Managing Emotions in Crypto Cycles

21 Jun 2024 · 1:10:14

Empire hosts Jason Yanowitz and Santiago Roel Santos discuss the psychology of surviving crypto market cycles, from portfolio decision-making to emotional resilience during downturns. They cover Coinbase's evolving strategy, the demographics behind ETF buyers, the shift toward consumer crypto applications, and fallout from the Kraken security incident.

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A day that you're holding on to something is a day that you're buying. So, think about it. Every day that you hold something is a day that you buy that position at that price. Overall, I think you should constantly, maybe not daily, optimize for mental clarity. Whatever you do, pay attention to the things that give you more mental clarity, and pay attention to the things that disturb, cloud your judgment. Because this industry is not easy. Markets are not meant to be easy. Otherwise, everyone would be making money. This episode is brought to you by Sei. Sei's V2 upgrade introduces the first hyper-performance parallelized EVM already live on public devnet. Mainnet comes later in Q2. You can follow along with the Sei journey on X @SeiNetwork.

Sei is spelled S E I. Go follow Sei on X, Sei Network. Hey everyone, Santi and I have been talking about Solana a lot recently, and we're excited to have a Solana sponsor of Empire, Marinade. Marinade is a staking protocol on Solana, and the only stake pool that delivers auto rebalancing, MEV rewards, and automatic downside protection with their new protected staking rewards. Optimize your SOL stake with Marinade by hitting the link in the show notes. Big thanks to Marinade. We'll talk more about them later in the show. This episode is brought to you by Avalanche.

Avalanche is a leading network of blockchains giving some of the world's largest financial institutions new use cases and business models while leveraging completely customizable infrastructure. Check them out. It's core.app/discover. You can explore Avalanche's subnet ecosystem at core.app/discover. I was playing around earlier today. Really cool. This episode is brought to you by Mantle. Mantle is an L2 backed by over a $4 billion treasury, obviously one of the largest in the industry. They recently launched their airdrop program called the rewards station to distribute both presale token allocations or listed tokens to MNT holders who stake their MNT. Mantle has nailed their rewards

program recently. Would highly encourage folks to check out the Mantle Rewards program at mantle.xyz/rewards-station. Listen, man. How you doing? It's not all right, man. Forgotten about this podcasting thing that we do, but here we are. Yeah, looking very European chic today. Oh oui monsieur. No. I'm Nick Muir like in the hood. Look at that. I got a I got a plant.

You can see. Yachties. This is a very COVID You're like baking shower bread dough. I never I never fell for that trap. I didn't get sucked into that trap. Oh, dude, I look very pale today and you look I look paler than usual and you look tanner. The YouTube comments are going to eat me alive today. Yeah, well, I've been I've been more openly documenting my uh my workouts and Yeah, well, so Phil Phil's in 100 km? New PR?

No, no, that was bike yesterday. I did 50K on the bike today. Did 30K running 2 days ago. Just uh just cooking. Doing good. Not too shabby. I hit uh I forget if I told you. I think Maybe I told you or I think I was trying to hit the 800 club in lifting. Which is uh What is that? Pounds that is for non- Pounds. Pounds, yeah. UK listeners. Yeah, okay. So, I was trying to hit 800 800 lbs by end of year and I hit it this week actually. So, yeah, 6 months early.

Dude, the YouTube comments um People are like, "Why the hell are these guys talking about like training?" We'll get to that. I forget if I read this one in in the last in the in the last episode. The Yianni Santi handsomeness ratio is almost perfectly correlated with ETH BTC. Down only for Yianni. Let's pray the bottom is in. Whoever you are, salute. I'll buy you a beer. Salute. How about this one? Santi showing another one of the sweater collections made by grandma. I teach I I collect I collect a lot of things, by the way. This is I like my sweaters.

Yeah, you do. All right. I think I have more sweaters than like shirts, browsers combined. I have 100 sweaters. You don't have 100 sweaters. I Yes. Why? You live in a place where it's sunny all the time. I travel. Mhm. Yes. There's some I haven't used. Yeah. Yes. Do you do your own shopping? Yeah.

I don't know about that. I do. Um all right, man. What do you what what are we talking about today? So, Listen, everyone wants to know what's going on in the market. We've been in a down environment since March, April, give or take. Uh no matter how you slice it, it's been pretty painful for a lot of folks. Uh And the like if you look at it like on a USD pair, it looks ugly. If you look at it on a Bitcoin pair, it looks uglier.

Um it's an interesting time in the market because like Bitcoin's at 65K. 65. Yeah, 65. Peaked out at 71, 72 back in March. 73. You look at the timeline and it looks like we're in like a post-FTX collapse. Like the world is imploding. Um our main character, Ansem, is going through this sort of our key call. He's been bearish on the timeline. He's been crucified at we got a little handsome existential crisis going on. You would think that it gets easier every cycle.

And yes, it does. Because you make mistakes. You like I have a thesis for the cycle. But I we're human. Investing is very psychological. It is still painful. It is still you like you still feel these range of emotions. So, anyone out there that is portraying themselves as like this like stoic character that doesn't feel emotion is just I'm I'll just like it's important to ground it to reality because you still second-guess yourself. You still like like it's never easy. Because crypto is a very volatile market and uh Yeah.

Here uh I don't get the aspect of like the panic on the timeline though. I I got to be honest. Like I like are people just levered to the tits on some of these coins? You don't have to You don't have to be levered to the tits. All you have to do is look at your portfolio value go down 60% in 30 days. But it's like I don't know. Are people are you are you trading around this stuff though? Like I know Joseph our producer was like I'd I'd love to hear how you stomach the volatility and your process for decision-making. I do want to hear the decision-making side, but like stomaching the volatility, I'm like I mean you just like you just don't sell when these things go down 10% unless you unless you do actually unless you're always

changing and changes. That's not necessarily true, right? I mean it is impossible to one speak what I'm doing may or may not relate to whatever the listener is doing because every portfolio is unique. Every position is unique. But um historically you have the likes of Uh by By way, being more smart here doesn't necessarily help. It actually might get in the way. Isaac Newton famously fumbled the bag of tulips. He called the bubble, invested in it, sold, reinvested, like had made early profits, gotten back into it, imploded. Literally like died broke, I think.

Um Stan Druckenmiller, one of the best investors of all time, got the tech bubble totally wrong. He was right on the thesis, he was down on the timing. He for such a long time shorted um tech stocks, lost like $100 million or whatever, was really down, and then unwound the short, closed it, I think went long the days literally before the top and the bubble popped. Right. Uh You have you know, long-term capital management like what I'm trying to say is you know, the common denominator across all of this is A, being smart doesn't necessarily mean you're going to like be

more equipped to handle volatility. Two, it really hurts when other people are making money and you're not, which is part of the reason what explains this. Mhm. Long-term like that I think is the Achilles heel of nine out of 10 people is seeing other people make more money than you. Great point. I agree with that. And that persists in any market environment. There's people making money in the eye. If you didn't long Nvidia, you're like, "Well, [ __ ] I should have just sold all my crypto stuff, not deal with any of this nonsense, and just punt it in Nvidia."

Um and then this the third point, which is probably more interesting, that I've been thinking about a lot is like we're all here, we all believe in this stuff long-term, but investing is very psychological sport, and when you ask me like you're describing prior cycles, we tend to overfit Now. Because hindsight you know 2020. And so. Like. It all fits the story fits very smoothly in prior cycles.

But I'll just remind people like in any market bull market you have these draw downs of 10 20 30% on major assets let alone. Everything that's all and higher beta. So positions being down 60 70% does that invalidate the bull market? No. Not necessarily. It has also been a very challenging crypto environment where. It's like PvP there's these hot balls of money that move around and there's some great tweets that we can link in the show notes that actually try to.

Quantify and I tend to think that we've been sort of in that environment where new like we had an influx of of flows coming in last year to Q4 Q1. I don't think there's been new flows coming in and so we have this constant rotation. From frantic to memes to now something else. Select coins yeah. So anyways. All right let me ask let me ask you a few a few yeah YouTube comments are not going to like you on this one. Um. All right first question here would be I'm looking at my portfolio and I would categorize it into.

Okay so three three buckets of the portfolio so I've got like Bitcoin ETH Solana like I've just like I'm I'm I'm I'm holding these things basically um actually. End up selling a big chunk of one of those for the other which we can talk about if you're interested um so I've got that then I've got. Solana for Bitcoin and ETH. I've got and I'm more overweight Solana yeah than than the other two um. I'm more overweight Solana. Um. Then I've also got another group of things that I think will do well. So, I've got like AI some some AI coins like a render or a cosh. I've got thing and this is like extremely non-financial advice. I've no idea what I'm doing. Um things like

maybe some allocation to like the move exposure whether that's sui or aptos. I've got the AI exposure with like a render or cosh. I've got the meme coin exposure with something like with that's like the second part of the portfolio. Then I've got the third part which I want to ask you about. I've got all these coins that I'm still sitting on from just the last couple of years. Things like OG D5 tokens or other L1s. And I'm not very excited about them, but I just can't bring myself to sell them. They're not that much money, right? It's not that much and I'm just like yeah, it's not a big difference. Like man, if like Let me let me one example might be like uni or something. Like uni's probably not going to like outperform sol here or outperform even maybe Bitcoin here. But

cuz it's just like you know, it just hasn't been a loved a loved token. Um but I'm like am I really going to sell uni? Um and I'd just be curious how you think about that. Okay. That third bucket of the portfolio where you're just kind of sitting on these things maybe it makes up a small percentage of the portfolio. Yeah. Are you holding that as a moon bag or to pay attention to the ecosystem or just for tax reasons? I'm holding it because honestly the this is uh this is going to sound like a really idiotic investment strategy. The idea that if uni something

I'm just going to keep picking on uni if uni ever ripped, I'd be like what an idiot I was. Here I am paying attention to uni super involved in the community like going to the events, talking to the team, like and I sold my two things. So here's my two things. One, a day that you're holding on to something is a day that you're buying. So think about it every day that you hold something is a day that you buy that position at that price. And so overall, I think you should constantly, maybe not daily, but I think you should constantly redraw your portfolio from scratch every

so often. Quarterly monthly annually, however you want to do it. I think it's important, probably shorter cadence in crypto uh because things are moving fast. Yeah. Uh that doesn't necessarily mean that you change things, you just re-underwrite. So that's point one. By the way, a lot of DeFi that we're going to look pretty good. Like you look at Synthetics, like it's just been like a they're flat on the month, but they're not as volatile, they're actually you know, they're just steady slowly kind of accumulate, like, you know, just you could tell it's probably like a lot of funds accumulating these positions based on like charts. Yeah, you Unis up, yeah,

from four to 10 in a year, like just slowly going up, but The second point is probably more important for for folks is you I don't think you construct your portfolio for the upside cases. I think you construct it for the downside case. Mhm. And you know, because if your logic and your reasoning is I would hate myself if I don't have something because it didn't outperform uh yeah. The base asset, major asset, whatever your benchmark is.

I think you should always be looking to outperform Solana or ETH or Bitcoin or all three combined. But but and so like you're I think in this environment like you have to constantly and I tweeted about this the other day. It's like how I I think risk is one of those things that we try to it's not very properly understood. Like most people equate risk to volatility. It's not the same thing. Uh an asset could be very volatile. It doesn't make it necessarily riskier. Um second, I think more importantly I think risk is very subjective.

Like someone from the outside might say these goons are just talking about like relative risk within crypto. The entire asset class is shitcoin, you know? Someone that doesn't understand crypto might like look at it as a extremely risky. Right. The same like you might look at biotech as extremely risky category. Like what do you know about phase one, phase two for a particular drug candidate? Nothing. But if you're in the field then that has way less risk because you're a domain expert. You're living, breathing it constantly. So this is like the point that I think really kills you is oh, people making money on meme coins. And then you you like you're like Isaac Newton.

You're like [ __ ] people making money on tulips. Like you need to get at some point you just understand that some point it's going to get to you. Mhm. Some point you're going to fall to it. Or you got to hop on the bike. Because yeah, no, well, do you have like a small ticket for your sanity? I'm not here to tell you one strategy is better than the other other. I think you My most important takeaway for this episode is optimize for mental clarity. Whatever you do pay attention to the things that give you more mental clarity and pay attention to the things that disturb cloud your judgment.

Because this industry is not easy. Markets are not meant to be easy. Otherwise everyone would be making money. And so, I That That's the thing that I like a day like today like the last 2 days haven't been easy. I've been very volatile. I've made me question the portfolio. I've been transitioning for the last month into higher kind of more defensive into higher quality stuff. And pruning a lot of the portfolio. Is it the best decision? Probably not.

I'm probably selling some stuff in there that's going to be a hundred bagger. Likely. Um probabilistically is a very very low probability of that happening. But I just remind myself of the core principle, which is don't lose money. Always want to have money when other people are scared [ __ ] And we're not in that environment. And the third one is I just feel better sooner that I do something. Like I'm I just feel And I'm not And this is like something that I want to ask you a question. Like sometimes like Okay, this isn't meant to be easy. Like does that mean that we have to endure all this pain and like

Not necessarily, right? Like I I I sold part of a position yesterday. And I've been thinking about doing it more aggressively over time. I haven't I did it and I immediately felt some like relief. Famously Soros got Every time he he went to sell his Q, he got intense back pain. Um that's just funny, but yeah, I I I think anyways, I don't know if any of that makes sense or if you want to talk more about it, but I'm not here to tell you what or what not to do. If you want to have these buckets, you want to have a moon bag, ultimately like I would just whatever is it that you do, I think optimize for for mental clarity. Yeah, I think I

think the two takeaways there are one, every day that you're holding something, you're buying it. And two, optimize for mental clarity and for sometimes I mean, we talked about this a couple months ago when I was saying, "Look, sometimes I'm I'm actually comfortable giving up a little bit of the upside because I'm running Blockworks." And like that that's where my mental that's where I spend 98% of my brain power, right? So. Yeah. Like yeah. Because I I think you you have to get one or two things very very right.

Um it's a sort of a power law distribution. Crypto liquid, too, and and private. Um but I I I think like what you just said is so important. Like can can you get yourself comfortable with the idea that you're going to give some of the upside and capture 60, 70, maybe 50% of the return. And if you can underwrite that and be happy with that and build a process around that, I think that if you can compound then I think you'll be really well in the long run. Yeah.

Like okay, it's not a 100x, but if you constantly do 3x like every two, three years, like Yeah, you're good. You're good. Do Do the math and you'll do well. The prob- the problem is like like concentration. If you can do it in a concentrated manner then all the better. And that for that I think you need a lot of mental clarity, a lot of How many uh how many tokens make up, let's say, the majority of your portfolio right now? 10.

10? Less than On the liquid side, 10. Yeah. On the private side, I have a lot of positions. I made up I make I'm very active there. Um and yeah. How how are the private markets for you right now? Uh Uh, I so. Like, what am I seeing or what am I investing or how am I thinking about what are you seeing? Like, what kind of valuations, what's happening, where like what ecosystems you're investing in, what kind of the companies? It's cooled down marginally. Like, okay, I'll fire off quick things. TON ecosystem, lot of interest.

I think it's it's it's it's uh percolating. I think people are So, so Telegram ecosystem is like an outlier. Um, valuations have subsided a bit. Like, I think uh they're pausing this pace of like really high vals. Um, and I think founders getting a little nervous in terms of just closing these rounds. And so, they're a lot of compromising on the price because, you know, when when price goes down a bit, they're like, "Hey, well, this isn't terms policy. I'd rather just close a round at a So, one company we buys down from 75 to 50, and I told them, "Guys, if this is 50, 50 FTV."

And um and they got it done. And I think uh you know, so so yeah, I I still am Look, my operating assumption is that any investment that I'm making now on the private side is going to be a next cycle kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah, I think we're at that point, too. What uh so, when you see the Telegram um the TON ecosystem go going like that, like what how do you think about uh buying TON, the liquid coin? Did you do the Did you do the discounted private thing in the time around a couple once again? an offer, but uh no, I'm not taking it.

I did a lot of the I I actually don't have any exposure to TON. I'm looking at an L2 right now. Similar to movement, but kind of for TON. Uh and the idea is that it's actually quite hard to build on Telegram and like there's a really good tweet about like this guy who kind of went through all of the like kind of dissecting Telegram or TON and the ecosystem. Uh I don't have any exposure. Do you? No. No. I tweeted a I did a poll recently yesterday and it was like you're a builder, where do you want to build next?

And I appreciate it. Got mad because I I mean you can only use four. Thank you y'all. Uh so it was you're a builder you can either decide I saw this. I was like oh my god, how many people just got pissed Yeah, they're like where is Solana here? Where is insert my bad. Like guys like We all know where I stand on Solana. But I listed Telegram Berachain and Bitcoin L2s. And yes, I could list Sui Yeah. Whatever. Basically, this is the constraint that I had. Telegram came number one at 39% followed by Aptos 31 Berachain 18 and Bitcoin L2s 12.

Um Yeah. So, okay. So, I I maybe this is a good time to bring up. So, I just spent the last couple hours at the Monad's office. So, Monad had a this thing this week in New York called Monad Foundry and they brought a bunch of developers in and a bunch of founders and people who gave different talks and so I was hanging with them Eunice, one of the founders and Keone and Kevin, the CMS intern turned full-time intern of of Monad. And ended up meeting a lot of the founders who are actually building on Monad. So, the first takeaway is like Monad has this actually booming ecosystem right now the of people who are who are building on them already which is really cool to see cuz they don't even have I think mainnet comes in several months actually. It's not you

know, it's we're not we're not too close. The big takeaway for me is that there's five places according to all of the founders in the room. So, this is kind of self-selecting for people who have decided already to build on Monad. Here are the five ecosystems that those folks debated building on. Monad Blast Base Solana uh and Berachain were the five that got brought up. And every probably talked with 12 13 different founders like different companies building on Monad. They've all chosen Monad, but of the ones that they decided between it was base, blast, Monad, Solana, and Berachain.

So, now you're kind of self-selecting like I'm sure a lot of people are building on something like optimism or Arbitrum or Polygon ZK sync or whatever it is, but like this was it's the kind of people who are building on Monad are choosing those companies. So, I thought that was a really interesting to just hear why they've done it. The like TLDR and why they're building on Monad was for them a lot of them actually came from Solana or debate it was down to Solana versus Monad. And they've in their in their experience building on Solana was too difficult. It's not about rust or solidity, it's about something that I'm going to completely botch something about object-oriented versus something oriented. I need to understand it better. I'm not going to pretend like

I understand it, but they just said it was a little bit too difficult for them. So, Monad kind of gives you a lot of what Solana has with like fast chain good chain, but on the EVM. So, I thought that was interesting. Interesting. You're hiring an analyst. Yeah. Saw this tweet from him. when I travel. Should I should just travel. What did you say? I get my best ideas when I travel. So, this was this is an idea that I had. I was traveling to a family office event in London. Nice. How was any any takeaways? I didn't know about crypto. Like like there was just like presentations about where to invest and like the room was like family offices from EMEA. So, you're the youngest guy there. Yes. Well, no they

were like the they were like also it was meant catered for like the the young people within the family office. So, like the sons out yeah, largest retailer in Spain and you know, like largest real estate developer in Saudi stuff like this. But I was yeah yeah. I know. I guess I would say Gen Zero, which means like it was like so like it's my family office. Like, what do you mean like your dad Gen Zero? It's going to be Gen Zero. Like no, no, I'm Gen Zero. And then I was like the only crypto person there, probably. Um So they didn't mention crypto? They didn't They They talked about like AI and like futuristic stuff and where to allocate and not nothing about crypto. Although there were a lot of There were a lot of questions from the like the the people

the clients of the bank talking about asking about, "Hey, what about crypto?" You're hiring this analyst, right? So you said things he or she would do. A, manage their own liquid book. I'll give them 500k to a million to start, then they grow from there. They get to keep 20% of the profits. They stay on top of teams in the portfolio and they provide research on emerging trends and ecosystems. I see this as a stepping stone. If they're successful managing their book, I'll help them branch off, launch their own fund, or just give them more capital. Looking for someone with experience, priority given to on-chain resume, and excellent reference checks. Walk us through this decision because this is something that you and I have talked about for I feel like years at this point. You've been thinking about it, thinking about

it. So what made you actually make this decision? Well, it's just easy. I think it's just like no different than investing in a company, but I want to one um optimize for being surrounded with someone. Or this could be actually I I actually foresee multiple interns or multiple analysts. So like I want to have like a desk of starting two, most likely someone had a great tweet about like why I just hired two, um which I think is a great idea. Um but yeah, potentially like oversee like two or three or four and they just cover certain sectors that I'm not going to pay attention to and they're going to go deeper, they're going to catch it faster. Um and and I think it's just a realization that there are people far

far better than me uh to do this in the in the in the liquid side of things. Um and and I want to learn from them. Clearly, it's just an investment into bringing more brain power, you know, to the organization. Yeah. That's really it. Cuz the thing I miss the most about being a ParaFi is just the constant It's like every day kind of thing. And now I don't do it every day, but I do it like I have a network that I go to certain people, but it's very ad hoc-ish. And I appreciate that it's probably better to do it more frequently. And the only way to do that is to have someone internally.

All right. Any rules around what they should invest in or a free rate you're giving them a million bucks and you're saying go go make as much money as you My my philosophy is I'm not going to hire someone to tell them what to do. I'm hiring someone that is smarter. I'm not going to tell Sefan how to make money. Like follow follow like best practices across risk management and security. Do they get a salary? Uh, no. I don't know. I'd probably just want someone that has like already made some money and is looking to just um you know, get involved in maybe have allocation to private deals that I do.

Do you have an idea of where this person should come from? Like should this person like No idea. I don't care where they come from. I I do No. I'm like How many How many How many applications did you You didn't even You should have put a Google form link or something. You probably got No. What are the processes can you get to me without me put No. No, that's part of the reason, man. Yeah. Like if you really are smart, So, you'll get the intro You'll get the intro to you or you will find a way. I'm not going to tell you how. I saw I saw someone commented and said where where should I apply and you said insert here and I was like Yeah, that's good. Yeah.

I'm like find me wherever. I've backed companies because they literally tweeted like commented on a tweet that I had. Yeah. Yeah, we I mean we've I posted sales jobs before and people are people will DM me and be like what like or people will comment be like where do I apply? I'm like dude we got we got a careers page on our site with the job posted. If you're in sales you can't figure that out like We we got we got bigger problems. So okay, who's who stood out? Like any Are there like I haven't started reviewing. There were like two or three people that came highly recommended from people that I respect. And they the way they kind of formatted the doc, what they put in the doc was like very well formatted, very well organized. Like I was like I I looked at

it for two seconds and I'm like, okay. I have a folder now. I'm just putting everything that I like in that folder. And there's a lot of unread stuff in that folder, but um I'll get to it this hour. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, like I look I've It's a really good opportunity. I think so. Like I think this is um I want to maybe Okay, like not not like Julian Robertson going to start like I've no way shape form compare myself to Julian Robertson, but I want to incubate like I've helped start a couple of funds in the space.

Like this guy Jason uh from Folio's, Maple Leaf Capital. Him and I were like chatting literally every day about DeFi and DeFi summer. To the point where I was like he was on a hedge fund. And and he was put it producing really good research. I'm like Gosh, like at one point like we explored hiring him and then I said you're too good. You should go start your own fund. And then I invested in his fund. I'm part of the GP like verifying like you know what I mean? Like we were big supporters and I kind of want to do that. I think the space deserves better managers. I think they're out there and so um the best part of our crypto is like um It's It's a space that is like ever expanding and I think like I look at like in any other industry like could you

make an empire yourself and start a fund in your 20s? Difficult, right? Not impossible, just difficult. Of course, in hedge fund land, you make money great. But uh I think crypto's a different animal, and I think it allows for that. And people that really make do the work and are like in the trenches, like get handsomely rewarded. And I appreciate you're not going to be an analyst because you make more money while outside. So, you have to be your own fund manager. And the structure that I envision is 80/20. Like you keep like you know, you you manage effectively I'm an LP.

Okay. Um and then if they're successful, like yeah, go you know, go and start your own fund. Yeah. And I'll help you do it. I'll um Part of the GP, for sure. Um And the thesis is that like if you like if I do this for the next 5 years, and I probably maybe have like a program where I bring in one or two people every year, or say three or four people, and you cut two, one or two are successful, like hey, you know, in 5 years you have like 10 people to start a fund. That's pretty cool. Um So, yeah, I think that's kind of how I thought about it. Yeah. You know, I've always thought this kind of a I'd call it an apprentice model should be more popular. I think it's the biggest career hack that you can make is if I

were if I were 22 or 23, what I would do is I would email the top 50 people or 100 people who I looked up to, both in investing or I mean for me I wouldn't do investing, I'd do like founders, probably. So, I'd email the top 50 founders. I'd be like, let me just come work for you. Give give me minimum wage, or give me what whatever it is, give me a highly incentivized compensation structure, and let me just come study you for 2 years. And then I with the goal that I want to eventually go launch my own thing, but I just want to learn from you and study you. That's If I were 22, that's what I would do. There's like ton of asymmetry, positive asymmetry from like just emailing that and doing that. Yeah.

Cuz like when you're in your 30s, no. It has to be when you're young. Yeah, I mean it's the teal like you mentioned Julian Robertson and like teal fellowship. I think the teal fellowship came out of like teal Peter Thiel would every year have a new like a one or two apprentice apprentices basically. He's got all this other stuff with young like he takes the blood of 18-year-olds and stuff like that but but it came out of the apprentice model and he's like this is working so well let me just start a whole fellowship around this. So. You know. Yeah, that's kind of the goal. Um So Yeah, but I think it's someone that you know want to I also don't want to micromanage these people. I

know it's like You don't strike me as a big guy manager kind of guy. I'm missing all the calls that I have. I just don't want to have calls. I I don't I don't like having calls. Yeah. Unless they want to talk to you I'll talk to you but it's just like great I have to I want to call someone. I just pick up the phone and call. But I don't like these calls. I hate calls. Folks just If you want to get to me chat. I love chat. Yeah. That's You're very responsive on Telegram. I'm super responsive like Very responsive. Yeah. I just hate calls. They're so like inefficient. Yeah. We just implemented no call Wednesdays at Blockworks. No not mandatory. No internal through Sunday. Yeah, there No no calls. So we're hiring Blockworks if people want to have no calls on Wednesdays. Mandatory. No internal

calls. I'm hiring no calls ever. Don't do this to me. Don't do this to me. Our I don't even want to talk about funds poaching analysts. Sensitive subject right now. Blockworks is a great organization. Um We got permissionless coming. Go buy your ticket. Tickets go up to $499 soon. They're $199 today. Go buy your ticket. Just just yeah. Go buy it. I just got to plug it. Probably why Can you explain to me why like I love skiing? I think I'll just snowboard. I'll explain Salt Lake. I'll explain Salt Lake.

Um, I like very strongly believe that the best conferences There are two types of conferences. There are conferences in cities that are like built around a city. So, like we have that with DAS, right? DAS is in New York and London. It's super easy. You're working at the fund. You hop over to DAS from 2:00 to 6:00. Like it's great. For what I'm trying to what we are trying to build with permissionless, I think there's an element of going to a a foreign place that is um Well, there's nothing to do but that. It's actually crucial to the experience.

Um, it gets you out of your comfort zone. You are fully committed. You're not going bouncing around really the city. Like Like our Like our best event ever was Palm Beach Permissionless in Palm Beach. drink all the booze in Salt Lake. True. True. You can find me on over there drinking and making cold brew. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, Yeah, but like I I mean there's a big difference between doing like a like I don't know. There There's There'll be an event I mean like Tokens in in Singapore and ECC in Brussels. Like we're sending a bunch of people to both of those. Like I think those are two amazing events. But like I think there's a unique thing when you go to a city that there's not honestly a crazy amount of stuff to do

and you it's a foreign place that like a lot of people haven't been to Salt Lake. We're We're trying it. Um, I think it's I think it's going to be really good. It's shaping up to be the best permissionless ever. It's really interesting to see the Cuz it's pumped by Delta. You should get Delta as a sponsor. My like Delta It's like their home. what we just got? Actually, you're not a big chess guy. But we just got a chess.com to partner on our We're We're building a whole chess lounge. So, we've got that. You You was really good at chess. Three people I'll go with Ben. Ben from Verify. How's his What's What's his What's his rating?

I don't know. But he he like he wins at crypto competition. I think he went pretty far. Lesnar came and and Ben are really good. Oh [ __ ] I got to Yeah, so we're going to have a big chess competition. We're going to have a pickleball competition. Um which is going to be popping obviously. We do I'll do a run club. How about that? You ever play paddle? Paddle's from It's like a Latin American sport. I don't consider myself uh Latin American, but yeah, sure. Uh I don't I don't I I have to check this with the price. I actually don't know.

Was that wrong of me to say? What a what No no. No, I just uh I don't I don't If I If anything, I feel like I identify American cuz that's the place where I've lived the most of my life. Uh culturally, too. Um You're getting canceled. Yeah seriously too. Um although I've been doing a lot of podcast in Spanish because I that one. Yeah, yeah, I connected you to uh that that guy. Yeah, it it it I've done like two or three or more of those. They're a lot of fun. Uh They I'll do a run club. So, we can go running in Central Park.

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And they give out actually the rewards to the Mantle community. There are two airdrops I want to tell you about. The first one, it was with Athena. They offered 2.5 billion Athena shards to holders of their native token MNT. So, the reward station program distributes these presale token allocations to MNT holders who stake the tokens. The second one they have going on is with Myso MYSO. That gives out over 90,000 MYSO tokens worth about $50,000 today. That starts on April 25th, runs through May 2nd. If you want to check that out, you got to stake your MNT and you can check out the reward station at mantle.xyz/rewardstation.

Big thanks to Mantle for sponsoring Empire. All right, I have another thing to talk about. It feels like there's a like a momentum or a narrative change or a zeitgeist change where people are just sick of the [ __ ] Like sick of the sick of the airdrops, sick of the like over investment into infrastructure. I just feel I feel it in the in the air that something's changing and I'm curious if you feel like sick of the sick of the stupid [ __ ] Now, I'm not saying airdrops are actually stupid. I'm not saying obviously infrastructure stupid. But I'm just like I just feel like the amongst the crypto natives and amongst like the crowd that matters, people are like acknowledging like, "You know what?

I think something does need to change." Do you feel that? Yeah. Yeah, well, like marginally yes. I mean, I think there's obviously that chatter of high TV low low float. That discussion wouldn't be happening if tokens were going up, not down. But nonetheless, there's also like very limited design space. Of course, Kobe's ICO idea is really good. Challenging in the current environment. We've talked about this at nauseam here. So, you know, it's sort of like yeah, we can talk and [ __ ] and complain about things, but like what work within the constraints that you have. I have optimist like I'm optimistic because um

I look like crypto's become the thing that surprised me the most is speaking truly about psychics is crypto's become presidential. Like yeah. Holy [ __ ] And oh like now Trump is really like now being very vocal about it. Is he going to actually implement like fall through if he gets elected, which I don't think he will. TBD, but look, I I think it's it's important nonetheless. I think it's a win for the space. The courts have ruled in crypto's favor. The SEC just dropped their investigation into the ETH as a security today. Again, these are the things that are happening in real time. People looking at prices down 20%, but you have these type of very important events to go unnoticed. And we're going to look back two years time say, "What defined this

cycle?" It was ETFs that opened the floodgates. It was a regulatory change, a political change in the most important country, the most important market changing probably 180. You know what I mean? Like in a very short period of time. Does that mean that we're going to have regulation tomorrow? No, but markets respond to that pivot, not the actual implementation of of the regulation. Now, I appreciate like everyone trying to ICOs and all this stuff. Like we're going to have to need like clear rules, but but that sets in motion today more interest, more pilots, more you know what I mean? Like people that have been in the sidelines like So, I think it matters, and so, like I just would caution people like not to

get too caught up in the movement day-to-day movement of stuff, and just like I I think there've been really important stuff happening. The psyche says that, I think. Airdrop I have my reservations. I think airdrops have peaked. Uh 41% of people like dumped the ZK What is it? The ZK sync token immediately. Common common No. Zero The Layer Zero one just have I mean, by the time this is published, the Layer Zero We're recording this on Wednesday. We have to record it early.

Layer Zero's tomorrow, so Thursday. This releases on Friday, so that'll that'll happen by now. I could see the Layer Zero one because they've put in so much freaking work. I could see it being one of the Like actually I could see it being the last big one that's done in this type of way. I'd like to I mean Actually, that's not going to happen. Never mind. There's going to be more, actually. that, but The thing that matters most is like when we think about airdrops, I think we can on the margin like be just more judicious of your team of who you actually give tokens to.

Whether they want to dump it or not, no, but at least I give tokens to someone that has put in meaningful work. They provided liquidity, traded, improved your KPIs in some way, shape, or form, go at it. If they have done some softer stuff, less tangible, maybe not. Maybe keep that in the treasury cuz you're going to need it in 5 years' time. And like uh I don't know. It's difficult. But um the thing that I was actually rather interesting is Ondo did not airdrop.

I don't think there was an Ondo airdrop. And they're trading and the tokens have done fairly well. Celestia airdrop, tokens have done fairly well. There's a lot of noise when you think about price, right? In a 6-month period that has been very choppy. So, it's difficult to make these conclusions that an airdrop was wrong and it led to all this price collapse. Uh I was actually on a panel of sorts organized by Movement. Hassib was there, Raven from Lattice was there. Uh Ru Shay, of course, was there and like uh Smoky from Berachain was there and yeah, like they were talking about all this stuff and yeah, it can be all these ICOs and Kobe's ideas great. Yeah, we all agree that. And so what? Like we can't do that today. So, what do we do?

I think the most important thing is actually liquidity. And people should go listen to that market maker episode that we had with uh Evgeny from Wintermute um and um uh Amber and the Second Line guys, yeah. The most important thing is to have liquidity out of the gate. Because, you know, like also I think like people look at the spike, right? And they're like there's all these projects that have this Burj Khalifa, like, you know. Just a little liquidity. Now, what if you have like some sort of bonding curve mechanism like where, you know, you you have like better price discovery? That's kind of like Kobe's thing.

I hope that come But like that I think is a solution. Like if you have good liquidity out of the gate, you can absorb the dump and like it's a smoother orderly shift of who wants to have these tokens. Also, like here's an idea out of the blue. So, if you're in the US in some of these jurisdictions, like claiming the airdrop has tax implications. Sometimes you don't want to claim it immediately, right? Now, maybe it doesn't matter cuz you're in June and whatever. But um what if you could elect to like not receive the airdrop, um transfer it, give it back, or just

like can we make airdrops more fungible in the sense of like can a project give many of options to people? Um, like get an allocation, claim it today, uh and it's worth so much, claim it in a year it's so much, claim it in 3 years so much, or however you want to do it. Or like do these things like like do tasks on chain, and then that like unlocks or I don't know. What I'm What I'm trying to say is that's the other thing like I feel like um can we get to a spot or would it be nice to like as a recipient of the airdrop to have a menu of options? Cuz right now you're not presented with menu options.

It's like claim or not claim. Yeah. And the process there most likely is I'm not claiming sell cuz it's a lot of money or whatever. Or I'm not going to claim it cuz that has huge tax implication and I want to be a taxable event. I'm going to wait till tax day or whatever. Um but would it be maybe for you like would it be nice to have a menu of options which is I don't know. I don't know what those options would be. I can think of a few but I don't know. It doesn't It doesn't like what I mean it doesn't improve the low float. I think a lot of times you would just want to increase the float and that the easiest way to do that is just you know give a very healthy airdrop. Yeah. We recently had this discussion with the

project that like was like determining what percentage of the token supply was going to go to the community and like why. Why? Yeah. Why? Like no, like how much are you keeping for yourself? You realize you wouldn't be building this right? And they're like oh yeah, well you know, that's a good point. I'm like no, like you should own more of it. But Yeah. Yeah, um you you missed this podcast on Monday or Tuesday but we had Reagan and Mike from Lattice on the pod. Um and it was really good It was the whole podcast was chatted for like an hour about just like airdrops and to like releasing tokens to the community and why you should even do it and mark what's wrong with market structure and as as all it was all about this. Really

good episode coming out soon. Um You know, a trend I'm starting to see is uh in the same way there's been like these KOL rounds the last year, there's starting to be liquidity rounds where the only people who can access the rounds at these like discounted prices are people who can bring liquidity. Have you started seeing this? Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah, yeah. The liquidity mining like worked beautifully. Yeah, people don't tokens whatever. But like yeah, like you know, you had compound and Ave get meaningful liquidity and like Yeah. Um All right, dude. That's all I That's all I got. I went to the Coinbase event, but that was last week.

by the way, fantastic thread. Fantastic. Can you Can you summarize like for people that didn't see it what the takeaways were? And I mean, we'll link it the thread cuz people should go read it. And then but Yeah. Um Surprising the three things that the pricing model or top line. Okay. Uh first thing Okay, so it was really good event. There was There was uh There was 600 people. It was a 600 people uh at this Coinbase just to like set the stage. 600 people state of crypto summit by Coinbase.

Um it was like this invite-only event. A lot of institutional folks, policy makers founders. Um Three takeaways. Okay, first takeaway was the CIO of the ETF business at BlackRock and then Cathie Wood both said the same stat, which was about ETF flows. And the number is 80% and the 80% number is really important because uh the narrative on Twitter is that ETFs are here, institutions are here. They both made the argument. They said, "Look, we have all the data. The institutions are not here. 80% of people buying these ETFs are self-directed people inside of their own brokerages, otherwise known as retail.

So, uh if you look at the data No, it's it's it's self-directed Yeah, self-directed inside of their own brokerages accounts. It's like it's like your dad buying in in his in his in his Fidelity account. Um and that's really really interesting, right? Cuz I think there was what 12 billion of flows in 3 months um or so so something like that. I might be getting that number wildly off. Let's call it um Most of the money on most of the money wealth is in RIAs and hedge funds and institutions. Yeah, our so RIAs control 40% of the wealth in America um and most of the flows have been It's not pension It's obviously It's not It's not any of the big players buying this. It's 80% of the capital's been self-directed. So, that was the

first big one. Second big one was um Brian talking about the Coinbase strategy. So, he said uh Let me see if I can get a quote Actually, I don't need to quote this, but he said, "Look, there are Someone's uh Kathy and him did a fireside chat, and Kathy said, 'Brian, what are your What are you most excited about right now?'" He said, "Look, there are three things or four things I'm thinking about at the company. One, most exciting thing by far is Base. That's the most That's the most important thing at Coinbase is Base. Uh numbers two and three are our derivatives business and then our smart wallet. So, you got Base at the top, then you've got the derivatives business and the smart wall and the smart wallet, which makes onboarding much easier. And then he said, "Fourth is uh we're pushing international." So, today said the last

piece of the puzzle for us is um is international. 17% of Coinbase's revenue today is international. It's the first ti- first quarter where international has grown faster than the US. Was Q1. Um and so what they've just done internally is he was very transparent. He shared a lot about the strategy of the company. He said they just picked 10 markets where they're calling them the go-deep markets, and they're almost going to blitz these markets like Uber blitzed markets, and just like really try to take over. Because if you look at Yeah. You can actually look at SimilarWeb for some of this data. Uh Coinbase has like 90% of the market share in the US of exchanges in terms of like page I just in terms of page views and traffic and stuff like that. And

even in terms of volume, they usually sit around 70% of US volumes, but international they're like minuscule. They're very very small in international markets. And so they're about to blitz the hell out of these 10 markets. So that's really interesting. And that's interesting because it's Coinbase is obviously one of the biggest companies, but it has trickle-down effects, right? It starts to impact maybe how Kraken thinks about their business and how Circle thinks about their business. So that was interesting. I said one one other quote was centralized exchanges will be great for a bit, but they're just a moment in time. Eventually it's all going to be peer-to-peer with no intermediaries and all on chain.

Uh and it's just a pretty remarkable quote, I'd say, from the CEO of the biggest US crypto exchange. His willingness the willingness of Coinbase to reinvent their business model is impressive. It's amazing. Yeah. So the and then the third takeaway was it So the summit last year I think last year was the first year they had it. It was all infrastructure. It was L2s, it was base, it was infrastructure. This year there was there were there were truly zero conversations about infrastructure. It was all about apps and payments and usage. Um And it's it's getting it's it's moment, right?

You got the What is it? Tippin and Solana. Tippin, yeah. I just feel like I I feel it in my gut we're on the precipice of like an actual move into I think I think by I think I'm six months early here, but like a move an actual move into consumer. I think there's going to be new marketplaces. I mean, we had Geo Net on the pod and like man, I was listening to that being like Payments DePIN AI. AI's later, but payments and DePIN AI's related because a lot of a lot of activity on chain will be by agents, not humans. I think that's a next cycle. I think that's um I think that's going to be a next cycle thing, but like DePIN and payments. Yeah, yeah. It's just um

I remember this experience I had the first time I ever made a Uniswap transaction and it was just so like like just click, right? It was like the financial system will work this way. I don't know how long it's going to take, but eventually the financial system will run on DePIN rails. I'm starting to have that for the first time since that experience. I'm starting to have that with DePIN a little bit. I'm just like, man, like Well, the thing about Uniswap is not so much like it's something something it's harder to appreciate, right? Because there people It was like, yeah, obviously this is how Robin works. The reality is no, like you have to explain it and counterparty risk all this stuff and you know, and and and and then more sophisticated people are like, well, you know, a centralized order book model is

superior than an AMM and you you get into this like you know what I mean? DePIN is like so concrete. Like you want a data point? Yeah, it's a fraction of the cost, has better coverage. How about that? Zero. That's it. End of conversation. Like Yeah, so It's so in your face. So tangible. And and also I think bootstrapping networks is super capital intensive and like I guess it was a bit of an oversight, but like think about the minor like the hash rate.

That alone the the willingness of people to bootstrap this incredible network that is everywhere, that people expend CapEx out of their own pocket millions billions of dollars. Yeah. Ready? To mine something that they had think has value. Like compare that to like trying to bootstrap that network in a traditional way. One company raising money, venture money. It's super hard, right? Yeah. The challenge with Helium and DePIN networks is by the way no DePIN network trades at above 3 and Yeah. Not Hivemapper, not Helium, not I think the market is kind of sleeping on it. I think that the challenge the market is not entirely wrong. The challenge it will be the monetization

aspect. How you actually can Cuz you know, when when people like Oh, cellular towers, look at American Tower, like hugely like prints-like. Look at mobile networks, like they make a ton of ton of money. Can DePIN networks translate coverage to revenue? That's the thing that I So, you can get the supply side. You can incentivize the supply side, but can you actually get the demand side to buy the The demand side, I think, is there. It's more so the monetization aspect. But the Geonet like has mapped and has coverage uh for GPS location data far more than like Web2 companies. Web2 companies make orders of magnitude more money.

So, at what point And that's the question I forgot to ask Mike, but at what point can you start showing translation of you have all this coverage, how do you monetize? Now, I think I think the if the product is very good, the coverage is very good, the reliability is very good, the hardware is up to par, then there's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to charge maybe exactly the same or a slight discount cuz you have less overhead, right? As an organization, so you should presumably Yeah, the market should set that price.

But anyways, that's the thing like look at Filecoin revenue, Dropbox and Box. Like you know what I mean? Like these are the comparisons that I think I'd like to bring in maybe more discussion to this at a later time, but that's the thing that I'm just Um that's the thing what will unlock DePIN more so from like a market standpoint right? Yeah. Um anyways, good Coinbase event. Oh, also, BlackRock CIO said, "Look, we used to think these networks would be we'd we'd end up going on chain, but it'd be in these permissioned networks. Now, we're 100% convinced it's going to be in permissionless networks." That was cool.

Um okay, unfolding right now, there's this Kraken hack. Have you seen this? Yeah. Okay, so let me I mean, I'm doing this in real time, so bear with me. But so, CertiK posted CertiK posted we found a series of critical vulnerabilities in Kraken's exchange, which could potentially lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, starting from a finding in Kraken deposit system, etc. etc. etc. I'm not going to read the whole thing, we can link it in the show notes, but basically CertiK posted that they'd found a vulnerability and they posted like the whole timeline and they said, "In the spirit of transparency and our commitment to the Web3 community, we're going to pub- we're going to public to protect all users' security, etc. etc." So, then the uh CSO of Kraken, Nick uh Perco- Per-

Perco- Perco, who's widely known as like being the best CSO in Kraken. he's Kraken security is He's He's like He's like the guy. He's the guy. the Navy SEALs. Yeah, he's like the guy. So, um so anyways, he posts. He goes, "Kraken security update. On June 9th, we received a bug bounty program alert from a security researcher. No specifics were disclosed, but their email claimed to find an extremely critical bug." He says what we what I know to be true as well, "Every day we receive fake bug bounties. They get it I'm sure 10 times more than we do, 100 times more, but we get that every day. Found a bug in Block Works. I'm going to change the whole website." You can't take everything seriously. He said, "But look, we did we assembled a cross-functional team to dig into the issue. Within minutes, we

discovered an isolated bug. This allowed a malicious attacker to initiate a deposit onto our platform and and receive funds in their account. To be clear, no clients' assets were at risk, etc. etc. We triaged the vulnerability as critical. Within an hour and 47 minutes, we had mitigated the issue. Here's where it gets interesting though. The individual discovered the bug in our funding system and leveraged it to credit their account with four with four million in with $4 in crypto. This would have been sufficient to prove the flaw, file a bug bounty report with our team, and collect a very sizable reward under the terms of the program.

Instead, the security researcher disclosed this bug to two other individuals who they work with who fraudulently generated much larger sums. They ultimately withdrew nearly $3 million from Kraken from their Kraken accounts. This was from Kraken's treasuries, not client accounts. And this is completely backfired on CertiK. Let me just read some of these tweets. CertiK are absolute clowns deserve to be banished from the industry. I will never do business with them. I would never hire their current employees. Next up, too bad there isn't a way to short CertiK. Step one, steal Kraken funds. Step two, fails fail to report security flaw for 3 days. Step three, brag about exploit to other researchers. Step four, researchers repeat the exploit and tornado cash the funds. Step five, go on

crypto Twitter and pretend to be white hat and martyrs. So, this seems to be really backfiring on on on CertiK. I haven't fully dug into it, but I was actually at Blockworks period some some folks were uh speaking not so elegantly or friendly about CertiK. Um so, yeah, this seems to have really backfired, but it'll be interesting to see this develop. Cuz I think CertiK is the biggest uh smart contracting auditing firm in crypto today in terms of just size of company and revenue. Not in terms of Spear bit like Spear bit's amazing and there are there are other folks with very good reputations, but I'm pretty sure CertiK is the largest by by size.

Yeah, I don't think that's like the best metric, but yes. I think you're right. Yeah, I mean they've I mean just in terms of like they've raised like $300 million. They're just a large firm. No, yeah, yeah. They're the largest, yeah, yeah. I think they're EY. Deloitte and Deloitte. Yeah, they raised from SoftBank, Tiger. They raised $290 million. Like they're big big old firm so. Wow. Anyways, I don't want to end on a bad note. I had lunch with Rich Woodman, head of strategy head of crypto strategy at Google. Uh Google is taking crypto very seriously, I would say. I think everyone's sleeping on that. Um, really interesting. They've got a quite a large crypto team. Um, they've got three fully developed products and I

think we'll actually see Google push pretty deeply into be more public about what they're doing in crypto. So, that was cool. I saw that tweet, yeah. Yeah. Um, what else? I've been reading a lot. Got a physical Kindle. Amazing. What are you reading? Uh, read a lot of the stuff that people posted on that thread. Uh, the uh, who was it? Uh, someone recommended, oh, Robbie from Amida Wealth said read 10X is easier than 2X.

That was a really good book. Mhm. Like that the title seems like a I don't want this stuff. that like it's actually hard it's it's actually I I I could imagine what the story is about. It's it's actually good. Like like good and then yeah, I've just been reading a lot. So, it's nice. I have a the best AI thing I think you'll ever read or that's a ridiculous statement. The best AI thing that you've that I have ever read. Okay. It's called Situational Awareness the Decade Ahead. It's about 150 pages long.

What's by Leopold Aschenbrenner. Situational I'm not sure what that is. series of essays about this guy's inside look into the AI industry. It I've been I'm on hour five of reading this thing. It's and I'm still not done. So, it's taking me a while. I'm a slow reader, but it's really really really good. Nice. I like that. I'm going to I'm going to pick it up maybe this weekend. Yeah. I'll I'm going to try to lift whatever whatever it is. Can you send me stats, and then I'll report back? And whoever the listener You can't lift.

I just like I can't run. Dude, what makes you think that I can't lift? I just I just got a feeling. I don't think I don't think you got that DOG IN YOU. LISTEN. LISTEN. LISTEN. You put a rack at Permissionless. People can fight. Let's do a hit. Put it this way. Put a gym in the corner of Permissionless, instead of a stupid booth.

That's actually a great idea. And let's pump, because I will I'll pump the [ __ ] out of you, dude. I'm going on the record. I will 805? Those are rookie numbers. You can have Those are fighting words. These are fighting words. Wow. All You guys see the um Waffle on Wall Street? Those are rookie numbers. You got Those are rookie numbers. Pump them up. Pump them up. Permissionless is going to go down. I will lift more than you in whatever combination that three disciplines you want.

You've vastly underestimated Wow. Wow. Wow. Oh boo. Yeah. Listen. Yeah, buddy. All right. All right. This is Ronnie MO HERE. I'M GOING RONNIE MO. I'm going Ronnie Mo on this. listening to this thing like, are you [ __ ] kidding me? We have to put a gym on the floor at Permissionless? Just a rack. Just a rack. Just like a you know. All right. Let's go. And we have Moana We we got Tolly, Moana, like Keone, you. Tolly, when we talked to him, he was trying to hit the thousand club. So, that dude's All right. Come on.

Whatever Tolly lifts is the price to try and get him some water. It's just like That's nice. All right, game on. All right, game on. I'm going to have so much fun. Let's do it. All right, good place to end it. Um Good place to end it. Good chat, good chat. Good I'm going to go straight to the gym. Dude, you're going to I'm going to the gym, too. Cancel the rest of my calls. You think I'm creating and going straight to the gym right now? I'll just see you later. All right.

Thanks for the pleasure. Don't forget to leave a comment and chip post and we'll be we'll be reposting. Peace. All right, you heard about Sei a couple times. Just want to give them one last shout-out. Big thanks to Sei for sponsoring this episode of Empire. There are a ton of reasons to build on Sei. If you want to get in touch with them, you can reach out to me. I'll put you in touch directly with the team. You can also get in touch with them on Twitter @SeiNetwork. You can follow the journey @SeiNetwork. They are currently live. They've got Sei V2 on public devnet today. Mainnet goes live later in Q2. Really excited to have Sei sponsoring and partnering with us on this episode of Empire.