OG Olaf Carlson-Wee on Why His Crypto Thesis Is Stronger Than Ever - Ep. 598

Transcript

One thing that was a big moment for me this you know this happened probably about 10 years ago but I was thinking about Bitcoin as this sort of abstract incentive machine that people get plugged into and that you know the Bitcoin network or ethereum network you know they're operated by machines but ultimately these systems control humans like they manipulate humans incentives to drive humans to like work for them. And I had a big moment where I realized wait a second you got wrapped into this like I work for Bitcoin like I'm the guy who got wrapped into this incentive mechanism

and now work for this thing. Hi everyone welcome to Unchained your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host Laura Shin author of the cryptopians. I started coming crypto eight years ago and as a senior editor of Forbes was the first mainstream media reporter to cover cryptocurrency full-time. This is the January 23rd 2024 episode of Unchained. Streamline your D5 with VaultCraft the ultimate on-chain toolkit for deploying custom automated D5 products on any EVM chain.

Join VaultCraft's referral program unite with a community and supercharge your crypto details on vaultcraft.io. Today's guest is Olaf Carlson-Wee founder and CIO of Polychain Capital. Welcome Olaf. Hey Laura thanks for having me. Excited to see you again. I think you may be the only guest of mine to live through every single bubble in crypto. You live through a tiny bubble from single digits up to $30 in June 2012. You live through Bitcoin's first bubble past $100 its first bubble past $1,000 the ICO craze of 2017 the D5 summer 2020 NFT mania of 2021.

And now we're recording as spot Bitcoin ETFs are on the precipice of being launched here in the US. So for listeners this this episode will come out later so they'll already have launched but obviously we're in the situation where prices are up volume is up the having's coming up and it basically looks like we're on the verge of another bull run. So what do you think this particular bull market will be about? That's a great question. So in a way one thing that's interesting to me is how much my general thesis has actually not changed since 2011 which is that this is sort of an incentive vortex that takes over and eventually we all sort of work for these autonomous

protocols. It's very similar to the way you sort of work for dollars or whatever currency from the day you're born and you never really think that much about the fact that you're plugged into that system. It's just sort of like in the background you take it for granted that you know you go to school you go to university you get a job and it's sort of all working for this big imaginary system. So I think in a in a way like not that much has changed and it's sort of this this center you know spine of this whole thing that will never change which is just sort of you know it's like a vortex for the world's time and capital.

Now for this particular sort of moment in crypto I think that a lot of the infrastructure around smart contracts you know these namely are projects like you know Arbitrum and other layer two systems on ethereum systems that have been hardened like Solana and then systems like Celestia EigenLayer that are a little bit more dev tool oriented but you know sort of unlock the ability to do new types of applications. I think that those novel apps are going to always they've always been a big part of each one of these cycles is sort of this unlock that gets invented very quietly when nobody cares about this

market and then you sort of see it shine in in applications you know during the the intensity of this you know bull market cycle. And so we saw this like in 2012 kind of bear market you saw things like Coinbase launch that enabled people to interact with these systems without you know using the command line on their computer. You know then in 2015 bear market you saw ethereum launch and like the first you know primitive crowdfunding smart contracts things like that. You know 2019 bear market you saw sort of D5 and NFTs and then this bear market I think is a lot of this more scalable infrastructure that's really going to unlock new types

of applications and I think particularly things like crypto social or crypto enabled video games and things like that that are a bit more consumer oriented and financial in nature but not sort of as explicitly financial as say a Bitcoin where you just sort of buy it and hold it as an investment vehicle. Instead it's sort of a backbone of financial incentive that sits underneath the existing mechanics of like a social media application or it sits beneath the existing logic of a video game right. So I expect that to be a big theme here is okay it turns out all that stuff you know that people that

I invest with were building turns out it all matters and it's useful even though you know it sounds a bit abstract it's like early ethereum you know you hear okay we're going to take this turn complete virtual machine and embed it in the blockchain it sounds like nonsense or just you know techno babble. It turns out that that's actually a really big deal and enables lots of new ways to use this stuff that people didn't know about but it sort of does have to get invented one day. So I think these inventions are going to play a big role in this in this cycle and you know I I do think you know we're going into this kind of election year and there's just going to be a little bit more of a

you know very public narrative. Previously these these cycles you know 2021 was the first bull market that was sort of public in a sense. I think this one will be very public. All the previous ones were pretty much limited to the folks inside crypto. Yeah and I definitely want to dig in more on the social finance gaming questions but we'll kind of go through I guess like lower layers of the tech stack before we get up to applications but I also did want to ask you about Bitcoin because obviously the way you got into this whole thing was through Bitcoin you discovered that when you were in college you wrote part of your college thesis on it and so you know you and I are recording right before the

launch obviously this will come out after but what are your thoughts as you see that spot Bitcoin ETFs are about to launch in the US like in what ways do you think the moment is significant and in what ways do you think it's not significant? Yeah I mean I think it's significant in a very similar way that the Coinbase launch was significant for Bitcoin a long time ago. It just makes it easier. It doesn't really like invent a new thing per se right but it just makes it easier for regular people to get involved in this and invest in this and it turns out that's a very big deal right like if you look at what happened to gold

after gold ETFs were created you know I expect a very similar trajectory for Bitcoin. I think there's a huge number of people that don't want to set up a wallet but do want passive exposure to this this whole thing and a lot of the way they're going to do that is the way they get exposure to the stock market or bonds or things like that which is you know ETF like instruments that trade on stock exchanges. So I I do think it's a very big deal in the scheme of like the trajectory of crypto. The way it's not a big deal is that it's just sort of a wrapper right it it's like a wrapper for the underlying thing.

It's not really a new invention like the creation of something like ethereum or some of these more fundamental low level technologies that I mentioned to me is like a much bigger long-term deal right because it enables people to use these things in ways that we couldn't imagine before. You know we all know what's going to happen with the ETF and it's not like the ETF is going to enable stuff that I could have never thought of you know 10 years from now it's like whoa can you imagine how people are using the ETF right? It's just you know it's just an investment wrapper that allows regular people to have easier access.

But that you know I I don't mean to say it's not a big deal. I think it's a very big deal and I agree with you that it feels broadly like 2024 is going to be a very good year for crypto. Yeah yeah. Your team sent my team some recent remarks you made at your LP day and one of your quotes was most criticisms of crypto are actually criticisms of property money and markets. What did you mean by that? So um you know when I said earlier you're born into this system that ends up sort of guiding most of the big decisions of your life like school and a job and where you live there's this backbone thing that's like

capitalism and the concept of money that you sort of are born into and work for right so you sort of like work for money but I think it's very rare that people ask the question like wait what the heck is this? You know it's all be $100 it's like 100 what? And like I work you know so much for $20 an hour and it's like 20 what an hour like what's going on? You know, and I I think that it's funny that it's sort of this it's so central to the backbone of of the fabric of our of our society that nobody asks about it because it's so it's so present that it's almost invisible. It's like a fish swimming in water, right? It doesn't

think that it's wet. It's just like this is just life, right? Now, when people criticize cryptocurrency, I think mostly what they're really criticizing is these systems of capitalism, private property, you know, money and markets. They'll say, you know, crypto's fake and made up, right? Um and I'm like, yeah, so is whatever other system we have out there. Um money is not uh something you can look at under a microscope, right? It's not like a physics-based thing. It's a sociological thing that only emerges in the interaction between different people.

Like, if if you're the wealthiest person on Earth, but everyone else on Earth disappears, you know, you have nothing. Like, money is only useful in in a social context relative to other people. And this sort of fake and made up feeling um of crypto, I I think is really a reflection that you're inside this fake and made up system as it is. You just never thought about it before. And then, you know, criticisms like, well, there's there's inequality in crypto. Like, there's there's these whales that own these whales like all of owns so much crypto.

And it's like, yeah, do you know how dollars work? Like, there's like these whales that control these things and have a lot more than other people. You know, we we can try to make equal rules, but we'll never have equal outcomes because people are different, right? They have different abilities. So, you're you're never going to have sort of equal outcomes. I think it's it's just a fantasy. And the criticisms there of crypto are are again really criticisms of money, markets, and capitalism, but people just never thought about it all before.

And so, you know, I think most of the negative things people say about crypto, they're just for the first time ever taking a first-principled approach to thinking about the system that they're already in. So, you know, when people say Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, you know, the people who are in it have an incentive for other people to to buy into that imaginary reality. I mean, the same is true of private property and the dollar, right? The people who have a lot of it have a huge shared a huge collective incentive to make sure everybody else believes in it.

So, like, if if I have a billion dollars, that's only useful if everyone else agrees that I have the billion dollars and that that billion dollars can be traded for for things. So, I you know, I think that most of these criticisms, they're they're not incorrect. It's just that they're not unique to crypto. And people have just never thought about the system they're already embedded in before. Yeah, I've also faced those kinds of questions and comments, and my most frequent comeback is you know, for the longest time seashells, like cowrie shells, were used as money. And like, it's not anything new. Like, they you know, this kind of social agreement and like fiction around money is just what money is.

You also said in your LP day that Web3 apps are fundamentally different, and it's critical to understand how the architecture bubbles up to the app experience. As a founder, every time Web2 turns right, turn left. Not just different, the opposite. Can you elaborate on that? Yes. So, in the context of Web2 application logic, we are used to building these sort of walled gardens where the logic is limited to inside the application right? And the goal is to control that walled garden and extract value from the activities that happen inside it.

So, if you're inside Facebook or you're inside Instagram or you're inside TikTok, there's kind of this logic to that application that is you know, it's decided by the developers of that system, and they sort of monetize all these little interactions. So, there's this interesting relationship between creators and fans across every single one of these platforms, where the platform is sort of sitting there being a broker of these interactions, and taking a bit of a fee, um and there's a lot of jockeying around what type of fee can they create, how much can they jump in the middle, and how much does that sort of broker of that interaction really provide value um between that that creator and that fan,

right? In the context of Web3, the architecture is like open source, and so anybody can take like the underlying social graph and build their own version of the application logic. So, you can take if just as a basic example, you can take the Twitter follower graph. So, who follows who? But then you can build your own feed based on that. So, instead of having this one Twitter feed that's sort of determined by Twitter Inc. or X, I guess.

Um you have, you know, potentially hundreds of competing different applications that all have their own feed logic based on your follower graph. So, the follower graph, you know, might be sitting at that sort of blockchain protocol level, um and because of that it's it's open source and extensible. What that also means is that people can build radically different applications built based on that follower graph. So, you can take the Twitter follower graph and say, you know what, I'm going to build Instagram based on that graph.

And so, you already have this experience every once in a while in Web2 where you'll log in and it'll say like, link your Twitter, right? Um or or link your Instagram. And they're what they're doing is they're they're asking through a permissioned API to talk to like the Instagram servers and the Twitter servers for permission to grab what is their proprietary data about who you follow and who follows you, and so that they can plug it into their application. In a Web3 context, like everything is open, and everything so the way to think about it is it's like Minecraft and modding in like video game communities.

Like, in in these communities, like, people take like an architecture of a video game, and then they mod it and they create like their own version, So, like, modify. Yeah, they mod Yeah, they modify the game, and they kind of create their own weird little world, and it's like this open extensible thing. Um and there was a short time period in Web2 where these platforms did have like open APIs. Um but the problem was sometimes people would use those open APIs to build apps that were like competitive with that core app.

Um so, broadly, nobody really backs companies like this anymore. I think a very famous example of this was Zynga. You know, Zynga built um on the Facebook API, they built a very successful business, but then they had issues with Facebook basically unplugging their access, and all of a sudden Zynga Zynga crashes uh spectacularly. And it's because they're not building on sort of this open system. It's like if um you know, you can't build Microsoft on Google, right? And then have Google be able to unplug you, right? Like, you're never going to be able to have this like genuinely competitive marketplace when it's all built on dependencies that potential competitors

control. So um this is sort of the the application interface that the end user sees in crypto, like, ends up having dramatically different logic because the underlying infrastructure is different logic. And another, you know, example of this that's sort of do the opposite. If Satoshi Nakamoto owned 100% of the Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin would be worth zero. It would be worth nothing. The only way that they were able to create value for themselves was actually by giving away all the Bitcoins, basically.

And this is true of um you know, tokens that are tied to, you know, any sort of crypto app or crypto infrastructure. If the founder and founding team like keeps 100% of the tokens, they effectively have nothing. This is not true of a traditional revenue-generating business. Like, if if Jeff Bezos owns 100% of Amazon shares, it doesn't change that much fundamental logic about like Amazon the service. Now, in these crypto systems, the underlying sort of {quote} cap table or ownership structure is very tightly tied with the functioning of that application, right?

So, if you consider Bitcoin the asset part of the functioning of the Bitcoin network, it's like if Amazon shares allowed you to buy goods on Amazon, right? There's like interaction between the ownership structure and the application logic itself. And so, because of that, to create value for yourself as a crypto founder, if you have this crypto asset, you actually want to dramatically give it away. Like, you want to give it away to as many people as you possibly can. And it's it's the exact opposite logic of building a traditional proprietary revenue-generating business, which is like, be very careful about who you let on your cap table.

Um you want to have the least amount of owners possible. Uh I I broadly I think the advice I would give people um in that sense, and in the Web3 sense, it's like, give away the token to as many humans on Earth as possible. So, it's again, it's sort of this bizarro world like opposite logic. Like lean into the open source developer community, let them build on top of your application logic, let them compete with your application interface because ultimately all you're trying to do is make the protocol successful. And so if you can have thousands of different applications built on top of your protocol, that is going to be what makes it successful, right? So it's it's instead of building this walled garden around the ownership

structure, you know, around the application logic, you know, and having things like patents on your software, it's it's sort of do the opposite every time. And it's there's more of a create value by by giving it away, which is it it it can be tricky for people that are very deeply entrenched in that web two world to to understand that logic. Yeah, there was another quote from the LP day that I really liked and in a way this sort of just elaborates I think on the same thought, um, but you know, if you have anything to add, let us know. You said crypto is not about payments like PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle are. Crypto's about money, the socially constructed imaginary opt-in system we use to define

and legitimize who owns what. So I I love that but you know, I don't know if there's anything else you want to add. It feels like I you know, I mentioned this a little bit earlier but you know, it's it's it's really this like incentive vortex. I mean, one thing that was a big moment for me this you know, this happened probably about 10 years ago but I was thinking about Bitcoin as this sort of abstract incentive machine that people get plugged into and that you know, the Bitcoin network or Ethereum network, you know, they're operated by machines but ultimately these systems control humans. Like they manipulate humans incentives to drive humans to like work for them.

And I had a big moment where I realized wait a second, you got wrapped into this. Like I work for Bitcoin. Like I'm the guy who got wrapped into this incentive mechanism and now work for this thing. And it's not that like it it's not that different though than being just born into the traditional old system and you're just like working for dollars, right? Like you never even think about it. It's it's the fish in water. Like it's it's so deeply entrenched in your logic of reality that you never step back to realize you're even in water.

And so like it was fascinating for me like, you know, I was kind of a fish in the Bitcoin water a sin in a sense and it actually took me a moment to realize wait a second, I just you know, I'm one of these people. And eventually it's going to get everyone, you know, it's just going to because it's this it's such an elegantly designed incentive system and one that's immutable and no one can change. So it's infallible in a way and I think it outlives the you know, money of any nation state. And it's kind of a bet on the internet instead of nation states as like the defining logic of of society, right? And I think it's very clear that's the direction we're going in a macro scale.

Broadly you know, this is a very powerful machine that's beyond what anyone including the people that have created these things could have really ever comprehended. And it's sort of infinite branchiating you know, complexity will eventually pull in everyone. And someday you know, we'll all you new young people will be born and they'll just be the fish in water with cryptocurrency. Like they won't even think about it like why why this? It's just going to be there in the background.

Yeah, honestly right as you were speaking, I suddenly remembered how we met. Do you remember how we met? No, I I don't remember. The very first article I ever wrote about you was about how you transacted only in Bitcoin and I remember that. Yeah. The year that I wrote that was that 2015 2015, I remember that. And so, you know, when you were talking about how you were the guy that got wrapped into quote unquote working for Bitcoin, I mean, I remember you told me in your for the article that you were like figured out a way to pay your rent in Bitcoin, you would always pay friends in Bitcoin. You your friends probably are so grateful to you because they're probably like so wealthy now

from you like paying them for pizza in Bitcoin or for burritos or whatever. I just remember I asked you pretty much about every aspect of your finances and how you managed to Yeah. Yeah. And I I you know, a lot of my goal back then too was you know, I was very dedicated to making Coinbase work where you know, I was working full-time on Coinbase, you know, double full-time I would say on Coinbase. And I wanted to sort of be a tester for every aspect of the product. Right? So can can we do payroll in Bitcoin? Can I you know, pay my rent in Bitcoin? Can I buy regular

stuff in Bitcoin? Can I send this to friends? Like I just wanted to make sure that the product suite you know, was capable of supporting like the full cycle of someone's life. So someone's full financial life because my ultimate goal is is you know, I don't mean goal. It's just like what's going to happen in my mind. It's it's not a a system that is going to exist alongside the stuff we have today. It's going to be like that for a long time and then eventually it replaces it.

And it's not and I don't think it's anyone can do anything about it. I just think it's already it's already happening and it's just going to keep happening. And do you think that transition from them coexisting to it just being crypto, do you think that happens in our lifetimes or or not? Yeah. Yeah, I do. Interesting. I mean, I think I'll be you know, you know, I think I I won't be like a a young man when that happens. But I I think that once you get to like 50% it's so clear you know, that you're going to get to 100%.

Sorry, what about the fact that mail like snail mail and email continue to coexist? Yeah, but snail mail only continues to exist because of just absolute reasons. Like weird regulatory things where like you have to get it delivered or you know, and it's also just spam. I think that snail mail existing is because of like obscure subsidies basically. I think if it was just like it had to compete on its own against email like we wouldn't really have it the way we do today.

All right. Well, so now we've we've gone through like a lot of theoretical stuff. We're going to get into some specific things. One thing that I wanted to ask about was just about Polychain. It was reported last July that Polychain has raised or had raised $200 for its fourth fund but was targeting a $400 run. Did you close that round or you know, or I don't know if you can talk about that. I can't really talk about it but you'll you know, I'm sure you'll hear about it when we have something to announce.

Okay, and but could you even talk about sort of what your thesis or strategy would be for Well, yeah, I'm happy to talk about what I'm excited to invest in sort of over the next couple years. Um I mean, I I've been investing in this category since the beginning and I think it continues to be very important which is just expanding like core low-level functionality and scalability. I just don't think that project is done. I think it takes a very long time. It's like getting the internet from you know, dial-up modems to video streaming

took a really long time. And I think crypto is is no different. I think it's a little faster because we sort of have the internet to use to get it done faster. But it's I don't think the project is done. Like I don't think the tech stack we have today is ready to replicate like the needs of the global financial system and global property ownership systems. Like it we're not ready. So I think that continues to be a very big category for me and then I I am very intrigued by you know, adding like you have in video games and social media networks and things like that. You

have these feedback loops that are non-financial that get people to log in and use the thing. Like nobody is really getting paid to like like the creators are in a way but like the regular fans aren't really getting paid to use Instagram or Snapchat or you know, Twitter. Like most people are on there for free, right? And they're on there for other reasons. A lot of what I'm excited about is can we add a financial incentive backbone like in addition to these application loops that already exist.

So, you know, actually you get paid a little bit of a kickback to use Instagram because you're actually providing value for the company and for the creator but today like there's really no elegant mechanism to pay the users to do that. I do think adding this kind of financial backbone to application logic that we already know about could be very explosive. So, it's one area that I'm I'm paying attention to. You know, it's still small. I mean, crypto consumer you know, other than like these exchange platforms that are explicitly financial in nature is still a very small and you know, early market. Whereas this sort of infra

and scaling side, that's a very established market. So, I I think we'll continue to be pretty focused on low-level protocols and infrastructure like we sort of always have been, but we are sort of creeping up the stack as time goes Yeah, yeah, crypto just hasn't gotten to that place where yeah, it really can go mainstream. So, in a moment we're going to talk more about scaling choices, but first a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible. DeFi just got way easier with VaultCraft, a blockchain infrastructure for building, deploying, and monetizing non-custodial yield strategies in a few clicks.

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Back to my conversation with Olaf. At the moment, we have two blockchains that are in a similar space and they've taken very different approaches. So, obviously Ethereum and Solana that I'm talking about. There's also kind of an up-and-coming contender, Celestia. And that maybe you could say is going to take modularity up a notch. I've heard you say that you think the modular approach makes more sense. You've probably heard some people talk about Solana offering something more akin to an Apple-like experience. So, I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about, you know, why it is that you view modular as superior, but what you make of that, you know,

a commentary about, you know, Solana offering a better experience. Yeah. So, I think in broad brushstrokes, the modular architecture is better suited for just long-term durability. And you have more diversification in the different protocols people are using, the different teams working on those systems. So, if you look at like, call it the Ethereum modular stack, right? You have core protocol development on Ethereum itself, but you also have all these different teams working on layer two systems. You have teams working on data availability

like Celestia. You have teams working on capital efficiency like EigenLayer. And it's sort of this whole ecosystem of modular components that each sort of compete in their little arena, but sort of all combine to build sort of one stack. And I think it just means that there's less dependence on a single group or person. And architecturally, I think it's just the better way to build software. Like if you're building software, you know, you don't want this one like when you say monolithic codebase in software, that's like a bad thing, right? You don't want this one big piece of software. You want it to be broken up

into smaller components that can be optimized in in their own sort of avenue. I it's it's not to say though in the sort of short to medium term, I think there's a lot to be said for like the simplicity from a user experience perspective of this kind of monolithic approach that you have like a Solana or like a Binance chain kind of taking. Now, I don't think it has as nice of security properties for like long-term scalability. And I think sometimes there are shortcuts that need to be taken to make it work. And I also think just broadly, there's way more dependence on like a central dev team or even a single

person. Which I think just adds fragility to the system. So, you know, if you look at the whole Ethereum modular stack, I don't really think there's like one person that this all rides on at all. You know, including Vitalik. If you look at Solana, I think a lot rides on Anatoly's shoulders and and you know, making this work. And just like the core Solana dev team. You know, because it is this monolithic thing that you're depending a little bit more on on this team to continue to upgrade and maintain, right? So, yeah, I I do prefer the modular stack like as a long-term architecture for this whole thing. But I think there's a ton of merit in the short and mid-term for user experience in in the

kind of monolithic approach. One of the more significant advance for Ethereum that's coming up is EigenLayer. And I think that's going to launch sometime in the first half of 2024. If that succeeds, then how do you see that influencing the development of the Ethereum ecosystem? Like what will that future look like? Yeah. And so, to be clear, EigenLayer is live today. Not with, you know, unlimited cap on funds and not with full functionality, but it's it's like a live on mainnet thing right now.

So, the thing that EigenLayer allows is for third-party bits of infrastructure or applications to basically plug in to the security afforded by Ethereum staking. And so, people often call this re-staking where you can as an Ethereum staker take your ETH that you have staked and say, you know what, I'm going to plug in and stake on this other application and get paid a little yield over there, too. Traditionally, to create the kind of security properties of Ethereum, you would have to literally launch a token and get it to the value of Ethereum.

Like, that's the only way to do it. That's really hard, right? You have to like all that stuff I was talking about like the social, this kind of imaginary social system that we all sort of opt into. I mean, it's very hard to bootstrap one of those to be worth, you know, a trillion dollars. It's really hard. Now, with EigenLayer and re-staking, application developers that want to secure like an oracle system that feeds data that's not endogenous to the blockchain into the blockchain or that want to secure something simple like a trading card game that they have and they want to make sure that, you know, the scarcity of the cards is is true and and blockchain-based. So, you don't depend

on, you know, some third-party card maker to, you know, enforce scarcity. You can just sort of plug into this security afforded by Ethereum without having to launch your own token. And without having to bootstrap the value of that token. So, EigenLayer is a great example of something where it is going to enable a ton of new applications. Nobody knows the extent to what all of those will be. Just in the way that Ethereum itself enabled so many different types of applications and nobody not nobody who made Ethereum imagined all the myriad of ways it would be used. I think that, you know, a system like EigenLayer has very

similar properties where it's like it's sort of this fundamental low-level unlock. And we just try our best to see as far into the future as we can. But it's like at the end of the day, it's bigger than anyone can reasonably predict. But you're not talking with like different developers or seeing any activity that gives a hint as to what you think. Yeah, I mean, I I think the early stuff is secure middleware systems. So, things like you know, things like price feeds and and things that have historically been really important.

Like blockchains don't know the price of the asset natively. Which is it's kind of weird, but like Ethereum the blockchain, the protocol system has no idea what the price of Ethereum is relative to other assets. So, that data and any other data like what happened in the news, who won the election. Like you know, the blockchain as a data structure doesn't know any of that stuff. Feeding that data into the blockchain, you know, enables this huge suite of applications, but it's really hard because it's sort of an equivalent security property or security problem to finding a valid block and feeding it into the blockchain, right? Which we have, we have, you know, obviously a lot of work goes into figuring out how to do

that right. And so, things like a data feed, it might sound pretty basic, but it's a really big deal, right? Like being able to have a secure data feed without having to bootstrap your own token. So, I think right now it's it's the what I would describe as these middleware services. It's kind of like a blockchain SaaS, right? Like a lot of this, you know, middleware SaaS software that we saw explode in over web two over the past like 15 years with the advent of like cloud. I think this is we're going to similarly see, my best guess here is like a blockchain SaaS type of ecosystem in early days.

Yeah, and speaking of that, you've also invested in Celestia and um I think it's like potentially competitive with EigenLayer. Um so how would you compare those two? Well, so um not really. Like Celestia is um a data availability layer and so it just is it's kind of a you know, the original name for um Celestia was lazy ledger. And it's it's lazy because it only does one thing and it does it really well, right? And it does it in a secure manner. Um and so I think it's it's part of the um scaling stack and it similarly like unlocks new applications that I think weren't possible before.

But it's really like this whole idea of like re-staking and you know, shared economics security. That's quite unique to EigenLayer. So I I don't consider those competitive. Okay. So I do want to ask more about like innovations and where things are going, but I also just have to ask you about the year of 2022 in crypto. Obviously it was uh just a crazy year. It was, you know, Terra Luna, Celsius, 3AC, FTX, Voyager. I mean, DCG.

Lots of things happened and I wondered, you know, what your kind of takeaways or lessons were for yourself, for Polychain, for the crypto community broadly. What are your thoughts? Yeah. So, you know, I in a sense am an investor in a in a risky and speculative asset class, right? I think that's inarguable. But um because of that, I actually like to have extremely tight risk controls around the things we can control. And I don't want to ever get overconfident or or um add on risk that's like this unnecessary risk. Like we already have enough market consumer adoption techno like hard

hardcore technology risk, security risks with these protocols. So I've always been extremely paranoid from the beginning of Polychain about counterparty risk. And what I mean by that is where are the coins? You know, um it are they sitting on exchanges? Let's say we do lending agreements. You know, who is that person we're lending to if it's through one of these like lending desks? Who are they lending the coins to and where are those coins ultimately living, right? Um so I've had a lot of investors and other folks over the years say "Okay, you're sitting on lots of crypto assets. Why don't you lend them?"

Cuz we we don't you know, we don't really engage in in lending at scale at all at all. Like we we just have never done it. And it's because it just takes on this extra counterparty risk to get you know, get a little bit of return. But you're sort of missing the big picture, right? Which is that if we play our cards right, the return we're going to get is is very very good and let's not take on this additional risk. So um you know, I was able to avoid every major blowup of '22. Like you know, Terra Luna and UST, um the entire lending collapse and and contagion there.

The entire complex of like Sam Bankman-Fried companies and projects. And I I really you know, I really think it was like 80% because of real risk management um philosophy that I had in place for years and years and 20% luck, right? Like I you know, it's there's there's always luck in these things. But you know, I got pitched by Sam um many many times and passed every time because there was such an obvious and like irreconcilable conflict of interest between FTX and Alameda and that turned out to be the thing that destroyed the whole thing.

Um and all the coins that they launched had like this low float like scheme, right? Where you sort of have a mismatch between price and liquidity, so it looks like it's worth $100 billion and it's but you really try to sell and get out and you get nothing. And so there's just a lot of you know, they're pretty basic tricks actually, I thought. Um that and like for example, Luna UST, like we had had this experiment play out for years. I mean what is the only asset that you you know, we really all agreed you don't want to have as collateral in the Maker DAO you know, Dai stablecoin system? It's MKR. It's like the one it's it's the one thing everyone agreed like let's not have that as collateral.

Um then you had things like empty set dollar that played out on smaller scale. It was very clear that this sort of collateralize itself like Luna UST relationship doesn't work. Like it just it it just was so clear from the past experiments and years of research um on this topic. So you know, that I think a lot of this stuff was people getting over their skis um overconfident and not really thinking about the risks that they're taking on. Um another part of my philosophy is not to use leverage. You know, I don't try to time the market and move up and down my exposure and and lever up. Um you know, crypto 50% drops in crypto are not

black swan events. It happens like every two years. It's you know, so if you're on 2x leverage, you're just going to get blown out every other year in crypto. Like it's not um a reasonable way to to trade in this market and like survive for the long term and and make returns sustainably. So um you know, I I feel actually very very good about the way that Polychain navigated uh 2022. Like I think that we we pretty much dodged everything.

Obviously we get taken down uh with the macro drawdown. But you know, all the specific landmines um we avoided stepping on. But uh so one thing that I'm confused about is um Polychain did invest in Terraform Labs. Yeah. So So we actually So this is one of these complex things is when we did we invested in Luna, we actually led the seed round of Luna. But back then it was a very different project, right? Like these things can pivot and change. Once they sort of lasered in on this Luna collateralizing UST system and like that's the project, right? It's it's not like this pre before it was like this smart

contract platform that was going to target um Korean developers. We had a bit a little bit more of a thesis around uh geographic diversity of smart contract platforms that I I think was um not right uh in the end. Um and you know, it's plays out in small ways like you know, Tron feels geographically specific, whatever. There's So this is why we made the investment in the first place. Once they became this just stablecoin system, um we exited. Like we didn't want anything to do with that anymore.

I know. So why was that? Like what did you see at that time that made you know, this is not for us? Well, I mean I talked about these projects, Maker DAO, which was really the first like crypto collateralized stablecoin project. And you know, I did the first institutional investment in Maker DAO. Um I bought 4% you know, of the Maker DAO coins um for I think like $40,000. You know, a long time ago. Wow.

And um you know, we were involved in empty set dollar. Um which was a very similar con- conceptually a similar project where you have like this kind of gold like asset collateralizing a stablecoin. Um but you have only that gold like asset collateralizing a stablecoin. Um So I and both you know, Maker DAO you don't allow MKR as collateral, it's to avoid this death spiral. And empty set dollar did death spiral to zero as did like a couple empty set dollar forks.

This was the original idea behind this project Basis that we invested in in 2018. This is like the team that's now behind uh DeSo. You know they I had a lot of exposure to this concept. Like anyone who it was in crypto a long time had had a lot of exposure to stablecoin systems. And um they're not easy and you know, the it it got so much bigger than I thought it could. Like empty set dollar grew and and blew up and these other projects, but they're at pretty small scale. Like there's no headlines about these things. It's like weird crypto nerds trying out things that got to this mainstream level that I

did not you know, I did not I did not know, but it the thing is it works as long as the price goes up. And then when the price starts going down, it like death spirals all the way to zero. Um so you know, the mechanism in a way worked as as I thought it would. And what about decentralized stablecoins as a category overall? Are you just down on them or like I'm sure you're aware of Aave, um which has a slightly different design as far as I understand. Like do you think some version of a decentralized stablecoin will work? Yeah, I mean I think you know, I think we've had them working for a while um for years. They're just at smaller scale. Um they're harder to use. They're a little trickier to reason about the

risk. They're more complex systems, right? Um I do think they're in a in many ways more durable, right? Like I just think a couple accounts could get frozen um and you have a system like Tether in a pretty bad place or USDC, right? Um and you can't go into Ethereum and like freeze the collateral. All right. So, I do think there's a sort of durability and security trade-off versus just like ease of use and simplicity.

Um and so I I I think that they decentralized you know, and it's not limited to stablecoins. It's just like synthetic assets, right? Where you have a price pointer for like the S&P 500 or Apple shares or the dollar, all these different assets, and you point it to a crypto asset and say this thing um is going to track that price and it's going to be collateralized by some other um asset that's like inside crypto. So, like Ethereum or Bitcoin, these things that where you're you're not like tracking it through a synthetic um you know, price price feed.

Like that is a larger category that's bigger than just stablecoins. Um and I think that's a I think that's potentially a big category. So, one thing that's been going on for quite a while in crypto, um more than 5 years is that the community in the US has been dissatisfied with the regulatory um status here. And I wondered for you, um you know, you mentioned how you had a geographic thesis, but I wondered how the state of regulation in the US, you know, specifically the uncertainty has affected your investment strategy.

It hasn't really affected the way we invest that much. You know, the regulatory posture has never really changed that much since I started Polychain. Um which, you know, it's at this point seven and a half years ago. Um It's, you know, it's unclear. There's not tons of clarity. Um we all try our best and we all try to be um you know, do the right thing. You know, there's so many bad actors in crypto that are just like outright fraud and thieves and things like that that um I think the regulators have their jobs cut out for them. And nobody wants

those people. Like it you know, the people that are just stealing, it's like this people inside crypto, outside crypto, we can all agree on this. Like I think the more nuanced questions about, you know, technologists trying to build a new thing, right? And they're they're not trying to to steal from anyone, right? They're just they're just trying it to build a new thing, but there's a lack of clarity on the best way to go about that. I think it's a tricky um question. There's never really been an answer. Um I don't see a clear one in sight. So, I it it hasn't really changed my investment philosophy very much.

Okay. Yeah, and but I mean, I think what's interesting is, you know, you said, "Oh, they're going after like scammers, fraudsters." But then, you know, obviously they also are going after the likes of Coinbase and Kraken and so it's um yeah, it's not always just that. Um but I did want to ask you about something else that um was just an interesting comment. I just wanted to get your take on this. Um so, we have this show here on our channel called The Chopping Block. And Haseeb Qureshi of Dragonfly was talking about Vitalik's recent blog post about getting back to the cypherpunk ethos.

And Haseeb said, um you know, Vitalik was talking about things like governance or um you know, quadratic funding, public goods funding, privacy, stuff like that. And then he said, quote, "In a way, he's sort of dismissing the bank the unbanked, Tron, super low fees, all that kind of stuff that Tron is actually doing despite the fact that yes, Justin Sun is not the paragon of decentralization, but he's the practical guy who's getting stablecoins in the hands of people in emerging markets." What's your take on Haseeb's comments? Yeah, I mean, I this is what I love about crypto. Anyone can go build anything and we just it's just like this one huge global competition where everyone can just come out of their

basement, their garage with their newest protocol design and just ship it, right? So, you know, I do think that there's a temptation to have like a nostalgia for like this really tiny crypto era, right? I have that. It's like going to like this like little Bitcoin meet-up and there's like three other people that have ever heard the word Bitcoin and you're sitting there talking to them because they're the only people in the world that know what this thing is, right? There's like nostalgia for that and I do think a lot of that of the stuff that Vitalik is talking about are like important, you know, important experiments and there some of those are things that just like

people have talked about for years, but haven't really taken off. You know, I I have a pretty pragmatist mindset, right? Like I I don't pretend to know, you know, better than like a your average consumer like what they want. They know what they want and they're going to use what they want. So, like they it turns out that they might like USDT on Tron more than they like like quadratic funding of public goods, right? Like it turns out that that's like what they want. Um and I think you have to just be a pragmatist and and honest about that. You know, as crypto gets bigger and bigger, you know, I think it's it's gotten appropriately like less and less ideological, right? Like the early crypto people um I think it was very

ideologically driven for a lot of early people. And I think increasingly it's more pragmatically driven. Like whether it's, "Oh, this is useful for me in this way or I want to make money with this." It's like this it's a less ideological kind of stance and I think that's just because it's getting bigger. Like once it's everyone, what's the ideology, right? It's it has to be like mainstream, sort of, so to speak. That makes sense. Um I recently heard you say of ordinals on Bitcoin that you didn't see the point of building things like that on Bitcoin, but then I also saw you invest in invested in Bionic, which is an ordinals marketplace. So, I wondered kind of your thoughts on on that. Well, you know,

I don't always get every single coin that people trade, but I do understand the exchange business quite well. And you don't need to understand why everyone likes everything to run an exchange, right? Um and if there's a market there, then there's a market there, right? It's like you know, if you're running Amazon, you're not going to understand why people want every widget that's on Amazon. And you don't have to sort of believe every widget is is useful um in order to run Amazon.

You know, and I've got, just to be clear, like I have absolutely nothing against ordinals. Like there's nothing against this. It just it feels a bit like let's run it back on Bitcoin. And it's like, well, we kind of already we already sort of have a lot of this stuff and we've had it for years in other systems and then like let's append it to Bitcoin. It feels like you know, upgrading the old uh system rather than being like tip of the spear on new stuff. And so I I tend to think more tip of the spear. Well, one So, for me, I guess, when I think of ordinals on Bitcoin, to me, I remember, you know, like when I first heard of it, I was like, of course, because, you know, NFTs are about

status. And so, then having your NFT on the OG blockchain, somehow it feels like it's a little bit extra or like more special or something. Mhm. So, the like what do you think of that? Yeah, I mean, I agree, but it's like you know, then I think about like the researchers building Celestia and EigenLayer and it's like we're just it's just in a different ballpark, right? It's like um But yeah, I I think that it's it's I want to see every experiment run. Like there's just the the thing I love is that, you know, the folks that created ordinals and the

folks creating a marketplaces around ordinals and the people building, you know, new sort of drops inside ordinals, they're all like these outsiders that are just, you know, running around experimenting and that turns out that that, you know, bubbling experimentation, like every once in a while something really important pops up out of it. So, I, you know, I'm really happy to see all the experimentation. I, you know, I really don't mean to to come off negative on it. It's more just like for me personally, it's it's more the tip of the spear um research problems that I think are are what I spend a bit more time on.

So, I now want to turn to cryptoeconomics. Um you know, we saw Axie Infinity was this game, it took off, but in an inorganic way um and ended up kind of fostering the short-term speculative activity rather than something more sustainable. And, you know, you talked about how gaming is an area that you think applications um you know, will be going next. And I wondered like how you prevent that type of situation. Um and it doesn't even have to just be blockchain games, but generally, I think a lot of crypto projects kind of suffer from bad incentive. So, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah.

I mean, it is incentive design is is everything, right? It's like at the core of all this and um if you do the incentive design well, um your thing will very efficiently um get people to work for it, right? And get them to grow it. If you do it poorly, you get like these weird local maximas. Like it explodes and then goes to zero and things like that. Um so, I I, you know, this is I think between myself and the other folks at Polychain, like this is our specialty. This is like what we are good at.

And I mean, I could talk for like 10 hours on on um incentive design. But there's, you know, I think very common trade-off in all these is like time to like distribution. And like the rate of growth that incentivizes. So, you know, as a basic example, what's the inflation rate, right? If the inflation rate is really high, you're going to get um a lot of new players entering and not a lot of like new validators coming online, but then you sort of have the speculators saying, wait a second, maybe I don't want to own this asset um relative to every other asset in the world that I could own with this money.

Um and so you you sort of get this problem where there's expansion, but the thing you're expanding is like doesn't have value. Uh by contrast, let's say you just distribute 100 um of a single NFT. It's just It's like Ether Rock. There's 100 of them and it's just done, okay? It might be really valuable, but it's not really going to expand and grow new users, right? Like cuz there's just 100. So, like you're kind of capped at 100 users in a way. So, this is That's a really primitive example of like the types of trade-offs we have to think about when we design these systems.

But like the happy medium is probably in the middle, right? It's not like this 10% a day inflation, nor is it like there's 100 ever and and go away. Um So, it's again, I this very primitive, but I I think that incentivizing like growth relative to dilution um is a very tricky one. It's kind of like venture capital, right? Do you raise a ton of money and take on a ton of dilution or or do you raise nothing and grow really slow and have zero dilution?

Um and the answer is maybe in the middle somewhere. Um and then there's lots of mechanics about like skin in the game and holding, right? So, it's like if you stake for a longer, your your yield will be higher, right? And like little little things like that, I think they're actually not little things, they're big things. Like if you get those designs right, um it's everything. So, yeah, I mean, I could talk about this forever, but every all this parameterization of like getting the incentive scheme right such that it is it drives in new users, but also rewards the early users. Like that is the core balance.

And if you overly reward the early users, you don't get new people. And if you overly reward the new people, you don't get people that stick around. Well, there is one trend here that I um you know, perhaps is one of the solutions, which is points, um which are mainly off-chain. And I wondered what you thought of them as, you know, in terms of design. Yeah, I mean, points are points are just like pre-tokens.

And I think the only reason to have points is to avoid a secondary market, so the thing doesn't have a price. Um and to have a more careful um regulatory approach um than just like shipping out tokens. Um I think the main reason is the latter, actually, that points have grown so much. But do you find them useful for kind of helping you design a better crypto-economic system? mean, points are big you know, points are just tokens that you just can't trade them yet.

So it's it's like it changes it because you can't trade them and there isn't a secondary price, but like ultimately, it's pretty similar to thinking about like just token distribution with a traditional token. All right, let's now talk about privacy. Um I saw Sarah F Im Checker of Athena Labs tweeted found out today that Polychain has a unit doing crazy privacy research. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so this is um you know, we have a a whole research team. I I think our our resident expert in cryptography and privacy is is Luke Pearson.

Um you know, we've done a lot of work um that Luke has spearheaded on especially like zero-knowledge cryptography. Um and it's a very complex area that um you know, by optimizing um the math over the past like what, five, six years, we have made these systems go from like imaginary to possible. And it's happened, I think, a little faster even than I anticipated.

Um like there's been sort of like you know, thousand X speed improvements or processing power efficiency improvements. Um and a lot of that research like informs then what we can invest in, because a lot of what we invest in is like actually scientific breakthroughs. Um and it's like the rocket science of software, basically, is a lot of what we invest in. And so, it's we're just one step downstream from like core research, where there's like this breakthrough in cryptography that then leads to um an investment that we do.

And I've heard you say that you think that crypto will trend toward a privacy-by-default design setup, but I'm sure you saw what happened with Tornado Cash. And so, I wondered kind of how you're going to thread that needle or where you think that space is going given what happened with Tornado Cash. Yeah. It's tricky. I think you know, I I think it's a bit odd today. Like we're again with crypto, we're a little bit fish in water on the fact that this is all transparent. Like I think it's quite odd, actually, that this whole thing is like this public ledger.

Um I think it makes a lot more sense for it to be secured by cryptography, so you have the same security guarantees that you would if it was public, but where it's um you know, private by default. So, I I do think though that if privacy adds usability problems or um you know, just makes it harder, then it's it's not going to be the default, right? Um so, you might see a thing where, you know, you have systems like Signal and Telegram that aren't as big as iMessage or WhatsApp, but they're still very big, right? Um it could end up sort of going that way.

You know, if we can migrate these big systems to be private by default and not have it affect usability, then I think that's big. But they you know, it turns out too though that the transparency has led to a lot of like interesting use cases, the fact that it's transparent. So, it's kind of like NFTs are a big part of this. Like who owns these NFTs? Um being able to look at someone's portfolio, like, oh, that person, this influencer just bought this. There's a lot of like interesting stuff there that I I think will always be there. Like we don't want to lose that.

I wanted to ask you about one of the more controversial projects from 2023, which is Worldcoin. Um People I've talked to we either have kind of one extreme view, like, oh, I really think it's the future. Other people are quite critical. And I just wondered what your take was. Um I think that the Worldcoin coin distribution is a nightmare. And it's enough of a disaster to just make the project very hard. Um I think the idea um conceptually of biometric authentication that's privacy-preserving to give you a crypto wallet is very interesting.

I I love the idea conceptually, like what I just said. Now, the instantiation of Worldcoin, like the issue is the coin distribution. But it's a big enough issue that Remind me, it's because it it's similar in that there's a low distribution and it gives it like an inflated market cap. Is that Yeah, and it's just like too much value goes to the creators and early people when like the great thing about a project like Worldcoin is that you could biometrically give everyone an equivalent amount of money.

So, like you could or or just a more gentle curve, right? When remember I was talking about um incentivizing new people versus incentivizing early adopters right? I think it it violently incentivizes the early adopters um to the point where the project doesn't make sense to me. Um like if you screw up that incentive system, it doesn't matter how cool that like hardware you know, privacy-preserving iris scan is. It's just like the thing that you're giving out is like you screwed up the incentive design.

Okay. Yeah, it's I it's very interesting um because I I feel like I've just heard opinions all over the map on that one. Um I also wanted to ask you about Blast, which was also controversial for who rang up a bunch of money before it launched. And I wondered your opinion on that. Yeah, that I I don't really understand Blast. I don't know what happened. It doesn't seem It doesn't make sense to me. It it's over your I'm not like super deep with the project, so I you know, I I'm hesitant to um criticize it too much, you know. Um but I didn't I don't really get it.

Okay. So, we're now going to enter the final phase of the interview, where we talk a little bit more about uh some of the stuff that we started with futuristic type things. I'll start with actually AI. This didn't come up earlier, but I saw you tweeted um in crypto nearly 100% of value accrues to startups and outsiders, not existing establishment interests. Value capture in AI technologies will be primarily by incumbents. There will be valuable startups, but for example, even open AI realized they needed to align with legacy tech. And I've heard people talk about how in crypto, how they believe that AI will transact in crypto or that DAOs might manage AIs. But from that

comment, it seemed like you thought crypto and I AI will remain separate or how do you think they might intersect? just me. So, I was the way I would meant that is a commentary on being a venture investor. Right? Um you know, one thing I said is that even mediocre venture investors in crypto that timed the market okay did quite well. I think that that won't be the case in AI. Like I think that you know, there is this you're competing against the largest software corporations in the world.

Those are your competitors day one. Um in crypto like it's just different, right? It's it's it's it lends itself more to startups um and outsiders. Um and that has been where the value capture is. So, in the intersection though, um one thing I'm really interested in is AI agents like inside smart contracts that like work for money. So um you can imagine um like a chatbot that um learns what to say to like maximally extract value from the person that it's chatting with.

This is not that different than what like an OnlyFans girl or like so-called e-girl might do. So, they're they're sitting there like chatting and trying to like say, "Here's my ETH address, like send me ETH, right?" You could have a bot do that, right? And you could have it learn how to be better and better at it. And you could sort of embed that inside a smart contract. And then you could like distribute a token that represents ownership in the bot, right? And then you have that DAO like representing the ownership units of like some AI embedded agent. Like it's stuff like that that I um can imagine getting very big.

Um and you sort of have these AI agents that are like for-profit and can be you can sort of like distribute ownership shares of them. So, you can imagine too like these influencers that aren't real people. Like the person that created this long time ago as far as I know is like Lil Miquela where there's like this Instagram account and it's like just not a person. It looks like a person and they like wear Gucci stuff or whatever and they have a following sort of like traditional influencer, but it's it's just computer generated images.

You can imagine like each one of those having their own um token ownership system. You can imagine an AI that makes influencers like just pumps them out over and over and over and that has its own uh token ownership system. That whole landscape, I think could get really big and really weird. And it's yeah, I'm very I'm very excited about that. So, I'm I'm quite excited about the crossover. I just think that like crypto investing is very dramatically different um landscape than AI venture investing.

Yeah, and it's interesting actually when you mentioned Lil Miquela. I don't know if you know Trevor McFedries. Um he created that and then now does Friends With Benefits. So, he's now in crypto. Oh, interesting. Yeah. We all end up here. Yeah. Um so, you said that you you view social fi as probably one of the applications that will likely take off next. So, what do you what are some problems you think that need to be solved in that space for that to become a bigger thing? Um you know, get paid to use the internet, um get paid to doom scroll, you know.

These are like I think pretty killer things actually. There's a lot of very hard challenges around like spam and like botting and stuff like that. So, I I don't that sounds really conceptually simple. It's really not simple to design. But um broadly like sharing value with users and influencers um in a more efficient way than these platforms do today and allowing there to be like just more platforms with like less gatekeeping um around these closed closed gardens and closed logic, I think is is all part of the that next kind of growth era.

And are there any particular social fi applications that you're excited about? Um I mean, you saw like the early early like ideas of things with like friend.tech. Um there's one Tomo um that I'm excited about. So, I think it's very early innings, but the thing that gets the mechanism right um will grow very fast. And then what about gaming? What do you think will I mean, I just feel like this has been talked about as what's going to, you know, bring crypto mainstream.

Hasn't quite happened yet. So, what do you think needs to happen for that to become a thing? I just think we need a you know, there's been like these video game designers that don't understand crypto that jump into crypto and like just bolt on a token and think that that works. And then you have these crypto people that create like this really elegant mechanism, but like a really shitty game. Right? So, we we need a pairing of these two worlds. I think it's oddly been a a skill issue um of like the pairing of these two worlds that has prevented it from happening already.

And are there any games that you're kind of keeping your eye on that you're thinking might become winners? Um we are in general don't invest in like specific games or specific game studios. I think just in general that's a tricky category um to be a venture investor in. And it's even harder when you're depending on the double bank shot of like the crypto works and the game works. Um so, I none come to mind, but I you know, I talk with a lot of folks about like the mechanism design um underneath these things.

All right, Olaf. Well, is there anything I did not ask you that you think you know, that you'd want to talk about? We covered a lot. Um the only stuff I can think of would be like leaving crypto. Um so, in inside crypto, I think we covered pretty much everything. Uh okay. And that leaving crypto as a topic is maybe it maybe a separate separate pod podcast. But you're not saying when you say leaving, are you saying you're thinking about leaving crypto? God, no. No, God, no. I meant like as a topic like um Like lucid dreaming, psychedelics.

Yeah, that I could talk about, but you know, I think inside crypto, we covered everything. Okay. All right. Well, maybe we'll have you back to talk about the other stuff. All right. Well, are there any like handles or you know, websites or whatever that you'd want to point the listeners to? Um you know, I just think all the names I mentioned, if you're not familiar with them, I would go poke around. I do think you know, on the AI side, like the project BitTensor I'm very excited about. You know, I I I think any of the names you hear or words you hear that you're not familiar with, there's potentially really real alpha there to just go poke around. Okay, and your own handles?

Oh, um I'm on Twitter at zxocw. Great. All right. Well, it's been a pleasure having you on Unchained. Yeah, thanks, Laura. Pleasure as always. Thanks so much for joining us today. To learn more about Olaf and Polychain, check out the show notes for this episode. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Kevin Fu Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovich, Megan Gavis, Nelson Wong, Shashank, and Mark Mercuria. Thanks for listening. Unchained is now a part of the CoinDesk Podcast Network. For the latest in digital assets, check out Markets Daily five days a week with host Noelle

Acheson. Follow the CoinDesk Podcast Network for some of the best shows in crypto.