Investing in Crypto's Next App Wave with 6th Man Ventures | Mike Dudas & Carl Vogel

Transcript

the thing about these agents to me is that the the value in them is not that it's built on decentralized infrastructure these agents have a personality and they may launch a token or trade a portfolio and that is what is actually attracting a lot of liquidity one big area that we're going to continue to focus on is the um explosion of you know tokens but there's a clear product Market fit to attaching tokens to attention and to traditional forms of media like video and audio and we're just going to see explosion of that and it's clear from from pump being an example that the product Market fit is better than just about you know anything we've ever seen that is going to explode you're seeing with on crypto tokens now and agent tokens over the next 12

months scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different other L1 networks have costly transaction fees clunky user experiences and lack true adoption in Ai and onchain gaming explore the gas-free ecosystem at scale dospace ecosystem and follow their Journey on X at scale Network that is scale with a K hit the link in the show notes to get started hey everyone Jason here wanted to talk about something that's been on my mind a lot recently if we should not be just recreating the trafi industry that's why I'm excited to share with you that today's sponsor magic Eden is getting into token trading and their vision is to become onchain binance and then much

more as the entire world moves on chain stay up to date with magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X at Magic Eden all right everybody welcome back to Empire we have uh two friends of blockworks former enemy of blockworks now now friend of blockworks we have Mike dudis and Carl vogle from six-man ADV Ventures welcome to the show guys thanks great to be here yeah I say former enemy because um dudus started the block around the time that we started block works and uh until he got I don't know what that was a hostile takeover of the block or whatever we want to call that we we competed so dudas how's uh just curious how how is it running a VC compared to

running a company um so in crypto you know they're both hectic and crazy and you know me as a pre- boomer you know my mid-40s uh I'm still working you know primarily with people in the early 20s uh which was the case of the block uh you totally globally distributed and you know same thing with with the group of ERS that we work with uh the the reason I enjoy you know running a venture capital firm more than running you know media and research organization is that you know median research you're in the middle of the information flow um but we work in a in a money industry and obviously when you work in a money industry you want to be in the uh in the middle of the money flow uh so you know I think the block was a fantastic way to

get to meet you know everybody the builders who are creating these you know new financial and non-financial products uh and it gave me the opportunity to then you go out and you know basically because I had seen so many different folks sort of pitch inbound had a good way to kind of like filter between you know what was real and what wasn't so that you know practiced out for three and a half years and then decided to put some money behind it what do you think uh we were debating this on the show the other day are VC's Founders in their own right so uh I would say that so absolutely uh because you know no matter what era of crypto VC you're talking talking about uh the folks who were raising their funds at any given time were largely doing something that's

contrarian I know it doesn't seem that way now you know where we have these Mega funds but a lot of these Mega funds are Mega because the value of their Holdings is appreciated due to the early asymmetric risks they took but if you go way back you know panta you know when they started their Bitcoin fund massively contrarian and Dan you know put Millions into Bitcoin and you know brought along a lot of his friends uh you just keep going down the line you know the precursors to dragon fly um you know did the same took a lot of money from their friends and deployed it and then you know the best kind of like call it not Mega funds of today but what I would call like the best pure playay VCS with the biggest brands and like framework and multi-coin you know they

raised their initial funds you know sub20 million and and basically had to beg people in that you know 201819 period um to get that initial capital and and it paid off tremendously so certainly Founders in that sense of you telling a story um that's contrarian and you know pitching to everybody on Earth uh what's really cool about crypto is not only you know are the folks entrepreneurial in the businesses they run but a lot do actually have experience you know I mentioned you know framework they do a tremendous amount of you know stuff on chain similar to you know Deli digital and alliance St you know the best quote unquote VCS are actually the people who are out there building stuff alongside uh their portfolio companies or you know even

people are not invested in who they love uh you know and I think Carl can probably add to it but you he's an engineer himself and obviously has built a lot of stuff before becoming VC yeah for folks go ahead girl go ahead yeah I was mad like that's one of the reasons I remember when I was I was a um sort of picle before this and I was when I was looking to join six-man I was talking to Mike and I said one of my biggest fears is you know going from being a product Builder which right now it's a great time to be a product Builder to an investor uh I I definitely had some concerns there um because I I love building and at the end of the day I I was a PM for many years I still get to act as a PM think as a PM um but we're

also Founders I mean we're four people we're an extremely lean team we operate as a startup we have almost zero bureaucracy which allows us to move very quickly um and you know we're building a generational fund and firm and so with that uh I I still absolutely feel like a Founder every dayce yeah and the last point I'll make is you know as we get kind of this I think it's wonderful candidly uh this anti-c rhetoric you know hyper liquid launch never raised any VC money you know all of the sort of you know AI uh and crypto you know AI agent trenches these tokens are getting live before you know they ever have need for investor Capital because there's actually real business they're generating fees uh so it's a really really exciting time again where I think

the the the playing field is pretty even and and VCS are buying the same Market as everybody else and have to be entrepreneurial about our business model you know we've historically invested in private rounds we're actually you know Carl and I were talking late last week about whether for AI agents specifically we should just start you know not even considering private but start you know delving in to public tokens because it seems that's where the returns are maybe I mean let let's go deeper into that because that is an interesting thing to consider and actually I think a lot of the mega funds have mandates where they can't do some of that stuff and I think some of the more Nimble newer crypto funds are starting to actually win some of those games so you have all these like I mean there's this anti- VC

rhetoric it's always been there I don't pay much attention to that however there are these like anti uh I don't know if anti VC is the right word but you know things like Legion and Echo and coin coin list has been around for a while obviously but Legion and Echo I had a Founder the other day say should I just do my entire series a on Echo um you have the meme coins you have these AI agents it does see like hyper liquid it does seem like there are trends that are moving in the direction of hey you can just raise Capital without VCS how does this impact six man's future yeah so I think we're fortunate you know relative to some Mega funds and that we're actually perfectly suited our our fund size right now is 140 million our second fund and you we're going to raise a third fund early

next year you know not that much larger you know two to 250 um but in a world in which the capital requirements are shrinking at just an astronomical rate right where you can create you know pump raised I believe less than $5 million and has generated in nine months something like $320 million in Revenue um you know the model of deploying a hundred million do into a crypto business it's just like there's not that many really good opportunities and the ones from last cycle where that happened I won't name any specific companies but most of them didn't pan out so we think we're really really well positioned um either to do so publicly you know like OTC purchase from uh Founders who have light Capital requirements but the

things that those Founders are looking for you know they're not looking anymore for brand names like they are the brand name ai6 Z you know zbra like they have great brands that like people recognize more than they recognize the brands of of a venture capitalist so you basically um you we're kind of working really hard we have an appropriate fund size for it or we can put one to2 million dollars to work into an idea um but but yeah we're in a world where you know we kind of have to win the trust of those founding teams to whether it's sell OTC to us um or to embrace us if we buy liquid and want to you become part of their growth how do you prevent getting into this cycle that I've seen happen where I'd put six-man in the third wave of venture firm so first would be like panta

blockchain cap second would be like dragonfly uh you know kind kind of second cycle dragonfly maybe Pary um framework Etc and then the third is like I you know I probably put six-man in that and then there's a fourth wave that's happened recently which is like modular cap and those guys the trend that I've seen play out is you raise a you know 10 to 20 million and you have insane performance and I think you guys had this just you know by any expectation just insane performance then you raise another fund sounds like you guys raised 140 and you have really good performance but maybe not as good as the second one and then the third fund when you raise this maybe you go out and you raise a 300 million or 400 million and the performance I've seen has been subpar like you know underperforming

Bitcoin sometimes how do you prevent that from happening yeah so it's a it's a great question I think you have to be so as Relentless as you were on the day the firm was founded and and I like that you mention you know framework and multi-coin again and Dragon I kind of consider those the true north on how you build your know crypto native brands from scratch but those folks are out there hustling winning they're founder Le like Carl said we just have four Partners we don't have big support staff this that and the other thing you know we're not waiting for an associate or an analyst you to come bring something to IC and tell us why this idea that I have no understanding of is interesting um you these folks are just hitting the pavement you see them everywhere and they understand what's happening so I do

think you can Excel and I think some of those funds I mentioned are going and are going to prove it uh over the next three to four years because we can see the deals that they're doing and they're incredible you know things like multicoin you know getting into i.net you know one of the largest GPU compute Market places um you know at a preed valuation they do not stop hustling Carl you have some thoughts yeah I mean at the end of the day I think also the expectations are lower I mean if you're operating a sort of a billion fund your returns are going to be lower a lot of times you know when we look at how these very large Mega funds underwrite deals they're underwriting for two to five x of the fund I mean that's that's sort of

like a great outcome for their LPS for them and so that just the risk return profile is different more like growth Equity like yeah it's like growth Equity like if you look at the size of these rounds are getting done you would typically put it in a growth Equity type business um so I think if you are small and Scrappy you have to be able or a smaller fund size you have to be able to take very large risks otherwise it's kind like why are you playing the game because at that size especially uh you know you need large returns in order to establish your brand and then go ahead and start to like move up the stack towards bigger opportunities absolutely a few of our LPS have literally told me they they basically said something to the effect of you know dudus if you're

going to 3x like I might as well just you know put my money into private equity and save myself you know the heartache uh when I'm looking at these Market swings we're underwriting you to a 5x plus huh um let's talk about the winners that you guys have had so far so when actually can you give us like a 30 second just on the fund for people who are less familiar with six man yeah so uh we did start as an entrepreneurial Fund in 2021 uh me and and my longtime friend and and a colleague at Google Wallet many years ago uh Serge cassarian uh basically have been you know buying nfts and in 2020 2021 doing pretty well with like NBA Top Shot art blocks you know early crypto punks um so we started an a fund with

our buddies from college 12 of them they each you know sent us 12 eth and we made them a bunch of money and then they were like you know can you invest in big crypto deals so again it was a really entrepreneurial organic story so we raised as you mentioned a small fund 7.4 million and our strategy was just hey we've got great relationships From the Block and our time in the market uh so we wrote 100K checks uh follow checks into a tremendous number of businesses in 2021 everything from you know step in to magic Eden you know both of those sub30 million valuations uh squads you know sub5 million valuation ether scan and so we were successful and then we timed it perfectly to where we went to raise our second fund much larger sort of right at the the peak of euphoria

crypto is all about timing so in late 2021 early 2022 raised uh that second fund and the tack that we took is we have actually been in traditional Tech like I worked at Disney for a number of years I worked at YouTube and and we've actually worked on applications that consumers and businesses use I do think there is a little bit of a lack of experience amongst investors and Founders it's getting much much better over the last 12 months in crypto but when we were start investing in 2021 2022 um there was a great need for people who had built businesses uh so you know we were able to get on cap tables earn trust our performance was solid enough um that folks gave us another chance and and here we are nice what are the um what are the winners so far yeah so yeah yeah it's

it's hard to you know we're only three years into the first fund and and two years into the second um but you know the some of the early winners are are stepping you know which kind of kicked off this whole along with axi infinity this whole ex to earn phenomenon so that was a really exciting investment for us you know magic Eden re recently launched their token you know we invested in them as an nft Marketplace in 2021 um but mainly because they were the mo some of the most incredible products Builders we'd ever seen and that's paid off as you've seen they've expanded you know not just on salana but to basically all the large chains where nfgs are traded and they've introduced a wallet product so they're you know a holistic brand they've added liquid trading uh in terms

of ordinals uh and runes so so it's just a really exciting um company uh and then as I mentioned you know one of our another early one was squads um which is kind of the nosis safe of salana I hate to actually frame it like that because I think over time they have a chance to be even bigger than safe as they expand to multiple chains um you know they have a fantastic wallet product uh so it's been a lot of fun and then more recently out of this fund you know we've continued I like to call it like we're doing a barbell strategy where we're investing in kind of really serious things but then also really fun things um you I call it you know business in the front party in the back I say that you know kind of every time I talk publicly

because I think to have a a true economy you need you know the fun apps and then you need the places to kind of like Park your money for for serious reasons so um you some big Winners out of fund two that look like they're going to be winners you know pump. fund is obviously you know the number one um you know Revenue producing you know it's basically the fastest to 100 million 200 million 300 million you tech company in in uh technology history and they actually think of themselves as a technology company not a crypto company right and they're going to add social features and they have been adding social features uh and they think of themselves as a consumer first app company uh so it's really exciting to see that mindset shift um so that's

that's obviously a big one um and Carl can talk about a couple more the two I guess two other ones uh you know during the bare Market your investment strategy needs to change and what what we found is again we're we're mainly application layer consumer investors but we do work with hundreds of portfolio companies and they do need some sort of infrastructure to be successful and during the bare Market we invested in two companies that were increasing in market share during the bear in The Sal ecosystem but was pretty obvious that like once the market returned that they would just be massive winners so helus was one of those we did their seed round and that was you know and M is also just a uh you know like a 10x founder very clearly the guy is uh maniacal barely sleeps is chronically

online and if a if a Founder tells me he's chronically online that's that's a very positive signal in crypto and we've had a chance to know mer for a long time uh squads also we down it's one of the only Investments where we actually invested in multiple rounds even out of multiple funds and so I think for fund you know two that's how I would round it off but again it was incredibly simple thesis that that has paid off many many dividends and we get a chance to partner with these amazing Founders and so now whenever any new salana app is looking for RPC support or multi-stake you know it's very easy to say go work with these two portfolio companies we've known them for years and uh you're going to have a great experience yeah and what I'll one thing I'll add yo is basically you know

because of the composition of our fund and having you know mo not like massive you know pension fund institutional investors our LPA or our limited partner agreement does give us you asked earlier gives us flexibility and latitude on our strategy okay uh and so we were able to invest in the entire salana stack because of that so you know we started buying uh salana in the open market in 2023 you know in the 20 in the 20s as it was starting to recover uh and continued to purchase you know through the private FTX sale uh and then we've also been able to invest in jeto both in the private and public markets um so to Carl's point you know we just feel like the salana stack is extremely powerful it's born that out over the last 15 18

months it's just getting started as more payments things and deepin uh projects and and social apps and and trading and speculative apps move to salana or a birth in salana so it's an exciting time and you know goo benefits from that yeah yeah jeta's a nice little 30X or something from it one thing I'll say to on that is like what I found and Mike tell me if you agree with this as Mike was listing those companies I was reflecting the faster we make a decision the more successful the outcome has been like every single one of those DLCs talk to we've turned around in less than a week do you find that you know the that you have a good sense of what the winners will be when you're doing the rounds or is it a or do you believe that they're all 100 x's and it's just a

crapshoot uh I mean I would say we take we we pick top Founders and then sometimes the market changes the sentiment changes there's a new but are you like okay Lucas I forget the pump what's the pump guy's name Noah or something are you like Lucas Noah and mert are like A+ and like some of these Founders we've done are like B+ and do you know that at the time of investing we I mean we try not to work with B+ Founders like at the end of the like I'm being genuine like we're not going to we have such limited time to do diligence and and dig into deals and our process that if we don't think they a plus it's disqualifying criteria and so you know what I'd say about all those Founders

you mentioned is they're all um you the exception of no extremely public like Lucas is very public m is very public Stephan is very public and so um through that sort of not only do we see their A+ but we have years of data points that prove out their A+ we can kind of get to that point quicker but if we can't get to the point where we determine something an A+ during a process it's just the biggest thing we've learned about the people is that we bias towards the folks who have built something um I think that's been a better productor so if people have gotten it's it really is the why combinator model it's the alliance down model what I love about Alliance companies we we invested in two out of this cohort called data hiive and offramp doxyz one's a stable Coin

Company one's an AI data company um is you know they have working products and they're super super focused and and so where we've that um we've had a lot more success than people who have said here's my vision by the way look at my fantastic background I'm formidable I maybe have done great things in the past what we found is we've had a lower success rate with those folks if they haven't produced something that's almost exactly what they plan to build you know over the next 12 18 months do you feel like you need to be contrarian to make outsize returns right now like like pumped off fun like most people passed on that I think it was like what you guys Alliance and big brain and I mean I'm an idiot I think dudas you showed me

that deal I passed on it like uh why why did you guys do something like that when most other people passed yeah so uh I gets back I mean I I had been you doing meme coiny stuff I was fortunate enough to be you work and be an early contributor on Bon uh certainly by no means the the biggest contributor um you that's Nom and and Cadence and a bunch of other folks but you just kind of seeing how much people loved at the bottom of the bear you know to basically receive you know this Bonk airdrop and and you know it was for developers it was for people who bought the Saga phone and it just kickstarted so much onchain activity um that made me start paying attention to mem coins so

all through all of 2023 we were kind of looking and saying well we're VCS we can't buy these tokens directly even though we do have a wide latitude it's just liquid meme coins it's definitely not our strategy um so always had our eyes open for you know what's next and so you know basically we had a magic moment where um you each one of us was able to launch our own coin uh own token on pump and just watching this thing get like instant liquidity and start to move up the bonding curve having you know been in the trenches ourselves having watched like the one second chart ourselves while trading me points you're like oh wow this is Magic it's addictive you know the the flashing lights but basically not caring about convention design mechanisms and and and making

something that's really special so we definitely have had more success on that stuff than you know let's say the thing that is wildly polished looks like a web two product um you know and uh and and you know has maybe is over product engineered yeah and and to that I mean I've had a thesis we all have I think around the financialization of everything and then thesis has played out to a t this year I mean now our elections are financialized uh you know you know um meme coins are financialized cult and ideas are financialized and so I think at the end of the day people say why are why are mcoins successful and it's because you're investing in an idea and as that idea grows in popularity over time like that coin and that community grows as well and so Noah was able to articulate that extremely well

which gave us a high degree of confidence that he's the you know the person to carry this out yeah uh let's start to get into how you guys are thinking about next year and I think maybe the best way to lead into this is I was looking at your portfolio companies and you guys uh you guys are probably the only crypto Venture firm that segments out your portfolio companies without a segment of infrastructure so here I can zoom in for anyone watching on YouTube um you have ai consumer deepin developer gaming and money um there's no infrastructure Tab and so I'd just be curious i' I'd love to actually break into these different buckets as we think about 2025 but give me your general like vision for what next year could look like and how you're

thinking about investing in the space do you want to start to this yeah absolutely so look we uh you know infrastructure is is something that we're we're always going to be investing in um but but you know there has to be an End customer for it we don't like like infrastructure for infrastructure sake so I think you could probably call developer you that's the area of infrastructure things like helias that make it easier for developers to build an app or set of apps on an underlying blockchain infrastructure like salana yeah that's where we're going to invest but the way that we've categorized it you know these um six categories we we

try to keep it consistent it's it's really important for you know Founders to be able to look at your portfolio how you categorize things and say wow like I really think I can kind of fit into their mental model and and they understand what I'm doing and and can work with us so um you know as we look to to next year there's no question I'll just start with the last category money okay you know so historically and then maybe Carl you can talk about some of the others but you know if you look at how we Define money um you know cube is both a money settlement layer across different blockchains it's an exchange so people are trading and exchanging you know Financial assets uh squads is uh you know basically I'll call it almost

like a uh a crypto bank or better than a bank it's not not really a bank but basically you have a wallet you have your multisig and you can keep your funds really secure on chain and then you can off-ramp them you lifi is a way to move money you know through jumper you know cross different chains and we can go on and on but you know basically money takes so many different forms we don't have a couple of the exciting logos on here like offramp doxyz but pay is on here and now we're getting into consumer money so historically people have kept their money on exchanges like binance so they could be US dollar denominated in different parts of the world world we think there's going to be a massive massive unlock as people move to a self- custody model in money in 2025 uh the rails are there you can you

know basically take your money now off of binance you don't have centralized exchange risk you can put them into a self- custody account um and with offramp and pay you can basically literally offramp your money via debit card wherever debit cards are accepted globally so it's a really really exciting useful um change and and how things go um maybe I'll let Carl attack one of the other categories Carl before before going into the other ones one thing that's always confused me a little bit about stable coin like money investing is candidly the lack of a token oftentimes how do you think about the yeah how do you think about that yeah so uh basically many of these uh we do look at as Equity businesses um

you know but but in some cases a token very well could be necessary um it could be a way that you know if I'm effectively transacting in a native token or there's a protocol layered token it could incentivize even cheaper money moving money money movement you know for example if I'm paying in the native you know pay token fee or something like that Carl do you want to expand on that a little bit yeah I I mean at the end of the day like our goal is to make crypto mainstream right and so not every single business should have a token asso with it and so if we see a strong Equity business we're long-term investors Mike and I aren't going anywhere so we have no problem and we've communicated tolp is we have no problem investing in an equity business that can

produce substantial um you know cash flows over time the other thing too is I mean look at the the bridge acquisition I think you know what is the exit for a lot of these companies sure I mean a couple of them may go public but like realistically many of them are going to get acquired by large players that felt extremely left behind you know we've already seen um you know one of our portfolio companies dakota. XYZ which is the leading uh business you know consumer Bank uh you know Crypton native Neo Bank um I've already had strategics from multiple large Enterprises really wanting to understand how this works because they're growing quickly have hundreds of customers are doing hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly volume and if you're someone like Mercury and

you see all these new businesses now starting here with a more secure self- custom solution that allows you to earn a higher yield you know a lot of these are going to be looking to tucking crypto or expand their crypto and having a sort of a flagship acquisition is a very clear way to do it so that's how we rationalize it exactly it does though make entry point uh or entry valuation you know quite a bit more important um but you know what we've found really interesting through 2024 is how many of these tokens like Ando for example I think is trading at like 19 billion FTV you know far more uh quote unquote valuable than Circle which which has a substantial larger business so you know currently the Ando token's you primarily a

governance token it's not clear why it should be worth 19 billion but at the same time you we don't argue with the market so if the Market's saying we value tokens then certainly where we have the ability to encourage an equity-based business to you know theoretically uh create a you know token design that complements their business even if traditionally it's been Equity only model um you we will obviously do that because the market is rewarding it and it gives these um call it companies that that are turning into protocols a a currency that's just so incredibly valuable and cheap I mean just think about how much an advantage it is if Ando ever starts doing Acquisitions or

it wants to attract liquidity and how much they can do because they have a token and and they own a tremendous amount of it that you know their balance sheet is just massive uh another blockchain you know or Another You project that's done EXT exceptionally well with that is is suie uh you know where they've just had a massive massive war chest um and have used that to to actually make Acquisitions they haven't announced all of them but they've done some gaming Acquisitions um and they can provide tremendous incentives to increase the activity on their chain do you I guess how do you think about that more broadly for the whole portfolio in terms of just yeah I mean it's funny the Ono Circle one is a very interesting comparison right because

circle is a more valuable business than Ando like full stop period like that is just a fact but Ando trades higher so one thing there has got like that is a very inefficient Market I would say one thing's got to give either the tokens have got to come down or the valuations on privates have got to come way up what do you think budges there I mean this this this is an irrational market so I think the token can stay up for a very long time that's that's a bet that I think it's a really smart bet candidly that ando's making so you know let's just say that draws down 75% you know it's still I believe at the same level as the last private valuation of circle which has you been in business

for 10 years so it it's pretty clear that that the Market's saying you know in this environment it really makes a lot of sense to make that quote unquote bet on you know launching aen XP is another example of this you know what did you say Carl xrp itself is another examp I don't know the current FDB of xrp but you know relative to fundamentals and progress yeah worldcoin Ena um Athena's token these are just great examples that you know by having that liquid currency um it it's uh you know even hyper liquid you know it's a it's a token where now I mean it's just like up only every single day but you know people look at that and

it makes their eyes grow whoa like super big and uh basically what it's what's happened is everybody wants to chase that in a bull market and it's led to a billion dollars of usdc stable coin inflow to hyper liquid since the tge just a few weeks ago it's just wild to watch and makes lot of sense I have a I'm gonna get down the rabbit hole and off topic for a second but Mike uh imagine you went down a different Road in life and you stay you were still running the block and you'd been running it for several years and you're saying um I'm still you know still running the block there's there's no Acquisitions in in crypto like there's no Acquisitions for cryp for privates really I mean the m&a market just never has really arrived

would you think about launching a token for the block yeah unquestionably yes yes unquestionably say say more about that yeah so it would be uh at the outset you know based on us regulatory environment it would be you know what you would call a community token um there there's one that was recently launched by wrecked RT uh which I thought was really interesting which just says like it's the intangible value of the community and the Goodwill and the people who love the project um you the block has just so much Goodwill that effectively the way that I would do it if I was there right now is I would launch a token a community token I would you know allow anybody who's a subscriber anybody who's an investor anybody who's you know

contributed or been covered by the block you know to claim some portion of the token and create a community where everybody is pulling for me and our media brand um and you know over time I would add utility to it where you could pay for your block subscription you know with your token so it could be you know an airdrop and there's just there's just no way to get fully valued as a media company you know where you're going to be something like you know two to 5x Revenue but once you launch a token people have proven they want to participates I think you're going to see you know just like you've seen W you saw pudgy where you know the the value of pudgy and Pudgy's IP um you know I think the token in pre-market today it's

launching tomorrow is trading close to two billion Pug's never been close to unlocking that much value prior to issuing a token and and for now they're saying hey this is a community token it's representative of our brand um and kind of like all future Goodwill attached to it um but again it gives them a currency to do really really exciting things and I do think you know I'd be curious how you think about it but I see rug radio and decrypt and i' imagine imag fro you know who who's deeply involved there and one of the senior folks I gotta imagine they're going to launch some sort of a fungible token I think yeah I think they'll launch something I mean we're we're not launching something right now but maybe that is uh maybe that's the wrong decision I don't know we I mean we yeah

maybe that's the wrong decision better watch out the community just might launch something for you someone launched Yano coin and I was like God please don't buy this I'll give you another example too you I did start uh you know a utility project uh one of the you know more utility specific projects called linkow um where we you sold a bunch of nfts which gave people um golfers you know access to a ton of perks and benefits and discounts and the ability um to join a golf course that we purchased in Scotland uh and we're going to be announcing our us course purchase here in the next couple weeks which is really really exciting um but we are actively and and deeply considering you know the launch of a liquid token to

capture basically involve more people allow more folks to participate in this community nfts have historically been limiting if you're Media Company subscriptions are limiting you know in terms of how many people can get involved um but think about it you know if you kind of allow people to claim a liquid token um you can allow so many more people to attach you know themselves um a little bit of ownership of of some intangible thing um to the brand and and it's just it's clearly an unlock and it's only going to accelerate in my mind what does this do for the token of the link Stout tokens I guess because you guys what have 10,000 or yeah so we I guess you've seen it with Pudgies right

Pudgies launched I didn't even realize until this weekend Pudgies had pudgy um they obviously have little little Pudgies but they also have um oh my God what are these rods rods the rods thank you I didn't even know they the rods yeah yeah it's wild so basically if you talk with their team they'll say look we used to basically uh anything we do we do amazing things we're going to have you know a movie we're going to you we have our plushies in Walmart but the you know the price of the nft is just too high for the average person to enter in and so the value of what we're creating it's just hard for that to get represented and the price of an nft and and obviously you know when you have a token that's purchasable in know any amount uh it just opens up the ability

of people to share in that Community upside uh and all the great things that your project is doing even if the value does directly correlate like it's not a security there's your pengu is not going to be Distributing fee Revenue to Holders it's it's closer to something like a BNB which binance has which is kind of like a loyalty token and a platform and a and a community token that gives you benefits inside the ecosystem yeah yeah one of the things that surprised me this year is that nobody has yet no project has really figured out the 404 standard or basically be able to make uh you know funable assets non-f funable and vice versa so having like we talk about the value of the IP the brand the image um but there you know it's a completely

separate token in order to be part of that ecosystem I think having is a standard that exists today I'm just waiting for the project that cracks it where now you can have tokens you can get involved easily but you can also represent yourself and own IP by swapping a portion of those tokens into uh into like rare assets or images associated with the uh with the project I I expect somebody's going to figure that out I just don't it just hasn't happened yet and surprising if you said beginning of 2024 I just said totally it's incredibly obvious but it hasn't played out yet scale is the blockchain that is Simply Built different let's face it other L1 networks have costly transaction fees that increase as the network gets busier scale has solved

this problem with a gas-free scalable infrastructure where users never pay gas fees scale was awarded the most active gaming chain in 2023 by coin Gecko and host five of the top games on dap radar you should definitely check out scale I was using it the other day it really is incredible to use that's scale spelled with a K hit the link in the show notes or head on over to scale dospace ecosystem to get started today hey everyone Jason here I wanted to take a second to break down why magic Eden is getting into token trading their team is extremely concerned that crypto is still Consolidated in the hands of a few centralized exchanges who act as Gatekeepers ultimately recreating the

trafi space they believe that crypto is still missing an onchain binance and their aim is to move trading completely onchain fully decentralized they've done $6 billion do in nft volume in the last 3 years and have had more than 1.4 million users visit their platform in the past year making them the number one nft platform in the market today they are the ones that can do it stay up to date with magic Eden's journey by giving them a follow on X at Magic Eden yeah h um all right we went down the rabbit hole should we should we come back up to uh we talked money Carl do you want to take us into any of the other ones of these either consumer or deepin or AI crypto yeah let's do let's do deepin so

I think deepin is the area I love investing in most particularly just because I spent years building hardware and then spent years at coule Nest doing iot um and you know ecosystem development so from that perspective it's just been really exciting um I think looking out I I wrote a piece on sort of where what type of deep in projects ACR value um I think you're on to link it most likely in the show notes um but ultimately I think as I look at a 2020 five uh I guess backing up to 2023 looking at 2024 we are expecting a large amount of growth in different projects and sort of like a lot of these projects BEC more mainstream uh Brands and narratives and I think you know overall like the industry has has experienced

marked growth uh if I look about look at the amount of deepin deals we looked at in 202 4 Wells of 2023 I'd say it's five or 10x at least higher I there's an explosion of deepin now every single type of Hardware is getting a team building a decentralized permissionless version of it so I think more of these are going to come through fruition and materialize over time um looking towards 2025 I think areas like um mapping are are particularly uh exciting I think two is as we're looking at all the sort of UAV is this you know kind of like a Time bin thing all the U that are appearing um everywhere I think generally we're going to see a growth in uh UAV adoption just from personal hobbyists and we've

seen a number of companies enabling users to either get free uavs or buy these uavs and then go ahead and earn tokens for mapping certain areas whether it's for Disaster Response whether it's for um uh you s real estate mapping whether it's any sort of use case but being able to say from anywhere in the world I want to get a real-time image of a particular location and have a network that's able to fulfill that request like that is an incredible power that does not exist anywhere you can even imagine new forms of like hedge funds where they sort of look at Satellite mapping data all the time it's quite expensive having hobbyists being able to go out real time scan parking lots take images I think there's G to be a lot of growth in that segment looking forward uh for 2025 I

think divin and sort of decentralized CDN is another area where you know when you're a streaming platform you have high degrees of volatility and so trying to constantly have a large amount of infrastructure to support that volatility is a very Capital intensive um area and while also making sure during periods of high volatility and high viewership you actually can get the resources that you need it's pretty complex to structure an infrastructure Network and contract like that but I think that's where decentralized networks can come in and and outperform centralized Solutions and uh what I'm really excited for you said what is one thing that's going to help deepen go even more mainstream than it is today I think it's going to be free Hardware so you know we've been talking to uh the dawn Wireless team who who we invested

in a Neil and you know they're able to take uh they're basically build decentralized highspeed gigabit internet and they're able to lower the cost from the average American to $50 to sub $20 pretty incredible uh Network that's being built out but you know what I was telling Neil is how do you make this internet free like how by basically having a network where you're capturing not providing not just internet but let's say you're you're also doing IP web scraping uh on the side or you're also providing other types of singals intelligence basically aggregating together a couple different networks into one platform how can you make now give free in people and I think when you have that moment all of a sudden you're going to see exponential growth on the deepen adoption side so free dpin if

you're building this I'd love to chat with you uh I'm particularly excited and I think we have a chance at achieving this in 2025 yeah uh just stop banging the you're hit you're hitting the table some with something just a heads up okay um Carl what you guys laid out the these like four Frameworks um for evaluating D pins um granular Geographic importance supply side overlaps with the demand side compete on performance not on cost and demand scales nonlinearly with Supply can you take us a little deeper into this framework yeah sure so I I guess starting with the first one um there's a lot of dpin networks in the compute space are they're depins uh but at the end of the day uh the location

the precise location of the infrastructure is uh you know fairly loose so for example if I'm quering a Data Center and it's 30 miles away versus 60 miles away of course there's a a change in latency but I'd say it's fairly uh marginal for especially for most use cases and with that it means that you actually have less of a moat if you're a company because anybody can acquire and build infrastructure in a wide geographic area and be able to serve uh you know very quickly centralized build all this infrastructure and then service a wide population and so with that it's just harder to build a moat versus if you have street level you know mapping or street level Wireless available all of a sudden for somebody to replicate that

Network it is uh exponentially harder to do to be able to get that geographic distribution so that's the first one pretty pretty clear that's why things like helium and hi mapper particular are quite powerful quite novel uh secondly is supply side overlaps with the demand side if you think about a situation where I'm an operator in a dpin network if the only reason I'm doing this is for tokens then during a bare Market or other situations I might turn off my network and I might have no quals doing it it's a purely economic decision that means I need to receive a substantial amount of tokens to be to continue operating this infrastructure but if we look at something where I am already using this infrastructure regardless

like I need this to operate my business and rtk network is an example which basically helps transmit uh signals to GPS sensors that way they can be much more accurate like if I need this already to operate my Precision farming equipment my other Robotics and automation I'm already doing this and so sure if you give me a token kicker I might buy your model versus a competitors but like I I need this regardless and so you actually need much less incentives to bootstrap these networks token incentives specifically then ones that are the supply are completely different people than the demand side so we always look for those types of networks and because at the end of the day they need less token emissions which means they can reserve those so let's say boost trrap the

demand side or boost trrap other opportunities third compe on performance not cost you know this is pretty pretty obvious but at the end of the day somebody who can do something cheaper uh especially if it's only marginally cheaper like 10% it's it's not interesting um but if you can enable net new capabilities not possible in a centralized approach I think Hive map is a great example of this uh you know you can't have Google cars driving down driving around everywhere 247 but having a decentralized network makes a ton of sense um so you always want to compete on performance not cost um even some of the aerial mapping I was talking about I think that's another very clear example where satellites only have a certain refresh rate of data you know they're literally in orbit but have being able

to real time spin up a network that can be more P persistent obviously a very large opportunity and better performance and lastly is demand scales nonlinearly was Supply and what I mean is in a compute Network you need if you bring on more demand you need more Supply to match it right but if I let's say map or service a particular area with images or data I can have one subscriber to that data or a thousand you know to day I'm just replicating a stream of data that's coming out and so that's much more powerful when you're scaling a network then you always need to be constantly balancing demand and supply and look I I don't think any project has all four of these in its completeness but these are the types of things that I've looked for

and I've sort of been working on this over time and finally said you know I should publish this um these what we look for what we see in a lot of the best deep him networks today nice so of so of all of that criteria you've only found four that fit this is that is that right andrina Zeppelin live pier and IET so here's the thing I think it's a great it's a great question because it sort of goes into our firm's age like we weren't we we were starting 2021 we only started really leading deals in in 2022 when we raised the second fund so you know a lot of these OG projects the helium The Hive mappers which I'm talking about like they raised in 2018 2020 like very very early in their life cycle and so you

know I've met with arel from hmro I've met with the helium team I I think they're terrific F Founders and operators but from our fund strategy it's just outside the the The Sweet Spot and so now this is sort of the next generation of companies that's that are coming online and we've been able to invest in them they've been and to add when we were looking you know we've definitely looked at at dozens of you know deepins over the past 18 to 24 months um historically they haven't actually been valued in the same way as some of the tokens we were talking about earlier uh I would say that most of the early movers haven't really been terrific at creating sort of mtic value for their tokens they've been you know

so focused on the rigorous um you know basically Supply demand and and network building and real businesses uh uh that you know that Carl described like a real business framework and so what we've actually noticed over the last six months and what I think we're good at is we've seen a shift to understand that you both need to build that really powerful underlying business but also have a really exciting Community strategy um branding like if we were gonna uh invest in the future in a you know Trucking Logistics platform you know dpin data deep in you know I would advise them to call the thing truck and have some you know memes that would make like you know people in Midwest want to buy this and so it's a mixture of those

things and they've been I think pretty highly valued in the private markets relative to where tokens have historically traded dpin has not been one of those euphoric um sectors I think that change is starting pretty much now you know we've seen grass and some others IET which were're investors in you know go out at pretty big numbers yeah yeah Carl do you have something no I that's the that's right I mean the only thing I was thinking about adding is also a lot of the deep in projects that we talked about are still have a large a low market cap relative to fdv and so we know that there's a lot of you know investors out there selling some of these these mainstream tokens and you see it if you look at the chart because I was you know on on my PA I was I was

buying uh some other different deep in network you sort of see price go up you see clip you know clip almost like in an hourly form uh so I think from that perspective it's just the question is when is the right time and and look like Risk return it still might be great but there's there's lots of other opportunities we see especially in privates on deep pend what we can get much earlier uh than than trying to buy some of these uh liquid opportunities have many complex Dynamics getting them concurrently yeah the last one I'm curious to hear about is uh is AI um we can talk consumer too if you want to but AI I think is just this area right now where it feels like there was the first wave was like a c and render and bit tensor and now there's all these AI

agents where people just have no I I would say most of the industry including myself has no clue what's going on I mean like zerra like we you know we follow the the main ones and maybe buy the coins but like from a venture perspective I'm very curious what is actually happening on the AI on the AI scene in in the in the crypto Venture world right now yeah I mean there's from our perspective you know like look Mike and I aren't AI researchers what we do is we read we talk to Founders we assess thesis um where we started with our AI approach that has proven quite um beneficial is starting with very thin layers of the AI stack so I think iet's a great example great somebody's GNA use

this for inference uh they're not using it for dat you know they're not using a generic platform for data collection and processing and training and uh sort of um Rag and other types of solutions and I think a lot of these crypto AI companies are trying to build the entire stack from ground zero and I just think that's incredibly challenging not only to deliver a product but to compete with web to where these companies have 10x more funding than even a crypto fund project and so we've tried to focus on narrow areas where crypto can actually outperform existing web 2 uh Solutions so far that's played out I think where what we started to see now is that a lot of the value capture in AI has not gone to the companies themselves they've gone to these new generation of agents and

like the thing about these agents to me is that the the value in them is not that it's built on decentralized infrastructure like there's not I haven't seen much about the decentralized infrastructure providing some sort of massive benefit relative to what could be built in web 2way but it's that these agents have a personality and they may launch a token or trade a portfolio and that is what is actually attracting a lot of liquidity so that's we we kind of alluded this at the beginning of the show but right now unless somebody has an incredible thesis and and background investing in AI agents themselves uh might actually be that with tokens might be a better strategy at least for the next three months uh that than actually trying to provide fundamental investments into these incredibly overfunded uh

overfunded areas um the last thing I've been focusing on is AI crypto is is uh I actually wrote a memo internally about this last year and we've started to see companies building here but um BAGI only recently was was tweeting about using the blockchain as a way to provide image uh authenticity and potentially even attribution I think in an age of generative AI like we're going to see more and more fake content fake images how do you actually know if this account was hacked how do you know if this is real and with distrust in the media distrust in centralized in institutions only increasing over time uh you know blockchain is that perfect substrate uh where you can upload content and have it be verified towards your um identity um

also you can actually use that same identity to send and receive payments for attribution so to me like this are we've talked to a number of companies I continue to look for deeply but in area that I in 2025 I do hope we start to see a company establishing themselves as a leader in the space and people uploading content there for for trust and attribution nice nice um any other big themes guys that you guys are thinking about for 25 that we didn't you know we touched on dpin we touched on consumer stuff a bit AI um yeah dpin anything else that you guys want to cover on 25 yeah so I I think you know one big area that we're going to continue to focus on is the um explosion of you know

tokens it's it's pretty clear as we looked at retail you know coming in uh you know with their first sniff of like maybe since you Trump's uh win in early November and you what did these folks who are coming right you back in do immediately they started build you know bidding the coins that they remembered from three years ago um they started speculating if they came on chain you know they were going to pump and you putting a ton of money in there and that's why you know radium volumes exploded you know people are sort of again beding on chain moonshot which is a gateway to getting on chain and trading has been extremely popular so it's pretty clear what people want to do um you know for 15 plus years the number

one use case for crypto has been kind of like trading and speculation trading and speculation towards long-term bigger goals and I think that's going to continue uh what's really cool about for example the AI crypto and the AI agent space right now is you have folks who have been building you know AI related projects and products for sometimes for years with no token and then they attach a token to it and all of a sudden they have you know literally orders of magnitudes more people interested in their project we've heard this from numerous Founders um they have people contri buting you know to the um you know GitHub repository and open source

repositories and you're just seeing an explosion of Interest so I I think we're really excited about novel uh token distributions and really an explosion of tokens and then what the implications are for what use cases that enables so people to speculate on which you know AI entertainment character is going to be the most exciting the most focused on capture mind share um and you know hey how are people going to keep track you know there's a ton of like infrastructur related things to do um and it goes all throughout the stack uh but but the last thing I'll say on that front is as these tokens come out um and you're basically now more and more you saw and pump had the live stream feature uh for a while

kind of exploded in popularity you know with some you know adverse um issues that arose and and you know basically stopped that to to kind of reset but there's a clear product Market fit to attaching tokens to attention and to traditional forms of media like video and audio and we're just going to see an explosion of that and it's clear from from pump being an example that the product Market fit is better than just about you know anything we've ever seen that is going to explode you're seeing with a and crypto tokens now and agent tokens over the next 12 months yeah do you guys think we'll get a uh a real consumer app on your phone that ends up uh that is a that that skews more towards what I'd say like consumption of

cont content or consumer and also is financialized like pump off is like 98% financialized with some videos in it uh is there going to be something that's mostly it's like a Tik Tok competitor or Instagram competitor or something or who who knows what it looks like that also has some Financial components is that a this cycle thing yeah unquestionably and you're seeing uh people are working on this aggressively you know we get pitched hey once something Launches on radium how do we create a community and chat and videos and things around that uh so there's almost no question in my mind yeah um what I'd say though is you I think you know you need to be mostly financially driven in order to break through the noise like if you're 98% social 2% crypto you're not going to be

able to compete with Tik Tok or Instagram so I think that's why pump was growing it rapidly is the live streaming was a way to take Tik to Tik Tok meets Robin Hood um in in a solution and I think over time you start highly financialized and then become more and more just you know sort of mainstream over time yeah do you guys uh there's there are a couple other like takes or things I'd love to get your guys' takes on just cuz I think you have good takes about the industry one is um one is just these you know it's like kind of like eth vers Soul versus the l1s versus the l2s um you've got maybe a salana ETF coming next year it seems like the move ecosystem is picking up with apos and soie and movement just went live at a big valuation obviously um just be

curious to get your guys's General takes on these like l1's vers l2s verse yeah just like the base blockchains how how are you thinking about them right now I mean what I'd say is as an application developer I I I think we care less about the base blockchain than let's say other firms that kind of goes to our application layer Focus you know I think poly Market has been other than pump the other breakout consumer application this cycle and that's on uh poly markets on polygon and you know I think people sort of written off polygon and it doesn't matter but the end of the day it has one of the number one apps out there and so I think we are less concerned about what blockchain is on as long as that blockchain can fundamentally support the types of use cases they want to deliver I do think

there's benefits about buing building on a high performance chain like salana or even some of the other move ones in that you it allows you to bring more operations on chain than you would otherwise you know for example a lot of um P market for my understanding is I don't know their exact architecture but a lot of it's off cheat right and so I think the more you can bring on Ching um whether it's even through um building trustless uh you token distribution systems for for deepin uh if you want to pay thousands of people every single block let's say deepin rewards uh it's going to be hard to do that on some of the other networks versus something like salana either at the base level or even having like encryption built in natively uh that allows you to scale more so um or compression maybe more specifically

so from that perspective I do think chain matters in that extent but we really focus on it's the top applications yeah and from the end user perspective like folks are going to be using applications across numerous chains uh they did you know during the nft even the normies did during the nft Mania of 20 2122 you know you had nfts uh on ethereum you had them on polygon you had them on salana uh so I think people are comfortable with it and the tooling is just so much better I mean I saw you having some some trouble bridging over to hyperli the other day but uh but again people that was what I learned is that was my own user ER that was skill because they're these o I mean I actually think what's happened is

they're OG cryp people who've been in the industry for a while they don't realize the Tech's actually gotten so much better so they do the like I don't swap inside of wallets for example because the remember the fees used to be like 10% but now I but now I learned the fees are minuscule when you swap inside a wallet so exactly and the people coming on board today are literally using privy or you know other methods to just all they know is they put their email in they get a code uh you know in their inbox they input it into the app that they're onboarding to um and then basically can onboard money with Apple pay or other methods I mean it's like truly dead simple so I think it's important for any individual developer to you know choose a chain that they feel comfortable but basically there's

at least six to eight good options where if you build a really compelling app people are going to find their way to you yeah Carl I heard you on the lights speed podcast I forget when this was several months ago talking about aptus vers sui do you have uh do you have updated thoughts on that it's actually funny because I'm sitting in the atos office right now um we're doing a a team offsite here and and we're we're friends with both teams um very very well but they you know they happen to have an office here that we're working out of I I mean look I don't know I think at the end of the day they're both terrific teams um you know they obviously have a very similar Genesis story and so I I don't have a particular view I think youu has more uh price action recently

than that of apos um but you know you look at TBL you look at these numbers they both just seem to be moving up and to the right and so it's pretty exciting um one of our investments is in uh shami which is a sort of the the thesis is quite simply to me helas built for the move ecosystem um and they are they service both they're the largest RPC on both um both both of those chains and they're also uh looking at you know ways to collaborate with move movement as well and so at the end of the day they're both good options we that's a situation where picks and shovels is a good approach and infrastructure that serves developers nice nice um Carl I'm going to try to pull something spicy out of you this episode so I will uh I will pivot into

uh into your takes on coinbase so you had two takes Onin I've had a couple recently two takes on coinbase recently you said agreed we used to stake on coinbase we will not be doing so on a go on a go forward basis you also said um I tweeted this before I'll tweet it again salana is the number one threat to coinbase's Future cashow they'll suppress salana for as long as possible we're still waiting for usdc SPL support on coinbase institutional give me what is spurring these anti- coinbase takes um so what I'll start with is um we there it really is a especially the the um account uh Representatives that we work with are really terrific people for example the padel tournament I was playing with Nico who's our one of our

main counterparts over there so we do like the coinbase team I think at the end of the day though it's a case of regulatory capture whereas raas we are I think the rules are still not 100% clear but the you know basically the the guidance is as an RA you should store assets where possible to qualify to sodium and the frustrating part here is because of that we're subjecting our LPS to much higher fees and in some cases uh more reduced experiences for governance or participation in Crypton native ecosystems then what we could do when we could self- custody our own assets you know and from that perspective I've you know when I was at paos I led custody for $20 billion in assets I feel more comfortable building our own system out

than I do having to necessarily rely on somebody else where we actually don't have the keys to these assets and you know we see with coinbase them shutting out accounts it's a frequent occurrence it's not just Twitter noise actually my brother-in-law was an early Bitcoin uh investor and like coinbase started to uh lock his account and they he bought it 10 years ago and they wanted him to show proof of where his financial payments came from like his job payment stubs to show where the money came from to buy that Bitcoin 10 years ago and it's it's sort of it was an irrelevant amount back then but now obviously it's grown a large amount and so now they're they're they're digging into it so I I think we see this sort of behavior of shutting down accounts without notice we see them

changing the way staking works so that specific one uh we we stake uh a large amount of our our salana to obviously helus our portfolio company and also uh jto and we saw now that coinbase Med it you can only stake with coinbase's validators and so we used to stake to the third party it was must experience support our companies they changed it without telling us at all and so the only way I found out is I went to go stake BC salana and I was like wait I can't choose a third party and then there was there was an update that was pushed and they didn't tell us and so to me that's just about value extraction from the ecosystem where they're only going to allow institutions to stti to their validators where they can take a very large spread on the staking rewards

rather than enabling other Founders even our Founders to be part of this institutional flow and so I look at these extract you value extractive practices their exchange goes sound still frequently when in high amounts of trading that's not the case with others sort New Age exchanges so I think I see this and it gets kind of frustrating on the value capture side and the fact we have to use them because they're regulatory mode now there's there again there's great features they have I like the team um I think Brian Armstrong has been an incredible Force for crypto uh you know during this during the past four years but these practices are definitely extractive yeah so it has more to do with the ethos the ethos of coinbase and the ethos of the industry less of uh risks or concerns I would say correct it's it's

like it's less on the optionality side and it's more about the the ethos um I would I would agree with that yeah um all right guys I think as a wrapping Place du this I'm going to uh throw this over to you maybe for a I've been seeing you in the trenches my friend so I would uh I would love to just see I'm seeing you tweet the the hyper leg hyper liquid pip meme token whatever this thing even is I don't even know um I mean you're out here trading perss which I've never seen you do in my whole life so what what uh take us into the trenches maybe we could wrap there yeah so what's been exciting is it feels like 2021 all over again to me I am having so much fun you know on the weekends at

night uh just exploring new things that candidly in many cases I don't completely understand like the AIA agent stuff and and just basically learning by doing by you know making a little money losing a little money and um you know not to make it too political but you know with Trump winning and then the change in the regulatory environment that that we expect I also feel like I can talk about this stuff publicly again I mean I was like you know we're register investment advisors and you know we were made to feel that by being you know American citizens and and publicly talking about crypto we were committing a crime like it just really felt like that uh for for most of uh 2023 and 2024 and so the reason you're

seeing this is it's like the the real me like the one who likes to have you know fun on chain loves these products so anyway and what's really cool is there's so many different things flourishing like to your point earlier on you know salana versus ethereum versus you know other l2s like dude everybody's winning even like there's just incredible Financial Primitives being built on Bitcoin now where you can you potentially earn some yield on your Bitcoin on Chain versus on something like blockfi that was centralized like there's just so many exciting things so I love this stuff like I like to like it's not a job for me um and so yeah I'm just thrilled that I can talk about and

then you know you get all kinds of weird stuff like I bought this uh pip token no no Financial advice I bought it for fun I YOLO and then they were like hey do you want to make you you know penu uh custom pfp and I was like I haven't done that in three years let's do it and so it's fun yeah yeah it is fun this is the good part of the cycle when all the crypto natives are making money and uh the new the new folks haven't come in and I can see here on my telegram or on my Twitter screen there are a lot of CopyCat doeses popping up this is this is when you know we're at this part of the cycle oh it's wild it's I mean it's amazing how much time they spend building fake telegram they already got

the new the new yeah thanks oh yeah D awesome guys well it's been um dudus it's been just awesome seeing your ride like going from the Block to six-man just killing it and having uh very unique in takes that have led to outsize returns and uh Carl like great getting to know you and this is uh yeah good podcast thank you really appreciate yo and it's obviously been equally fun to see you um and I think you know you open this with saying hey we were you know competitors but I think you you guys were so focused so mature such hard workers so to see you know your Empire as we say growing it it really is awesome so congrats means a lot thanks

guys thanks for the time hey everyone thanks for watching today's episode just wanted to quickly thank today's title sponsor scale scale really is one of the best chain experiences out there today and I've used so many different chains there's a reason they are gaining so much adoption in both gaming and AI use cases hit the link in the show notes to explore the scale ecosystem [Music]