Permissionless: The Next Generation of Consumer Crypto Apps

Transcript

I'm not picking Salano over Apptos. I'm not picking like one over the other. The reality is, especially when you're running like a centralized exchange, it's AWS versus Salano, right? Like where the gas fees are your cloud services fees. You're doing 50,000, you know, transactions per second offchain. And that's okay because it's a it's a it's a it's an order book. Um the settlement is starting to go onchain. We're starting to see that with the likes of like a hyperlquid that's hybrid, CFI, DeFi. And so I think that like my prediction is over time we become agnostic um and we just go to where the best products are and we leverage the best technology. A quick shout out to today's sponsor Katana.

We'll hear more about Katana and their ongoing pre-eposit campaign later today. But for now, let's get into the episode. [Music] Nothing said on Zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is forformational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Pokio, Ryan, and our guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. All right, I think we're all good. We're going to get it started. Uh, thanks for coming out, guys. Uh, want to get into talking about consumer crypto. I'm Danny K from the Blockwork Blockworks research team. Uh, consumer crypto apps and products are probably what have me most excited right now. So, happy to have all these guys on. Uh, we've got Vishall from True

Markets. We've got Patkim with narrative and Saladir with Bullpen. Sorry, sorry, I almost blinked there. Um, I want to get right into it, guys, and I'll let you do some quick intros. Um, just tell us about what you're building, why you're building it, and maybe who you're building with. Cool. I could start. Um, so background on myself. I was uh at Circle as head of USDC at launch. Uh I left there to join Coinbase's head of exchange uh preipo. We took it from 20 assets to 235. Launched perpetual futures and US futures uh out of my team. Same team that bought Durabit recently. Um I left uh with my co-founder. My co-founder and I have

known each other for 17 years. This is our fifth business together. X Goldman X Coinbase. Um and we're building True Markets. True Markets is a hybrid CFI defy platform uh that enables spot trading in the United States for everything from Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, SPL, EVM tokens. We do this in a kind of an interesting way. We leverage uh we're non-custodial exchange. So we um we leverage a qualified custodian Paxos to to hold your assets, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana. Um and if you want to trade defy assets um we go we leverage turnkey wallets uh for non-custodial. Um we are also a stablecoin native

platform. So we can speak all the all the stables that you want for settlement and collateral. And as I mentioned hybrid CFI defy allows us to kind of get the best of both worlds. Um, CFI is quick, easy to use, and DeFi gives you um, broad assets, so you're not trading just 200 assets on a centralized exchange. You have access to everything that's um, available in DeFi. Um, Pat, hi everyone. Uh, my name is Patrick. I'm co-founder of Narrative. Uh, before Narrative, I used to be in college. I dropped out six months ago to come build narrative full-time with my co-founder. Uh, yeah. Uh and at Narrative, we're building the first ever

protocol that lets you trade onchain or off-chain data in real time. So you as a user are able to take lever long or short positions on things like uh prediction markets, uh Salana REV, hyperlid market share, literally any set of data we can make a market for. And in the future, we'll expand out into like web two based markets. So you could trade in real time things like OpenAI market share, dead internet theory, which is like the percentage of internet being used by bots versus human beings, things like this. really interesting markets that we think um can be traded and speculated on by anyone and we use per as an underlying trading engine for that.

Hey guys, I'm Saul Kadir, co-founder and CEO of Bullpen. Uh Bullpen is all about making trading onchain as easy as humanly possible. We we currently just support Salana and Hyperlquid. We're very opinionated by what we enable. And by easy to use, we're talking about embedded wallets on and off ramps and an opinionated UI that helps people discover great assets to trade, have the best data, have the best execution possible uh in one cohesive interface. The reason why we're working on this is uh in my opinion some of the most crypto is mostly useful for issuing and trading assets and we want to hyperfocus on one of those things and we think that in and of itself will bring tons and tons of

consumers into crypto. Awesome. Thanks guys. So each of your apps you know or products we're getting into a consumer focused sort of mindset here. Are there specific beliefs or trends that we're expecting to play out over the next couple of years that inform you know what we're building? Yeah, I can talk to one. So, you know, traditionally crypto exchanges act acted as gatekeepers. They would only enable assets, you know, when they could. And you originally you saw, you know, Coinbase only listed Bitcoin and then eventually there's like, you know, three assets, then 20 assets, now 235 assets.

And now, you know, in many ways, the exchanges have became purveyors of what was like good to trade. And I think that that we're going to move away from the gatekeeper mentality and move closer to like a gateway mentality where we're really just trying to enable as many different products as possible. And I think things like asset discoverability will become a problem that we'll have to solve, you know, when you can trade millions and millions of assets and product types. And I think that that's, you know, the availability of assets will is what's going to drive adoption as well. Consumers want access to like something like the Trump token and they don't want to wait for an exchange to list the thing. They want to leverage some of the DeFi narratives to allow them to get exposure to it. But I also

think it's part of our, you know, all three of our plans is we have to protect the client to some degree. um you know in many ways we're brokers, we're wallets, we're exchanges and you know we I think everybody here has sounds like has traded a per here. I would say enabling products like pers are like quite dangerous if you don't do it well. You know what how does margin look like? Are you know 100x margin is probably not you know everything is not what everybody should be trading. Should we be offering options instead of per should we be you know letting the client know the difference? Um, I think we're in a in a really interesting stage in consumer trading where everybody's just like, let's just enable everything. And then the reality is that may be true and

we should be gayways, but we also have to like alert the clients of things that may or may not be harmful for them in the future. So, I think those are some of the trends that I'm I'm pretty interested in. Yeah, I think that speculation is probably one of, if not the biggest use cases in crypto or in DeFi or crypto in general, right? And I think that I operate on a very strong belief that I don't think this has to be tied to traditional price pairs, right? I think speculation or per as a speculation engine or whatever it is um has like a really big capacity to push like trading forward. So for example, like poly market is a great example of this, right? where or prediction markets in general where binary options work as the underlying trading engine uh where capitalbacked opinions or information

you know creates a more accurate news source um particularly for like geopolitical and sociopolitical events right and I think that for these kind of events that are like binary payout functions I think these work great but I think for continuous markets per actually works as an extremely strong trading engine for these like continuous markets right and so if you want to take a directional bet or get gain exposure to prediction markets in general, right? Or maybe like how onchain derivatives work versus off-chain derivatives, right? Like things like this. You can do this all on narrative, right? Via our AMMbased like per engine, right? And I think that in the future we hope that per ends up becoming a very abstracted away sort of uh function to the end user where you're just like literally taking

a bet or a directional you know exposure trade on something like how binary options worked very similarly for prediction markets. Yeah. So everything in consumer crypto changed after one specific event in 2023 and that was the emergence of fentech. And so what Fentech demonstrated to the world was two critical things. I mean indirectly, but it was kind of the the domino that fell. One is that generalpurpose wallets are a thing of the past. People don't want general purpose wallets unless they're hobbyists. Um the app should be enshrining the wallet and that's what Fentech did. They they put Privy on the map. They demonstrated what a headless transaction signing sequence looks like.

It's a lot cleaner. It's a lot more web two. you sign up with a Gmail and then you started to see every other consumer app kind of adopted that and privy became what it was. It it just got acquired recently by stripe. uh it's a huge deal and it all came because of fentech and the other thing that demonstrated was uh the bonding curve mechanism which is now what uh caused platforms like pump fun to become really popular which is what caused this meta where there's a billion tokens now and last cycle there was like 10,000 tokens now there's you know 17 million of them and so from a consumer standpoint our job as founders is to help people curate what they need to buy Um, and and the derivative effect of of that is

centralized exchanges are no longer relevant. They're no longer the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers are people, random people that launch coins, the devs. And so the the trading experience is completely different now. You're you're seeing Coinbase and Robin Hood are very scared about this. And now they're investing heavily in their wallet products. They're investing in u social proof and helping people discover assets. And instead of a a listing strategy, it's the opposite is you you trade everything on the app and you help the user discover what to buy. This episode is sponsored by Katana. If your assets are sitting idly, they're dead.

Katana is built from the ground up to bring your bags back to life. Get started with Katana by joining their pre-eposit campaign before mainet launches at the end of this month. Follow the links in today's show notes to get started. This episode is brought to you by Ledger, the global leader in digital asset security. Celebrating 10 years of innovation, Ledger remains the most secure hardware wallet for your crypto and login. Trusted by 7 million users and securing 20% of the world's digital assets. Follow the link in today's show notes to grab your Ledger now. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. Awesome. I'm hearing some common themes here um from a couple of you guys. Maybe let's dive into the product then um and talk about you know you you mentioned that shift saw around

fentech and the introduction of wallets into the applications. What are some of the like more meaningful technological differences that that we're bringing with our products that you know are differentiating ourselves from incumbents today? Yeah, I can I can kick off when when you mentioning that something had happened in the last couple years. I thought you were going to say FTX, but um I think we learned a lot in a post FTX world and we haven't changed a lot in the post FTX world where you know a centralized exchange largely you're giving them dollars. You're saying I want to buy some Bitcoin or something else. I'm going to trust you to hold it. It's going to be sitting in in you know in a either a hot or cold storage wallet. They may or may not be a qualified custodian or not. And and you

know that that's a designation um that's important. um you know want to make sure your assets are not comingled, you want to make sure your assets are safe, you want to make sure that you know if something goes wrong, you can reach in and grab your assets. And if you look in that post FTX world, we didn't do anything to change it. So like I, you know, I left a a pretty cushy exec job to say, let me let me try to do something different, build a non-custodial exchange and broker and build it the right way, build it um in a safer way. And if you think about in the United States, it's really hard to get exposure to like spot Bitcoin, right?

like just to get I want to I want I I just want to own Bitcoin. You go to Coinbase, you go to Robin Hood maybe and there's like two or three other exchanges that make up 99% of the the volumes out there and we know that you know that exchange those exchanges were built pretx and none of those um there there's no there's no initiative to change their existing models. There's no initiative to be non-custodial. There's no initiative to use qualified custodians behind the back back end. So there's there's definitely moments and I think the FTX moment moment was let's do this a different way. Let's do this safer. And you know I was on a panel a couple months ago that that was titled what do exchanges look like in 2030? And it was a bunch of incumbents. And then

at the last question was like well what do exchanges look like in 2030? All of them are like pretty much the same. And I'm like that's got to be the wrong answer because we know that they're they're not safe in a centralized custodial manner if you're holding all your assets on the exchange. So like again, you know, the team members here all are talking about purpose, they're talking about DeFi. I totally agree with them, but when I'm talking about the casual consumer, they're just saying, "Hey, I just want to buy Bitcoin in a safe way." And that non-custodial manner is what we're building right now. And that's why that's what we're excited for. And uh you know, download the app by the end of summer, you'll be able to to trade Bitcoin and own it in a non-custodial manner. Yeah. Yeah, I I think to add to

that point, I think as a founder or developer, there's a few considerations you have to optimize for for UX. I think uh like there's a lot of things you can do. I think like gas optimization or abstraction is really important. I think uh like minimizing choice paralysis is also really important and also I think this is less of an app sort of infra more like a blockchain infra. But end toend finality is also really important, right? Like especially I think when you see a lot of chains like touting like really low end toend finality as an L2 for example I think that's a little bit disingenuous because if you're building as an ETH L2 you're technically still have 12 second end to end finality right as in you need to wait for the next ETH L1 block to be processed and to be confirmed on that trade you still need

to wait for that block to build which takes 12 seconds on ETH L1 right and I think there's a lot of these considerations that the end user shouldn't really feel but you still need to think a lot about as a founder and I think for us we think mostly about gas optimization SL like abstraction and then also the choice paralysis point is also really important because I think if you crowd too many like collateral tokens or too many choices in like their trading interface I think you uh give the user you know like a big headache in the sense of I just want to be able to click one thing and make this you know trade or buy this NFT right and so for us I think very similarly to what they're doing at true markets we're also stable coin native where everything's nominated in USDC because I think that

this is just by far and way the best user experience um that you can do in crypto. So from a product standpoint, the key challenge that traders on chain have is actually not that different from the key problem that consumers of YouTube or Tik Tok or what have you have, which is there's a million, it's a gazillion creators. There's too much content. They have no idea how to start or where to start. And so the issue is curation. Now onchain, we have this thing that no other industry has where all the data is public. You can see what wallets are buying. You can see how early they are.

You can see what their P&L is. You can measure all of it. And so the really crude way to solve this problem, which I don't think is a long-term solution, but it works, is you study what people who are early to the last runner are buying next. They call this like whales in some cases in some UIs. This is something we've experimented with a lot. Uh the long-term solution is going to be heavily driven by what we can do in terms of ingesting data from onchain sources um into an LLM workflow. Have an agent or an LLM kind of parse all this data and ideally even personalize it to the user's preferences. Maybe they really want to get into stuff sub 50k market cap. In that case, you know, you have different parameters that lets them see tokens that are being bought early

or that the onchain data suggests is high signal to that user. On the flip side, maybe they only ape into stuff above a million dollars or so or 50 million. Different parameters, more personalized, but the short answer to this is it's going to be a combination of AI workflows, onchain data, and probably off-chain data like social media. You hear a lot about crypto integrating Poly Market. It's going to be kind of combinations of these data sources. Um, and that's something we're super focused on at Bullpen is how do we parse all this data and present it to the user in a very curated fashion.

Great. So, I mean it sounds everyone is opinionated about product and what experience they want to offer to their users. Is there are there specific things reasons why we've chosen either where to build or what tech stack to build on or for example what assets to offer? Michelle, you mentioned you know people just want to buy Bitcoin for example. Yeah, it's interesting. I um I think the the companies I I most respect are the ones that are building this like hardcore tech and then like something like an open AI where it's just like a hard stack of really beautiful tech and to expose that to let's say a retail client they build a beautiful app that sits on top and kind of plugs in all the APIs. That's how we're built. We you know you can download an app called True

Markets right now. It's pretty pretty basic as we speak, but behind the scenes there's some matching engine, there's settlement both in C5, D5, there's DeFi routing, there's all the primitives that allow us to build, you know, if we want to like build the next prediction market or we want to build the next hyperlquid in the United States, if we want to do all those things, we have this hard stack built for markets, that's why the, you know, the business is called true markets. and the app itself is like less important, but it's the beautiful front end that like a retail client needs to kind of tap into all these APIs. Um, so I mean I I think I you know I have 10 people on my team. I think seven or engineers. Um, you know, we're just a hard tech team. Um, what I always tell

the team is you can win with great product and and terrible sales. We've done it before. Um, but it's impossible to win with great great sales and terrible product. And so that's that's where the focus is. Hard tech, great product. Yeah, for us, we chose to build natively on monad for a few different reasons. I think on the technical side, being on a high performant EVM L1. That sort of adds to the argument that the trillemma is sort of a false fallacy and an outdated framework to think about how do you build an L1 is really important for us for performance reasons. And then I think on the non-technical side, I'm a really big believer that your product is your user, right? And I think that of the nasonent ecosystems, I think Monet

has probably done one of the best jobs in creating a set like power user base. And in the long run, I think that Mad has a capacity to potentially be a direct competitor to Salana, which I think is hard to bet against. So yeah. Yeah, I kind of alluded to it earlier, but we're very opinionated about what ecosystems we integrate with. So we started with Salana. That's kind of like the base. You on and off ramp through Salana. As far as like newly launched tokens, there's really no other chain that has them that are that relevant. Bass kind of has them, but missing out on base. I can't even name the last runner that was on base to be honest. Um whereas a lot of they happen all the time and so we're very comfortable just having one ecosystem for that.

Hyperlquid to us is like the clear winner in the per trading space on chain. Um and there's kind of winners for each category trading product. you can do this exercise again and again, you know, prediction markets and so on and so forth. Um, and so for us, we just try to pick the best one for each one, do the best possible product for that ecosystem. It reduces dev complexity. It also reduces decision fatigue for the user. Um, and so that's kind of how we think about it. you know, we we talk a little bit we talked a lot about um let's say which chain to use or which infrastructure and I'd say, you know, we launched on Salana first, but our goal is to be chain agnostic and I think the end user doesn't really care. They're just looking for access to to products or whatever they're they're looking

looking to get access to. Um I think we have to be careful about trying to pick those winners and I think you have to pick you have to pick one to start with for sure. Um, I do also think that crypto has this like infrastructure problem where everybody's just building infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure and no one's really using that capacity, you know. Um, I had a discussion with a founder um of an L1 and he's like, well, why would you use one L1 over another? And I'm like, you you got it incorrect. Like, I'm not picking Salano over Apptos. I'm not picking like one over the other. The reality is, especially when you're running like a centralized exchange, it's AWS versus Solano, right? like where the gas fees are your cloud services fees. You're doing 50,000, you know, transactions per second offchain

and that's okay because it's a it's a it's a it's an order book. Um the settlement is starting to go onchain. We're starting to see that with the likes of like a hyperlquid that's hybrid CFI def. And so I think that like my prediction is over time we become agnostic um and we just go to where the best products are and we leverage the best technology. Shout out to today's sponsor, Katana. Katana is a DeFi first chain built for deep liquidity and high yield. No empty emissions, just real yield and sequencer fees routed back to DeFi users. Incubated by Polygon Labs and GSR. Katana is launching with a notable ecosystem of primitives, assets, and partners like Morpho, Chainlink, and more. Be early to Katana by joining the pre-eposit campaign before mainet opens

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apply. Do your own research. Yeah, I mean, we had to have this panel to highlight some of the apps instead of the infrastructure. So, I think it's great to get on to that point. Um, maybe let's dive into a little bit around market fit distribution. I think one of the questions here is like are we building for the users today or is the user you know two to three years down the road a different market segment. How how are we going about attracting either you know individuals that are already in the market or expanding that reach? Yeah, I think I think this the team here is largely cryptonative. I our our focus is actually a very different type of user. I'll call them like retail plus.

It's essentially a client that may or may want may or may not uh have exposure to crypto currently. They may or may not have uh Coinbase or Robin Hood wallet, but they want access to like maybe a the next DeFi token that hasn't been listed on a centralized exchange yet. They know that they shouldn't be trading for 250 basis points to buy Bitcoin. They want their they want their assets to sit separate from the exchange. They're slightly smarter than like um just a pure retail trader that's like um that doesn't care. Um, I do think that we're careful about just being like meme tokens only. We want like 70 70 plus percent of the the volume right now is traded in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, you know, natively. And we need to be able

to offer them a better platform in the United States. Like there's been this degree of regulatory capture that we've seen in the United States where it's been incredibly hard to take dollars and turn them into crypto up until this year. Right now, you see stable coins proliferating. you're seeing um access to to taking these dollars into crypto proliferating. You expect fees to come down. You expect competition to breed better product. Um I mean that's that's where I think everything goes. Better product, cheaper fees. Yeah. Um wait, sorry. I like Could you repeat the question one more time? Yeah, I took it I took it on a tangent by the way, but like it's I think he's he's you can restate it, but like I I we're

building for the next version of the of retail traders. Like let's say like there's barely a billion traders if if that in the in globally in in crypto. We expect everybody to be having exposure to crypto. So we're building for the next whatever. Yeah. I I think my opinion is that I think most of the onchain activity and volume is flown through protraders and whales. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. But I do think that as a consumer or like consumer related sort of founder, there's a few sort of considerations you have to make. I think the biggest one by far is like actually agentic models, right? Um I think it's, you know, not unrealistic to say like what happens in 3 years if maybe 50% of the trading volume on chain is done by a

gent models. What happens in 5 years if it's 90%. Right? I think this is a very strong consideration you have to think about and I think it's hopeless and naive to think that this is this is not a non-zero chance and so as a founder and a developer you really have to optimize for or think really heavily about okay like how does my business look in 3 years 5 years whatever if agentic models actually end up driving a lot of this volume right like whether we actually get there and that timeline is accurate I'm not an AI researcher so I couldn't tell you exactly but I do think that based off of what I read um on Twitter and like a few different papers I don't think it's unrealistic to think and I think that this is actually the thing that we think more so about than

actually trying to onboard uh like your average Tik Tok brain rot user because I think that reality is even within the bubble of consumer crypto it's really only the few tens of thousands of CT retail and like protail users right um obviously you want to rocket ship out into this like web 2 retail space where memecoins and prediction markets have reached but I think there's another level on top of that of like agentic models like how does this happen what do you do when it happens and you sort of have prepare for that in your thinking, I think, in a daily basis. Yeah. Yeah. I actually like fully agree with what Patrick is saying. So, we're in a state now where there's maybe like 50,000 people that trade this stuff on chain like all the time in size. Um,

that number hasn't really changed that much in the last year and a half or so. The only exception is the Trump coin launch brought a lot of new people in. But if you look at the chart, uh meaning like people that still use moonshot, it's basically the same level it was before Trump, you know, months before and after. Uh so I don't think any of them stayed is what I'm saying. Um the bet we're making though is that more and more things that are fun to exchange will be powered by crypto rails and you're seeing the early innings of it with platforms like Poly Market. I imagine there's going to be similar concepts in social media where you're kind of betting on creators. Uh and the sort of the list goes on. You can kind of tokenize and financialize anything and make them fun to trade and exchange.

And so from that standpoint, yeah, the pie will absolutely grow and lots of new people jump in just like fantasy sports and daily fantasy betting became a thing in like 2018 onwards because the the law changed around that. Um, so yes, the pie will grow, but the path from here to there, uh, I think it's still super unclear and it unlike last cycle, there's very little retail engagement. Like NFTTS were a great kind of, you know, flag in the ground whether people believe them or not. It brought a lot of interest in. We haven't really quite seen it this cycle. It's been just fundamentally different and I think it'll be a slower grind up to bring retail in.

Yeah, I like that you brought up Moonshot, the Trump token. What I guess what do we think fundamentally is required for this like sustained growth towards mass adoption of these products? You know the moonshot event, the Trump token event was kind of a you know a weekend of uh you know new interested parties, but how do you onboard them and keep them into the future? Yeah, I think that everybody here is trying to work on on capturing the retail client and and really keep them around. And we talked a little bit about, you know, some of the problems we're going to have, especially when you have go from having like really, you know, three main assets, 200 200 main assets to millions of main assets. You you're going to have an asset discoverability problem. You're going to have a product discoverability problem. But I I do think that like, you

know, we talked about prediction markets, like just getting exposure to the news is interesting to people. Now, how do you capture them beyond like the election cycle? How do you keep them involved? Like I think it's up to each market. it's up to the platforms to kind of contain the user. Um, you know, I think there's like a Zuckerberg quote somewhere where where he states you have to have a wow moment within the app and then you have to have a reason to come back for that wow moment. And I think we're still trying to nail that. Um, you know, there's obviously consumer apps that have worked in crypto, but um, I don't think any real native like crypto native apps have have had long long-standing um, solutions that have worked. And um you know I think we're

all working on on things that we think will will solve some of these problems. Yeah. Yeah, I think if you're building an app that is trading or trading adjacent at least, I think by far the biggest consideration is can your users make money on your protocol like just straight up, right? Or at least can you sell them the vision that they can make money on your protocol, right? Like Pump Fund, great example of this. A bunch of trading bots, for example, great of this. Like Axiom, for example, right? Like Axiom has completely eaten up the trading bot market share purely because of, you know, their revenue share model via referral links or whatever it is.

And I think that these things are actually by far the biggest marketing hack in trading and in DeFi is can your users make money period. I think outside of trading and consumer when you get to things like crypto social for example, right? Um to be honest, I'm not really sure how that works. Like how do you solve the problem of the um the friction of users coming onto your protocol and like abandoning their legacy uh you know like products that they've been using in web 2? Is it a 10x improvement in UX? Is it incentives? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I don't think that most of Cryptosocial has been successful up to now uh in the sense of like having that rocket ship, you know, uh early stage venture company. Um but I think in trading it's by far can they make money.

Yeah, I I think the trading stuff we kind of talked about decent amount. Um at the end of the day, you know, ignore crypto like retention curves for trading apps are just generally not great uh because most people aren't good at it. And so I don't think crypto is going to uniquely solve anything there. Although what I will say is we can kind of push people to you know trade beyond just the really high volatility stuff like you know allocate to Bitcoin and so on and so forth. So I think that'll help a little bit. Um outside of trading though there there's interesting experiments that are being run right now. I think TYB is a good one. They raised series A recently where it's like rewarding um mostly girls for buying makeup through their app and they partner with brands to do this and they have I think you

know double digit thousands maybe even 100 thousand users and they don't even know they're on chain and so there's going to be more experiments like this that take advantage of you know financializing attention or loyalty um with embedded wallets kind of the things we've already talked about and it benefits the business and it benefits the end user in a way where siloing off in databases This was not necessarily the optimum way to do it. This episode is brought to you by Marinade. Marinade is focused on developing staking technology that strengthens the Salana network and connects soulholders with the best staking rates available with solutions for both DeFi and Tradfi, including liquid and native staking as well as direct enterprise integrations.

Marinade's high performance staking delegation platform brings billions in liquidity and security to the sole market. To learn more, follow the link in today's show notes. And thanks again to Marinade for sponsoring today's episode. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk. Terms and conditions apply. Do your own research. I guess if we if we look out a year, two years, what what does a successful outcome look like for you guys? How would you define, you know, a successful either on the trajectory towards mass adoption or, you know, what are we looking for? Is it that niche community that's coming back, you know, every day or every hour for that wow moment or, you know, you've really grown the pie and drawn in, you know, millions of new users? What are we what are we looking for? Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's the typical, you know, retention numbers

that we all look for, but I think in this world where we have tool sets we didn't have even a year ago. I'm thinking about AI, thinking about like even just being able to do like morning updates in the market, have people just like start looking at the markets themselves. I I think eyeballs are very interesting still. I think that people have started using markets as a way of referencing the, you know, what's happening in in real life. people are looking at prediction markets before they're looking at polls or even news stories. Those eyeballs are very important. I think that that that's very interesting. I think getting people to trade it is is even more. Um we mentioned AI agents as as like um I guess even consumers or or participants within the markets. And I think that

that's also going to be just really interesting. I think one of the things that kept me in crypto and some of the up upturns and downturns is the idea that you know at some point computers are going to have to like computers are going to be talking to each other, AI is going to be talking to each other, AIs are going to be kind of deploying each other and the only way they can really tr like pay each other is leveraging crypto rail. So some of the behind the scene things that we're building are, you know, again like the top end looks like a retail app, but the on the bottom end it's like well how do you use a stable coin to pay someone? How do you transact in all the stable coins, not just one? You know, this is not a winner take all, you know, type of business.

So, we want to be able to en enable all markets, all assets, all stable coins. Um, so I think those numbers are are the ones we're going to look at. Yeah, I think to use the rocket ship analogy again, I think that crypton native is a great way to get initial product validation, but I think like I said earlier, your north star as a founder or as a developer should not be to target the few tens of thousands of people that exist on CT and exist on like Salana Meancoin trading, right? It should be to grow so big that the world physically cannot ignore your presence, right? Like this is the northstar for every founder, every developer, every new startup, right? And I think that for us, we really really strongly believe that we can get there uh via using, you

know, like our markets and introducing new asset classes and things that people can speculate on and get directional exposure to. I think that again, speculation is by far and away the biggest use case of crypto right now. And I think that for us, our northstar is always be so big, nobody can ignore you. Yeah. And just piggybacking off that final point there, um, speculation is how you get attention. And a a belief that I hold and that the entire bullpen team holds is that it is good for humanity if more and more people uh have full sovereignty over their financial assets. Maybe it's Bitcoin, maybe it's Lana, maybe it's USDC, whatever it is, that is not good for society for a lot of reasons that we don't need to get

into. And so from our standpoint, success in two or three or 10 years simply looks like does the underlying things we're building on does that have a thousandx increase in adoption? Are more people holding Bitcoin? Are more people trading on Hyperlquid? More people trading Soul tokens and are we the reason why? If you think about mobile broadband, it's existed, you know, since the '9s, right? Since 2000, but the iPhone made that demand for a thousandx higher. We think of ourselves as a trading interface. In a similar vein, can we build a product that's so easy to use way more people just start doing things onchain?

Gotcha. Well, I guess I'll ask each of you then uh for each of your products like what can what can people expect? What's the timelines look like? Um either going live or just what are some exciting, you know, advancements we're working towards and let the people know what's going on. Yeah, you can download the app right now. True markets. Um it's market data only this week. By next week, you'll be trading SPL tokens. By the end of summer, you'll be able to trade Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana, leveraging a a qualified custodian, Paxos, um, as the custodian, and then you'll be able to trade SPL, EVM, and base tokens. Um, you know, we see Coinbase actually going in that direction. They announced that they're enabling all base tokens on their native app as well. So, I think you're starting to see the hybrid CFI, D5 movement happen. Um and by the end of summer

we'll be cheaper, faster, easier to use and safer just in our non-custodial manner that that we sit. Yeah, for us we'll be live on testn net really really soon here. We're hoping the next few weeks slashmonish is the timeline that we're targeting. Uh you can find it on our Twitter narrative xyz or on the monad testnet explorer page. Uh from there we'll sort of be iterating on markets that we want to introduce. So we'll start off with things like being able to speculate on hyperlquids market share or you know speculate on prediction markets or trading bots or launchpads things like this and eventually we'll sort of expand out the pie literally as far as we can go horizontally. So we're hoping that we can get there especially with like mod that mainet timelines which is supposed to be later this year. So

yeah and for our app it's currently a web app accessible on desktop also optimized for mobile. In our opinion, it's the currently the easiest place to trade or on-ramp into Salana, Hyperlquid Per, or Hyperlquid Spot. And six weeks from now is going to be our next big release, which, you know, if everything goes according to plan, will be the easiest place to explore and trade any um prediction market. We've got a few more minutes. I guess I'll just ask one more thing. like is there one particular thing, trend, idea that each of us are just most excited about within the crypto industry going into, you know, just going into the next one or two years that could be regulation, could be a new type of product coming to market, uh could be your own product, but

you know, whatever is exciting you the most. Yeah. I mean, so the charts that I looked at a lot, especially uh at Coinbase, was market share and in the United States, so I think the US trends are very interesting. You see 99% of the volumes in the US equity markets or sorry in the US spot markets are traded by four different exchanges and Coinbase is 75% of that volume. So you expect to see more competitors you see expect to see fragmentation there. And then if you look at the US doiciled US denominated stable coin market USDC is 99.5% of that market. So that's essentially the non-tether market, right? So you expect to see the Stripes, the PayPal of the world start to launch their own stable coins. And we talked about regulatory

capture for getting dollars in. We expect to see fragmentation in that market. With fragmentation, you're going to need infrastructure. So that's a lot of the things we're building behind the scenes is stablecoin infrastructure. Um, and I think that that's those are the numbers that I expect to see fragment in the next two to two to five years. And uh I'm excited to build into that. Yeah, I think on the regulation front I it's definitely very bullish and I'm hoping that it goes in the right way. Um like naturally as a US citizen there are some concerns with like trading and like per especially can get kind of dicey. Uh and you obviously don't want to end up in a situation like the poly market founder being raided by the FBI.

Honestly, a little bit bullish if you're get to the point where no one can ignore you, therefore you're raided by the FBI. Um but like obviously for legal concerns, you don't want these things to impact your business and impact your personal life. So regulation by far is I think the thing that we're hoping sort of gets resolved very very soon. Yeah. I mean not to beat a dead horse here but um it is a huge deal that companies like Stripe are getting interested in stable coins. Uh that the regulations are getting more and more friendly for crypto especially compared to the last administration. Uh what this means in simple terms is more people in the US will have stable coins. uh they'll be using them at an increasing rate which makes the bridge to start using crypto products that that much

smaller. So I would say it's just incredibly bullish uh for our industry. We're going to see more teams be founded here. Uh crypto from a cultural standpoint is very you know US- ccentric and just seeing the regulatory tailwinds align with that is very good. Uh more great products will come out and adoption will will increase as well. I love it. Ryan Connor from the research team loves to say, you know, teams and products shouldn't wait around for regulation, but it is nice when you have sort of a helping hand um on that side of things. So, I appreciate all you guys, Vishall, Patrick, Saul for coming out. Um, glad to chat consumer with you guys and thanks to everyone for coming out and listening. Appreciate it.

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