think every chain now if you're not fast you're not really building the right architecture I think that the industry is going into this pure like you need to get latency as low as possible that's what everybody's talking about now and you just need to make like your changes as fast as possible and so you know is that bearish for salana I think that it's confirmation that salana is the leader in the correct thesis of what people want they definitely will have more competition now though nothing said on the hive mind is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is strictly for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our own opinions not Financial

[Music] advice hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the hive mind podcast the goal of the podcast is to provide an inside look into what we like to call the deli hive mind bringing together some of our brightest Minds from each of the divisions to share insights Alpha and [ __ ] posts today with us we have the usual crew myself cedus who leads our institutional research arm and Yan managing partner at Deli Adventures but stepping in for our shitcoin scavenger who is who is on holiday we have zon uh CEO are you CEO CEO and founder of I'm just uh CSO well I usually go by C BDSM officer business Business Development

strategy marketing um that does not have a good ring to it CBDs to some people it has a very good ring to it though nice to be here so what do you go by now CS yeah just CSO Chief strategic officer chief of strategy I usually just say co-founder very cool okay the thing about being a co-founder is really you're just like a glorified intern you end up doing anything or everything anyways yeah that is that is unfortunately true I can confirm um so we have a lot we want to talk to you about today I think you're pretty well positioned to to talk about a lot of this stuff and I think we want to start

with eth um and specifically I think that the framing I want to go at this from is can eth be saved or is eth going to be like the atom effectively um where sort of the cosmos SDK and obviously we're you know you're you've been building in Cosmos for for a long time time I've been bullish in building Cosmos for a long time too um I think a lot of people were rightly bullish Cosmos SDK and the cosmos SDK has kind of crushed it but the token has not gone up right like the there's a lot of successful chains using Cosmos SDK but Adam is is uh is basically a stable coin for the last few years or or Worse recently um and so what do you think

caused that and do you think eth is going to have the same fate is is eth going to be the atom basically like rollups succeed you have a bunch of new rollups launch you know uni chain base um world world chain like all these by all means successful rollups but do eth just just just become Adam yeah so I think there's a few different things here the first is what went wrong with adom and Cosmos like you said the cosmos SDK um is a very good tool to build unique blockchains and it is what everyone still uses to date right Celestia Nan uh bar chain inisha like all these things are built on top of the cosmos

SDK and they all have um a lot of those are probably going to have larger market caps than Adam itself um I think where Adam failed was the original ICF never really had a guiding hand over how the ecosystem should form and evolve they're very incredibly neutral in this same thing happened with ethereum um and with that they never cemented atom within the network of chains right no chain in Cosmos cares at all about having the atom token have liquidity or have use cases or build demand for it IBC um does not require atom at all uh there are a lot of original designs to atom like

having assets move through that chain chain uh as the router chain or as the Hub chain which could bring you know maybe some um value capture to Adam which was never really done I think the I now so interchain Labs which has been spun up by the skip team and is kind of taking over Cosmos SDK development um only within the past few months they've really like cleaned house and are starting to you know look at this with a fresh lens and very excited for what they're going to try and do because they will bring some ideas back to the table and maybe this is not the best thing to say but you know every good tokenomics design has a little bit of Ponzi to it and so I think um some of those things

were missing and with ethereum you know the difference here was that ethereum was canonically supposed to be money and every rollup on ethereum uses eth as gas or at least the vast majority of it so I'm not exactly sure where things went wrong for eth it is is you know the biggest credibly neutral smart Contracting platform everyone still uses them as gas I obviously am a bag holder because I have most of my net worth in the ethereum token um one of the things I think that needs to be fixed is just the ethereum foundation their leadership um is like unknown like I have no idea who anyone on the ethereum foundation is except for

vitalic and I think that's very strange right you know Anatolian Raj you know a lot of people on this solono Labs foundations they're talking they're using protocols they're using apps they're engaging with the ecosystem um and the ethereum foundation has nothing like that but I H don't know how the system is run so I can't really come in and and say what to fix but I'd be curious on some of your tis I I think personally when you talked uh the eth's money thesis I think they have made eth money right like eth to your point eth is used on all these rollups it is used as the gas token but that hasn't accured any meaningful value to the Token really using it in that way and so I think like

yes e is money but I think it was the expectations for what that would mean were like a lot higher than in reality what it really is um and people are just starting to Value infra and eth's infra mostly on fundamentals like if you look at most infer tokens over the past couple years and people will put a pull out like mem coins or xrp to uh prove this wrong but like if you look at the majority of infer tokens they are trading based on what kind of like real economics they people expect them to Prov provide over like the long term and

so eth is in such a weird think that's true I do think that's true yeah look at every ethereum has the most the largest amount of transaction fees in the past 7 days out of any smart contract application or chain it makes less than salana now and it's valued at like four 3 4X the amount of Soul um if you look at all the other INF for tokens like L2 tokens of a lot of these dead l2s they're all basically down only um Tia is I think Tia is like interesting here for the first time but you know it's hard to get around like you need to be really

bullish on Celestia just absolutely crushing as a DA layer and it's like hard when you see something like Salon get so much activity and so much real dollars actually occuring to it to like and then again all like the L2 tokens if you look at their historical charts they're pretty atrocious um I just disagree with this fundamentals thing I don't know I don't think any of this stuff like you still have so many all l1s trading it multi-billions or tens of billions of dollars that do no Revenue I mean the same with the l2s to some extent like all of them would be valued at absurd multiples um the bridge protocols like

there's there's so many examples of things that that are valued in in the billions that that don't have the revenues or cash flows to justify it and like with even so like right at the bottom before it started pumping that was the argument everyone made like so we'll never have have cash flows because the transaction fees are too cheap and then it pumped and probably I'd say like I don't know when R started to catch up but it was pretty late into the into the pump it was probably like like Soul had already cleared 100 bucks by the time RV really started to to catch up meaningfully because you needed the wealth effect from the soul pump for people to start aping memes and then the memes are what generate most of the the Rev so I'm just skeptical of this story that price Falls fundamentally I think

it's more like price moves for reasons that I think are very hard to understand and then people make like then it improves fundamentals and also people start telling stories about fundamentals um more than anything but yeah curious what you think Yan yeah yeah it's usually you know narrative drives price and then the reflexivity there drives activity and fundamentals and kind of looping and everything else that's built on top I don't know eth kind of had you know initially was uh fat AP velocity of money mvpqb you went ultrasound money because there was actually a deflationary element and you can M it as this kind of Internet Bond thing and then over time

as activity waned now it's gone back to you know trying to indirectly do velocity of money where it's just used everywhere but doesn't actually drive enough fees so you know you're getting to the point where inflation you're basically undoing all of the um deflationary elements that that happened from the from the EIP and so it's in a weird spot where you know the activity on it isn't going to justify I think you know pointing at some of the the the other ghosty chains that are trading in in the low billions I think you know to some degree all of these have like a baseline valuation in that you know low 10 figure range and that's just kind of like without any activity

this is what the fdv of these things trades at and then to get to the higher Echelon you really need to to rationalize it somehow and I think eth now you know it's just the fundamentals aren't getting there and and it's going to kind of I think gradually compress um I I just don't see where the incremental bid for eth will come um over some of these others like I guess namely Soul basically Eric Trump yeah I was about to say Eric Trump but um to the fundament point like I just looked at def Lama oneyear fees dashboard and ethereum is number two for oneyear fees with number one being tether and salana is like number six so

it does generate fees yeah yeah it's valued at like $300 billion do though yeah I think it's uh it's almost at the same Revenue multiple as the market cap difference between salana and uh ethereum yeah I think salana is people are just pricing in that it's going to keep if you look at every chart Soul versus eth Revenue app GDP um it's just all up and to the right and it's like Salon just keeps taking more and more of market share and so like I don't even know if Salon trades at a higher it doesn't because it's doing more Revenue over the past like few months and it trades at like a third of the market cap so it's not even

like Salon is doing a higher multiple versus East so there's still a lot of Market expectations that eth is going to like turn it around in that sense or salana is not going to be able to scale um to their kind of these Ambitions that they have of you know 200 millisecond latency like 100,000 plus TPS um so yeah Solana what do you think about the competition that salana will have along its vertical right Solana is fast chain and upcoming over the next year we have maybe 10 new Fast chains that are trying to directly compete but nothing is trying to compete with etherum just one one point I wanted to make on E before

we move on to fast chains which I think is a really good uh segue is just that I don't know how you guys how your journey with eth went but like eth was what got me into the space pretty much like I'd heard about Bitcoin before but not an Austrian Economist so I was really bullish uh eth pretty much have held it my whole probably the only token I've held first token I bought and the only one I've held the whole the whole time um and at some point in I think probably 2023 when the merge or whenever the merge happened I actually like was fully convinced eth would flip in BTC um and I I don't know if anyone else had this but I was fully convinced probably very close to the to the local eth BTC top which uh which is always how it goes but

yeah the merger just happened there was like it was deflationary everyone was was masturbating to the burn um and it's like if it's deflationary in a bear imagine what it'll do in a in a bull and then since then ebtc has just been like down only um and all the activity just moved to these to these rollups right like all the all the meaningful sort of transaction flow and like I don't know for me I still uh I still hold eth I don't as as I've been saying for for like a year on this part I don't really know why uh but but I do still hold it I I still like like eth I like the the the values and the and the community just the Innovation that happens there um and um and I do think the E EF could fix

this and for me I think there's three things I would like prioritize uh the first one I think is that you do need to reclaim L1 execution and like it needs to happen parallel with this with this uh rollup Centric road map but I think you need L1 execution to scale um I don't know if you can do that within the EF I think you probably need like a hungry team to do this like I don't know acquiring like a monad or something like this earlier on when it was cheaper I think would have made a a lot of a lot of sense and having a team like this work either within the EF or or outside of it on on um on scaling the L1 would have made a lot of sense um then I think L2 interoperability like the stuff that you

guys are laser focused on with with inisha I think like the EF should take control of that like much more um have like bridging standards like enforce like wallet ux standards and just like care about like it's it's obvious that it's broken it's sort of obvious what what needs to be done for it to be fixed at least in terms of end end user ux um and I think that should be like a way bigger focus and then the the third thing is sort of what you mentioned Z which is just the the like BD devil which is just terrible like we have teams on on eth that have I won't name names but that have like multi-billion dollars of of tvl on Ethel one uh and that that have never spoken to the

ethereum foundation or have spoken to them once reached out once and then they'll launch on salana and immediately have the salana foundation reaching out salana Labs the super team they're getting them connected to all the teams it's just a completely different experience um and it just feels like the EF is in an ivory Tower they don't use the chain like some of the comments on on eth Research over the years just shows that you know it's always this Alice pay Bob thing um like no one is is understands Alice doesn't want to pay Bob she wants to ape shitcoins right and and like across different chains today was the day ethereum foundation put in something like 25k eth into a few different protocols today yeah I mean exactly it's like five years later right

five years post post defi but um yeah I think it's fixable I wish they fixed it I think vitalik's awesome like spiritual leader I don't think he's the the the the prince he's more like the prophet right like the kind of spiritual leader of ethereum like super impressive someone who's been in the space so long had so many opportunities to to corrupt yourself and never has has just always remained pretty pure um he posted about love and communism today I didn't see that that's unfortunate timing um but uh but yeah I hope he fixes their their [ __ ] I don't know if anyone has to anything to say on that otherwise we can we can move on to to the fast chains and competition for salana my only thing with eth is like a lot of the demand last cycle I think

people a lot of people got sced into thinking that there was a lot of natural demand to use ethereum because ethereum was like a good product and the reality is that it was kind of the only game in town and it's where all the early Innovation happened and so that's the only place you could really do stuff and then you saw in the bull market when e fees got really high then you started to see people Branch off and use like polygon BSC was obviously massive uh Phantom Harmony like all these you know pretty like dead chains today the difference with the last couple years is that people were using Salon in the bare Market um when gas prices were like one two gu right and so this is kind of this is like a fundamental change in

recognizing that people like it was more than just the expensive fees why people didn't want to use ethereum it was a lot of like ux issues uh around that and so that has been like I think the biggest and a lot of this just stems from the evm just like not being good um and so I think that was like a big kind of like reality check over the past couple years the other big one was just the the recent scaling road map that had plans out to 2030 I think that was a big nail in the coffin for anyone who had you know a last ditch hope of this thing actually becoming you know

usable at scale yeah I think it's just expectations that's all like again it's still like $300 billion right it's not like it's cheap and so I think it's just people had like you said uh Jose like you thought it was goingon to flip eth right A lot of people had that opinion and when it was 0.008 on the ratio it's like it pretty much has to flip Bitcoin at that point for to be a good investment right and so all you've kind of seen is the reality that it's not going to flip Bitcoin just get like priced in and yes Sal long ASO formed ethereum a lot cuz it you know it's got a lot of users all this stuff and it was like just so cheap compared to eth right so yeah I don't know it's like it's it's

to me this is like expected for eth like it's like the operation was a success ethereum but the patient died eth right like ethereum as a as a movement as an ecosystem continues to grow but eth is just not like people I see people bring up like Mega eth as this is to be what starts pumping eth again it's like why like Mega eth uses da yeah uses eth as the gas token but it's like their own sequencer their own I don't know like it's hard when you're a big asset it's hard to move it like these these little things I don't know the types of users and buyers are also very different this cycle versus

last cycle right you had like onen Deens coming to play on ethereum and some of these side chains but you know most of the Boomers or people that were not involved in crypto yet would just buy BTC and eth but now you have like Senators you know buying pump fun [ __ ] and so when that starts to happen like they are not trying to get into crypto to buy ethereum anymore and like be convicted in tokens they're trying to flip the coin right in 10x and so I think that just like totally changes the type of dynamic of what what users are coming in to do here at least right now um until we have some more you know like long-term products within this space and figure out how to make sure

that it's not just about gambling but we should segue into the fast chains yeah let's do it so what what are the fast chains like what do you or or maybe just yeah what are the new chains that that you think are competitors to to salana or that you're excited about I think every chain now if you're not fast you're not really building the right architecture like is bar chain fast no and I think they like I'm not I don't know it's be chain is I have like no disrespect to the team or anything and I know a lot of people like it but it's it's kind of weird it's like feels like 2021 defi um you still have the approves and swaps on everything which is a pretty bad like I don't understand why people

still launch evm chains with that ux flow because it's it's really bad um like people just do not like it um it's not like you know crazy high performant I think you're seeing a lot of these like you know Mega eth obviously there's paradigms doing Ithaca there's Rise um obviously you had Su Aptos uh you have now you have like Fogo just pure fire dancer I don't know like how real Fogo is um I know you have xfire dancer Liam doing unto I think it's called which is I think it's like

vmess uh even like I don't even know if it has or it's making its own VM it's not svm or anything I think that the industry is going into this pure like you need to get latency as low as possible that's what everybody's talking about now um and you just need to make like your change as as fast as possible and so you know is that bearish for salana I think that it's confirmation that salana is the leader in the correct thesis of what people want um they definitely will have more competition now though so it's not like they're guaranteed to take the spot and you do see this time and time again in crypto where people want to be early to

stuff and you can't be early to Salon anymore um and so that like that Force alone right the force of being early could help some of these newer chains that are like direct salana competitors right yeah and it it's just like how much the thing is it's not like the people when people say this they're like oh there'll always be a a bigger like a faster salana and all this stuff it's like maybe salana is still they're still trying to be as fast as they can and they're still trying to improve like the L1 and still trying to improve like you know having double zero now right from like Exon of people so it's not

like they're stopping going after that goal they're continuing to go towards that goal of being like the fastest Global and obviously if you're like a meate or something you can be faster than salana just based off of pure like physics um of having like one sequencer but yeah it's like unclear to me that a totally new re architect L1 can actually be like faster than salana like maybe right but then like how much faster and then you know if salana can get down to like 200 millisecond with multiple concurrent proposers is know1 that can do like 150 like maybe that 50 milliseconds does

make a massive difference I don't know Fogo is aiming at like 10 or 10 or 20 right yeah Fogo is weird though because it's like it's an app chain so like they're they're um it's sort of like it's also interesting because it's extending this to thing of there's only six contracts that matter in in blockchain which I agree right now but I I I really don't think yeah it's a good sort of bet for the long term and they're like integrating I think they're enshrining an oracle plus doing like special order book logic where you know similar to hyper liquid like order cancels going first and stuff to make it easier to to run order books on chain because like order books on chain solano's fast but still like Phoenix has never as far as I know hasn't really generated like significant volume like

order books have not really picked up and it's um I think a lot of people point at this is as the reason why so it's it' be interesting to see if like it's basically faster salana with like some enshrined stuff that makes it better for the main contracts that people use blockchains for so it'll be interesting to see how that does um I do think the competitor like the the Chow I think I how you pronounced his name from Alliance had had a quote about how it's hard for him to to recom his Founders go anywhere other than salana right now um which I kind of agree with honestly and feel the same way for most projects where they're not using much of the chain they're just like basically launching a token or um and or just

running like undifferentiated contracts because chains aren't just like Tech and at this point like you said the tech is pretty commoditized and what you're really looking for is like Capital markets and community and when you launch on salana you have the entire like pump fun Deens um all the f users everyone ready to to ape your thing uh and I think that ends up being it's sort of like you know launching on the on the NASDAQ um versus like footy right in London like why would you not launch on the on the US why would you not IPO in the US if you could and like sana's in the same position right now but I think the exception there's two two things I'd say on that the first one is that every chain is only one killer app away from

unseizing salana like this stuff's still really small we kind of saw that would Salon itself right there was no activity during the bare Market really there were just like a few people putting their Jos soul on margin or something like there it was nothing significant and then pump pum came out of nowhere and and like now Salon is the is King I think it's very possible to see that happen with another app on another chain is the first thing I'd say and then the second one is I think there are uh projects that do need the chain uh to do certain things that aren't sort of well suited for a generalized environment that's sort of where see like initia really really play um and I think you're going to also see a lot of those but yeah yeah I think you know one argument for not launching on

salana so like what benefits do you get by launching somewhere else as a as a quality project it's you know direct interfacing with the core team and some some level of incentives and Foundation support and and you know financial support and so if you're building an app where the there are elements that are onchain the and and but if you're interacting with the app they're mostly Opus skated anyways and so you can kind of benefit from uh onchain liquidity and onchain transactions but you don't necessarily need to be a crypto native user to to tap into that um I think in those scenarios as an app you don't benefit As Much from the community within salana

but you get to benefit from the you know financial support uh of of a a chain that from a chain that that that needs quality apps and so uh I think you know like you mentioned with with each uh platform being one super app away from from uh you know onboarding a massive amount of users I think like those are the kind of setups where it makes sense to potentially avoid salana to some degree not avoid but uh where you know it makes sense to pick something else in place of it if you're building defi I would still not say that salana is the best place for you right like the defi heavy users the big amounts of sitting liquidity and like the people that come

to farm are still on the ethereum layer one um the problem is that's why like Athena was their usual resolve like all these major D5 protocols that launched this cycle still chose ethereum layer one if you are looking for just plain users maybe you go to salana and that case um yeah not exactly defi it's like stable coin equivalents um but I think if you're trying to do anything unique um that's when you kind of start to look at full stack apps or building your own chain and that's when you come to Anisha and so I think that my thesis around this is you know every chain is going to be fast

right that's like going to be table Stakes you have to have good infrastructure whether that is a general purpose chain or an app chain they all need to be fast um and they can all probably be fast enough I think everyone that's competing along the camp of how do I get the fastest chain possible and its general purpose for everyone is going to have trouble when it comes to fighting for a similar set of users projects and liquidity when you do have Solana that really is the king here now I think if you look one to two years in the future and you know that every chain is fast where do projects start to find unique value proposition that can actually

attract users and build real products and that's when they start to tweak parts of their chain that are specific for their application whether that is using a VM that only makes their application possible whether that is customizing transaction ordering and execution right these are the the things that can start to create little differentiators for you to find like a niche product Market fit along one specific vertical that you never get by building on a general purpose blockchain and that's why I'm still very bullish on the long-term app chains being the winning solution here because you'll need to start finding those differentiators to

win out users in liquidity and you know I think the greatest success of this cycle was hyper liquid but um it's very hard to point to other examples right now outside of Perpetual products where app chains have really won yet yeah and you really got to do it all yourself if you're launching an app chain right not just build the chain the tech like um although there are some solutions for that now but also like get your community do your marketing and I think that's what yeah that's what initia exists for right like you come and you focus on your app and you just focus on the Alters you want to make and everything else is there for you and follows a lot of shared standards I

think modularity and what happened this cycle with that is everyone got tricked into thinking modularity was about you know what da you use what oracles use what interop solution you used and you had these Ras Services basically build these uh vending machine like models where you can come and pick whatever you want uh but you still have to do a bunch of Bey work as you talk to all these third-party integration teams inisha however is a very opinionated design on how these things work because when you actually talk to builders no one cares about what da they use what interop they use and what Oracle they use they care about those just working so we work with just the Best in Class there you spin up

a roll up on Anisha you get layer zero Celestia built-in oracles you have an entire front-end product suite for how you connect to wallets how you bridge into the chains and because everyone uses shared standards we can build like the UI and ux elements that can sit on top of all of these and eventually create a chain abstracted experience where you still have these applications that are uniquely altered for their one specific segment and I think you know having this design along with a really strong economic model is how you're going to be able to share liquidity users and have them move between these different app chains in the future um because everything is no longer

fragmented and we can have a hand over how this ecosystem evolves yeah makes a lot of sense I know I want to get cis's quick uh take on the because you were you were an app chain bull early app chain bull I would say in the Bear right like you were very involved in US writing that report where we made the Fateful decision of of choosing Cosmos um not not blaming you for that but uh what when then but you updated your views right you you kind of went to went the other way but I'm curious to hear where where you're at right now yeah yeah so I a lot of my app chain bullish was because of like Ethel one in last bull market right and I was like okay you can't fit everything on one chain

you need to like create these isolated chains so it made a lot of sense to me um but then over yeah the years that followed that a lot of the issues with app chains kind of became apparent and a lot of these are just like Cosmos like it's a coordination thing right exactly what Z was saying how like it was kind of a free-for-all and then you had a lot of people in Cosmos just launching new new chains to like launch their own token and then everybody wanted to be early to a new token in Cosmos and so there was always like new chains getting launched and because everybody wanted the new token and then nobody could ever like coales around one thing and so there was like a

lack of unity around the whole process and then at the same time you had Salon over here and yeah it got like the worst thing I think any Eco could go through and like they were still building and then they were building what people wanted we talk about uh you know how the only successful app chains so far have been perss and that's true but if you just think in general with crypto like the only success successful apps in general have been like spot trading and perp trading and like you know defi goes along with spot trading in a sense like minting cdps all this stuff it's like you know these Financial per and spot trading even if you look at ethereum

like I compare ethereum to salana salana trading is very basic it's like mcoin you know dog hat Bonk whatever and then ethereum you have all these like yield games where it's like usual it's like okay let's let's mint this fore locked token and then we'll go Pendle YT and we'll farm that and like they're just different games but they're still kind of just trading at theend at the end of the day and so I think that yeah I think Anisha is going at this problem like being coordinated from day one having shared standards having like if you look at ethereum you know there's like super chain erc20 right and it's like okay super I think

is the best comp for what indust just trying to do I would say I don't know what you think about that zon but yeah but but even still there's still even the super chain I think that a lot of that stuff is trying to make a cohesive thing after the fact still and a lot of yes respect right that's the issue and so a lot of that is in ethereum is and like you see agair and they're like oh agair is this neutral agair Tech might be good it's very hard for me to see agair being like a real long-term solution in ethereum there even if it has this amazing technology um I think yeah like you need the cohesiveness with everything you need I think Cosmos is prob Adam problem and like Salon is kind of

backing in to being a place where people are launching like Zeta is launching perss uh app chain roll up on salana right uh you're seeing some other like couple and these are also like Network extens whatever you want to call them these are mostly like app specific on salana which is kind of like the original Cosmos thesis right and I think salana kind of backed into this by accident because they just had this like they made they had this like shared liquidity economic layer right and that was successful and now people want to like build around it whereas Cosmos whereas yeah whereas Cosmos was just like just everybody go build your own

apps and then there was no Unity around around anything and then people felt like guilty of like giving back to to Cosmos Hub so it's like oh we'll air drop to Adam stakers like this is the big thing this is how Adam was involved it's like oh we'll air drop our new to to you but there was never um any and then also the atom Community was like when they turned down atom 2.0 I realized that it was like pretty toast at that point um so yeah I don't know shared standards is like a massive yeah shared standards is probably the biggest thing like you can't you just need like you need you need you also need like one Explorer right you need

like one block Explorer to look at everything not just for also for like taxes and stuff man when I go when I go trying to use like Cosmos chains and I don't want to start doing all this stuff it's like oh [ __ ] there's like all these different chains I need to add now to like my tax everything shell yeah it's like it's it's that that thing for sure a lot of people don't pay taxes and stuff they don't care but that's like a pretty big deal for do you want that operational headache of reconciling like reconciling your Cosmos taxes was the worst most painful experience um and yeah I don't know so yeah you need that like

cohesiveness yeah I think so going back to some of the first things you guys commented on there's things like super chain erc20 um I also agree that it's a bit little too late and I tweeted about this like two days ago where you know it's like that Meme where it's like oh my God there's 18 standards we need one more to fix all these things and then there's now 19 standards right I think we should just use Frameworks that exist that everyone already uses so like we use layer zero right it is the probably the most canonical bridging standard now um every major asset that people care about actually bridging uses layer zero they now also have usdt zeros you basically

get native tether issuance when you have a layer zero endpoint and every roll up on initia just boom has access to that day one for free um this is I think the big thing like I feel like sorry like kmos thought that all people needed was security and a stack to build a chain right and I think there's like two things wrong with that first of all people don't really want to build their own chains anymore like they they just want to have their own rollup I think it's it's sort of in the current meta ends up making more sense for for most people and then the second thing is just that like security is like first of all you don't need uh security in the same way with the rollup and and second of all that's just like a very small part of what you need when

you're launching a new chain right like what cus are saying the Explorer the the wallet Integrations the having native stable coins on your chain having an article having Integrations with exchanges right like if you have a new chain The Exchange has to has to it's much harder to get an integration with an exchange there's like all these things that are huge frictions of launching an app chain and to me like the initia is is sort of like how do you have because it's clear that app chains have benefits how how do you Reserve those benefits while eliminating all these frictions all these annoying frictions or like I guess what would eth look like if they were building it from scratch now for a roll of centric world I feel like that's the other kind of way to see it um maybe you can i' love you

to also talk about like the wallet stuff because I I found that really cool like the metam the way you can use like metamask or Phantom to to to use Anisha but you you can finish your last and by the way we should have probably disclaimed this at the beginning we're investors in in Anisha in case that wasn't obvious I'll probably redo the intro and say that just to make sure we don't get torched for this but yeah go go ahead yeah I think um the super chain comp is probably what I would say is the most direct of like what we are trying to build right now without saying like we're trying to build ethereum um you know it's actually like a reasonable comp um I think the one difference here or the major difference is you know we are starting with the shared standards

already in place and the teams that we are trying to Target are just by far different right when you build on on the op stack you get the same copy paste Fork right now and it's basically only used by these general purpose institutional blockchains and I think that's very unexciting I think that app chains are about you know having customization and building for a specific purpose and so the types of builders that Anisha has right now building on the stack are really like either Define native they're like fully onchain games they're teams that are trying to optimize for a specific vertical and I think that's where they'll find success and we won't end up with the same um you know four or five copypaste applications that end up

on every single one of the super chain layer twos I think uh shared liquidity like I actually just want to I just want to hit on that point though too like I think you're point about like all the copy past to general purpose I think that is like I think that the two architectures you should probably do are like a very performant general purpose chain like a salonu type thing and then probably like an app chain type thing and to your point like all these super chain chains are the exact same thing they're not differentiated at all and that has always been my biggest problem with like the ethereum rollup thesis going back like years is that all these teams were building the same like vanilla evm different color on

twitter.com yeah and it's like that was always the thing and like and you and you see it like nobody uses ZK sync AVM nobody uses polygon Z AVM optimism main chain nobody really uses they all use bass now it's like if you just make like scroll if you just make a million of the same product it's not anyways I mean to cut you off but it's like that was always my biggest issue yeah people got so fed up with uh evm layer 2s this cycle because we got the same V drone Fork the same lending Market Fork um just reskinned on every single one of these and so I completely agree I think just the two ways to scale blockchain are going to be very application specific full stack apps take advantage of the chain for your application or the

Giga layer 2 or sorry just Giga fast base layer chain and I don't know which one's going to win yet but I have placed my bet but some of these other things that you're mentioning like shared liquidity um is very important and that's why the initial layer one is this shared liquidity Hub assets are fungible across all the different layer tws having those shared bridging standards um means that the trust assumptions across all the chains are the same asset issuers if they're comfortable with one they can feel comfortable with another yeah that was the worst thing about IBC by the way just when you IBC to to a new chain and you did the wrong version and then it doesn't even show up on your on your wallet you have to like go find this thing and Bridge it back like these things are so important like these

little ux things oh you thought you thought you owned Adam Osmos Adam you actually own uh Adam Luna Osmos Adam yeah exactly you got go back three times and then go back yeah and the same thing happens on ethereum now right because you have a lot of different Bridges to the same layer too but they can create WRA token standards at least now with intense this is starting to get a lot better but some of the ux pieces are still not there right but on inisha you can move let's say usdc from one roll up to Ethan another um you know in less than a second through one unified interface that every one of these layer have uh as well as like the layer one and on the wallet part I think a lot of

what this comes down to for app chains is how do we break down as many barriers as possible so users can just come in and use products they don't necessarily need to come for inisha to use this we want them to maybe just come for this application or this fully onchain game so how do you break down the barriers obviously one was the bridging and now two is you know connecting to wallets and creating accounts here and so what we've done is every roll up on inisha is a cosmos SDK chain underneath but we offer the ability to use evm movm or wasum VM um and when you move tokens across all of these they get converted into Cosmos native tokens and then bridged so you can move let's say from

an erc20 into a move fungible asset and a move fungible asset into a cw20 so it's all nice and seamless and when you come and connect with a wallet we wanted to make sure you don't have the problem where you have to download a new one I think Cosmos wallets have come very far but they are still one of the reasons that I don't like using Cosmos I never went to optos at the beginning for a while because I didn't want to download new abdos wallets when you go to salana you still have to get a salana wallet like all these things are a huge pain and so we built this thing called the initial wallet widget and what it does is it basically lets use any wallet from evm Soul Cosmos We'll add the Aptos and

sui ones later but to sign with any of those Wallets on any of the chains despite what VM they are in without needing to know any RPC information or what chain you're on you just need to sign a transaction because this thing acts as like a a middleman where it just takes your signature and then it posts that signature to the chain instead of having like a real wallet integration and then that wallet widget shows you all of your assets across all of the chains um but it really just breaks down those barriers without us need to BD every single wallet team to get support for every single VM yeah that's going to be really cool I can't wait to use that to see if it so

basically people should be able to use inisha with Phantom or metamask or whatever without having to download any new wallet and they can interact with any of the rollups using Phantom or metamask basically that's right okay even if the rollup is in move or kmm or evm or maybe even doesn't even have a VM all these little ux things we just want to try and break down and like explore stuff too Cosmos explorers have been notoriously you know dog so we acquired the best Explorer team in Cosmos and we just said okay now this team um can focus on making the rollups on inisha have the best gu D explorers

and create like one unified system here was this and what was the injective beef on Twitter the other day or do we need to we probably don't need to get into it but they released some new updates to their Explorer and it was like a copy paste of our Explorer okay interesting yeah I guess we don't need to get into that um although you kind of did just then but yeah we'll probably get um get him as a tweet for this yeah anyway um no no no hate to injected so next have we have we I think we've hashed out like the the modular thesis pretty well like what needs to happen is there anything else

you guys want to talk about on this like Tia or people are doing a bunch of cash flow models for Tia even like Gart did one I was surprised he bust model yeah I'm curious about your guys's take on is um there's recently a governance proposal two of them for Tia and I know set in some of his past podcasts has said I'm bullish on Celestia and data posting but I'm not bullish on the token and so I'm wondering if these two updates change your view one was reducing the inflation rate and the second was locking investor rewards going forward so I think both of those are like good both of those none of

those fundamentally change like the token right um it just kind of changes the supply Dynamics for a little bit I think I am getting more bullish on TIA these days though partly because of how much it's been hammered to be totally Frank also you're kind of seeing that Bas is taking like 50% of ethereum blobs and it's going to take a long time for etherum blobs to really scale to any meaningful level and so it seems pretty clear to me right now that Celestia is going to start taking a lot more rollups market share and so that alone is like you know the problem one of the biggest

problems with I didn't like Tia at the beginning is it just went up so much and then they had like nothing there and you had to make some pretty you know at like 2020 billion doar with no rollups on it where you need like millions of rollups posting to actually make it like economically VI viable it's kind of like a hard sell um I think there's more of a path here what I think is interesting is kind of the ZK stuff with with Celestia if you can actually like start bridging Tia with that which I know they've been working on that is pretty bullish uh there was this paper the other day too I don't know if you saw it uh about like

actually using Celestia for verification of computation which is kind of interesting because then you're actually like verifying execution uh and everything and that kind of It kind of like changes that's kind of like a far out thing who knows how like immediately U applicable that is but yeah I don't know there are like there are my biggest question with da layers is that there are benefits to sharing a DA layer right like there are um there are these economies a scale that you get as a DA layer you know the bridging and everything like there's something real there right like it is a fundamental security like benefit my my question is always though

like what is the premium people will pay to get that right um I think that people like you know people aren't going to keep paying new rollups aren't going to be keep paying like ethereum blobs when they can get Celestial blobs for a hundredth of the price because of the the Improvement of like ethereum security right so it's kind of like what what premium can you actually charge as a DA layer and that's kind of that's like the most unproven kind of question out there for me um and yeah but I think Celestia has like some momentum now I think it's got like [ __ ] on too much uh I was part of that too I think they

just have the best scaling road map by far right like no one is going to compete with them amongst the alt da camp like Ian L Avil on these others unfortunately are going to be out competed here um I think they're just going to be the clear winner yeah because Celestia is not going to you're not going to like Celestia already has pretty big blocks and they're kind of like increasing them pretty aggressively so it's not like rollups using Celestia will will really be forced on cost basis anytime soon and that gives Celestia like a big opportunity with blobs being fully saturated and a lot of new rollups coming to Market that gives them a pretty big opportunity to kind of capture a lot of that market share so I

think like obviously abstract isn't using them yet but they're going to be using them obviously you guys are coming to Market uh there's like eclipse in flame which are early early days uh but you're starting to see like more you're starting to see more rollups using them so I think like yeah the next year or two I think is um yeah I also thought that the Celestia marketing I didn't like the whole mod mod versus monolithic Framing and I think a lot of people got SED by the term modular this cycle and didn't really think about what that really meant properly um and I think that's kind of changing a bit now

too all right should we move on to markets like just all Annihilation that we've been through for the last month or two like there's also some big launches that came out story protocol obviously launching into some pretty bad conditions does anybody know what story actually is like I still don't really know yeah I I I haven't uh I tried to to read about it it seems like just a seems like it could have been an L2 or just launch on salana with their IP and then I I don't know what programmability the app chain enables but to be fair I haven't made a very strong effort to the into it did you know on um I don't

exactly yet I think IP is tokenized as nfts um but it is built as a cosmos chain with evm um I think you know really a lot of story will be what does their BD look like who can they actually end up bringing on chain to use this thing not the tech at all I think it's sort of like if you have thep relationships then the best way to monetize it is to make an L1 around it uh you know and get the L1 premium more than it making a lot of sense to have an L1 for this but again I admittedly haven't looked into that much wor it's more marketing like realistically you know if what's going to create the most buzz and and and encourage or convince the most amount of Ip to get moved on is

if it's an app versus an L1 and then yeah the argument is L1 the premium allows you to have a bigger War chest and and make more noise and and ideally on board and create an ecosystem there the tradeoff is basically does the lack of other liquidity on this chain limit the value of the IP and the liquidity of it and so that's kind of the trade-off you're making at least from my perspective so TBD so it launched earlier today it's trading at around two billion bar chain launched last week they're also trading at around two and a half billion uh fdv um the bear chain one surprised me the

most I thought this thing was going straight to 10 billion but I'm obviously very biased because I was a big fan of M uh back in the day and that's kind of where this came from and I've known Smokey for a while and I just think the ecosystem is so ripe for like new D5 Builders or old D5 Builders it's kind of where you would want to go right now if you're looking for if you were looking for people that are going to actually use defi on chain but I think something we've seen after the launch is that people didn't use the chain but it's only been a week right so there's there's time but I think anyone Pro liquidity isn't live yet right proof of

liquidity is not live yet and the predeposit vaults may have been a Miss in the sense that if you wanted Bara exposure in size you already deposited $3 billion into these pools which are supposed to automate using the chain for you but a lot of it turns out to be like useless liquidity right you have like we Stone LP pool so like a eth LST eth LST for like hundreds of millions of dollars but who's who's using that um yeah the opportunities sorry I was just goingon to say the opportunities on the Chain if you go and use it are incredible right now because people aren't there so I've been farming stables for like hundreds of percent

apy yeah I checked uh on Kodiak yesterday and uh they have like islands and like fruitful Islands or something I don't know and uh there's like some crazy aprs on these four pools and one of them was eth uh Bara and it only had like 160k in it and this is like the main decks and then I go to the other Tab and it's like oh it's because there's like 500 million in stone barara and it's earning 0% incentives or anything uh um so yeah it's kind of weird it's uh yeah I think your point makes sense like a lot of these predeposit that are just locked essentially and people don't have extra bullets to kind of deploy because they

already made that allocation decision so yeah I don't know you still need like I still think though you need fundamentally new apps and it's still mostly everything right now on bear at least is just defi stuff again so I know they have the whole like how the how the system works is like unique right and like Innovative uh I guess it's like TBD if that is enough yeah yeah I agree um I don't know I feel like the again I'm same as Zona like

bullish on Smokey and really like the team think they've they've they've done a good job but it does feel like this would have been a good like 2021 launch like proof of liquidity was was uh made a lot of sense back then like jmx was was big um but I feel like Cosmos SDK like evm chain in in 2025 is is a tougher sell they have managed to they have really good builders on there like um I think exponents was one of our favorite teams that we saw on there Ryan Park shout out to him but um yeah I think it's a and I think for a lot of l1s you really need need a very strong reason to exist right like some kind of you need to have something that enables

like net new apps to be to be created because I think otherwise it's just it's just going to be tough um yeah I hope I hope uh the bear has pull it off for sure yeah I think proof of liquidity once we start to see it live and kicking will be very interesting just because we haven't seen it yet so yeah a few more weeks um and so are we are we near the bottom now maybe Yan are you yeah is all Annihilation over soon like uh please uh I mean I think the longer like BTC chop isn't really great for it um as we've seen so um I I do think we

we're kind of starting to to turn the corner though where you know bad news is no longer really nuking market so I think there's there's some degree of kind of seller or exhaustion on that front which is good to see um you know the two backtack high inflation numbers you'd think would have a larger kind of impact than they did granted like on the the PPI side if you look underneath um it's not it's like driven by uh portfolio management some some other kind of noise so um you know you know I think if if you gave the backdrop of inflation

reigniting you'd think markets would be massively pulling back and then that's not the case so I I I don't know what will really take us quite a bit lower now you had tariff delays until April 1 and so um a lot of alts look like they've bottom I mean I do think now is probably a good time to to bid I I don't I don't think you're going to get this like straight leg up I I think you know you do need some kind of a bounce from Bitcoin to give people confidence to to kind of go back in will it come back as quickly definely for like the other reason it won't come back as quickly is because of you know the amount of liquidations you've seen

like that's just money that's not really gonna be coming back like a lot of people got taken out and so um that's going to hurt quite a bit uh you're going to have tax bills that are pretty large that people are going to have to pay um after a good year last year so that's going to be another kind of headwind but um I I I mean if you were like the concepts and the reasons you were bullish before should still be intact unless right unless it was like a pure momentum trade then then not so much but you know if you thought narratives were strong before then they should still be strong now not much has changed on that front um and that's the thing right we we were

all we were bullish at the local top in in December Jan right and so it feels like if you're not bullish like 60 70 80% lower prices like a month later or a month and a bit later either we made a big mistake in December Jan which obviously possible or I feel like this is a good time to yeah you're just letting price the only thing from I think macro it's like obviously the tariffs are a bit of a wild card but the more they become a thing the less important they kind of are and then uh the inflation print is like one material thing that maybe you know but other than that like I don't think stuff has really changed too much so

yeah then you're just letting price dictate your uh thinking right and just crypto always front runs the bad news right like and the or any news like it almost you know like the tariffs and everything I think that's all and like unlocks is sort of all built into the price I don't know I I still think that version theme that we've been banging on about is obviously going to be a big thing like a lot of these alss don't do anything don't have any users don't generate any cash flows and still trading at nine or 10 figures and you have like a bunch of unlocks coming of people that know this stuff doesn't do anything and are like highly incentivized to sell so I think like fading those assets makes a lot of sense but I do think as we been saying there's

going to be some strong performers and I don't know basically the way I see it is like there's three kind of proven pmf businesses in in crypto which is like stable coins exchanges and and l1s basically and I think you want to have like the own the fastest horse in in in each of those or or a few of the fastest horses and then I think there's interesting upcoming areas that are going to that are like crypto AI which I'm really interested in um and I think dpin could be interesting and you want to kind of have some some bets in those two but that's that's kind of how I'm seeing alts alts right now um yeah sorry good I was just going to say I think there's a lot of coins that you

can just fade the cycle right you can just choose not to buy and so much of it is still vaporware right now that I've been seeing right there's like some projects that have launched main net two times and are going to launch main net a third time but they're trading in like multiple billions of dollars that sort of stuff is is kind of wild that it's still happening right now and that um maybe our user base still hasn't learned of like how to price things yeah and then and then I guess broader Market catalysts I think what was a detriment before is now going to be a catalyst right detriment being that everyone was kind of assuming there would be some executive order bid

related activities whether that's you know buying or or setting up of the uh spr um that got kicked out 180 days but you have like the Trojan Horse of of it happening through the Sovereign wealth fund which was on a 90-day timeline from announcement which I think puts it at like early May uh where it basically have to deliver a plan so I think there will be some Rumblings around that which which uh will start getting priced in at some point um and then Marky will react to that but that seems like a a pretty good way for them to get around some of the issues while of kind of the regulator not the regulatory but the

legislative issues around uh buying Bitcoin um through through this entity but yeah it's it's a tricky one because you know it's like where is the financing from that going to come from uh debt and so then it's like are you gonna outpace the cost of debt on this performance or yeah it'll interested to see how they kind of uh facilitate all that you know one of it will probably be through increased mining activities but um like oil mining not necessarily um crypto mining yeah anything else you want to talk about on on alts no it's just it's been like this this isn't changing like this is the new reality of

this Market there's too many tokens there's going to be good Pockets to be in there's a lot of stuff you just want no business holding like there's just too many tokens like the fdv of crypto is totally fake right it's like not it's not a real number um it's also crazy like the level of deception happening I would say these cycles that stuff is is crazy like yeah float that people publicly say these days is just entirely fake like people say they have like 20% Floats or whatever but secretly you know there's actually only like 5% of the float that's tradable um and that sort of stuff just happens naturally and

is like widely accepted in the markets and so some gross games being played for sure um with the float like see way larger also like I feel like some of the stuff that happened with World Liberty F or and some of the stuff that came out around these liquid funds you know getting Kickbacks to buy stuff on the open market like this stuff is really bad um yeah set said we got to start pricing things with fundamentals but it seems like having no product is still bullish in 2025 yeah it seems like it um yeah launching a product is kind of the worst thing you can you can you can do in crypto especially if you've built up a lot of hype and rais a lot of money but um yeah I do think the teams that win longterm are those that didn't do

that honestly um yeah and then I just want to do a quick note on because I Ripple yeah I asked you guys um about if you'd been using deep research I'm curious if any of you been been I know cus hasn't but Z or Yan have you been using it like the new open AI release no I haven't been yet okay have not either I highly recommend it I think it's like the most insane like I've been using it like three or four times a day on on holiday much to my uh girlfriend's displeasure but the you can basically get your own like tailor made reports on anything you want that are like the level that a pretty good analyst would do um in like that would take maybe two

weeks for them to do like I'll give you some examples just to like I was looking at a humanoid robotics play that that that Kang's been been bringing and wanted to see what the Tam is for humanoid robots and it basically produced like a giant report looking at all the different verticals that humanoid robotics could be used in adding Nuance like in manufacturing there's a lot of specialized robots so what are the specific jobs that only humanoids could do talking about service jobs like calculating the global time calculating like how long it will take robots to to to penetrate these different areas um yeah like we were looking at neuromorphic Computing play again produced a whole report on that I'm in I'm in a in in a country in South America that has an interesting local

culture I've researched everything about that like there's just so much um it's just insane like the the what you can do with this and I think people are just going to become like super people who use AI well are just going to be super humans for a few years before everyone uses it like you're just going to be able to 100x your your productivity and like the amount of stuff you can you can intake um especially as these Things become become more agentic and yeah I highly recommend does it take like how long how long does it take to think to like make one of those reports it depends what you ask at it's anywhere from like 3 to 30 minutes basically depending how how complex what you're what you're asking about is it's also interesting like sometimes you think you you've really stumped it and then it

does it in like five minutes and other times it's like seems relatively simple but it takes like 30 minutes to to to do it simple questions are hard to answer yeah and it's really interesting how like um you also when you go down the rabbit hole like prompting is the skill and I do think what this does is is it just like the most the smartest most efficient humans really get like 100x and then everyone else just kind of doesn't really have a job until until obviously like this thing gets so smart that even the smartest humans don't don't have a job either but I think that's going to take ages because yeah for for for for a bunch of reasons but you're kind of seeing this with like uh the prompts that people who are specialist in their areas can can

make and the type of reports and and responses they can get are so much better than than just random ones and you you start to really like there's there's a big science to like prompt engineering and and and stuff like that which I just think it's so interesting um yeah I'm start making it a habit to use it like daily I think yeah and there's also another interesting app it's called um I think it's called original. and you can basically run any text through it and it tells you whether it was generated by an llm or not and this is also really interesting to see how much of the [ __ ] on Twitter and and like even blog posts is basically llm generated um is there's quite a few of those there's a it's funny I was talking to Shane who I saw in the

background he was sending me some uh lipart argument from uh a friend and I was just like this sounds like the most llm thing ever and like 99% chance it was came out of this and I just sent him the screenshot I was like send this back to him yeah it's really funny um yeah and I think also the gap between people who are because you're going to have like hyper efficient like AI generated ads and content that just addict people and then you're going to have like hyper efficient people that leverage AI for their for their own benefit and I think the gap between them is just going to increase so much um it's kind of crazy it's also just destroyed engineering right like you can make a full application like front ends

back ends design like everything wired up in minutes now whereas that used to take days before when at least when I was studying in college which was not too long ago a few years ago yeah so things have just really come far and I didn't think I think Engineers will be one of the first to be replaced and I never thought it would be that order first right I always like human robots that would replace the people that are restaurant workers and things like that but I think it's going to be Engineers but it's just way easier to train on engineering problems with with RL right like they're they're just much more easy to to have have like definable kpis around yeah I was just Google Google's like I think they said 30% of their codes being generated by AI at this point which is wild maybe I should start

writing some contracts maybe I should launch an Anisha a Manisha yeah my new uh handheld buddy basic [ __ ] just one quick story like I had on my condominium that I live in like they basically sent me an email saying that I can't uh like my dog's piss has been creating like holes on the grass and I I can't walk my dog in the public areas and just literally had AI put together like a response like I was like just tell them that I'm going to keep walking my dog in the public areas and like the this this isn't a problem and it just wrote this like really amazing like long response to them uh citing like regulations around this stuff and all and all this thing and that yeah it was so funny how much AI slop is probably going to go into like just these email exchanges and

stuff like you're just going to be able to waste people's time just having an AI like continuously respond to people it's all over Twitter right especially with the Yap forming and Kaio like half the responses that I see I'm pretty sure are Ai and then I've asked them if they're Ai and obviously they say no which means they must be AI yeah yeah I used it for my daughter's preschool application just read the whole thing yeah it's crazy and it's just insane how like AI sorry to keep going up like AI passed the churing test no one cared and now it's like doing like superhuman like researcher level reports and stuff and still like no one cares the word just keeps going on as normal when it it just feels like if you use it

like everything has has changed and it's just hard to wrap your mind around how much everything's going to change with once this stuff like proliferates um especially considering how bullish Sam seems to be on continued like progress even past this this current level um but yeah we can end it here cheers thanks very much Zan for coming in that was awesome and thanks everyone thanks for having me yeah thank you [Music]