The Rollup TV: LIVE From Permissionless June 26th

Transcript

Heat. Heat. [Applause] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat.

[Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat.

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[Music] Hey, hey, hey.

[Music] You're not Got Mike from Etherfly, Ken Xers, Mashot

from Risk Zero, Daryl Lao from Layer Zero, Santiago. We're going to slip in Xavier from Fractice and their new fund, Hibs, Alton, John Charb, Wade Eye, Ivan, and Robinson. I think before we get started on this amazing slate of guests that we have planned for today, we hosted a dinner last night. It was it was incredible. It was a great time. We had a great turnout. I think we had 10 to 12 of some of the most prolific people in the space. Um, and it was a great time, very inclusive, great conversation.

What any any any takeaways, any feedback? What was what was some of your favorite? I thought it was hilarious that that Jordy was on on chain providing liquidity at dinner. Yeah, he had Jordy from Seleni had his laptop out providing liquidity during dinner as they were serving the first course. Yeah. Um we had laptops. We had what do we have? Espresso martinis. It was a good time. It was an amazing time. It it's great that I I love the dinners and the more intimate events. I think that's sort of you know we've we've gone from 22 23 year old crypto ravers to dinners. Maybe we'll go to Rob and uh ECC maybe. All right guys, let's get

started with the guests today. We have Mike. Uh he's here. Let's get Mike up. Uh he's going to tell us about what's going on with the cash card, their hockey stick growth, and more. Mike, come on up, brother. Let's get started today. Let's get it. Mike's the man. What's up, Mike? Morning. Just just flew in. Uh, yeah. 6 a.m. Fresh Fresh off the fresh off the plane. Um, welcome to the city. It's a way cooler today. I'm telling you, you picked the right day. Yeah, I came right to Good to hear. Yeah, man.

Um, so obviously we, you know, you, you put me on the Ether card several, several months back or I think maybe two months back. Uh, yeah, maybe just, yeah, because that's when we launched. Yeah, we had that podcast with Arthur Moustorms on the corporate card. The the the there is if you look at the Dune charts that you've been posting is absolutely going up in terms of money spent. What are the numbers now? Uh, what's the growth been so far? How are you feeling about it? Yeah. So, uh we have about 20,000 uh users that have signed up. Um uh which is pretty pretty solid growth numbers over the last two months. Uh we have um we're up to around 250 to 300K a day in transaction volume. Uh which is uh solid

two months out. We were told by uh our our card uh issuance partner that we're the fastest program they've seen to a million dollars in spend. There you go. Uh which we hit within, you know, like a week. uh which is great. Um uh OTVL so the actual deposits in people's wallets non-custodial uh wallets which they used to spend is now around 50 million. Um uh so yeah these are pretty serious numbers like to put into perspective the largest card program these are estimates because these aren't public numbers but the largest card crypto card program in the world does 5 to10 million a day in transaction volume. So, that's like the ceiling. But anyway, who's that? It's Crypto.com. Uh, again, these aren't

these aren't public numbers. We don't know. You tear up your Crypto.com card yet? They sponsored the UFC. That's that's that's how they got it. Well, yeah, they make money on, you know, lots of different things. Um, I mean, I think we'll get to a couple million in transaction volume within a few months. Uh, daily transaction volume. Um, uh, which would would make us certainly one of the largest, uh, programs. But what's most exciting to me about it is not I mean there's a million cards, right? That's that's not particularly unique. What's interesting is it's a non-custodial card. Uh it's plugged into DeFi. It's the only card that actually lets you like borrow or spend your DeFi strategies. Uh so I would call it like the only cryptonative uh card out there.

Um and it's a fully integrated product. Like if you download the app on on iOS, you try it out, it uh I mean it feels like a fintech product. Uh there's none of the crypto [ __ ] that most people are used to with seed phrases and signing random hex transactions. U so you get all the benefits of self-custody control and access to DeFi uh without any of the crypto nonsense. It's like truly a consumer product. I I think it's important to disclose Andy and I funded Angel into Ether. Um and I'm glad we did because you guys, like you said, there's none of the crypto [ __ ] You guys treat this like a real fintech business.

And I think often times we get in this kumbaya la land about oh build a community launch a token you're going to end up finding product market fit thousand years down the road. Well you guys are taking a much more pragmatic approach. You're targeting distribution. You've already found product market fit for one product and now you're targeting a a new segment. And so I guess if you have advice to some of the companies that are out there that may still be in La La Land, like how do they cross the chasm and go from La La Land into this real pragmatic business world? Well, this is, you know, it's a tricky question because the reason that one of the reasons that crypto, I think, has a

an absence of product market fit and, you know, real consumer uh app adoption is because the path of least resistance for making money or for getting money is some infra vaporware narrative driven [ __ ] Launch a token, cash out, call it a day, and maybe do that over and over again. Um uh and that I mean that's the path of least resistance and so that's where capital tends to go like on let's do the 500th freaking you know L2 and an L3 and whatever. Um so like how do you fight against that? I don't know cuz it's that that it's hard. I think ultimately I think it will change. The gambly aspect of it is naturally always

going to be there, but I think over time as the market grows, like the market for casinos and gambling is large, but the market for real [ __ ] is a thousand times larger. So eventually it does become, you know, a bit of a rounding error. it'll still be still be there. But the way this changes is builders that actually have a long-term focus um that spend time to actually do uh you know figure out real problems, do customer uh you know customer analysis and find find that product market fit. Um and that's just hard work. That takes time. Uh you're not going to make a quick it's harder to make a quick buck that way.

Um, so anyway, so that's the advice I guess, but like I don't know to somebody who's uh, you know, 22 years old, uh, launching a shitcoin, am I going to tell them like, "No, you're this disaster. Don't do it." I'm like, "Look, you have a you definitely have a chance of making some money doing that way." But I don't know. That's I'm not interested in that. I I think you make a good point. It's like, do you want to make some some money very very quickly or do you want to make sustainable wealth? And I think this is from an entrepreneurial perspective. the difference in sort of going into the gambling route and and launching the next infrastructure vaporware versus launching a sustainable business model and a pragmatic business.

Yeah. Yeah. Like look, my goal I'm not interested in making I you know I've had enough success in my life. I I don't I don't care about making you know a little bit more money. Uh what I care about is building uh something that is actually transformational, something that impacts millions of people. Like what gives me excitement is to hear people from all kinds of random countries in the world saying I use the product. It's great. It actually helped me solve a problem. Uh and I want to build a you know an entity a project that's worth tens of billions of dollars. Like that's the scale that gets me excited. Um uh sort of a quick hit just doesn't uh you know doesn't do much. Yeah. you you've been teasing about some new applications on top of uh Ether's like Neo Bank, DeFi Bank kind of

uh foundation, right? So, we have the cash card. What else are you looking at trying to build on top or you know are other people coming in to build apps on this foundation? What is that kind of [ __ ] Yeah, I did uh I did briefly kind of tease that. Um well, so there's a road map. Um, as the product stands today, a normal person still, I think, would have a hard time using it because if you think about what what's required to use like the Ether, we call it a DeFi bank. You know, you still, okay, you got to buy some go on Coinbase, maybe buy some USDC, send it from, you know, your Coinbase account to a specific wallet, and then you you see it in EtherFi, and then maybe you put it into liquid, and then,

you know, you get a card. So, when you say normal person, you're you mean like a normal person? A no coiner, right? someone who hasn't maybe gone a CFI user, let's call let's say someone who's you know keen on crypto but a CFI user there's it's still too many steps what it needs to be if you if you look at products like Wise or Revolute or Chime or whatever um like it's they're super polished like they have a level of polish that you expect from like you know like consumer apps these days. Uh you open the app in in two minutes you can have money in there and you could be spending it. That's what we need to get to. We have about a couple months of roadmap to get there. That includes like all the payments apps integration, you know, plaid integration, Pix integration, whatever. Ways of getting

money in and getting money out. Um ability to support lots of different assets, token swaps, her believe it or not, all this stuff just integrate into the app so that it's, you know, really nice and easy to use. Um um that's like the very next road map. One of the other things that I think would be really cool that I'm I mean for sure we'll do it at some point. It's just a question of when is I I really think there is an opportunity to create um I don't know how big this gets but like a whether it's apps or widgets or something that you can actually plug into this financial infrastructure and allow people to build like tools around this like maybe you want a robo advisor that automatically allocates you know some sort of index of assets for you

non-custodial you know automated way maybe you want something that automatically like saves you know every time you buy something it rounds it up to the 's dollar and like uses that to buy Bitcoin and that's just like a savings mechanism. Um, you know, like some sort of charitable stuff like you can do you can come up with all kinds of different interesting ideas uh of like hooking into stuff and I think that um that could be really compelling because it almost gives you an ability to create your own programmable uh you know fintech uh experience. Yeah. So in that in that regard then with these new features um kind of thinking about applications that you can build on top of this DeFi bank when you're when you're looking to kind of go from the

current state of revenue as to where you guys are now and and trying to kind of project out to your goals what do you think is going to be the driver of the larger revenue for Ether and how do you make the decision as a entrepreneur as as a builder in a very competitive space to like subsidize uh early adoption versus start to actually, you know, turn on the fee switch, try to really generate uh value from your customers. Well, so we're profitable every month, you know, we generate revenue and we use that uh portion of that to buy back uh the token. So there's like a direct tie-in between token and and protocol.

We I mean I having built a SAS business before uh that was much more in a much more difficult industry let's say uh it was higher education. So um uh I'm very cognizant about unit economics so that you don't spend more money to acquire a customer than they're worth to you. Um so far I mean uh yeah I think we've done a really good job of staying disciplined. you know, our, you know, take this these numbers with some caveat, but our average customer is worth about $1,000 a year to us. Our ARPO is about $1,000 a year. Um, and our cost of acquisition, depending on the channel, uh, is about $50 to $100. So,

that means our payback period is, let's call it about a month. Uh, which is great. Like, that's fantastic. Um once a few of those features that I mentioned are flushed out, we have a budget set aside, marketing budget to start really like pushing user acquisition. Um we have about $4 million set aside this year and our goal is to get to about 100,000 active uh card users specifically. We in total we have a couple hundred thousand users, but we want to get to a 100,000 users that use the full integrated product including like staking, the liquid vaults, cash product, the borrowing, you know, everything else. Um and the revenue opportunity be beyond that. Then we look at margin expansion meaning um uh driving more

revenue by by offering the user more products like token swaps, per you know borrows, more assets that they can uh they can use. Uh currently we generate about you know about 100 basis points on transaction volume on the interchange fee on the card. Y generated about 50 bips on the borrow uh borrow spread. uh we've got about 30 to 40 bips on the staking, about 200 bips on liquid, etc., etc., etc. So, there's this like stack of growing services that we can provide that are still the cheapest that the user can get in in the market, but it by by creating this vertically integrated stack um it creates this like very powerful uh positive feedback loop because then that lets us spend more

money and offer more perks, more cash back, more rewards or whatever uh on uh you know to to our customers. We have the travel booking stuff. I didn't even mention that. But that's I mean we have 7% margin on that which is like what what is that travel? Like you can book travel directly through. So it's like similar to like AMX or Yeah. You know Chase you go to this portal you get 5% cash back on all your travel bookings. Uh and the hotel prices uh are super cheap. They're usually 10 to 30% cheaper than you can get elsewhere. Um uh and so that's a great you know especially with uh cans and Argentina right uh coming up uh I I I had a question about another feature that you mentioned which was

plaid but also some just broader onboarding integrations that you had mentioned and I'm curious how much some of the deregulation or regulation just positively has affected that. Is this something that you've seen or tried to do in the past and it really wasn't feasible and now you know Plaid and some of these like traditional banking partners are becoming a little bit more accepting of crypto and it's easier to integrate those things for sure. Okay. I think that's exactly right. It's not that it was we're we spend so much money on lawyers.

Uh we make sure every jurisdiction we operate in, every product we issue, like it's literally to the point like every state you can use these two products but not this one and you you know you can get the card here but not there like Arizona is not supported for some reason. So every jurisdiction, every country were obsessive about this crap. Um, so it's not that this stuff was not allowed before, but it's actually exactly as you say, now that the vibe has shifted uh to where like, oh, this crypto thing, there's the Genius Bill, there's like, you know, like this stuff is actually like more reputable. Um, uh, all these services that in theory should have been fine before are now just much more willing to to work with you. Um, we

we did, for example, like Mailchimp just like kicked this out recently. That's happened to us. uh they're no crypto. I'm like seriously still. Uh so, you know, it still happens, but um it's getting a lot better. Yeah. So, are are you guys pretty much um let's just say uh finished with like the whole kind of like uh restaking kind of part of your business or like how still very much active? Yeah, you know, generates a huge amount of revenue for us. ETH is out there still, right? Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean, it's six or seven billion dollars in in deposits.

Um, but how do you think about like the like like the focus between those two going forward? I mean the the this is the cool thing about being vertically integrated platform. Yeah. The people that use the staking product were the first people to adopt liquid and adopt cash very compliment. Yeah. The people that are coming in you know from Taiwan or whatever uh to use the cash product deposit into liquid and then then stake. So it's we we view it as very um as I said it's a it's a positive feedback loop. This is uh I mean it's a playbook that's been around for like centuries like vertical integration is not something Yeah. Yeah. I mean you I can see a future where that where that site just like the etherf dashboard has Yeah.

Travel it has trading it has like a per thing maybe it has a Yeah. It's a fintech. Yeah. It has an AI agent like LLM dashboard where you can like you know operate your your portfolio like and if it's all in one kind of you know interface one place makes it much easier to operate from the exact same way that like you open up your if you use Revolute or whatever you know neo bank you use it's not like oh here's your checking account or here's your stocks like no no like you can keep your cash here you can buy some stocks you can you have a credit card like all this stuff is in one place cuz that's what people want. Yeah. And so that's what a consumer product is. You you like do the thing that people actually, you know,

want. So projecting like kind of skating to where the punk is going with with you guys. I I take it, correct me if I'm wrong here from a competitive landscape. It's not the other crypto companies that may be around permissionless that you guys are thinking about. Now they're going after Robin Hood. Correct. Right. You're going after like that sort of that sort of echelon of fintech companies that are out there. the the broader space that we're going after is neo banking. Okay. Um we are not a bank in that we do not take deposits but we are I think building and have already built a viable alternative to to a bank. Um so that's the larger category that market is about $150 billion.

You know all of DeFi all of it put together generates I don't know$1 to2 billion a year. It doesn't [ __ ] matter. Like the pump fund and the even hyper liquid like this is a rounding air. Like it's a rounding air on real [ __ ] right? Um so that's the market and the market is growing really fast. The neo bankanking space is growing 30 to 40% a year. This is going to be like trillion dollar market uh pretty soon. Eventually it replaces uh you know traditional banks. So that's that's what we're going after. That matters way more than trying to take market share from some random [ __ ] card program that's got 12 users. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, yeah, cuz you did kind of remind me of one thing, which is that the traditional banking sector does seem like it's sort of it's sort of like cautious and looking at what's happening and could potentially get innovated because Yeah, for sure. they're not nimble. They're not going to just roll over and die. Yeah. Right. Right. Um, and I was thinking about this in the context of stable coins because now you have uh you have these large social media platforms that are thinking about launching stable coins. Meta um even X is starting to seem like it's potentially getting into that game. And so now these companies with distribution are starting to become banks. Even even Apple, right, it has Apple Wallet, Apple Cash, right card. So as you see the

evolution of banking and traditional banking sort of being left in the dust a little bit, how how do you see this playing out from the social media side, the DeFi side, what do you think the evolution, you know, on on a pick your time horizon. What do you think that evolution looks like? You know, it's so hard to predict. Um, I think the only this this there's no information, but like the only thing you could say is it's going to be very different 5 years from now, 10 years from now than it is today. Yeah. Uh I think the correct way to operate in this space is to focus on building a product that lots of people want to use and not worry too much about what you know Apple and Google and and Meta are are doing um or or even like Chase or other you know

large uh large banks. Um the reason is because when you are in a growing market a market that's growing by tens of billions of dollars a year new revenue per year like what you need to do is just capture meaningful share of that um and where the boundary lines you know get defined I mean it matters in the grand scheme of things but when you're starting with you know from zero how do we go to a billion in revenue to 10 billion in revenue like the wherever those lines those boundaries end up being defined. Um, as I said, it matters, but like again, what matters much more is just this like maniacal focus on customers and creating a product that people actually want. And

then you'll define your niche uh over time. Um, yeah, I'm I'm curious how much you you prioritize like the corporate uh card and the corporate market with regards to like the you know wealthy crypto user market, right? like like what's your which provides more value do you think to the business or like or like have you seen a differentiated you know um revenues etc. Yeah. So it's there in crypto I think there's a very powerful um virtuous cycle feedback loop that occurs. We saw this actually with our staking product. The first product that we launched and when we were raising our you know seed in series A like every pitch people would ask us okay are you focusing on

retail or you focusing on institutional and my answer to that was look in this space I think you have do both. The reason is because if you get retail users, that means when you go to pitch the large institutional uh investor, all of their analysts, all the like 25 year old analysts who who work there are already using your product. Yeah. And so that cuts your sales cycle from, you know, 6 months down to like one month because they already they're already familiar with you. They're going to be pitching you internally. And vice versa once the institutions adopt that creates you know good brand awareness security and that helps you adopt get adoption on the personal own retail side uh because and obviously you know your TVO goes up

and that that creates positive feedback loop. So you kind we have to service both uh and we we have you know a B2B motion I guess to acquire yeah business customers and the retail stuff and the exact same playbook I think applies in this case for our corporate card uh product uh which is evolving um into more than just a card product but including things like expense management categorization treasury management and tracking all that stuff but then every single employee who gets a card automatically also gets a personal Etherfly account and with one click now they can create their personal card uh and collect cash back and rewards and points and and all that stuff. Um in a market like in a sense we're building

like at least for now a vertical uh focused business. the vertical being, you know, crypto and DeFi. And so this like layers on a cake model is uh is the way that you build uh like a moat is you, you know, if someone's using you for one product, right, they can churn. Someone's using you for three or four different things, your churn basically goes to zero. In fact, you get ne negative uh churn. You get like positive dollar retention. One last thing for you on the token side of things. How much has the hyperl liquid model do you think with with regards to the new administration that we're speaking about kind of newer uh abilities and flexibility then hyperl comes in the market kind of does its thing how how

much of that of these two things have influenced your thought process on uh ETH token and and and kind of how do you how do you like how do you think about creating value for for token holders? Um I know so we we had value acro and token buybacks from almost day one. So like I felt very strongly about that because I didn't want to just have a memecoin with the name of the protocol, right? Which is what most tokens are. Yeah. No utility, right? So uh Hyperlid also chose that. Obviously they're doing it in much bigger size because they're, you know, the casino dollars ethers.

Well, we are we are going to be integrating uh with Hyperl. you will be able to like on the front like you you'll be able to trade on that liquidity on the Ether 5 front end. Um that's work in progress, but will you be able to get like fees from that or Yeah. Hyperlid has a builtin uh it's the builder codes thing or Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So you can just tap into their front end or tap into their liquidity with any you'll be able to say okay take this chunk that's now collateral let me do some per and then we'll be able to pass on fee savings because we get economies of scale with hyperlquid to the users. So, um, uh, anyway, so Value Crow token from day one, that's been something that we, we cared about. Um, it's really great to see like a lot of the best projects now

starting to do that. You know, Hyperlid probably they're the most aggressive about it and we've seen their token absolutely crush it as a result. A's been doing that. Um, uh, there's there's others. Uh, so I think that's fantastic. I really think that's going to be a permanent meta where if you're not doing that, you're going to be kind of like looked at kind of like what what like what the [ __ ] are you doing? Separates the men from the boys because it is a lot. Yeah, it's a line in the sand. It's like a show me the money market, right? If you're not doing the buybacks means well maybe you don't have it's a tough question, right, for for builders because so many of these markets are so cutthroat in terms of competition of adoption, right? So you've got like a market like interoperability, right? for

example, like bridging, like if if anyone's going to start charging more, you just have people that raise the award checks and be like, "No, you know what? Screw you. We're just going to go free and just we want the adoption. We want Yeah, that's how the real world works. There's certain industries like that are super low margin and they're big industries, but they're shitty industries to build in. Uh they're undifferiated and yeah, like that's reality. That's good for people." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like coming to light in a big way as the last like sixish months here. Yeah. Like I think generally in crypto, maybe this is too strong a statement, but like broad horizontal platforms are harder to monetize because just eventually you do get crutched uh to zero because it's just like there's there's a million of

them and it's just you get perfect competition essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's the fork of a fork. Like that's what separates, you know, the in infrastructure vaporware as you called it from the verticalized uh businesses with differentiation. All right, Mike, thanks so much. Last thing for you. Um, what are you bullish on in particular? And what are you bearish on or fearful about? Um, I mean, I'm bullish on ETH. uh maybe almost like unreasonably so because I just I look around and I I think to myself like I don't know what other ecosystem you'd build on if you're doing something serious, right? Um uh and I think institutions are probably have the same

from what we see have the same kind of mindset. So I'm I'm still bullish on the uh Ethereum ecosystem. Um I'm bearish on you know uh the crypto ponzi [ __ ] that we saw across the last few cycles. I think um the market's getting tired of it and uh I I hope that like that the the capital exit out of that uh you know that world focus more on the real stuff which takes longer and is harder to build but is much more sustainable. Yeah. I wonder if we're going to see a massive market shift like out of all of these like out of 90% of tokens basically into like the 10% or the 5% like how that could look. It's almost like you're seeing a bifurcation

already, right? So like on the one hand like pure hyper gambling insanity like Barkcoin type stuff and then like legit serious business and anything in the middle is kind of getting left behind. Yeah. Yeah. It's like mid-curving. It's like you're not just a pure memecoin with with no value. You're trying to create something but you also aren't making any money. So it's kind of like Right. Yeah. Mike, it's pleasure to have you, man. Uh thank you for being here. See you guys as always. Enjoy the day. Um and sign up in the link below. $50 off the first $1,000 cash back.

Subsidized lending as well. I am borrowing against my wrapped e right now. I am not selling to pay for my subway. Um, thank you, Mike. Cool. Thanks, guys. See you soon. See you later. See you. All right, guys. We had um Ken from Xfirst up next. Uh, he said he's behind me. He's right here. Let's get him on. Come around the side. Much love. looking good here. Didn't see him earlier. What's going on, Ken? Welcome to the show, Ken. Good to have you here. Good to see you, man. How are you? Good. Good. Have a seat. Sit down relax.

How uh how's your time in New York? It's been great. Uh yesterday was uh you know, super hot. Uh yeah, I I heard you guys were like uh sweating out here. Yeah, it's pretty hot, man. Still got plenty of fans around here. So, we're trying to we're taking it taking it one one day at a time. You know, it's a little bit cooler today. Today's way better. Way better. You can just hang out. Just relax. Sit back, relax, enjoy the show. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, Ken, what are you building, man? You're building Bitcoin. Coming coming to Starket soon. Building a wallet with integrated apps, yield products, staking. Talk us through it.

Sure. Yeah. So, uh we're building Xverse. Uh we're basically building the home for Bitcoin Fi and we want to be the one single place that people go to to discover, use uh Bitcoin, Bitcoin DeFi applications, apps and uh you you might have heard of us from uh as a Bitcoin wallet that supports ordinals and the runes um but that's for us is really just the beginning and the wallet is our sort of core product and we have an entire platform that we want to use to onboard for people into crypto into Bitcoin. So is the wallet on is is it Xverse? Is it a wallet? Is it a Xverse.app here? Xverse.app is trusted

by a million users. Yes. How many downloads do you have? We have more than 1.6 million downloads now. From what like uh from what regions? So I would say it's pretty diverse. Uh definitely a lot of Americans use Xers. Okay. Um but our users are from all over the world. Yeah. Including Europe, Africa, Asia. Yeah, when ordinals went live and runes went live, this was, you know, due to a recent uh Bitcoin upgrade maybe a year or two ago is did you see an explosion in user activity from that demographic? Yeah. So, I think this was uh you know the upgrade that enabled ordinal and ruins came maybe three years ago. Three years ago. Okay. And ruins was about a

year ago. I'm sorry, two years ago. uh and we were the first wallet to offer full support for ordinals and we definitely saw a huge uh influx of users from that, right? Um and we kind of grew with that ecosystem from the beginning and you know now we're kind of like the go-to wallet if you want to use ordinals. Um and we're also the first ones to launch full support for runes back uh you know last year. So we also have a lot of users and and so you guys were able to capitalize on sort of this more grassroots Bitcoin community. I I think even around here we kind of get the sense you know from Ethereum world it's like oh no one really on like crypto Twitter really thinks about Bitcoin so much in and then in the

Bitcoin world it's you kind of got these two camps. You've got the micro strategy miners institutions that own a significant amount of the supply. maybe even, you know, have a statistic around that. And then you've got more of a grassroots Bitcoin community that's interested in doing things with their Bitcoin, right? The honorative Bitcoin camp. How do you reconcile these two camps? You know, do you see the grassroots Bitcoin community as large enough to support, you know, a growing business like Xverse? Is there enough enough users? Is there enough uh Bitcoin in those users wallets? uh or do you eventually have to tap into these Bitcoin holders that may or may not

really want to do anything with their Bitcoin? So, I want to say, you know, in the end, people want to you have to do something with your Bitcoin, whether it's holding it for, you know, just the value of it like they're doing right now a lot of the Bitcoin uh treasury companies or making payments with your Bitcoin or using it in DeFi. You know the value of Bitcoin is that you know it's it's trustless money and store value right so we want to activate these use cases on Bitcoin before it was kind of not possible right there's technical limitations you know there is no like real Bitcoin DeFi apps right in order to use Bitcoin in DeFi apps you have to uh use wrap Bitcoin which is custodial and

you go on Ethereum and use the protocol was there and then people would, you know, after they've made their money, they would exit back into Bitcoin, right? So, we're what we're seeing now is this Bitcoin 2.0, uh, you know, season 2 where a lot of the builders and and users are coming back to Bitcoin and there is now a lot of momentum to kind of change Bitcoin so that you can enable these types of applications. uh there's last year there were many Bitcoin L2 projects that uh received funding raised money and now these guys are about to launch some of their you know test nets mainets and Xers is the wallet that's going to support these

guys and make sure that users have an easy interface to use the protocols on these L2s for Bitcoin. Um, I think you know the the guys that are currently holding Bitcoin and not doing anything with it, they eventually will want to generate a yield on their Bitcoin if that's possible, right? The existing solutions, they're either custodial or it carries some other sort of, you know, risk. Um, whereas where we want to go is the we have a trustless system for people to put their Bitcoin to work. Uh in DeFi for example um there's various staking protocols for Bitcoin uh that are coming

out right now. Uh Starknet is actually uh launching something like that. Yeah. Um which by the way we uh we're launching support for Starknet as a Bitcoin L2 uh basically next week. Um the first version of Xverse that will support Starknet is coming out next week. Congrats. Yeah. Um question for you on what you guys are doing with stacks actually. Are you guys working with STAX on on anything? Yeah, so STAX is also, you know, a Bitcoin L2 which we've supported for for many years and we kind of started out with just support for STAX. Um, but the ecosystem has grown so much that there are other solutions as well and it's not just stacks, right? So, we want to support this entire ecosystem. So, that's why

we're integrating more L2s. So, so the idea is that you know as a Bitcoin native wallet you can aggregate all the chains that may have different applications that are offering Bitcoin 5. Yes. So the idea is that we want to provide a Bitcoin native experience for all these chains. So some of these chains may be, you know, EVM L2s where, you know, you could bring an Ethereum smart contract onto that chain or L2 and it settles eventually to Bitcoin, right? Uh others like Starknet, they have their own solution. Um and some of these chains or L2s, they they all depend on, you know, one or two uh sort of technical developments on Bitcoin. So there's uh an a proposed op code called

opc cat right uh which people want to get in uh into the bitcoin core and that's going to enable some of these L2s to trustlessly settle onto bitcoin but there are solutions out there that don't require these up codes right for example stacks does not require any up codes or changes to bitcoin it I'm cur is there a poly market on opcat on like whether or not that's going to be enabled I think that that that's definitely a possibility right now. I don't think it exists. Uh I mean I think there are some like poly markets for Bitcoin.

Yeah. But I think there uh they might be like custodial as in you have to deposit your Bitcoin onto the platform in order to you know make bets. Yeah. I don't think there is going to be an OPCAT one. Oh, here we go. Oh yeah. Will Bitcoin act activate OPCTV or O opcat in 2025? is essentially covenants. 94% neither. You can buy just OBCAT for 1% right now. Less than 1% with $43,000 of volume. It's not going to happen. Not in 2025.

No. And so what does the Bitcoin L2 landscape look like without Opcat? Is it just stuck in this purgatory between ETH and Bitcoin or So not really. Um so you know Starknet themselves, they're they're coming up with other solutions as as well. Uh there are other L2s that are based on you know BitVM for example. Yeah. Right. Uh and like I mentioned STAX doesn't require any changes to to Bitcoin. So either way whether or not I think the the industry is going to move forward and we're going to have Bitcoin 5. Tell us about what um SIP31 is for stacks and why you guys were so excited about to about supporting that. Sure. So I think the SIP is might be know a

little bit controversial because you know, it's essentially minting extra tokens. Um, but this is really going towards the next stage of the development of STAX. So, STAX, you know, has been in existence since, you know, I think is like 20 2018 was when the token launched. Yeah. Um, and there were a lot of technical uh hurdles that, you know, the project had to overcome. Yeah. And the features the major sort of like features was just released basically this last year, right? So SBTC which is a trust minimized version of Bitcoin on stacks that was just released. Uh the Nakamoto release which is the fast blocks that was also you know I think

late last year. Yeah. So now these pieces technical pieces are in place. Now is the time to grow the ecosystem by fostering apps and getting the word out there. So this SIP uh will mint these tokens uh so that they can be spent in this ecosystem to grow and get more apps, get more builders um and allow this whole thing to you know bloom. You know, in 2020, 2021, we had the entire DeFi revolution, right? Where it was almost like all of this ETH was sitting latent in people's wallets and then it was turned into productive assets.

Seemingly on Bitcoin, we have a similar situation. Just fast forward to now. All of this Bitcoin and it's a greater market cap than ETH was at the time of 2020. Yep. and more capital more capital to unlock and really more capital to leverage and rehypothecate which kind of winds this DeFi this DeFi flywheel right and causes all of this it it really spurs all of that growth um how do you reconcile like essentially you guys are an infrastructure provider so you know as as much as people want to take it where do you think you know the bitcoin the the bitcoin defi revolution will So, you know, I is it at the scale of what we

saw with Ethereum in 2020? Is it more sustainable? How how are you thinking about Bitcoin DeFi relative to Ethereum DeFi during DeFi summer in 2020? Yeah, so I think the Bitcoin DeFi ecosystem could be much bigger. Um, like you mentioned, the market cap is way way bigger and if you look at ETH, you know, a significant percentage of the market cap is actually the the apps and D5 protocols on ETH. So, if you were to take that percentage and apply it to Bitcoin, that's that's like trillions of dollars, right? Of course, you know, I don't think all that money is going to be unlocked immediately, but we're going to make progress towards that. And I think first it's going to be like the grassroots people that you mentioned, you know, those guys are going to put

their Bitcoin to work, right? They're going to put into these DeFi protocols and things like that. Um and then I think the existing users of DeFi on Ethereum and Salana, they would be interested in Bitcoin DeFi as well, right? Because ultimately Bitcoin is the most secure chain. And if you know if you want to have financial applications, you wanted to settle on the most secure one, right? And has the most direct path to Bitcoin. Like I mentioned earlier, a lot of the people, you know, trading, doing DeFi, they end up putting the money back into Bitcoin because that's the most stable one, right? So, if that's the case, then, you know, why not just use the apps on Bitcoin directly, right? So, yeah, I think this ecosystem

once the technical limitations are removed, it's going to grow really fast. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, I agree. Ken, one last one for you. Um, what are you bullish on and what are you bearish or or fearful of? So I'm I'm super bullish on Bitcoin 5 as ecosystem and all these L2s that are uh you know coming online right now and all the apps that are going to be available and some of the features that we're going to be launching as well to sort of aggregate these opportunities for our users uh existing users and new users as well for Bitcoin. What I'm a little bit fearful for is kind of the uh you know the overhype of some of these Bitcoin treasury companies and just you know that narrative. You know, I think yeah,

it's, you know, I'm bullish on Bitcoin appreciating in price, but I think when there's too much hype on something and not enough sort of real life applications, you know, it might lead to a crash and, you know, I I think it might set the whole industry back a little bit in terms of Yeah. How how do you think about like these Bitcoin treasury companies? It almost I get the sense they're almost it's almost like Bitcoin Fi but happening offchain, right? How different is that from Bitcoin Fi happening onchain? So Bitcoin Fi would be based on like you know real life use cases, right? So lending and borrowing, right? You can charge an interest on Bitcoin that you lend out,

right? Um you can pay interest if you borrow against your Bitcoin. But a lot of these treasury companies, they're not doing that, right? they're they're simply buying Bitcoin, holding it, and the the idea is that the the stock price will go up more than the the asset value. Right. Right. So, I I think in that case, you know, it's a it's kind of disconnected from the the reality. Yeah, I I think so, too. I mean, we've kind of been been echoing just hunting these retailers. Yeah. Especially like if it is trading at some significant, you know, multiple above NAV, it's like those those those margins will compress. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. So, Ken, we we got to let you go, man. Thank you for coming. Thanks for having me. And um have a great week. Pleasure. Thanks for joining, man. Cheers to you. See you next time, guys. Are you are you bearish on the treasury? Yeah. Well, I'm bearish on on any margin, you know, of the treasury companies above NAV because essentially like, you know, there's a certain amount of Bitcoin, you know, essentially these these companies are just custodians of that Bitcoin, but then yeah, they'll they'll go borrow against their stock price. They'll go, you know, use that use the funds that they raised to go buy more Bitcoin. Yeah. But there's not a ton more. And I think you know even Micro Strategy is going and they're

saying like okay we're going to use the Bitcoin that we have to build structured products. So maybe there is a little bit of product or service value that they are offering above just custodying Bitcoin that's there eventually yield maybe but we'll see right and so for the most part they're essentially custodians and so there's not a whole lot more value in there beyond the net assets on their books. So, I think, you know, are these things going to come crashing down from leverage? Maybe, maybe not. But I think more certainly the the margins above net asset value are going to progress. Yeah.

And they're going to have to find ways to get yield on that Bitcoin. They're going to do it on chain. So, up next, we've got Mashayat, the head of ecosystem at Risero, Marvel Girl. Uh, let's get her up here. Um, let's have some fun and let's talk about Riser's ecosystem. Boundless and more. Uh, look looking forward couple waters for the boys. It's not nearly as hot as it was yesterday. Got a water. Hello. Good to meet you. How are you? Welcome to the welcome to the setup here. Thank you. Thank you for having me. How you doing? I'm good. It's bright. Caffeine in.

How are you guys? Uh, we're doing well. Yeah, it's day two. So, we are we're in the groove now. It's not as hot as yesterday. Yes. What's your uh what's your first impression here? Oh my god. I actually love how it's all in one hub. I'm not like running around all over Manhattan. I feel like all of the other New York conferences just it's crazy. Yeah. Um so I'm really enjoying the hyper efficiency that we've come together as an industry just to have one event have consensus that we should all be doing our happy hours in one spot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think Can's going to be like that freaking CC.

Yeah. But I'm still excited for it. Are you guys heading out? Yeah. After this Friday and then I think it will be similar to this like where can you go, right? You're literally like on one side. There might be side events, but like walking distance, right? Exactly. I have to get a 30-minute Uber across the city in rush hour. Well, I mean, if you can't find housing, you probably have to take the train like every day from like Nice, right? Which is its own problem. But, um, I'm excited for you guys. It's going to be awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. Um, yeah, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. So, let's talk about what you're doing with your with the riser ecosystem. Um, you know, you've been you guys have been cooking on Boundless. What have you in particularly been working on? Go like

like what is your dayto-day? I'm a janitor. Okay. Yeah, us too actually. Just just putting out fires and cleaning up cleaning up. Just just the regular regular janitor. Um, no, I I I love what I do. Um I've been with the riso team um coming up to two years now and then um I've joined uh I joined in the BD team um back in 2023. Um and yeah now I'm leading out our ecosystem efforts on the boundless side um for the foundation and yeah my work is very much encompassing everything from you know supporting kind of the narrative work that our amazing marketing team has been doing bringing verifiable compute everywhere but also supporting our partners um across the board. So we work with a lot of

different teams as you know we're in the generalized EKBM space. So not only do we work with a lot of roll-ups like um you guys have on the rollup um but we also work with a lot of applications as well um a lot of research teams in the field who are basically trying to capture as much CK innovation as possible and then of course making sure that the improvements that we're doing on the risk zero side at the circuit level are translating to use cases that are supporting our partners and are translating in terms of performance cost adoption for them all of that. So that's primarily been the work for me. Um there's a lot of different kind of verticals that I touch upon um you know in use cases. So obviously like CK fraud proofs is a big thing for like you know

rollups um in the space and we're trying to make sure that they can go burr when they want to and making sure that that check is ready. It's definitely a longer kind of deal cycle um when it comes to um you know getting rollups to adopt. Um, but there's also been a lot of exciting work on the ZK interop front as well, which you have some spicy takes about that that we want to hear about to say. Yeah. So, so, so you recently said that that like this, you know, bringing on private banking and and these larger institutions onchain is just going to further cause problems. It's going to create more fragmentation, right? Which is logical because it's hard, you know, these these systems aren't necessarily supposed to interoperate. Um, what's your take there? How how do we solve that problem? Yeah, I think my take

there is twofold. I think interop is a problem that we've been trying to solve as an industry since eons. Um, and I think we have like come to quite a few interim solutions. You know, intense crosschain messaging, L2 to L1 messages, all of that. I think the problem there is that you still have a lot of these trusted intermediaries. And when it when we're now opening up as an industry to a lot of these private banks and a lot of these institutions that actually want to keep their assets and their inputs, their their information relatively private, you can't force them to go fully open and fully decentralized. I've had multiple conversations with folks about this. You can't bring the you you can bring the horse to water, but you

can't make it drink the water, right? And and they're just not going to drink that Kool-Aid. So, how do you create an ecosystem where teams like JP Morgan, they're actually going to be using base, so great for them. But let's say Morgan Stanley, they want to have a private permission blockchain where they basically plot all of their capital in there. How do you work with them and how do you meet them where they are? This is where ZK Interop really comes in because with cryptographic interoperability, you can essentially verify the state on any different network, whether you're from a public network or you're trying to verify the state on a private network.

And I think that's really key because the biggest kind of narrative that I'm kind of hearing here at permissionless is that as institutions come in, yield is going to look very different for all of us um in the DeFi space. We're not going to have astronomical like floats and inflated yields. Um and there's a lot of idle capital right now because there is a lot of fragmentation like in our industry. So for for a lot of this idol capital, if we want people to keep on using DeFi, if we want folks to actually be excited about DeFi and more folks to come on, we're going to have to put all of this idle capital to work.

And ZK and AROP is probably going to be the place that and the mechanism that's going to enable all of the islands that we have right now to connect with each other and basically eliminate the concept of islands altogether essentially. I'm ZK Pilled. Are you? Yeah, just a wee bit. Just a bit. Just a bit. Absolutely. I think I think it, you know, it it's all of what you're saying, right? It's like the the interrupt that you described originally it was it had the oracle problem. Oh, totally. In order to go from one chain to the next, the chain only. Sorry. It's not like I've been doing this all day for all day. You and the mic are one and the same.

I'm absorbing part of your body. So the chain only knows what the chain can see, right? It can't see the chain can't see another chain and therefore know what's happening on that one. So in order for it to receive some asset, it it needs insight, right? And classically that was the oracle problem, ZK totally fixes that because now like you said, you can cryptographically say this is what's happening as long as there's some verifier, right? And and now the verifier and the prover can talk to one another. Exactly. And and so I think I think you know you essentially can get your you can eat your you can have your cake and eat it too, right? You can

maintain privacy if you want that private permissioned environment, but then you can also communicate with the outside world and you don't have to give up any of that privacy. I'm curious, was there a moment when you had that a light bulb moment with when you were zkilled? Do you recall a while? This was a while ago. For any for anyone who's not zkilled, could you please ZK pill our audience? For anyone who isn't already, so many different ways to get ZK pill, you know, not one way. I think for a lot of cryptographers, it's like in their line of work. They've been doing it for years. Um, for a lot of DeFi folks, you know, hopefully this messaging and narrative really fills them. For me, um, I came into ZK actually through my previous work at Cello. Um, shout out to

Cello. Um I love solo. Um so I was doing a lot of innovation work there. Um I was doing um a lot of pilots. Um and we were working specifically in emerging markets like Nigeria and trying to do DeFi pilots like microloans and all of that. And you know, Cell was really at the forefront of a lot of innovative technology. Um, and they still are, but I, you know, distinctly remember that they built this CK light client called Plumo. And what it specifically did was verify like Cellos in low bandwidth areas like emerging markets. And I was like, damn. Like, you know, Cello has already thought about what like servicing the next billion looks like.

what does it actually look like in practice when you're in a remote village in Kenya or in um Tanzania and your stuff's not connecting and how do you create verifiable infrastructure for that and that's like still eons ahead I personally think but to have a team that was that forwardlooking really got me very excited about like ZK and practice and I think for us like at Boundless um as the Boundless vision started coming more and more closer to life as we started actually deploying and as And you, as you rightly said, it's a verification that actually unlocks interop. It's the not the proofs. The power is in the verification. How do you make your verifier go everywhere? That's kind of the problem that we've been solving or trying to solve at Boundless

from day one. And getting your verifier everywhere is not easy. I mean, yes, like on EVM, it's great. There's like some sort of a standard. You want to go to Alt VMs, you want to go to Salana, there's a lot of work that has to take place. Like work that takes one and a half years to come to fruition. Um, and so when I'm thinking about like how we're trying to solve kind of the interop problem, um, for us like at Boundless, we've been thinking about it from day one. Since day one at risk zero, we've been trying to get our verifier everywhere. And that's what gets me really excited because that's kind of where my light bulb moment went off because I was like, okay, well, now that our verifier can be everywhere, the economics of bringing ZK interop to every chain or bringing ZK to every

chain actually is viable because in the past like as we've been trying to solve the interop problem, a lot of bridges have been trying to decentralize even their multisigs and their oracles in a lot of different ways. But it's also a bottleneck for them because it takes them so much overhead to get to different networks. Yeah. But a verifier is actually probably one of the most economic ways you can get ZK on every chain. It's relatively standardized. And yes, it's going to require some sort of an effort to get like foundations and networks and bridge operators to kind of agree with you, but at the end of the day, that's kind of just the problem that we're all trying to solve, which is a coordination problem in like crypto.

So right now the economics of ZK went off with boundless where it was like okay cool like I think we can speedrun this like I think we can actually go to market. Yeah. So then like with that frame right with the enabling of this verifier across different applications and and chains maybe show the ecosystem a bit. What are some of the cool apps being enabled by boundless? Oh my god. Um what are some of the chains using boundless? There's you know. Yeah. Oh my god. so much. Shout outs. Shout outs. Shout outs. Oh, shout out to my day ones. Am I right or dies? Thanks for being through all the audits, and the upgrades. Um, oh my god, so much. So, we've been working with quite

a bit, quite a few teams on the rollup side um that are bringing um fraud proofs um obviously to their networks. um the soon uh the soon team um they're actually adapting our ZK fraud proof solution um for uh their SVM stack which is great because now we can actually bring SVM salon of VM performance to like Kyua and everywhere that they go which is amazing. Um we are working with the build on Bitcoin team. I mean we've been working with Bitcoin teams like since day one. I truly think that they're the ones who have been grinding at this interop problem like like literally when nobody else gave a f.

Hate to say it. Sorry. Um, but yeah, like they've been building trust minimized bridges like since day one. They're building like bit VM or Bitcoin like clients and no one really knows how the design works. People are arguing over what the framework should be and they're still grinding at it and we're really happy to like support them. Um, and we have teams like Bob, you know, who are obviously using us for um, proving their rollup, but they're also using us for um, proving like client proofs on Bitcoin as well. And then uh MALDDA, which is a crosschain lending protocol. Um they've been using us since day one. They're actually live with us on their mainet. They're doing crosschain lending across six different chains. They're live on Lineia, but you can basically deposit your assets anywhere using their unified ledger. Um

so these are some of the chains that we're working with. We also have some really exciting exciting announcements coming soon with some really big teams in the space um that are actually going to be very key for helping us solve this interop problem. So I still want to keep the alpha like a little bit but can hopefully in cans okay so very soon something will happen very soon are you going I won't be but the rest of the team is there okay we'll we'll miss you um I am curious if you can share do you have like a leaderboard even if it's something that maybe you guys just you know think about internally but you know are thinking about you know making more public who is currently sending you the most proofs right now you know like where does your order flow for these proofs come from is it any of the teams

that you mentioned? Yeah, it is actually majority of the teams that like I mentioned. Obviously, a lot of the proofs also come from um like roll-ups primarily like roll-ups that are using us for validity proving. We actually have a team called Highly. I don't know if you guys have heard of this team. Um they're pretty revolutionary. I think they've uh built like an L1 from the ground up as to what it would look like today. And they're doing quite a lot of significant order flow specifically because they're thinking about this problem from similar to us like what does it look like from the ground up and what is the outcome that we want for developers in the future, right? Do we want developers to build applications on one chain and then have to duplicate the logic and manage multiple repos and be constrained honestly by the chains that

they're on or by the chains that they want to service rather than their users. And highly has been thinking about that very very clearly from the get- go. Um and so they have a lot of these uh gaming applications um that I think is actually going to be what ZK Interoprop also unlocks like in you know going back to your second question um in the long run. Um they're sending a lot of proofs obviously um you know to our network and they're definitely testing the network at its peak and I'm really grateful for it. Yeah, we love we love uh pushing all that demand. I I had a question about building ecosystem in general. you know, you you're kind of out there talking to all these teams in these conferences, you're meeting people, shaking hands.

Yeah. You know, when you're thinking about building an ecosystem and and teams are struggling with this, right? They're thinking, "Oh, we want to make revenue, but if we charge teams, then we're going to kind of we're going to kind of limit, you know, the teams that we can have in our ecosystem." What kind of advice would you give to any marketers or salespeople or just general community and ecosystem uh personnel that are out there on some of these teams? Some patterns maybe that you've picked up along your journey that you've that that have worked for you that maybe you can share with others. Yeah, I think um trying to understand your own economic flywheel is extremely important because just like how this goes a little bit to the intera problem. What we're

trying to solve here for devs is a prioritization issue, right? Because instead of developers and app developers prioritizing their users, they're prioritizing chains. And that's kind of the bottleneck there. Similar to us, what are we trying to prioritize as a ecosystem lead or as a ecosystem team? Um, in boundless like the way that we've thought about this is through proof of verifiable work. And this is really a ode to the roots of the industry in like Bitcoin. So for us one big piece on the demand side is how do we make it super easy for developers or any sort of teams like rollups or infrastructure providers to use us. We've built at the risk zero side a lot of tooling that boundless is

going to inherit to make that happen. Obviously steel you may have heard this like is one of them which is like execution prover. Um and on the other side there's a supply problem, right? How do you ensure how do you build a decentralized open proof marketplace proving protocol, right? That is going to be live and that's going to continue to be live from day one. It's going to be reliable and it's going to basically create an experience that's similar in the long run to AWS or using Versell. That's really what we're aiming for. And proof of verifiable work is super key to this. Yeah. Because we're not just thinking about willy-nilly rewarding folks for just doing some sort of arbitrary work. The work that we've done historically on the ZKVM circuit at risk

zero really plays way into this because how we quantify the cycles and the proving is really key to how we actually incentivize the provers to stay live and um to be engaged and to keep on pro providing compute and keep on providing compute that's decentralized and open and where there's no loss in trust that's happening. So that is super key. And so when I'm thinking about building the ecosystem, I literally like dream about this economic flywheel. Sometimes it's a great dream and sometimes it's a nightmare, you know, cuz like every other team, demand is always the bottleneck and demand is always a problem. So you always have to think about, okay, well, like first I got to

secure the demand that's going to make my supply, keep my supply happy, and then I have to think about, okay, how else can I push this demand further? What else does this demand unlock? So for us obviously the biggest form of demand is like networks and proving rollups right as I mentioned securing as many roll-ups as possible or not even or securing the best quality rollups. That's in my case because quality is what well over quantity is very key. And then how do I create again tooling and tooling that all of these rollups can essentially use. So this is where ZK interop comes in. How do I create tooling that all of these roll-ups can essentially use? so that devs will want to come and just deploy an application

on boundless and they can access all of these networks from day one. So that's how I'm thinking about it. How do I h how do I fix my cold start problem and then how do I stretch my demand problem so that it actually applies to applications in the long run. Um I think that's very key for me. That's kind of the fundamental pieces that like I'm using. And from there on we're also then thinking about the economics of it all. How do we make it viable? How do we how do we who do we partner up with to sell it? Having really key distribution partners is very very important. Having partners who are specialized than us in like smart contract development, right?

Or even in other networks and understanding other networks really well is very very important. We're experts in ZK but we're not the experts in everything. And so finding those complimentary partners who are also going to help us scale once we have those quality networks in place to prove the entire economic flywheel is very key. And so that's how we're kind of thinking about it from like you know playbook rule number one. It sounds like pragmatically you've got it under control. One last one for you Mash. Um what what are you particularly excited about and bullish on and what are you bearish or fearful about? Oh my god. bearish. I'm not I'm not too bearish on too many things. Um I'm bullish on so much. Um I

think we have so much momentum like as an industry. I I definitely sense that there is a little bit of apprehension um you know from like some of the the banks that are coming in and and a little bit of the of the you know like the institutional side. But it's also really great because I think that yes, we've stri we've like from day one we've like gone out to build like a lot of important like trustless infrastructure but the financial industry is like starting to trust us and I think that that's very key. I also think what's going to be very important is that for us to also introduce in boundless to the industry is this idea and this cultural mind shift around security. So security

has always been like something that everyone like talks about with a lot of grandiose and a lot of like importance. But when it comes to decision- making, a lot of teams don't actually make the most don't base their decisions on like security. You know, a lot of teams are still relying on multisig. They're still relying on these trusted oracles. Now that financial institutions are coming into place, security is going to be highly highly important for them. Privacy of inputs is going to be highly highly important with them. are actually already working with a bunch of, you know, institutional folks like Libre Capital who are using our ZKVM in private mode um to prove and verify their assets on chain. But there's also going to be a lot of teams that don't want to just, you know, do it in private mode. They're going to want to interact

with EVM and even like hyperlquid or hyper hyper EVM while keeping their inputs private and, you know, engaging in trustless and decentralized tech. So I'm very excited and bullish on kind of this idea of the financial in institutions coming in and upholding the narrative of security and I think this is where ZK is really going to find its place and it's really going to be able to you know proliferate um and proliferate in that decision-m that practical decision making and I also think this is going to be the key as to why ZK interrup is going to be very important you know you have teams like wormhole with the ripple announcement who which is an amazing win for them.

They're also working with amazing um you know institutional partners like Securitize and Black Rockck. All of these teams eventually down the line are really going to have to care about the security and the trustlessness of the infrastructure that they're engaging with. Agreed. And this is really where ZKO meets them where they are. And so that's what I'm super bullish on. I got one more question for you and it's it's sort of on it's on this topic but also on on the ecosystem and and that's around verifiable work right that that uh uh that you mentioned but also um it it seems bigger than just that it seems like the entire export of our industry is verifiability. Oh totally. Yeah. Like

like that is what like essentially all these teams are sort of exporting to the outside world. um a team in in the ecosystem IEN layer uh just uh they they recently announced the uh the verifiable cloud right and so as I understand it you guys are helping verify the slashing table like the the matrix of all the balances of ETH that's rest all the accounts and I and I had a a podcast with Jeremy and Siri about this and and it was it was a fascinating conversation and so I'm curious you know would would Do you say that like as you're helping some of these partners, you guys are are really helping to push the verifiability of this space and this

is the main export of our industry and you guys are very key players in this. Do you do you see another key export that we're sort of the product or service that we're providing to these financial institutions, gaming companies? Is is this the main innovation here or do you see maybe there's something else that's complimenting? I think verifiability is going to be the backbone, right? Um I think it's great if it if it is the export and I think we as an industry specifically on the infra side, I'm really glad that we're all coming together on this one notion that yes, we as an industry have to work together to make sure all layers of the stack is verifiable from the cloud to the compute to the execution right to where the proof slipped all of that and I think

that's awesome but ultimately that's just the backbone. I think for me, and this is I'm biased because I have a relatively consumer background. You know, my partner works in the consumer space and I've just seen it firsthand like how hard it is for these devs um to kind of build a product that really uses crypto to its maximum potential find and find PMF because again they have this prioritization problem. So yes, verifiability is like one of those key things, but I think what we're really all and all of us as an industry from bridge providers to networks to infra providers, what we're all really trying to unlock is a unified interface for developers to just deploy once and be everywhere and use crypto as a backend

rails like very easily. Um, and I think that that's really what we're trying to do at Boundless 2. you know the fact the fact that our verification is everywhere is because we want developers to just deploy once on boundless and not to worry about their TAM not worry about you know oh my god do I focus on arbitum or do I focus on bass or do I focus on Salana it's like cool what if you focused on bass and you were live on Salana from day one two and you were live on arbitum from day one too um I think like there needs to be I think sometimes like when you're in the infra bubble you lose kind of touch as to like what your users really care about are users are not end users. Our users are developers. And so what are the problems

that they're facing on a day-to-day basis? What are the prioritization issues and frameworks that they have to go through every single day? And how do we make that easier for them? Obviously, like as I mentioned, the tooling that we are doing to basically execute a lot of this, you know, complex logic offchain, bring it on chain is a key piece. The verifier contracts that we're doing is a key piece. Um, and now it's all about, okay, well then what does this post interop world look like? What does the post interop unified interface look like? How does that even feel for the developer? How seamless does it feel? I think that's going to be the main export. Um, I think we want developers to feel empowered to build global applications that are verifiable

from the get-go, from day one, and they don't have to think about whether it's verifiable or not, but we're powering it, right? You know, yeah. And I think that that would be the future that I'm really excited to build. Well, I think the whole ecosystem is about to get burrified the next two, three weeks. So, I know you've got a lot on your plate. You're busy now. We're busy. We'll let you go. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Pleasure to meet you and chat. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Absolute pleasure. Are you briified, Rob? Wait, wait, wait. I have I feel boundless. Well, can I get you guys?

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on. He needs something like strawberries, raspberries, something like that. Blueberries, something like that. Up next, we got Daryl, uh, head of special projects layer zero. Uh, he's going to join us today. Going to talk to him about just anything but infra deep. Anything but infra. Going to ask him what he thinks about coin circle, the market, and and beyond. We're going to get him up here. Make sure he's taken care of and ready to go.

Come on up, Daryl. Yeah, join the party. Wash is gonna I think is gonna give us a a gift here. But what's up, man? The show, Daryl. All right, D. First question for you. Okay, pump all the hype backs. Coinbase is pumping today. Circle is down. Is there a real rotation between Circle investors into Coinbase after they've realized that Coinbase is getting over 50% of the revenue from USDC? I'm pretty sure like every single person looking into like the Circle IPO was like this is this is like a super bullish case for like for Coinbase. Yes.

And then every every single tweet I've seen about Circle has just been like how overvalued it is and how much you want to short it. Which brings up an interesting point whereas like we've seen people in like crypto talking about like how they want to open access to equities, but then they didn't actually allow like I couldn't find like a very liquid market to short circle and it's like really really hard to like find that. So I spent like a day just like looking how to short and then I couldn't open like a large position either. So like seeing that like come back to life it's like okay like it makes me also okay when I was looking at circle the other day and it's like almost 290 bucks. I was just like okay does this mean like every other like DeFi asset that we know that's like touches like

that has like real world revenues or like like much much like capital efficiencies would that be like undervalued then? So we look at likeina, we look at like everything else that's like working on like different stable coins that had e bearing like distribution potential that's like okay is this a world where like traffic is like really horny I guess for like for like stable coin exposure. I think they were Yeah. I mean like that thing went that thing went crazy from from the launch. It was like 31 bucks to like 290. I don't know what's the peak. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Are you still uh super bullish on hype here at like 3840? Yeah.

I think it's like the over past few like since the start of the law like okay no even before the launch of hype like the hype token like using the platform myself I was like okay this is a team that gets like that gets traders that knows like exactly what's the trade-offs they want to make to get like a better UX they had like no fees they had like prioritized cancels and they even for like the points program it was like perfectly designed to like get the best distribution and they were very like and then once the token launched for example it was like okay we have all these fees fees that we generate from like perpetual trading all the trading all the trading fees that's like millions of dollars a day and then it's buying back the token. So like even and basically perpetual as a business perpetual

trading is as business like it's like you feed you drive off volatility like even if markets are up you your volumes are like insanely up and markets are down like you get insane amount of like volume from like all the liquidations as well. Yeah. So like very much like um it's like one of the most like cleanest implementations of like tokconomics I've seen and it's like I think as the market continues like they've just like dominated the market share but then also like now we see more and more competitors come into the market whereas like they're launching hyper like perpetual style exchanges. So you see the few people just trying to like farm the new exchanges. Yeah. Like lighter, right? Yeah. Like lighter. Yeah.

Exactly. But you also see like the so it's one of the few like pro protocols that I've seen that's just like expanded the whole market share as a as a whole made it success like usually you see like people cannibalizing each other. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I saw it tweet that was like why don't most why don't other teams try to like you know copy what like the tokconomics and stuff as well. I don't think it's just tokconomics though. I think it's like the product as well. And also like the the fact that Jeff for example is like very clear that okay I'm not going to sell any tokens to any market makers any investors like anyone who wants to anyone who wants the token has to like buy it or have used the platform before before the token to token dropped. So it's very much like

equal opportunity for anyone like anyone could have like bought the tokens when it when the token came out like anyone could have seen like for example like okay that's like a literal fund buying like it's a literal like like hyper liquid itself is like literally buying back tokens every day. Yeah, exactly. And it's like it's a nice flywheel. It's a insanely nice flywheel. They bought back like I think 7.5% of circular supply already and it's been less than a year and I when I talk how much% 7.5% of circul treasury yeah yeah exactly and it's like the I think I've seen for example like the like it's just very clean like you can't people people make the take that okay I

can copy the tokconomics I can copy the point schedule but it's not like that I think it's like they've just done really well and like you've seen like the team you give confidence in a team. What happens when there's no more supply for them to buy? Then they go what happens when there's some more bitcoins to go buy? I guess same question. Somebody was saying that like at a certain amount of volume per day at a certain price, it's like it gets it gets crazy. But that's like very toppy and very like bull signaly. Like I don't know. I think I think there's going to be a good like uh exit signal on hype when it's doing relatively like if it and this something this is not my opinion it's something that I heard but if if it tops Binance in like 24-hour per volumes or something

or trading volume that's like it's like a pretty good like uh but maybe not maybe it's not an exit signal but that's a pretty good sign of like okay yeah I think valuations wise like if I look at it like purely from my example like okay my like we've always had like a higher premium. So like valuations compared to in crypto compared to like traditional markets of course like circle coinbase sale and like you compare that valuation like okay hyperlink is at 40 billion dollars valuation like fully fully like diluted and Robin is like what like 80 100 mil I think I'm not too sure but that's like 2x. Yeah. But we also have like much more capital efficiency and much more like like clarity with like the revenue buybacks cuz like I think Robin Hood made like a billion dollars last year. Hyperlucas has made like 500

$600 million like in the past six months. Yeah. So on track to do the same. Yeah. How do you how do you think about like not just in the liquid market but like exit exit strategy in general? Like you've done some private market investing, angel investing, you know, us too. And so you know we we did most of our angel investing 18 months to like 6 months ago. It sort of slowed down in the last 6 months, right? And most of these cliffs are like a year after token generation. And so several of these most of these have not even launched a token, right? So there's very few that have and are starting to approach the cliff, right? H how do you once you start to see you know these liquidity generation events? Is it like take you're probably

not selling as soon as you get the ability to. How do you make sure that you're not selling, you know, the the company that's going to survive the next 20, 25 years, the next Apple, the next, right, Amazon? Like, if you angel invest, these are once in a-lifetime investment opportunities. How do you how do you judge like, okay, this is this company's going to be around a long time. I'm going to hold it for a very long time horizon. Okay. And then generally like an exit strategy along with that. Okay. So, there's a few like different questions here. Like one is like how do I exit? I guess like how do I evaluate companies that has like long-term hold potentials and it's like like okay like I work at layer zero for example and I'm like I was an early investor back then and I and the way I

look at it today is like okay this is you whenever I'm doing like a venture style investment I look at it like in like three buckets broadly like one is like who is the team what have they done previously and what how are they best positioned to like target the market that they want to go for today what is the product they're building whether it's like a huge enough time whether it's like on whether take all solution market or like whether there can be like a few dominant players and then after that I see like basically when we invest in seed we we are accepting the liquidity for like years we are happy we are happy to wait it out and like it's really much like uh I want to bet on this founded and I want to be able to get there on like ground zero but I also

fully accept that it's going to go to zero I've had like 70% of like my my venture investors just like never do a TG and it's been years and or even when they do a TG it's like straight zero. I kept seeing tweets like that like I did 50 deals, 36 of them haven't even launched a token yet. Yeah, exactly. And it's like at this point I write it off. But I also think like okay there are some winners that like we've like there are some winners that have basically gone like all the way like 10 1000 X's but then at the same time it's like when you we did that valuation it's like not it wasn't like large checks also as well right so it's like we so even when you want to exit like okay there's when you want to exit that position you can also

go to like market makers and like do like a you can do arrange for like a T- op or sell sell around them like you shouldn't be like full stack Hitlering it I guess like they shouldn't be selling it immediately but like yeah when I look at like for example like like the Amazon IPO or like traditional tax stock investments like all these companies were like doing like much much lower volume so like much much lower revenues but if you held the like Amazon IPO 25 years like it's just like but is that the same for like crypto assets right is is the same like like should we be thinking about like oh you invest in you know maybe you did like Athena or something you know is Athena a 20 year project that like if you did the like the angel round but four years after you

were unlocked and you you you exited. Yeah. Then you look back in 15 years and you're like why the [ __ ] did I exit? I was so early to like the next revolution. So then yeah then it becomes like I guess like for me it's always been like personally like do I need this money today? Am I like keep a moon bag right? I keep a moon bag. It's like always like what I tell people. It's just like it's like do like to me it's like my life does not materially change if I sell like one bag. And it's like if I'm still if I see like fundamentals have only improved like throughout the time that I'm holding that asset. So for example like we see like ET or like some so some so many teams today like raise a bunch of money like in a later stages

around like later stages like I think A16Z has bought like tokens in a layer or like layer zero and like and a few other companies they've doubled down on their investment literally. So essentially they believe they've seen that like all these teams have like shipped much much more have like dominated the market share and like they believe that these seeds will like continue dominating for the next few years. Yeah. So that's always been like the way I think about is like I think a lot of people confuse C dove investing like okay these guys get in really really cheap but at the same time like anyone could also like double down or like increase exposure over time right I've heard like stories where like uh Masa like he he completely missed like Nvidia but then he after that and after that he just like bought like much he

were aped into like open AI and stuff so he knew he learned all that stories. Yeah of course it's like it's always about like how much do you learn from like all these trading investments mistakes as well. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you think we are in the cycle right now? And like do you think we are in like a like four year cycle type of thing? Like uh I don't think I don't believe in a four year cycle anymore after. Okay. But where are we at in like the speculative cycle then? Cuz there's going to like Okay. Then then yeah like like where we at? Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious. So the way I look at it is really is like how people think about the market. Like I think like for us we've always had like two lenses. One is like a trader perspective and one is like the builder

perspective. And like the way that I see like traders today is like they are a lot more like okay this is like the boring cycle whereas like we've had the president literally changed the whole regime and like be extremely bullish about crypto made it like super easy for any businesses to build in the US and that's like the most bullish like regulatory change that could have happened. Yeah. for crypto. And so now we see like all these institutions like I see like stable coins announcements every single day from like companies I've heard of like 10 years ago like bridge launched their own stable coin vis Visa Mastercard they're launching stable coins. It's like all these companies are coming into crypto but it's like what does it mean for like the enthusiasts? What does it mean for like the hobbyists like right cuz that it feels like that's a top signal. It feels

I wouldn't say it's a top signal but I'll say like things are going to be like a lot more like formalized. Yeah. People things are going to be a lot more slower. It's going to be like a lot more like corporate. And it's like for us like I don't know like we were like kids getting into we were like college kids getting into like getting into crypto. We were like the ones that we want to like redesign the whole like financial economy. We want to we want to like [ __ ] around and find out basically. We want like we want to be able to send money anywhere to like buy like CS GO skins. Like we didn't care about all that stuff. So like when you see that so that it's going to be like obviously a huge influx of people that had like no

exposure to this pirate and they were like completely missed out like the seven year history of like crypto but it's also like we reach much more people that way. I think we've there was a talk yesterday uh D5 renaissance where they were talking about like we spent the past five years maximizing like decentralization opening really opening up the floor of like all DeFi place to be infrastructure to be used everywhere but then like all the retailers like why do I need like so many wallets why do I need like what what are these chains like what all these stuff is like super max confusing so I think like we are making like on a builder perspective we are making like really really good changes to like have crypto in the hands of anyone and We I think it's a time where it's like we have like the best possible like

environment for like a builder. Yeah. One way to think about it maybe is like the way I'm thinking about it is like you're adding liquidity at the top like you kind of like had a low liquidity environment. It was almost like crypto anarchist. It was like still very volatile and then you know we sort of had a okay you know Bitcoin is still around alltime highs. coins, you know, are doing what they're doing. And it's like all of this new adoption came into the space. It helped kind of stabilize things right where they are right now. And so I think we may see less volatility as we progress. No, 100%. I think we see much less volatility, but we also see like I think like in what you're trying to allude to is like the market cycles where it's like you go

really really high up and it's like peak speculation and then you go down a bit, but then there you make a new low. I think that's like what you want as well. was like you want to make like you want to make like a new like a higher low than before of like adoption people who have used cryptocurrency people who understand like what's the benefits people who people have like actually like show like we have like more much more applications today where I can show people like hey you can this is how you can on board in crypto in like 30 seconds yeah yeah and that's like I think powerful yeah I'm I'm curious what you think about Celestia the reason I ask is because you mentioned some of these VCs are doubling down and I haven't heard that about Celestia and I'm curious why you why you

think that might be. Okay. Okay. So I think like Celestia has like Celestia's did a few things right for like in initial stages like for like VCs for example it's like what what I want to fund is like net new ideas that open up a new opportunity at a new market and Celestia was like basically the only player that I was like I'm going to build a whole data availability solution that's like modular and it's like when as like a VC investor you like okay this is like actually a new idea it's a really really solid team like why not back this so everyone's like happy to invest in that round and then like three years later down the road you're like Okay. What has how much adoption has that been like how many applications are using are using Celestia today? How much like I guess like like uh how much data

storage is actually how much data is actually stored but like and the it's also like how much volume that you need to do like to maintain a network of that of that size. I think like most people today is like we look at we look at like a lot of like revenue plays but then we and like obviously revenues are going to be dominated by like applications right you have like maker you have like maker hyperlquid they're all like dominating in pure revenue that they generate like all all defy stuff which is basically like they earn revenues from like the swap fees the interest fees and like for networks like celestia or even like layer zero as well is we earn fees as well but like we've it's more of a growth adoption it's more of a growth it's more of like a growth tech stock

model. So basically I look at like for example Amazon spent like 30 20 30 years building out like all the distribution and then even or even like for example like subways like they take like 10 20 years to be build out but now you see like millions of people go through them every day right so I think like it's one of those cases where it's like you're going to look at it like do I think like the price is going to be it's the price is like beaten down for sure for like Celestia. Yeah. On pretty much all all the VC coins gets the worst hate of it all though. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's like the I think Celestia got the most hate cuz like all the staking remorse as well. People people were able to stake which did create like a whole trend

where it's like should we or like locked people be allowed to like stake their coins and sell it indiscriminately. Yeah. Like we see and that was a good like discussion to come out where like now I don't see most teams doing that anymore. It's much better for like the retail entrance when they come in they know that everyone else they know that they are the ones that can are getting the security rewards alone and they won't be like indiscriminately dumped on I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's a it feels like the cohort of of VCs and angel investors from like 17 18 1920 had a much easier run than like the current cohort of like but also at the same time there's there's uh but like also you also have like the current cohort like it for example right of course and like these winning D5 companies and then like

all these new founders coming in from web 2 and like but I also think like it was a good example whereas like ETNA was the first echo round whereas like any anyone could which was a big which was a big thing like everyone's every single person could like invest in ATR through the Echaround which is like a public crowd sale of sorts. Yeah. And that basically opened up the door for like a lot of people to like enter enter like ground zero. Yeah. And now AT has like56 billion valuation. So that's an insane win for them. I missed out on that one. Yeah. Dude, how do you think about like um the the actual multicycle of tokens, right? So like you look at like Ethereum that you know started at like whatever the ICO price. I think it went up to like, you know, a couple hundred bucks.

Had a hack, went back down to or like went to like 30 bucks, back down to like five or six, kind of based out. Then in the next run went to 1,200 in 2017, back to 80, 5K in 21, back to a,000. Now, like, you know, it could go up again or down, whatever. BTC, same thing. Soul, same thing. like like do you expect a lot of these other tokens to have these types of like multicycle performance like up and to the right or like are were those like are are those like special snowflakes and you kind of see like like basically what I'm trying to get at is how do how are we supposed to be thinking about these networks in like a 10 year time horizon from like an investor's perspective with with with

these large cycles. Um yeah I think okay first of all I think most alls are going to zero okay like I think so like that's not going to be the case for a lot of these I think for a lot a lot of these things are not they're not going to maintain like up and to the right I think for like for like all the mention all the cases that you mentioned like all these teams like okay Bitcoin Ethereum Solana I can go I can go at them at case by case basis like Bitcoin you you always had the clear narrative of like this is the this is like digital gold and like Ethereum for example was like the initial stages just like the only smart contract platform you could do. Yeah, that you could build on like applications you could build like and then it was like the most resilient and

like most open developer community back then and you had like so many like innovations come out from Ethereum that people then replicated on like all the other chains but Ethereum was always like the main value storage like layer like I have I think even today you still have like most of the TVL of D5 still on Ethereum. Yeah. And then Solana for example came on later on and Solana had like a really really big big push towards like trying to break things really really fast. to try to like try new things that was like very much a consumer focused very much like product product focus and that's like where like Ethereum diverged from like Salana cuz Ethereum went more into like the research route like how do we do ZK how do we like scale up L2s and like S has always been like we are engineers we

know we know exactly like what's the theoretical li what's actual limit practical limit and we're going to push that to the absolute limit yeah and like you had all the other engineers who who are familiar with the code base like Rust and everything they came in they're like okay this is a system that we actually believe in and we actually like and push hard on and that that's like why it got like so much adoption as well like and that's why like everyone started building all the consumer friendly apps. Yeah. That's I think that's like and like most other meme coins or most other like alts they don't have like they need to like have like three things I guess like what is like the narrative the narrative around them like whether and whether that fits the time test of time cuz I see like so many

flashes in the pants where it's like you are like the next big thing for like two months and then it goes to zero that happens to a lot of these things. So it's like you have to like really think about like the longevity of like how you think about your system or your network or or your application like what what is it I can build today that can like last for like 5 10 years. So on that note are you bullish or bearish pump fund ICO $4 billion FTV raise trying to raise a billion is that something that is that something that's exciting to you or is that just not going to happen? Uh you mean not going to happen by like buying it? Yeah. Yeah. Like like like you know copper drop you know not financial advice. Not financial advice. Um so to me it's like I look I look at like

launchpads as just like okay pop fund by by far has been like one of the most profitable applications in crypto like they've made like I don't know $700 million in past like past few years of existence and you the way I would look at it is like kind of boring where it's like I could look at it I could look at the trend of like pop fun launches the past few months and it's been like slowly decreasing over time. I look at for example like all the meme coins that have graduated and how much volumes have been they've been doing or how high they've been reached. Not really. But you can argue that like pump fund when they launch this token that's going to be a huge capital injection. Yeah.

They're going to be able to do like all kinds of crazy [ __ ] They can they are able to like at a billion dollar race. You can buy anything you want. Yeah. And you can buy teams, you can buy wallet, you can buy products, you can build a whole ecosystem. Yeah. And like they've really gone the route to like okay now we have like live streams. if you want to like have the retail friendly crowd coming in. And I think like that's not something to fade, but I'm probably not going to trade this. I think like one thing about crypto traders or like it's like we it's the same like poker where you can actually decide to like fold your chips and not make it not make a trade. Like I'm just going to watch from the sidelines for this one. Like like I'm very curious to see how it plays out

cuz like I haven't seen a race of that size ever. I think in crypto and like usually for large races you have like much more people like you have like all the liquidity gets sucked out and it's a drain and then then it's just like quiet and boring for a while. So I'm like very curious to see what happens. So Poly Market is raising 200 million at a $1 billion valuation. Right now on the face of it I'm way more bullish on Poly Market at 1 billion than Pump Fund at 4 billion.

Right? But Poly Market's not they're raising an equity round. They're not raising a token. So like again same same question but to poly market bullish or bearish at a $1 billion valuation probably bullish. Yeah probably bullish. I think it's like the evaluation if purely compared to pumped out fund we basically have like I think prediction markets have have always been like one of those like okay what are the markets that actually would get a lot of volume like a lot of people were thinking that after the elections is done that that's that's it for poly market volume but they they've really managed to like carve out a niche where it's like you're betting on political events you're betting on like wars you're betting on like sports events as well and like those are things that most people like naturally flock to or like naturally

understand I can like easily go up to you and be like, "Okay, who do you think is going to win the game the NBA finals tonight?" Or like, and we we understand that like intuitively. So, there's a much better market for that. And it's like for like pump fun for example, you're like you're explaining to someone like, "Okay, pump fun is a like a memecoin launcher. Like, why would I buy a meme?" Like, and then you have to explain it's like much more harder to get asked. It feel Yeah, you're right. It feels like a much like hard like a much less intuitive form of tokenizing culture. Yes. Exactly. Whereas Poly Market has been able to do that and they've been able to almost become the source of truth. Pump Fund was almost trying to be the source of truth for a little while but and and I think they

are still trying to do that but they haven't had the same success. I also I also like the fact that like like for prediction markets they have like a very set deadline or like time frame like so you you know exactly what you're getting into. You know exactly like how long this hype will last and like when you can trade in and out of that. So like most meme coins like people complain that they die. Yeah. But that's like actually true of like all hype cycles or like all hype like everything about all the fats that we've seen over the past few years like they don't last long. Like tokens aren't supposed to last long, right? Yeah. Yeah. What else are you What else are you looking at either in the private market or the liquid market right now that has caught your attention? Um

let's see. I think like liquid market wise it's been like there was like a thread from Kobe, right? Tobius tweeted out like okay what are people interested in buying and it's like what would you hold like other than like the majors and or hyper liquid and it's like pretty interesting to see like most of the answers were around like a maker or like all the revenue generating place and that's basically like okay are we going into like the more fundamental investor approach it's like do fundamentals finally matter after like seven 10 years of like building in crypto which is like an interesting perspective to like see but then it becomes like if everyone's looking at this then like all the alpha is like kind of gone. So it's like if everyone's like thinking like this is like the play the next play. Mhm. So that's going to be always like that's

like an area where I like to I don't like to be like going like super populated fields as well. Right. Right. Cuz you kind of want a contrarian opinion that's where the edge is. Yeah. But I think you're right like it at least on the surface of it, it seems like it's been a fundamental season. It's like kind of a bull market in in pockets, right? Which is actually like really good. Like this is what you were dreaming of like back then. It's like when like D5 first started, we that's what we're dreaming of like eventually all these things will have like huge like TVLs and huge like application usages like everything can be built on top of each other and it made so much more sense right it's like fundamentals would like just blow everything out of the water yeah bitcoins stable coins revenue generating projects these are

all doing really really well do you think there's going to come a time maybe it's when monetary policy and macro is a little bit you know cooler or hotter right and they start lowering rates they start, you know, printing money again. Um, e, you know, ETH Bitcoin bottoms, altcoins outper. Do you think we ever get like that outperformance above majors, above the fundamentals from coins that are further down the risk curve? I would hope so. But at the same time, it's also like we've seen so much more coins launch. Yeah. Whereas like the magnitude has just been like 100 or 10 50x larger than like all the previous years and just only slowly increases. So there's only so much liquidity that you can see to come in, right? So it's like and it's alo like this first was like

what's hot today like I don't like and that's why meme coins were really soaring in popularity like basically nobody believed in like fundamentals like for a while and everyone just like I rather just buy memes cuz it's funny it makes me laugh and then everything just ripped something I could see that happening. Yeah. Yeah. H how much? So you could see you could see like all old season return like mid coins rip but I guess like all season returns but like for the newer vintages always the shiny new the shiny new coins so like shiny new trends for the day like I think we saw that with like AI as well the past like year like when when AI started like when open AI started being popular everyone was trying to figure out like how does crypto AI like how does crypto AI work in a way and like we we still

haven't figured this out like this is like still like open question like how does crypto or AI AI intersect and like improve each other. Yeah. But like there was like insane mania around like all the AI agents for example and all the coins. I still hear Mark Andre talking about this problem in AI with deep fakes and being able to authenticate a piece of media or content via blockchain and and you know Mark Andre obviously A16C and Andre Horo it's like just massive massive VC in both web 3 and web two continues to shill crypto and AI. He's obviously talking his book, but it's in a very specific topic and a very specific use case of the technology. And so is it essentially the the opinion here seems

to be like okay 99% of this is grift but you can see that there is one really or you know a a pretty specific set of really valuable applications in the crypto AI space. Yeah, I actually agree with Mark. It's like I think I think like a crypto is one of the only ways that you can like verify something is true and like have a have provenence history and like actually and like AI is like yeah it's true. It's like I've seen so much like art generated from like AI nowadays. I'm not sure it's real. I've seen like people generating videos now too like when are you guys going to switch over to that? I know right. Like you guys we're already trying to clone our voice for like reading ad reads.

Yeah, you can like uh clone your voice and and just have like these digital ads. So, it's pretty tricky, but it's still not there yet. It's close. Like I imagine a world where it's like I could like just type out like a essay or paragraph and then I could just be like, "Hey, I want like Robbie's Robbie's hit to just like say this all and that like that would like save like a lot of people's time." But then also open up question like can anyone like deep fake you like Yeah, I know, right? Yeah. Well, you already see that with Joe Rogan, with Trump, right? Like people just type these prompts and then next thing you know it's like Trump talking about them re re uh rebirththing you know dinosaurs to like patrol the border down south right it's like we're going to have guys on on pterodactyls and

teeth right and they're you know so that there is a video that went viral of him talking about that he obviously didn't actually say those things someone just typed it up and then he and then there's a deep fake video of him saying it and so you can imagine this gets It's real trippy real fast, right? Like the because there is the capability of doing that. It just hasn't gotten commoditized to the point where like it's really really good and it's able for anyone to use. And so when that it's inevitable that it happens. Yes. At at that point it's like okay we're really gonna have to think about you know with all of this wild this content in the wild west.

this this this reality that Mark Andre is talking about becomes even more important that the authentication of right like imagine there's someone that makes a deep fake of of you know and I or or you right and shilling their project right and then all of a sudden it's like oh like that would be the worst thing in the world well if it if it's a rug I think right then it's like potentially really predatory right if they're potentially if they're saying that like oh these guys marketed it it gets maybe some buyers and then people you know drain the liquidity It's like hey we didn't do that right right I got it so like that that that application becomes ever more important and blockchain right is the technology to solve that but I think I don't know I keep I think try to think back for like

previous examples and like I go back to like Bitcoin where for example when Bitcoin was created it's basically to like show that you had like programmable money and like a set issuance standard set set inflation standard. Yeah and like that was like a way for like to us like counteract like banks printing money out in air. Yeah. So we knew this was real. We knew this is like like we knew this approvably real. We could see everything that happened before in history and like and the origins of it all. And that's like one of the innovations that crypto has like pioneered in a sense. So I really do see like a potential where like we pioneer like AI identification or AI verification. Yeah. And then you'll see like for example how do we scale that up in a way? Yeah. Darl man we got to let

you go. Yeah. Okay. No worries. Thank you so much for having a good conference. Enjoy. That guy's awesome. All righty. Up next, we've got Santi. Um, it's here. Santi, we are ready. Where you are, brother? Um, where do you get Santi? Up. Pull it. Pull the table a little bit. I need more space for you, man. Do a little a little change here. See real quick. A little bit of a break.

Yeah, not much. Yes, sir. So, we got Santi up next. Um, then we got Hib coming and then Hersh. So, it should be a good couple panels here. Um, I had to run out. Had to had to go to the bathroom. Back now. Back in action. I got the pump up on answer I was looking for there. I think I'm going to hit the restroom real quick before getting up here. Yeah. Yeah, man. All right, guys. Um, how we doing here today?

Santi's coming up. All right, guys. We got um gonna talk to talk to you about his company inversion um and the transition to being a builder. Man, who knew who who knew, right? Where do you want me to sit? Yeah, he was fine. Rob will come back in a sec. How are you, man? Good, man. Good to see you. I like the setup. Appreciate it. Are you based now here or spending most of your time? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I moved here uh for the last three-ish months. It was just a three-month plan.

Um, we're we're live, by the way. Oh. Oh, okay. Great. You're all good, though. Um, I'm actually like coming up on like the end of my trip. So, where are you going next? We're going to go to ECC for can. Okay. And then from there, we'll we'll we'll see how it goes. I love the nomadic life. Yeah, man. You've been traveling quite a bit as well. Not as much not as much as you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How was the How was the Avalanche Summit? Uh, it's very good. You know, I I've been to a few Avalanche uh conferences. I think I went the one of the first ones in Barcelona. Yeah. Um this is very serious people, you know, like um a lot of really good builders, like not fluff at all. Um it was very the venue was great. Yeah. We we were the opening I was the opening speaker

which was caught off guard. I was like I thought Emmen was going to open it. Like no no you're going you're going to pitch inversion. I'm like okay. Uh but it was great. I mean I I really um I've been very very impressed by the caliber of um other ecosystems that I perhaps like was not paying enough attention to you. Of course I've gone deep into the avalanche working with them tied to the hip and you know Virgin will be avalanche L1. So yeah. Yeah. Just u very serious from a you know I come from traditional finance, private equity, J investment banking, JP Morgan like I'm dusting off like you know it's like I come to these conferences and um uh I spend most of my time not in crypto conferences. Yeah, but Avalanche is like

the closest thing to like enterprise grade the quality of the team and for for us it matters a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you've been so you finished the raise as of recent. I'm not sure if it's been announced. It has not been announced. Okay. Well, I'm spilling the I'm spilling the tea of it. Um otherwise, um it's been what a couple months now. Heads down focus. You guys been hiring um doing a ton. I'm just curious like what's been your lifestyle change from like before starting inversion to now and like how have you been adapting to that? Uh great question. I mean it's it's not that dissimilar from investing. I mean you you are also an investor. Yeah.

disclosure, especially when when you're investing in early stage projects, the thing that you need to assess is it's it's a, you know, try to get a gauge of like how good is the founder and is he going to be able to inspire other people to join the the the the team and like if you're a venture capitalist, that's a skill set that you need to refine. like it's a very you're reading people and you're assessing technical competence and leadership skills and I think uh as a builder now I've it's like going a step further because you get to do it and I'm now in a position where I need to convince smarter people to join across many different areas and it's so rewarding. I can't I'm like addicted to now I'm like who else can I go out and sell on this idea and then have them

join the team and and honestly it's been so hey what's up really it's it's it's so rewarding you know because I mean I you're familiar I mean I don't need to rehash what we're trying to do at immersion but I think it I mean I wouldn't have left and put everything on the side to do this if the mission and the outcome could have a material like a massive impact in crypto. Yeah. And I think when the mission is is such I I've been able to I've been very inspired by the people that have reached out folks that I I'm like this person is very comfortable in his in their role in crypto outside of crypto. But the the amount of applications that we've gotten I I think like um one of our lead our lead investor has a a pretty big recruiting team and they were like we've

never seen a startup get this amount of inbound from people not just in crypto but outside of crypto. Yeah. LinkedIn um paused one of our posts because we posted that we're hiring two private equity associates and we got so much inbounds I think 400 in the first hour. Yeah. They're like they paused it. You have to be a bot. Truly. Yeah. So So all this to say is I'm trying to build the most dense human capital organization. Yeah. And I'm addict I'm having I'm having time of my life because it's it's so inspiring. You know what I mean? It's like when someone I go back to certain moments in my career. It is incredibly empowering when someone that you admire comes to you and says I believe in you and now it's the is like people that I really respect that I know have a high

opportunity cost coming saying you know what I've been I've been crypto curious but this is the first thing that actually makes a lot of sense and a lot of it is not just to what we're doing. I think the industry is at a point where it's like actually a very pivotal moment. Regulations cleared up. The infrastructure's been developed. So I I couldn't tell you that I'd be in the same position if I tried to do inversion four years ago. Yeah. But timing is sometimes everything. Yeah. How's the uh how's the seeking for for businesses going an investor update here in so what are you doing? Well, not not to leak too much alpha because we're obviously under NDA with all these businesses. But I can tell you that I am working 100 plus hour weeks and I'm like grinding till 4 in

the morning doing models and Excel junkie. It's it's like going back deja vu like like as if I were an analyst at JP Morgan the investment bank uh doing like leverage buyout models. So So how many like companies are you analyzing on a weekly basis would you say? Uh we have a very well the interesting thing is uh we know what we want to buy. Okay. We don't know exactly the company. We have a list of companies that we like. Um, but we've pressure tested the thesis so much. Yeah. That it allows us to do diligence very quickly in a particular company because we'll we'll go in there and be like, we're looking for these very specific things. Yeah. And so and so it's very focused and and that allows us to you know we're not a team of

hundred people in consultants that like back in my day like in private equity like a large private equity fund has a massive army and and consultants and advisers and all that and look we we'll use them but but we are very focused and we know what we want to buy again this crypto enabled business transformation that that allows us to very quickly spin up and go and and like find the answer. Yeah. So, we've looked at a number. We're very focused on Latin America. Um, just because, you know, stable coins are all the rage these days. Yeah. I was going to say the stable coins must be enabling a lot of uh possibility here.

Exactly. And so, for us, like we we have narrowed down the sector, the region. Now, it's a question of negotiating terms, price. Yeah. Uh specific like company specific elements, but we're busy. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, a bit more broadly, Santi, how are you seeing the like let's just call it the the the non uh Bitcoin Ethereum market right now? Uh kind of like the like the token market. What are you seeing in the market from a investor perspective from like I I keep kind of memeing around this revenue meta but it's really just like this like idea of uh it feels like a lot of these uh assets are kind of moving towards like show me the money productive like

there's just like there's just a big shift in the mentality of investors I think in this space that has happened as a result of hyper liquid or as a result of the new administration. uh what are you seeing from your investor's lens um in the market now? Um and it's quite a broad question, so feel free to kind of take it wherever. Yeah, I touched on it a little bit in the roundup that we did live. Um there's um like you have Circle and Circle has done a 10x since it IPOed. Yeah, mind you, this was uh right before the IPO, people were saying it's not going to go public. The IPO is botched. It's going to get acquired by less than six billion. It's going to get acquired by three. It's going to trade down. And here we're on a state of the world where circle is at 300. Yeah. It's

done a 10x. Yeah. And I think that's very indicative of like people outside of crypto traditionally have been wanting to express a a long thesis on crypto and then particularly stable coin adoption. They haven't been able to do that and a lot of these allocators don't want to touch a token. So, so when circle comes along, it's an easy buy for them. It's an easy way to go to their their PM or go to their CO and say, "Hey, listen. If if you're if you're sitting at a hedge fund, you're like, "This is the cleanest way to express a view in the public markets." And of course, Coinbase has caught a bid. You now have 10 other probably companies that are private and are going to go public. Chain analysis of the world. Yeah. And and I so it's it's an interesting game because like

it's a liquidity flow. It's like uh we've been in a position where to your point very few assets have really performed in this cycle. If you weren't allocated to Hyperlquid, Yeah. Salana, Fartcoin, and some derivatives like you you or and Bitcoin primarily, you would have vastly underperformed. Yeah. And and it all comes down to where the flow is going, right? Hyperlid very clear. They've they've really positioned themselves as capturing like onchain purps and they've actually done a phenomenal job. They have the the burn mechanism. Like people get that very clear. It's an easy clean story.

Um so the question is like where do the next if 100 billion 500 billion of flows are going to come into crypto where where is that going to get allocated? I think different than other cycles now you have more and more instruments that investors can express a long crypto view. You have Bitcoin treasury companies you have Coinbase Circle Robin Hood new banks. So so um does that mean that tokens are not going to catch a bid? I don't know. I I mean I think there's like a there's a time and a place for people at some point in the cycle they express and go farther and farther out in the risk curve. But but you you guys know this game better than anyone. It's like human psychology at the end of the day does not change. Yeah. People that

miss Bitcoin are going to buy hyperlquid. People that b miss hyperlquid are going to do something else. People that miss circle are going to buy something else. And so markets are incredibly psychological environments. And so that dynamic never changes. Yeah. So, I'm not here to tell you that Bitcoin dominance is going to go above 70%. At some point, these things do catch a bid. Yeah. The thing is the nuance, right? And also, I think like if you've been in crypto for more than a couple years and you're now bearish or thinking that like tokens are dead, well, you know, you have to your point regulatory environment clearing up. You have the ability to now like truly call perhaps these tokens as they

are. You have the token transparency thing which I think is going to be important. Yep. And so this gap that you've had of like governance tokens dancing around securities laws I think that largely goes away and like again draw a comparison circle maker. Yeah. Coinbase unis swap um hyperlquid binance and all the other exchanges. At some point the market wakes up and says, "Oh, wait a minute. There's this thing called circle and then there's a thing called maker that is pound-forpound a better business model. Has 100th of the employees like you engineers hyperlquid has? I think they have less than 20 like 10 or 12. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wild. Yeah.

And to that same point, Tether is now the most efficient bank in the world. Correct. They, you know, have a number of employees. It's what much much less because they don't have to adhere to some regulation that requires them to hire 300,000 employees like JP Morgan and yet by deposits and reserves all all reserves no right but the eighth or ninth largest bank in the world. Yeah. No it's it's wild crypto enabled businesses you're going to hear more of that. Yeah. Yeah. and just thinking about it as businesses actually, right?

And less so about um just kind of like token token uh creation companies or something like that. So I mean people are still caught up in the meta of like Bitcoin and wrapping their head around what this is, but you know Robin Hood has caught a very interesting bid. Vlad the CEO keeps talking about like how his business is structurally more efficient on the crypto side than the traditional brokerage side. I think the market now is increasingly understanding that crypto is, you know, Bitcoin is is interesting social experiment, but but this space offers so much more that I I'm I'll go as far as saying that more value be created by companies that come in crypto because they see an

opportunity to leverage this technology to cut some cost in their P&L. You know if you're if you're a Google or if you're a company that is paying some service provider web two company for data and you can say oh I can use hivemapper for location data or geoet or I can use helium as a network to buy spectrum costs the problem with these deepen things though is that the tokconomics have been just really bad and that's like the biggest criticism correct I don't I don't disagree with you that like but again it all comes down to if a network catches a lot of demand you you can then turn something around, right? Look at something like Helium, right? They have a million daily active

users. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So that token model clearly works. I think it's not just Dpin projects that have faulty tokconomics. It's it's most token projects that have faulty tokconomics. I'd be curious to get your guys perspective, but like there are a lot of tokconomics that were codified in a world where there was a very different regulatory environment and so it warrants like if it's a good product then you could probably restructure the tokconomics to some degree. Um but again it all it all is do you believe that this project actually is real demand and I I think some of these projects are actually getting real demand from real companies that are are are saying hey listen this is a good

network it produces data that is reliable and it's a fraction of the cost. Yeah, tell me why reasonably speaking you wouldn't adopt it. And and Hivemapper has mapped a third of the world roads. Mhm. Uh the data is reliable, is up toate, it's community owned network. It is landing Fortune 500, Fortune50 companies. Yeah. Every other week. Yeah. Yeah. One kind of more uh investing question here and then we'll let you go in a sec is that we we've focused a ton on on like uh angel and kind of like private stuff for the last like two-ish years. allocated a lot through our fund. Now, we've been really just kind of like really really picky on the on the private side and like very very focused on maximizing the liquid side as we feel that we're like beyond

midcycle per se whe whether you agree we're in a cycle for multiple years or not. I'm curious like through your investing journey through different cycles, how you've like managed the thought process of allocating between like liquid markets and private markets and like if there's like a model that you've had to like slow down or ramp up or if it's really just like project and founder based. Um yeah, ju just kind of like h maybe help us understand a bit how you think about those two parts of your portfolio and like kind of how the timing of basically where we are in different speculative periods affects how you allocate.

I don't change my investing framework based on market conditions. I do it is some of it is informed but like like if I see public like liquid stuff be totally neglected then I think the risk trade off at some point you're like oh well I I I like this project why wouldn't I like allocated to it I mean at the end of the day all these are early stage projects so I I just come at it from that standpoint some have marginally more liquidity than others which again I invert and say okay as an investor where I've made the most amount of mistakes is where I've overallocated or don't have cash flow or don't have the opportunity to invest. Uh and so when you go too far in the spectrum of

investing only in privates and if you if you invest the $100 that you have into privates, you should be prepared to like hold that position for the next 10 years as is traditional venture. Now crypto is a one of those liquid venture asset classes where you can have a token and whatnot. But I think I think going into an investment if you're going to do privates, it's like rising 100%. It's a for me it's it's always been a disproportionately high percentage of my portfolio because I feel that's where that I have an edge. I've cultivated a relationship with founders. I like to be one of the first investors in projects and you know I go in there saying probabilistically it might it will likely not work out but if it works out it has sort of a power law distribution.

Um but but managing cash flow is super important. Why? Because the worst mistakes I've done are when I feel I feel the crunch. Yeah. Everything goes down. And look, it never no one has ever complained that they've had excess liquidity to deploy when everyone is scared. And and you know, I think the best investors like like categorically throughout the history of finance have been ones where have been incredibly patient and have waited for the market to come to them. Problem is like everyone has anxiety holding cash. you you you want to deploy feel unproductive, right? Um but uh but now that that's been the biggest upgrade that I've done, which is I I still very

much love meeting early founders, being one of the first believer. It's just it's just I like it. Yeah. It's it's inspiring. I if I can be a part of the journey of like believing them early on, all the better. But um but I guess I I've I've been in a position where I've now optimized for like having a very good set of my portfolio totally uncorrelated. And so most people always think about is the thesis correct less so is this the right structure? Is this the right liquidity? Is this the composition of the overall portfolio? And so I think like that's where I I've spent more and more time around like I want to always have uncorrelated assets because that then allows me to be really way more

aggressive in stepping in because look in the next five six years. Are we going to see Bitcoin less than 100,000? I I I don't think so. You don't think so? I think it's I mean it's possible to get it under. Yes. But like for I think it's it's more likely it it goes higher. Yeah. I I I I don't disagree with you. I do think that we will see it definitely be sub 100,000 and you want to be there with cash when everyone else I thought you meant like in five years is not in a binary moment but I'm saying there are very discreet moments the velocity of markets and the mo the movement of money is like it's just in a in an accelerating pace like most investors don't hold on like in 1980 1990 most investors holding on to stocks for over

for for multiple year periods because most of that relationship was broken brokers and your investment advisor would like call you every 6 months and say, "Hey, by the way, here's how you're doing." Like, yeah. Now you have Robin Hood where people can express views on the daily real time. And so the velocity, the market is just mimemetically trading these things, not just in crypto. Yeah. Um, but I do think like if you can allow yourself to break away from that for a minute and say this is what I believe in. I'm going to focus on these particular areas and I have this thesis.

I I think it serves you well to like as much as you are bullish on a particular opportunity to have uncorrelated assets where you can draw from in moments where the rest of the market is saying god like like how go study Howard Marks. He he is the person that I draw a lot of inspiration from because investing is a very psychological sport. And he says one thing that has always stuck with me which is the market pendulum swings from extreme euphoria to despair and fundamentals never deviate from like a tighter middle range. And so if you have a good understanding and appreciation for what this technology offers uh the real fundamentals like from your position you get to talk to a lot of

founders. you get to understand where the puck is going probably better than others. Yeah. Then you have a pretty good like that's your edge, right? Yeah. Do you want to be like lever long 10x and be liquidated? Absolutely not. But when you see the market like if you're in this conference and everyone's like bearish project Xia or whatever. Yeah. But you know the team, you've been paying attention. You're like, "Okay, well clearly the market is not being efficient and I'm willing to hold this bag for the next 5 years." Yeah. You step up with big big conviction. The other thing is like there's a lot of insight that you can gather by onchain activity, right? You know the vesting schedules, you know who's selling. And so that is just an added piece of information where you always want to appreciate the dynamics of cuz I I'm I'm

always like second guessing. It's like when I come across as something really good. I'm like surely I'm not the first person to look at this. What am I missing? How do you manage your own psychology amongst the general market psychology where the general market psychology may be wrong and you may have a contradicting opinion? How do you how do you reconcile the two? It's like that meme of like the guy staring in the he's like the market's wrong. How do I reconcile it? It's given me um again I think when I was in the podcast insulate your lifestyle to a point where you can absor you can absorb all the irrationality and if you and you hold the position it's like listen I'm always willing to change my mind and quickly but I'm not I never want to be a I never

want to be forced into doing anything. Yeah because that sucks. Everyone's been in a position where imagine that you're bullish in the space and you get forced to sell because you have obligations. You have to pay your bills. have to. Yeah. And so if you if you can insulate that, it gives you mental clarity to say I'm going to dedicate 90 as much of my time to continuously absorb information on this particular thesis that I have, which is the module thesis is correct. And you're constantly like paying attention to everything that's going on in other ecosystems, but and you you keep like processing information, but you never want to be forced into doing anything, right? Cuz that sucks, man.

that you can have the thesis right, but if you don't express it correctly, none of it matters at the end of the day. It also supports your point about patience. Patience and insulating your mindset and your lifestyle will help prevent decisions out of necessity. Correct. Yeah. And and therefore maintain patience. Yeah. like like the ideal state is you don't have to think about anything other than doing research, doing the rollup, bringing on smart people that you're going to absorb as much information from. And then you package all that and you express a view.

Why would you ever put yourself in a position where you have to think about am I getting it liquidated? Uh do I have enough money to pay bills for the next couple months? It's like you want to be almost like I guess the way to do it is inverting and saying in a in an extreme scenario where this asset were to fall 90%. I'd be extremely excited to step in. I need to have the capital to do it. Mhm. How often do you think about inversion from a from a philosophical view? Is it part of your belief system to sort of look at the thing at its face value and then take one step deeper and invert from a different perspective? Yeah, I mean invert always invert and I'll I'll summarize it be honest. I mean it's a

Charlie Monger bought it from a German philosopher and the process of inverting is like I would summarize it as if you focus on the downside the upside takes care of itself. So so like clearly you guys are here and are dedicating your career because time is the most valuable commodity. Now you've decided that crypto is one of those generational um categories industries that has captured the zeitgeist and it's going to transform every industry. You either believe it or you don't. And I think you see most people come to that conclusion because discovering crypto, I almost wish that I go back in the first days that I did it because it's like you open a door in the future and you see ways of doing things that can transform the fabric of society and businesses at large.

But then being patient enough to saying this might take actually 10 years. And so what you want to do is be in a position where you can be very patient. I don't think it takes another 12 years for companies to start using this technology. I think it actually will accelerate because crypto sits on top of the internet and you have distribution and you know the world discovers these things faster but but again if you focus on the downside and what is the worst thing that can go wrong well you know the space can go down regulation can change it doesn't mean like back in 2012 when I first discovered this thing there was a very material risk that the industry would go to zero there's only Bitcoin now I think that that that existential risk has gone away so now you're in a

really interesting position where it's like okay this is in the next 20 years crypto will go from what is still a very drop in the bucket of an asset class that is still discounted. You walk around you outside this venue you just appreciate that no one is actually using crypto in the way that it will be used. Yeah. Like this technology is not relatable to anyone other than oh this is another way to express risk and maybe like make a 100x bagger like it's a casino. Yeah. That is going to change faster than most people think. But I also a part of my brain just always goes to am I willing to wait and if this were to take 12 years will I be here and will I continue to express this view and maybe increase my allocation to

it and so I I get comfort around that. Maybe it's a coping mechanism, but but I I look I I I think like we're at a I've said it time and time again. I I do believe it like I'm there's something just so powerful of the arc of this industry where you see it fitting into so many different industries and at a and and exponentiating what AI can do from a data verification, immutability, model training, inference, whatever you want to do or call it. But like crypto sits at the core of a lot of our like super generational transformations.

Yeah. Like you best believe this asset class is going to grow at least an order of magnitude. Don't do dumb [ __ ] Survive. Yeah. You know, stick around. It's the name of the game. Like you can't even be lucky if you're dead, right? Don't die. Quite literally. Don't die. Yeah. Do you have any uh esoteric or out of this out of the box thoughts around AI? AI. Yeah. Or about like this like the way that the space is, you know. Transforming and just growing. Like do you have any kind of like I'm not an AI expert. I I do use it now. So So two two insights. One, I've felt less of a need to hire for analysts for instance because what I can

do with perplexity or deep or or chat GBT even mockup designs. I'm not an engineer but I've been able to mock up certain designs for how I want to build and transform the company. So like I've I've like what would have taken me a team of 10 people and like an order of magnitude and cost now we're a lean and mean team but we use a lot of AI in our workflow. Yeah. So it's it's allowed me to do things that I would have required to have a team of three analysts and taken a month to produce a mockup or an MVP. Now I can do it quite literally in less than a day.

Um anything that is repeatable we're cutting out of the equation. So like we can be vastly more efficient as a startup that we are cuz we just raised round. we like we can leverage these tools for a fraction of the cost and they're super powerful. So that's like insight number one. I think I think that's I just I just have observed it firsthand building conversion. The other one perhaps more controversial is that I think the impact that crypto will have on the making companies more efficient. You know when people talk about AI is like companies are going to be able to use AI and and fire like a big part of their workforce and they're going to be more efficient. any repeatable process like AI will truly make these businesses very very efficient. Yeah, I I do believe that what I but I think everyone

like is focused on that. What I believe that perhaps others don't is that the impact that crypto as a piece of technology is going to have to businesses is going to be more material in the near term and probably medium-term than AI. Why? Because AI like you have these companies investing hundreds and billions of dollars in capex and H100s to train data and models and whatnot. And look, it's okay. I think it's overhyped. I think the t the market when when DeepS came out, everyone freaked out because it's like, wait a minute, you have companies that are spending hundreds of quite literally massive amounts of capital to pay chat GBT or whatever. And then Deepseek says, oh, with 5 million, we're able to build a model. Yeah. That is like pound-for-pound good. And so I I I'm cautious of investing in anything AI

because I think the pace of innovation there is really chaotic and fast. I think the companies that really reap the benefit of AI are like large companies that have data. So the S&P 500 like go long the S&P 500. I wouldn't invest in AI startup. But I will say like a crypto is a piece of technology and we're seeing it in a conversion. This is core of our thesis is sure can I buy a company make it 10% more efficient with cryp with AI? Absolutely. and we'll do that. But I can make I can cut cost 60 70% of the crypto rails. And I think like that's something that like no one in the public markets appreciates. I'll tell you who appreciates it. Stripe. Yeah. They bought bridge. They bought privy.

But most if you go talk to the analysts that are covering these companies or talking about AI, you tell them, "Hey, what do you think about crypto as a piece of technology that can allow companies to cut costs or go to markets or expand their top line because they can from a unit economic standpoint? they all of a sudden stable coins has allowed them to do so and so like oh what are you talking about? Yeah like no you know it's not it's totally not in their in in in the language of markets of analysts like everyone's talking about AI what I'm so excited about what I'm doing is that I hope that I can deliver that moment for analysts that covers telco JP Morgan I buy a company and the entire telco universe has like shitty margins and I took this company and like double margins and the analyst

was like oh you probably you probably did AI to do that and you're like you know to some extent but it was quite literally using crypto rails and I think once we do that I think the focus and how people perceive this industry is vastly different it's it's a it's a these conferences are not going to be people with t-shirts it's going to be people with suits coming in and saying how can we use the modular you know the or how can we implement crypto in our workflow you know so so I I guess that that would be probably of a controversial take. So, are you going to wear suits to the crypto conferences? I I I am I'm dusting off my suits because a I'm I'm hiring mostly from people outside of crypto like in finance and uh from and also

conversations like you go talk to management team. I want to buy their business. I can't show up in a t-shirt. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. S I think uh I think it's been a great conversation. Just one last thing for you. Um what are you bullish on and what are you bearish or cautious about today? Ju just in general, crypto, life, anything. Let's do one for life and one for crypto. Oh, uh, probably crypto is easiest. What am I bullish on? I'm bullish. Um, as I said, I think this this we're at a pivotal moment in crypto. I think I'm earlier now. it fits into so many things and I think we're truly at an inflection point and a large part of it is because the regulatory environment has changed and you know I I I'm excited to see a lot of things that we've we wish we

could have tried as an industry maybe a couple years ago but we couldn't because of these constraints. The nice thing about it is so much infra has been built that we're at a really interesting time to execute and deploy on these things. So token design, tokenized stocks on chain, all that I'm super bullish on. Uh I'm bearish on um what am I bearish on? I guess I'm marginally bearish on how people express the view on crypto because I think that that probably changes. Like I I think like there's a version of this world where like public token public companies that use crypto outperform crypto tokens. Why? Because distribution's king. Yeah. If you don't have distribution, it's tough. Yeah.

Robin Hood Yeah. has distribution. Yeah. Maybe a question for you guys. Who what do you think outperforms Robin Hood or Coinbase? Or Robin Hood and maybe not Hyperlquid, but yeah, it's just something I think about a lot. And this cycle is different than than others. Yeah. Um it's been the public equities this cycle though, at least in the Yeah. At least so far. I I guess I I am bearish on on public companies uh like bootstrapping uh like the the the token like the warehousing tokens like the micro strategy the hundth micro strategy is not going to work. So I'm bearish that.

Uh so that that would be for crypto. I don't know if there's anything specific. I am curious about for life. for life cautious about as we as we rumble into this world of AI of of of of brain rod of social media of uh the change in the way that the world works. What is uh what what are some things that you think are going to be prioritized more or the puck will go to to that direction? For example, one thing would be human to human in you know interaction experiences, right? our you're bullish on patience, genuine authenticity, but and what are you bearish on in in that in I'm very bullish on um I I I think the middle ground kind of

disappears. The extremes pro like proliferate. So you remember when the Apple Watch came about, everyone was saying that traditional watches were going to die. Yeah. It's been nothing but the opposite. Why? Because in a world where you're totally digital, you crave the other extreme more. Yes. the human interaction, the analog. I love I love collecting watches. I to me there's something so nostalgic and just remarkable about the watch making as a craft. So I'd be very bullish on on craft like something that is the total opposite from as much as we are talking about technology and we love technology.

There's things Morgan Hel has a great book which is uh always the same. I think I think it's always the same. It's phenomenal because yeah, we're at a point of like the the pace of innovation is like there's never been a moment in the history of humanity where we've innovated across multiple dimensions and it's it's compounding but at the same time a lot of things don't change and so I I I think there are certain pockets like like entertainment as a category or human interactions or watchmaking as an industry like I think those continue to see rising demand because you will humans will always crave one thing which is differenti iation and the signaling of things. So like I think those experiences like sports are they're all

the rage, right? The Lakers just sold for like 10 billion or so. Like these are things that never change because humans at the end of the day don't change. And so I'd be very bullish on understanding like in which areas whether it's watchmaking or whether it's sports as franchises like really like that I think never goes away. And I think in this world it's so tempting to say no that that disappears because we're totally going to be digital and but I I I think uh and what I'm bearish on is um I I mean from a I think when when you when I first discovered crypto and Bitcoin was around it's I think like I'm bearish on governments that don't serve

their citizens to the best way possible because I think we're moving more towards a world where when money transcends local barriers and moves easily, yeah, it it places more I think the there is a power shift more towards society that if you're in a place where the government doesn't treat you fairly, you can pick up your [ __ ] and leave, meaning you can use buy Bitcoin and and leave. And you saw this in Venezuela, you saw this in the these places. So if I'm a government and you're not holding up the other end of the bargain which is providing core services. Yeah. Tax a bit. I think this whole na construct of nationalism and like

governments and like the separation of power. I think you have now this thing called crypto which truly transfers power more to people. Yeah. That's not to say that governments are going to cease to exist. It's not to say it will always be a thing. But I think that it is it is I'm bearish on governments that are are regimes that don't don't treat people fairly or don't hold up their other end of the bargain. Yeah. And and that that could that could be the case of like how easily people move from New York to Miami. But that extends further at a at a global scale. Yeah. One of my favorite YouTubers is Nomad Capital. He talks a lot about like living in different places, how to do it, optimizing structures, and his saying is is go

where they treat you best. Correct. And that's like the world that we're headed to like more and more. Yeah. Montescu talked about three separations of power like legislative, um, executive, and judicial. Now you have a fourth tool, which is this this thing called like non-s sovereign stores of value and digital rails that transcend local borders. Now, are you still going to affiliate as an American, right? Like I'm not American, but I identify with the values of this country, which is extreme innovation. And people care more about your ideas than your background. Old money, new money, all that crap. And I think that's powerful. That that is a philosophy is not so much a country. And I would argue if you're in like someone in San Francisco, like San

Francisco is this collection of people that come there because it's a mecca of innovation, but you know there's people from all walks of life, all different countries. I think they have more affiliation to their company values than their country per se. If you're a Googler or like a So anyways, Baji talks about the network state, this the network state. I I I really ascribe to that. Santi, man, I appreciate your time. Yeah. Thanks for joining us. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. Always appreciate the conversation. Always good. Bigger bigger conversations. In person's always better. That in person's always We'll have to do it again if if you guys are not bored of me by now. Thanks. Thank you guys. Take care. Enjoy your week here. Yeah. Good to see you. Yep. Take

it easy. You too. All righty, Rob. We got um couple more before a little break here. Uh the boys are uh the boys are cooking. Look at the boys cooking. The boys are cooking. Uh, looks like we got Hib up next. Um, very cool. And then rolling into Hirs. Um, I don't know if is here or Hirs. Santi's Santi is great, man. He's getting his drawing right now. He seems to like it. Brendan's doing a great job. It's our resident artist for the week. Yeah. and uh always always you know it feels like the conversation with Santi is always it starts off with crypto and then maybe it goes into AI but it always ends up into a bigger conversation about the bigger things in

life. It does. I I appreciate that. I think we're we're going to go on standby for a quick break. Um and we'll be back in five minutes. Real quick, just check out the link below. Sign up for the EtherFi cash card. $50 off, $1,000 spend. We got to hit a quota here. Help us out. We'll help you out. We'll take care. [Music] Hey. Hey. Hey.

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Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music] you know, and uh yeah, like France,

Spain, Italy, bad shape. Very bad shape. The reason I asked, we're doing a kind of setup like this, but from a poker tournament that's uh serotonin. I feel like they overinvested in these fans. We have a lot of today is much cooler than it was yesterday. Yesterday, they were very, very clutch. I'm like, these fans are not necessary anymore. Where uh where do you where are you based mostly most of the time? So, I split my time between SF, Seattle, and Singapore. And and Singapore. Okay. Yeah. I kind of rotate around throughout the year. I didn't realize, but Seattle is quite the innovative hub. Maybe just as a result of some plight from from San Fran, but there's a bunch of teams that

are based there. They got some deep like cipher punk roots, too. Is there I know like I layer is based there Zero's based there and I think like one or two other teams. Yeah, I zero are the main ones. Yeah, there's not there's not that many more. There's not that many more. Um there used to be pre-COVID. Uh there was a lot more going on. Oh, sorry, not pre-COVID. Uh right when CO hit, there was a lot more but things kind of scattered. Um so not as much these days. A lot of people have hubs. So like the big companies have like some people, you know, Anchorage had some people, Coinbase has some people, but it's not it's not like a it's not like a center.

What what is it that you like about it that you enjoy staying there? Um well, I mean, at the time that I left, SF was pretty on the downturn, right? Because I left during the middle of COVID and SF was just like collapsing, you know, it was like really bad. Um now I feel like um SF is on is on the come up again. I mean now apparently New York is turning socialist and like SF just got out of their socialist era. Yeah. So there's a little bit of reversal going on is interesting. Um Seattle is kind of um it's it's like the summers in Seattle are great. Uh the springs and the winters are [ __ ] awful. So, it's if you travel all the time, then it's

actually a good arbitrage. Okay. Um cost of living is much cheaper. You know, taxes are lower and like it's got a good tech scene. It's got like good food, good culture. Um Sure. But, um it's it's it's chill. It's a chill place. So, I kind of feel like, you know, I'm on the road half the year like [ __ ] doing crypto stuff like this and then everything's frenetic and super high energy. And then I when I go home, I just like I eat, I work out, I work, and that's pretty much it. Yeah. You know, that's my life. Well, let's talk crypto. See, we had um we had Tun on here yesterday, and I asked him what he's bullish and bearish about. Yeah. and uh kind of like what we did at at at the dinner. And he said um he said he was he

was bearish on the fact like he was bearish on staking yields and staking and proof of stake in in in the sense that the peak of staking businesses could be behind us uh from where we are today. Yeah. and and that you know the proposal from Near and Celestia kind of moving that uh forward towards these different models and that he's actually he's bullish on a lot of that capital moving to actually wanting to be used for stable coin yields uh and and and earning yield in that way rather than doing staking yields with I guess more volatile proof of stake assets. Yeah.

What do you think about that? Do you think it's the top of proof of stake is in? Um, it's pro we're probably going downhill from here because staking mania was definitely a little bit of an illusion. Like I mean there I I was at a dinner last night where people were talking about boomers love yields and like just the idea of like oh you can make 8% on this asset great without asking what the asset is and whether the asset will go down more than 8% this year. Um, so like these are these are nominal yields, right? They're not real yields. They're nominal yields. And nominal yields sound good if you don't actually understand what it's doing to the underlying, right? Which is like if you're inflating 8% a year, but you're getting 8% a year in inflation, then basically you're just paying taxes.

Yeah. Right. You're just paying taxes on 8% a year, which is tax, right? It's inefficient. And the original theory for this was that, oh, you're paying for security. And people have increasingly come to understand that this idea that you're paying for security is kind of a meme, right? like these layer ones, the thing that makes them secure is not, oh, they have this this inflation rate. It's like the robustness of the software, who the validators are. The other thing we realize with most these proof ofstake networks, it's the same 12 companies that are running validators on all of these chains, right? Like we we're in a professionalized validator world, unless you're talking about Ethereum, which actually has, you know, homestakers.

Every other chain, there's no homestakers. They're they're they're meaningless. So the security model is just not what we pretended it was 6 years ago when all this stuff was first getting created, right? And so as a result, it's only rational that we would be fixing this problem and moving away from this world where like right now if you're in an ETF uh and you can't stake the ETF, it's a big problem because you're getting inflated away and all the staking ETF, all the ETFs are like, "Oh, we want to include staking." Why? Because they understand that staking is basically risk-f free. Yeah. That they understand it's a meme and they understand it's like, "Oh, it's like a yield. you're getting, you know, nominal yield on this asset, but really it just means you're not getting diluted by the people who are staking, right? And everyone understands that. So this this

kind of economic fiction, I think, had to go away at some point when we realize the real way that it works. And that's what you're seeing now is that people are normalizing and saying, "Hey, you do need some amount of inflation, but that amount of inflation is very low. It's much lower than we originally claiming that it was." Um, and it's really just diluting people who are either too lazy to stake or who are structurally incapable of staking. And that's kind of a it's just it's just not efficient. It's not fair. Yeah. So I think that the inflation stuff now is also a a result of the uh price action of a lot of uh proof proof ofstake chains. Yeah. And and really what that means is that you know the the unit price can go down.

Yeah. But the person who's staking can still be up um because they're you know they're getting you know they're getting uh 10% a year or 8% a year. Even if uh the price is down less than 8% you're fine. Yeah. the person who otherwise is in an ETF and their price goes down, you know, seven, eight%, they're like, "Well, I got screwed and somebody else got got made whole for it." Uh, that is is kind of a dumb system at the end of the day if that's all that's really happening. And then everybody's paying taxes on the whole thing, right? So, like that that that's a bad system. Um, I think at the end of the day, uh, like these these systems are rationalizing over time. uh Salana had this uh they had this big vote about whether or not I think it was SIMD 228 or something that

was uh whether or not they were going to bring down the inflation rate very significantly but it was this very complex mechanism that had a lot of bells and whistles. I think multicoin was pushing it. That one ended up failing relatively narrowly. Um but almost certainly there's going to be a second push within Salana to lower the inflation rate because everybody knows the right answer is yeah the right answer is much lower than where it currently exists. Yeah. Very interesting. So that's kind of that was Tun's answer to like bullish or bearish, right? I'm I'm curious from your perspective, what are you bullish on and what are you more bearish or more cautious about? I mean, I'm bullish on the obvious stuff. I don't think I'm going to blow anyone's mind by saying that I'm bullish on stable coins continuing to grow and getting more and

more integrated into the normal financial flows in the world. Um, one area that I've been spending a lot of time on is u stable coin credit cards. This is one thing that I think uh people don't spend enough time thinking about is like how what's that like cast? Yeah. There's a bunch of them that are um basically saying so today the dominant way that people actually pay each other with stable coins is using something like Binance Pay. Yeah. Binance Pay is a you know basically a non-custodial wallet and these non-custodial wallets you you see them being adopted but mostly in places that where things are really bad. Yeah. Right. Right? So you see them in places like Venezuela or in places like Iran or in Turkey um where they're they're you know borderline

failed states where you have very very high inflation and people are getting they're it's so bad that you're willing to adopt an entirely new application even at point of sale like merchants are saying you look you can scan this QR code pay with Binance Pay right but most places even where people want to use stable coins it hasn't reached a critical mass such that all the merchants are going to accept this right and so where do you actually get stable coins to come in in in a place where, you know, you're like in um in India, right? Where things aren't so bad that everybody's adopting stable coins, but there's some people using stable coins and they're like, "Yeah, I like this cuz I want dollar exposure." Um and the only real answer is that you have to be able to piggyback on the existing rails.

Yeah. Right. Now, Coinbase has a you know, they they have a credit card, but their credit card is not it's not like a stable coin credit card, right? It's like just a normal credit card. You get Bitcoin rewards. It's kind of like, you know, it's it's fine, but it's kind of like, okay, it's a different flavor on airline miles. you're just getting your cash back in something else. And you know, it's a Bitcoin. Oh, maybe Bitcoin will go up more and you'll make your money. Yeah. Okay, great. Fine. That's a good reward. But um these stable coin credit cards, they are what they're doing is they're literally drawing an onchain balance in stable coins the moment that you swipe your credit card, right? That is different. When you say drawing, like minting the stable coin or borrowing against the position. No, no, no. They are drawing down against your

stable coin balance, right? So you have stable coins on chain in a wallet and when you swipe your card at a point of sale they take the stable coins out of the wallet, right? And because they're doing it in real time, you actually don't have to have stable coins. You can have whatever it is as long as they can sell it instantaneously and swap it out into stable coins. You could have it in Athena. You could have it, you know, in in, you know, staked uh soul or whatever, right? You could have in a staking a staking token. Uh you can have in anything as long as you can swap it instantaneously into stables. And if that's happening at the point of off then um at the at the credit card authorization then you basically can have anything in your in your wallet.

this translation layer I think it mirrors a lot of things that we've seen about how technologies get adopted right is that if you think about for example Apple Pay Apple Pay now has taken over the world right in in the US uh we went from basically being all on credit cards and you know China and many other parts of the world were already on QR code payments and the US was like look we're credit cards are good enough right but we went from basically during co from you know hunks of plastic to now it's your phone it's just all your phone and why is it all your phone now. The answer is because we piggybacked on credit card rails. Yeah. Right. We we didn't reinvent the wheel and say, "Oh, there's a new thing that all merchants integrate and now you can incorporate Apple Apple

Pay and and Google Pay and all this stuff." It's like, "No, we just piggy back on credit card rails." And that answer is how actually a lot of technology ends up getting moved forward is that we're not going to go into a new stable coin stack. It's that instead we're going to just use the rails we already have and kind of adapt the systems that we've built. So, you get both. You get both onchain balances in anything in real time programmatic. But when you're buying stuff, you just, you know, you tap your thing and it it all works. So if you're Mastercard or Visa and you're looking at the stable coin adoption that's happening, are you thinking to yourself, oh these guys could eat my lunch, or are you thinking these guys are going to build on top of my existing stack? What you're saying is

that I better make it that these people can build on top of my stack cuz if I don't let them, then they're going to go around me and then I'm really in trouble, right? they might disrupt my monopoly if they feel like they have to in order to get adoption. But if they feel like the fastest path to getting integrated anywhere, same thing like imagine that uh Visa had said, "Apple, we're not going to work with you. Screw you. We don't want people moving away from credit cards, right? And you're on your own." Okay? If they had done that, then Apple would have said, "All right, we got to build our own system. We got to get merchants on the other side to be willing to accept Apple Pay because Visa and Mastercard are cutting us out."

Right? what what they said they did is they cut a deal and Apple gets 50% of the interchange on what they get to Visa. Now, Google Pay actually has a much lower uh split that they get with with uh with the the credit card uh uh providers because they don't have as high value uh highv value clients, right? Apple is known as being the premium product. There's a lot more spend there and so they were able to go first and scare them and say if you don't cut this deal with us, we're going to go build our own network. Right? So the stable coins are now in a similar position is that they realize like look um right now bridge is doing this. Uh there's another company called Rain that's doing this. Uh there's a lot more players as you mentioned. Uh uh even Marquetto which is a kind of traditional

payments company is getting into this game of issuing these stable coin credit cards. Um and increasingly I'm I'm I believe that it's going to look more like Apple Pay and Google Pay is that it's going to ride on the same rails because it's the fastest way to get to global adoption. Yeah. And at the end of the day that's all we really care about, right? Um it's very likely that again this stuff is going to introduce more competition. But um like the the the reality is that that last mile of how do you actually get this onto the merchant? How do you actually get you know Old Navy to take payments in this thing or everybody in the world? It might be that okay they all integrate Coinbase Commerce or whatever. Yeah. But an even easier way is that you just have a stable coin balance that's connected to

a credit card. Yeah. Yeah. You know what's uh kind of weird though is I was talking to Robbie from your team and he was quite bearish on domestic US payments. So I I'm I'm largely in agreement with that. Okay. I think domestic US payments getting on these rail is going to be very very slow because I mean look you guys are American. I'm American. Like I'm not going to use these cards, right? Why? Because I have money in a bank account anyway. And like I I can use that and I'm getting credit, right? Most of these things actually there's no credit extension at all. Right. You're not actually getting credit, right? That's it's basically like a credit card is the form factor, but really it's more like a debit card, right? It's basically like more of a charge card type like actual mechanic, right? So, um now the reality

is that if you're using stable coins in emerging economies around the world, that's that's alone is great. Like I'm totally fine with that. Um credit extension is not where these things are going to shine because I don't actually know if you're creditw worthy by looking at your balance on chain, right? But I do know how much money you have and I can let you spend that money in real time. right? That mechanism and a lot of what credit cards do is of course there's more than that. There's chargebacks and all this other stuff. Um so there's there's a lot of stuff the credit cards do they solve this payments problem but they don't solve the credit extension problem which that has to get solved another layer and we're not there yet. Yeah. With respect to you know actually getting crypto payments incorporated with credit. Yeah. One one

more reason I've seen at least from a narrative perspective that these companies are are starting to think about either issuing their own stable coins or adopting stable coins for themselves is to lower their cost of settlement. But again, if they're just doing the the settlement on on top of existing credit card rails, are they not still do they do they not still need to pay those fees even if it's using a stable coin or is or is this sort of setting the scene for some sort of deal where they're able to start to split some of those costs and earn back some of those 3% credit card processing fees? So I So first of all, I'll say I'm not an expert on exactly how the fees break down with respect to stable coin settlement versus dollar settlement. Um, a lot of the a lot of the big question

is can you settle directly with Visa or Mastercard in stables versus having to do that last leg of getting the stables out and back into fiat. Uh, Visa is starting to do these pilots where they're allowing people to settle directly with Visaet in stables. Most people are not on this yet. So, most people are still settling with fiat, uh, which is actually much less capital efficient because you have to go and, you know, ping circle turn the USC back, you know, pay the 30 bits that you have to actually get. there's some latency there and actually getting that thing to get out and then go settle with Visa. So that that's actually a much worse um uh flow if you have to do that. But if the credit card systems are willing to take settlement in stables, then all of a sudden settlement is basically

instantaneous. Yeah. Right. Um they're starting to get there. Visa is probably a step ahead relative to Mastercard on that, but they're both they both see the writing on the wall is that they have to get there given what this the noises this administration is making, right? about wanting to allow stable coins to be treated on par with other forms of payments. Um, at the end of the day, like the the Visa system uh of charging 30 bips, they charge those 30 bips to the merchant, right? Uh uh uh that uh sorry, not 30 bips, obviously more than 30 bips. Um and they charge to the merchant. That's going to continue to happen, right? Because the end of the day, the merchant is the one if you're Visa, you have the merchant by the balls. Yeah. Right. I don't know if you're allowed to say that on this

podcast, but say whatever you want. So, okay, great. Um, and uh that that that doesn't change whether it's stable coins or not, right? If you have a supply side or merchant side monopoly, you're going to be able to squeeze them and say, "Look, these people are not going to trust you unless they have the ability to do chargebacks." Yes. A a stable coin credit card still has the ability to do chargebacks, right? Because you can say, "Look, this guy defrauded me. I want my money back." And Visa will say, "Okay, this guy defrauded you." They do the, you know, dispute window da the whole thing happens and you can still do a chargeback. So um at the end of the day that is what you are like look if you want to take a Visa credit card the thing that you are guaranteed as a

merchant is that Visa like you will get paid right as long as you provide your goods and services. Um and that policing job is the job that Visa is getting paid for. Um everything becomes more capital efficient and the FX costs go down if you can get stuff uh in stable coins directly. Um and the um you know the the the card programs the people who are actually making these cards they don't have to have as much cash up front. Yes. If everything is being settled instantaneously. Yes. And that gets passed on to the customers as well. Yes. Still not still not credit but but you know Yes. It's a better system. Exactly.

So I have this ever growing thesis that this type of matter that we're discussing here very intricate financial uh conversation with regards to intersecting with the real world or traditional assets stable coins dollars credit cards RWAS it that's like increasingly going to be a very very hot investable category from VC from liquid etc. And then I I am ever growing that on the other side completely on the other side $10 million FTD rounds the latest spin on prediction markets with like a a DGEN twist or like a you know this application with like a little bit of extra sauce and like very very early stuff are like increasingly going to be

more and more in demand and like wanting to be like invested in by most VCs and a lot of like the like the middle stuff like the L1's the L2 twos, the infra, the, you know, next DeFi app, the like these things are kind of like are almost not really that appealing uh from a investing perspective. If if if this is the case, I'm curious if you think I'm just full of it or or if this is what you're seeing. Like there's going to be two camps of of investors that go and and win these two categories in a big way. And I think it's going to leave a lot of investors kind of in the middle, not able to like really capitalize on either that well because they they they're just not that far on the on that end of the spectrum.

Yeah. So So I don't know if this is Yeah. Let me make sure I understand your question. So you're saying on one poll there's the fintechy stuff, super finty, but super finty and then the other side there's the applications that are more consumerf facing. Super consumer and then the the sort of the lonely middle is the infra stuff. infra or infra traditional apps, traditional ideas. It's like very novel, interesting consumer stuff. Yeah. And then like very like gigab brain fintech like you got to understand how payment networks work in in the real world and like everything else is just kind of like Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is a little bit too strong of a claim. So here's why I think that.

Um, first and foremost, it's always been true that with every passing year, there's been fewer and fewer infra investments. I think most people don't perceive this. They think that like infra somehow has been accelerating, but it's the opposite. Infra has been decelerating in that, you know, if you look at Dragonfly vintages. In our fund one, we probably did like, you know, 11 12 layer ones. In our that was like 2018 vintage. Uh, in our fun two, we probably did like six. In our fun three, I think we did three. Yeah. And this fund we haven't done any so far. Maybe we did one. Um and the reality is that with every passing vig that's not surprising is that the infrastructure stabilizes over time and we're seeing that stabilization start to happen. Now that being said, infra is still unequivocally

the biggest category. It is the biggest category, right? What are the biggest outcomes in crypto? Bigger than Circle, bigger than Coinbase is Salana, is Ethereum. These are the biggest games that there are to play. period. That being said, it's really [ __ ] hard to play this game and you have to be really, really good and you have to have a unique idea and unique angle of attack and very few people have that. Yeah. But what I also believe is that we're not done. Right? It's not true that in the year 2020 we figured out everything we would ever need to figure out about how blockchains need to get built. Right?

There will be more. Now, will there be, you know, 50 of these? No. Will there be five? Maybe maybe not even five. Maybe there's only one or two more that are going to matter that are ever going to get built. But as VCs, we're on the lookout for one or two things that will matter because when they do matter, they will be absolutely enormous. Okay. At the end of the day, scaling blockchains is fundamentally one of the biggest problems in the industry period. Yeah, that's true for Salana, it's true for Ethereum, it's true for rollups, it's true for everything, right? We still do not have enough block space to do this stuff at scale. Yeah, I don't care whether you're Salana or you're anybody.

Everybody knows that we don't have enough block space and everybody needs more scale. Yeah. So that's why I say um infrastructure still matters. Yeah. Um second, there's a lot of stuff I think that that falls within the infrastructure sphere. Now look, there was an overbuild of things like you know, MEV infra or all this kind of like really highdimensional ZK something something something. um that stuff people realize now demand isn't there and the problems that they're solving are too esoteric or just not important enough to really warrant uh a lot more investment. But there's still going to be a lot more that happens as we see what happens especially in the in the field of AI that starts to intersect with crypto and you and I have talked

about this previously um both offline and and and on the rollup is that um when that tech is ready when the the AI side is actually strong enough there's going to be an absolute explosion in what gets built at the infrastructure layer um in retooling how everything in blockchain works but that that's going to take some time and that investment is not going to happen right now necessarily because um the the prerequisites for it aren't necessarily here yet. But when that happens, there's going to be a lot of infrastructure investment to be done in that space. I recall this this mental image of the the dog wagging the tail or the tail wagging the dog. And I think you put this into

perspective when it comes to crypto and AI. I think this might have been the last time you were on the rollup. At least I heard you on the rollup. And that that was maybe few months ago, maybe even six months ago. And so I'm curious with recent developments in both crypto and AI, has your perspective changed? Do you think, you know, back then it was very much so that, you know, it was sort of an open question, right? Which one is wagging the other? Have we do we have a definitive answer now? Nope. No, it's still just too early to tell. Yeah. The reality is that um everybody wants the space to move really fast. Mhm. Chad GBT was now uh what is that two two and a half years ago? Yeah. Two and a half

years ago was the Chad GBT moment. Um everybody at that time and I was among them was like humanity is cooked. Unemployment is going to rise to like 15%. Uh the entire economy is going to be transformed and unrecognizable. Yeah. Here we are record low unemployment. Nothing has really happened. N right. AI writes my emails. That's it. You know, like few people have AI girlfriends, but beyond that, like the world is kind of the same. I mean, I'm looking around like the world's kind of the same. Yeah. So things um you the thing that they say over and over again in Silicon Valley and like I uh you know, especially being in crypto, like I used to laugh at this and now I believe it more and more every single passing year. The old saying in

Silicon Valley is people overestimate what can happen in two years and underestimate what happens in 10. Yeah. And with AI, I was extremely guilty of this and I think probably most of us were uh is that it's really hard to change the fundamentals of how the world is is operating and that's true in crypto too. Yeah. Right. Like I was telling a big story about stable coins in 2018. Yeah, man. I was talking about how stable coins are going to change the world change international payments. World is going to be unregnizable. Currencies are going to collapse. Blah blah blah. It's 2025. Took a long time. We're just getting start. We're just getting started. And look, it will happen. The time frame is the two to 10.

That's true. That's true. So it will happen, but it takes time. It takes time. And as an investor, I mean, one of the lessons that I've had internalized is shut the [ __ ] up. Learn to be patient because look, everything, you know, Mark Anderson used to say this about uh the dot bubble is that, you know, when they were taking pitches during the dotcom bubble and everybody was super excited and people were so convinced the internet was going to change everything. And what he says was that, you know, almost every single pitch that we got, uh, almost all those companies failed. But the other thing he says is that almost every single thing that they told us in those pitches that the internet was going to do eventually happened.

Almost everything they said was going to happen did happen, but it took a lot longer than they thought it would. So the these companies were just they were right, but they were too early. They were too early. They weren't the ones to make it happen. So whether it's, you know, Chewy, which became Pets.com, or you know, Web Van, which became Instacart, almost every single idea eventually happened. Yeah. But, you know, people saying, "Oh, you're going to buy everything online." It's like, well, [ __ ] here we are. Yeah. So, the lesson to to draw here is stay patient and survive. Yep. That's right. I'd like to go through some of your uh predictions from this year, actually.

Okay. U We got a couple of them pulled up here. Oh, good. Oh, it's only half the way through the year. You can't call me on these yet. But we need like a little bit of an update. I say all right, we'll do the update. Do the update. How you think here? Yeah. About halfway mark. It's actually pretty much perfectly halfway through through the year. First one, L1's, L2s, the distinction, the distinction between them is collapsing. Your prediction was effectively that um you know that they will kind of consider to or they will continue to collapse and they just kind of be known as like chains. But the blockchain landscape, L1's, L2s combined, is overcrowded and due for a shakeout. The consolidation will be less about technical superiority, be more about having a unique niche and building

stickiness through GTM. How do you think that's pretty good? Okay. I feel like that's pretty well. Like you look at you I mean base, hyperlid salana uh you've got monad and barachchain on here. Monet hasn't launched. Barachchain's kind of struggling. Um but otherwise you know name me a chain that is is I mean aptto um couple these other kind of story came about but like tell me a chain that is like that you know yeah no the other thing the other thing about it that I think has also aged well is that there are all these new chains that are launching and people don't ask are they L1's or L2s anymore right they

just know they're chains right so like is Hyperl an L1 or an L2 nobody really cares converge. Um, you know, does anyone know like do you know at top of your head is plasma an L1 or L2? Yeah. I mean, I know it's an L1 cuz we invested. But like there, yeah, if somebody didn't know, they would be like, oh, it's a chain. I don't know if it's L1 or L2. Doesn't really matter, right? Doesn't really matter. And I think that I think it's part of like the L1 premium thing that people have been discussing with regards to that kind of losing its its value. I I I think that I think that that is going away and there's a um a premium on chains that people care about that that matter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see how it pans out. With a unique niche and go

to market. Yeah. Next one is uh token launches. Uh everyone doing huge air drops via points programs is over. Uh moving to two track one KPIs northstar metric farm it be transparent about it. Track two, uh, smaller airdrops to reward social contributions, but the the majority will get distributed via crowdfunding. Um, meme coins will continue to lose market share to AI agent coins. Uh, migration from nihilism to over optimism. Uh, you're coining that one. That was quite wrong. I would say it looked really good in January and then it went straight downhill. But hey, there's still time. There's still time.

There's still time. So, as far as token launches go, I feel like uh you may have underestimated the the amount of infoi Kaido uh uh you know, things that were going to happen. But I think that maybe is with like it's kind of a KPI. It's kind of a social it's kind of in the middle of your two predictions. It's like yapping talking about the the project allocating uh you know.5 bips or or half percent or whatever it is. Right. You're, you know, I'd say I mean, I think I acknowledge the social air drops, but I think they're becoming bigger than I originally anticipated they would. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Kaido has just completely taken over every pret more or less. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So, it does feel like Kaido is running away with it in the in the in the airdrop meta. Um, but the thing about the airdrop meta is that never stands still. It always keeps evolving. But I think you're right about huge points programs and distributing out a ton of a ton of supply. It's like tell me one token that has launched in the last 3 months that has had this massive points program leading to an airdrop. Yeah. I can't think of one. Yeah. Can you guys I mean Pump Fund is going to launch. We don't know exactly. That's like this crowdfunding thing that Right. Right. That is more the crowdfunding. So that might have a large air drop but not via points program. Right. Yeah. Points are I I'm curious because you mentioned on the memecoins one, right? Like the shift from uh from memecoins to AI agent

coins hasn't right. But you said there's still time and so I'm curious like if virtual has made a little bit of a comeback genesis things. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of winking back into into you know page one. So so for this to come true over the next 6 months what would have to happen? What do you think that could look like? Look, I don't know. I mean the the latter part of my predictions is all that AI agent coins are cooked anyway, but I think it's like a a short-term um mania. And I think in in many ways I was surprised at how quickly it receded. But it does seem to be getting back in the limelight. And look, I think I think the main thing once AI agents really start to work, right? Not just chat bots and you know like me year 10ear thing maybe. But I

think once you start to see uh AI agents doing things and really taking on more agency in a more meaningful way, people will find a way to attach meme coins to that. Yeah. Right. Right. At the end of the day, what people find captivating is things that are new and surprising, right? Um once AI agents are able to start surprising people again, they're not today, I think you will see a memecoin resurgence around those. Yeah, you're completely right. Like like they tweeted like they started tweeting and that was like surprising. It was like wow, it's kind of like a sentient Twitter bot. It's like not just like a normal bot. It's but that was shocking.

Yeah. And then Yeah. So like whatever is the next thing that people are like, "Wow, that's exciting." Exactly. Speculation just follows that. That's right. That's right. Next one is regulation. Stable coin legislation passes. Has passed on in the Senate, right? It has. Halfway there. Um under Trump, Fortune 100 companies would be more willing to offer crypto to consumers. More risk appetite. Um aggressive expansion of crypto integration into web two platforms. pretty good. Number four is pretty good.

AI agent craze. Um, these things are not really agents, of course. I actually quote tweeted this one, like a screenshot recently, and I was like, "Yeah, this is spot on." Like, I think it was uh this this novelty just dies out. People are pissed off. You're you put out a tweet, you've got 30 people commenting, and it's bots, 30 accounts. Yep. It's It's no fun. Yeah. Um, this is a long one, so I Yeah, but we'll see how that goes out. Actual crypto times AI, uh, autonomous agents will use crypto to pay each other. AI agents are will start to fall deeper into this category, right? As the surprise factor comes back and the more legitimate ones continue to rise, we'll we'll move the

AI agent category into this actual crypto AI category. I'd say you're looking like 50/50 right now. Okay. 5050. Wait, what? Oh, I had a six. All right. All right. Yeah, they're 50/50. Hold on. Hold on. Ref. I think we need We need the video. Review the video. One's L2's token launches. Got it. Stable coin. All right. Yeah. Yeah. 50/50. Can you believe this guy? Like six months through the year. Yeah. So, what are your uh give us two or three predictions for now to the end of the year. You're going to make me do this. Um do you have any? No, not really. Like I I look I I think it's um I think it's weird that we've seen so much malaise in the cryptonative market and all this mania in public equities. Yeah. Right.

I've never seen this before in my career. It's very weird. Right. It's like all the craziness that was buying Celestia before is now buying circle stock. Right. And I think what we will see is that at some point it's going to reverse. But I don't know when. I don't know if it happens this year. I don't know if it happens in a year. in a year and a half, but like there will be something that just like kicks the fire off and things start to move again on the crypto side. Uh but I don't know when it is. Like when I talk to people, I don't think it's just lower rates, right? It's never just one thing. It's always like, you know, there's some story. Rates aren't a story. Rates are a mechanical thing, right? But like there has to be some, you know, I don't know,

some some, you know, Fortune50 company decides to do a thing and it like just goes crazy or some or Taylor Swift is like, "Hey, I love, you know, [ __ ] meme coins or something." And uh it just like reanimates the culture around something. The culture does feel like tired. It feels just like it feels exhausting. Yeah. And to be clear, like that's important. Yeah. It's important that that happens because you have to shake people out first, right? before you have to like kind of burn um you know the deadwood on the floor of the forest before you can actually start to to rebuild something of real energy and excitement. Yeah. Right. So, but one thing um so actually I remember I was I talked about this on my panel. Um so you posted a while back like hey uh how long do you guys think the the revenue meta

is going to go? And everybody was dunking on you and everybody was dunking. Yeah. They were destroying you in the comments of like you [ __ ] idiot. Obviously forever. It's never it never the revenue meta is never going away. And I think that u it's it's a cute answer but I think this is wrong. Okay. I think it's actually wrong. I don't think the revenue meta is never going away. Like obviously revenue will always matter in some obvious sense but like what it's obviously true for many assets circle being one of them right that people do not focus so much on revenue as they focus on stories right why what what what makes a difference.

The answer is optimism. If you are optimistic about what is coming in the future about the growth of this asset that you're going to focus more on growth and less on revenue here and less on revenue, right? If if your focus is entirely on revenue, what that means is that I don't think you're going to grow. Yeah. It means that I think basically you've topped out. These are all the people are going to be on chain. These are all the things you're going to do on chain. Right. Like that's what people believe when they say the only matters is revenue. Okay. Yeah, I think that will change, but we're not ready for it right now because nobody believes any of that. Nobody believes that there's going to be more stuff on chain. They basically believe that onchain is cooked. This is it. It's just a big

casino. And I don't believe that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, but the market doesn't agree with me and like the answer is like, look, I think I can outlast the market. Yeah. I mean, if you look at any asset, right, especially like equities, you you're looking at future projected cash flows always. You're always looking ahead. Exactly. And Yeah. like the revenue stuff makes it feel like you're just looking at all right what did you do last month it's like looking backwards more so right openai right now is making you know a few billion dollars their market cap is in what 350 billion or whatever their last round was and um why is it so high this is because people believe that they're going to make a lot more money in the future obviously they believe in growth let's see man it's been an absolute pleasure chatting man thanks thanks for

joining us thanks for having me it's always a pleasure it's a new day here um a little cooler isn't boys. Yeah. All right, guys. We'll go stand by, grab some lunch, and we got a couple more. Be right back. Cheers, guys. Thanks, Steve. All right, that was fun. Yeah, good talk. Wow, that's amazing. I got to take a picture of this. Thank you so much. [Music]

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like started from again. Production career. Here we go. production crew. The guy's getting fired next year. These guys aren't going to make it back. Yeah. Alton, how are you, man? Good. Good. Very good. How about yourself? All right. Um, all right. You are the co-founder of More Markets. Um, disclosure, we invested in Alton's companies. Uh, you're building money, Legos, DeFi, vertical infrastructure, more markets. What's the deal? Yeah. So the deal is like there's a lot of idol assets in crypto. So when you look at Bitcoin, XRP, XLM, they just sit there, don't earn anything, right? And they're usually sitting with exchanges. So you know, Binance holds like bunch of

Bitcoin uh from customer funds. XRP is the same, right? Like Uphold holds like 56 $6 billion of XRP. So when we started looking um we said when when you get top 10, these assets should be earning something. Um and exchanges do something with it. Like exchanges have some ways to earn, but they're very minimal. um they're 0.5 1% and likely they're owning the most like they're earning the most of it and don't give to the users. And we said look there's there's a lot of things happening you know people don't have to bridge anymore you know there's a lot of chain abstraction u good things are happening on chain abstraction and we said how can we like take these assets and um use them in DeFi and pay pay yield on them um through through what we know in Ethereum and Solana but

why don't we just open up to everybody so that's what more markets is it's a very simple app that you can come in um we're launching in two weeks to be able to um just just like an exchange you come and deposit in the background around um you can actually see it's very transparent where the yields are coming from and you can earn yield on your XRP starting with XRP but through going to be XLM bitcoin near all the assets that are not actively used in yeah okay cool um how how has the team and your investors and people that that you have talked to how have they adjusted to this new idea? Yeah, pivots are hard and I think they're harder in crypto and I think we we talked about it before,

right? Like a lot of people should set that ego aside and say, "Hey, I need to pivot cuz that the product I'm working on um might might not just end up as a billion dollar company." Um that's what venture returns are. um Electric Capital led our round and they have been super supportive uh just because Avatar has the understanding of you know Silicon Valley understanding how like people pivot a lot to figure out where they um where their niches. So been and EDI has been super supportive like uh he's been he's been a supporter since day one. Um so it's been it's been going really well. Uh like uh a lot of people like it on the on the on the investor team.

Would would you say that um the trend of like verticalizing uh these applications from like the the owning the chain or owning the the execution, the wallet, the the like the DeFi app? Mhm. Like it's like this full ownership of the stack. Is that what you're trying to like accomplish here? Yeah, we want to start with the app, right? Because that's where the distribution is. Um and and Hyperlid did this nicely. Uh obviously you can't compare ourselves to Hyperlid. They've been building this for the last 3 years. they are just expert market makers and you know they understand the market. Uh but that's that's a trend you're seeing like it started with hyperlquid you're seeing with Athena um you're seeing with unis swap you know you have you have the distribution obviously but then you want

to launch a chain to to own to own all the value acrruel to the to the project um and we'll see a lot more like it's it's not the first time. So you're not going to launch a chain right? Um not yet. We we want to make sure that uh first like we have users, but definitely something in like we can go down and and um after we have users to like to consider basically. Yeah. So in the next couple of weeks, you're you're going to be rolling out the app then. Correct. Cool. Correct. Yeah. Cool. Just, you know, zooming out of of more markets, what what are you bullish about in in in the space and and what are you bearish or fearful about?

Um I don't want to say stable coins because everybody is saying stable coins recently of course. Um I think the the next wave after stable coins are RWA, right? Like um if you have um institutions are coming which want stable coins, they also would want real yield, right? So um the real yields are usually some onchain like collateral. Um so I'm excited about lending markets. I think there's going to be more and more lending markets and there's a lot of iterations that Morpho is doing, you know. Um um so I'm excited about that. Bearish about like um there's an over supply of tokens. So like we need to solve that as an industry um and think through how like you know everybody's playing the same books but like how do

we kind of go back and look back at the tokconomics and build better token structures? Yeah. Uh is something that we can we can learn as an industry. Um yeah so that's those are the two things. What what uh what is it like working with Ilia in the past at Near? Like what's been that that experience been like? Ilia's great. Um, Ilia is one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life. And I I I say that from heart. Like he's he's technically brilliant. Um, and one of the things that Ilia does well is to when he recognizes founders, he let gives him the space, right? Like we we did near DA back in near it was a project that we probably wanted to start in a week and Ania allowed us to do it

and gave us the space. So that is very important in a company like Near. Um, it's been amazing and also it's been amazing to be get supported by Near. um throughout the whole you know um spin out process and everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Who do you think are the uh are the best founders in the space? Um I would say Jeff is one currently that everybody would say. Elia is one of the best technical founders I've ever seen. Um I really like Robinson. He's been, you know, he's been very supportive. Um for us, um appreciate you guys in media. like media is something that uh is hard to do and hard to craft and and really really appreciate you guys putting a lot of um content um and especially grassroots which is very

important which a lot of people don't do. Um those are the those are the ones that come into mind um and really good stereotales like I I still really like Shir storytelling abilities like he's he's amazing at that. Um so yeah there's a lot of good founders coming in um to crypto. Do do you think that that that uh that narrative is more important or uh actually like having like not like having users but like do you think like like distribution, storytelling and and and narrative is more important than like uh you know having a a killer a killer app or a killer product or like just any sort of like like how do you think about the the the balance there?

It's hard like especially for crypto, you know, like if you're in Silicon Valley, you can just launch a product, you know, you do um you market in your own ways and you're you're good to go. Yeah. For crypto, it's pretty hard. Um so I think it's a it's a delicate dance between the narrative and the the product. Yeah. Um I think it's changing in a such a way that, you know, you obviously need to have a product with a narrative, right? Like you need something that people can come in and actually see, which Kaido was able to do pretty well, right? like there was the info 9 narrative, but you also have a really good product in the back. Um, I think we're converging into that meta.

Like hyper liquid has a great product, but has also a great narrative that people uh want to stick to. Um, so if I was if I was to start again, obviously stick with the narrative, but have a have a product that backs that narrative um with with all the numbers and revenue and rev that people discuss about. So that's how I see it. Yeah. I mean, I think it's we're in like a show me the money era of the space, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. And we we did that mistake. Like look, I mean I I take the mistakes personally. Like DA was a great narrative, but it's it's hard to it's hard to um it's hard to make money off of DA. Yeah. So we we've realized it very early. We're like we need to figure something out. So we moved out from

that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I think a lot of like infrastructure projects are realizing that it's going to be hard to monetize and make money consistently. And it's hard like if you launch a token on that narrative too like very hard to pivot from there, right? So yeah, and pre-token projects have that still. Yeah. Have the advantage to be able to like nimble, have a small team. It's crazy how like the pre-token vibe is like so different than like post token vibe. Yeah. And sometimes you talk to founders, they're like, "Well, this token is dumping." And I'm like, "I have no idea why it's dumping. It's just market. Like I have no control over it." Which is which is tough. Yeah. Yeah.

So what's the next couple months look like for for you guys at more markets? What are you most focused on? what are you prioritizing? So, we we we focus on XRP just to start. I think we might be in the in the the next weeks we might be the biggest XRP wrapped in like Ethereum. Um, so that's exciting. Um, and then we're going to roll out other assets. So, been thinking about Near because Near is reducing inflation now. Yeah. What do you think about that? Yeah, pretty bullish. Like I think Do you think L1's are just cooked and they're just going to like reduce inflation because the the token's dumping and like it's just Yeah. Like it's it's it's nice to reduce inflation, but it's just like this coming back to reality moment, but but but it's also like proof of stake maybe wasn't as

important as we thought. Yeah, it is like a it is important in such a sense, but I think it's like you already know the validators, you know, like if you have 100 validators, you've kbed them, they're businesses, they're not going to go like rug you in a sense like it's pretty hard for them to rug. Um so excited about that and with that in mind like Near token for example needs to have more DeFi or like more utility. So working towards with uh with the near team to be able to find a utility for near um which is exciting. Uh having a look at XLM which is a big token. XRP is the main start but like we're not going to stop there. Um the the vision is to become almost like an onchain earning app that everyone can see like you and can come in and see

that you're earning let's say 4% through a or like some combination of you know earlier a whatever and that's exciting like it's not something that uh people had before and the next months like launching the product getting the first users um getting the first deposits in which is doing a lot of audits still so making sure that everything is secure is is something that we're working towards. What what would you say to all the XRP haters out there? People who think XRP is garbage and they don't like it. Ethereum. Um, the way I kind of phrase this is like I also have it on my uh pinned on my Twitter account is like I see Ethereum and Solana as like demand centers and all these assets doesn't really matter where they come from. Like if it's XRP, if it's a Bitcoin, it's

it's an it's a collateral that you can use. So I invite everyone to get excited about um getting alternative assets onto Ethereum and Solana rather than fight it. But the at the same time XRP has done an amazing job in marketing. Like Ripple has done phenomenal job creating an amazing narrative that sticks for the last 10 years and it's not going anywhere. Like it's it's it's going to get more and stronger even with institutions coming in. And guess what? Like they're they're in fintech magazines. You know, my brother is a fintech uh like he's he's a trader. Second asset he thinks about after Bitcoin is XRP. So, um, it has a different, you know, user base and excited to kind of get them get them yield a little bit through through Ethereum. Uh, that's that's what we're

working on right now. What's your message to the XRP community here? Yeah, they should just join the wait list and earn. You know, XRP ETH has been earning for a while, you know, like 3 4%. Solana had more like, right, like more earning opportunities. I think it's time for XRP to to earn. Let's let's say 3 4% like sustainable yield. Um, but it's the time that XRP gets healed, too. Um, so if you're watching this, just just join our wait list. Uh, we have a lot of people that join uh within the 48 hours and people keep joining um to be a user um and excited to be launching that soon.

Um, yeah. How one last thing for you. How's your journey through founder marketing going? What what are you uh what are you really focused on for your personal brand to lead more markets? Yeah, I've been doing a lot of like XRP uh I've been in bunch of XRP KL channels on YouTube and uh that's been quite interesting like it's very different than Ethereum and how you talk. Um so that's been we've been leading that. Uh we've actually went to XRP Las Vegas and BTC Las Vegas was there talking to literally community members of like why why do you hold XRP? Like just literally doing user research. Um, and people think it's like going to 10,000 and you know, if you're going to 10,000 and you're not earning yield, you know, like

that's that's that's how you kind of talk to them, which is amazing. Um, you know, it's the it's the belief in the community that at some point it will. Um, dude, which is not going to $10,000. Can't comment on that. Uh, but u going to 100, bro. Yeah. Um, but anyway, so 10 is a stretch. Well, the the the the the belief is, you know, it's like Bitcoin went to 100K, so why not XRP can go 10,000? Um um which is um again, right, like there's there's there's people that almost believe it like a religion, right? Like it's Yeah, it's it's a it's an amazing marketing machine. I know

that like movement ability of of a community is extremely strong. Yeah. Yeah. The community is like I have never seen something like this in my like XRPM is such a strong community. like, you know, if you just like go to them and say, "Hey, like I'm part of the XRB army." They're like, "Wow, you I'm too like when you like when did you buy the asset? When did you You're a big part of the XRP army now." Uh yeah, we talk to them quite often. Uh we do a bunch of marketing with the XRP QLS, but uh just to give you guys that like XRP is a strategy. We start with XRP because there's no yield on it. we we'll go to other assets like XLM, you know, near and others that don't have that much DeFi activity like how can we bring them offchain on chain and earn earn through

those um earn through more markets. So that's that's what we're focusing on right now. How's your how's your personal life going, man? Are you uh are you uh you happy you staying healthy? Yeah. Yeah. Trying to be uh founder life is pretty pretty tough. Um you know you long nights, right? Yeah. Long nights um early mornings. early mornings you can't exercise as much as you used to do which is which is annoying. Um but I play football a lot like people in uh crypto crypto community have been playing like soccer because we're in the US. Um which has been fun. Um yeah been been going well. Good man. Well thank thanks for joining us today. Thanks thanks. Um what what's on your docket here for the rest of the day for the rest of the week here in the city? Um going back to the city

to do some meetings with uh prime brokerages because they they hold a lot of XRP. Um they have customers that hold XRP. So, uh, getting them to deposit onto more markets, introducing them like DeFi, which is, uh, which is an Is that a challenge? Yeah, it is. It is definitely a challenge. Like, it's not like Ethan Soul where you can just tell people it's DeFi and then people come to you. Yeah. But, you know, if if it's not a challenge like there wouldn't be a Yeah. There wouldn't be a large price at the end. So, been been motivating team with that uh mindset. Um, which is which has been going really well. Um, yeah. And then going back going back to London and Saturday. So, cool. Yeah. Safe travels. Thanks. Thanks for joining.

Wish you the best on the launch. Thanks. Thanks. Hope hopefully you get some good traction. Some good some big deposits. Get some of those prime brokerages in there. Yes. Yes. Um and look forward to seeing it, man. Likewise. Thanks for having me. Cheers, buddy. Welcome back. Nice. My message to the XRP army. All right. Push P in more markets. Join the weight list. Yeah, there you go. Awesome. Cool. We'll see you later, man. All right, guys. Up next, we've got John Sharp coming but he's done.

Up next, we've got John Char. We'll see where he's at. He's come through. Um, wanted to shout out to Ethifi. Click the link in below this tweet. You get $50 off on your first $1,000 spent cash back. Um, one of the best crypto cards in the space. I have it on my phone. Uh, Apple Pay. Tap to pay. It's my It's the second card under my American Express business. I come in here, pull it up. There it is. You can see your history. Use it for anything expenditure and all of that.

Um, we are gonna have our next guest come up, John Charb. Um, and let's see what he's doing. Let's go. Stand by for a sec. There you go.

All right, John. What's going on, man? How are you? Good, man. The uh day three. Yeah, I'm enjoying that panel. Was uh was pretty funny. We had a we had some some funny people on on our uh on our panel. That's for sure. Doing anything with Max and Tun is always going to be fun for me. That's always sure to be a good time. It was fun. You know that like um soul ETH debate that we had in Bangkok together with Tun at the studio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a good one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun stuff. Well, okay. So, I've been talking to uh Hib and then um Alton earlier today about this uh state of the proof ofstake uh landscape with these L1s and um I I had I had to room yesterday say

that he thinks that staking businesses the the top is behind us for staking businesses. Do you agree with that? Uh yes, I do. Uh I'm I'm curious validators that Well, so I I'm curious what the others guys takes on this were. Uh cuz I was at a dinner with his team the other day too. Um and he was like sort of on the same side that I've talked about before like most of this economic security stuff is like a lot of this is a meme. Yeah. Um so I I mean I I think a lot of it is topped a lot of the staking businesses at least in some sense where I I I mean I think a lot of it is just unsustainably profitable right now. Like if you look at the breakdown of particular particularly on Salana the amount of money that validators in the

past year have made on Salana is just like absolutely ridiculous. Yeah. So there in particular, I would say just as like a margins business, I would say it's probably topped. Um cuz it's it's just been like a super inefficient market where for example, it was just like the norm for a super long time that the validators have just been like keeping all the priority fees on Salana. Yeah. Which was a thing that like no one paid attention to early on when this was a small market and people weren't making money. Um, but as these markets have gotten really big, um, and just the options for you to stake with different providers has gotten so much easier to move capital around like you you just start negotiating with people. I mean, like we we did that with our stake where early on with our soul stake, we didn't

really care where it was staked as much because it didn't make a difference. The provider that we were staking with did not give priority fees, so we moved our stake once it started moving up. And so, and then you start negotiating with people, margins compress. Um, so that's going to happen industrywide. Yeah. Um just as the I mean the industry will get bigger, proof of stake assets will get bigger, the dollars amount staked will get bigger. Um but a lot of the businesses today are definitely going to get squeezed on margins where I mean Coinbase taking what you know I don't know 20 25% on like retail staking and stuff like that. Like you you just can't keep doing that long term. It's not sustainable as you get better options and you lose your moat. even even on um you know like on like the Kepler

dashboard for uh tenderment chains on you know you had validators that would take 10 15% some would five and some would would have zero yeah and I guess for some perceived uptime or some perceived uh lack of slashing or security reasons but it always baffled me how much capital would be parked into like these these validators that are taking 10% commission I was like why like like how like they're all running the same hardware and software like it's like there's there's no difference here. Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing we're going to see compression from both sides where just from a user perspective as just staking options get better in general where there's more options to stake there's more competitive market and more people will get rational over time. I

think as the field institutionalizes more people will just you know actually care about what are the margins and stake elsewhere. Um, and then we're also going to see pressure, I think, from the chain side where this is in practice part of why chains are starting to make an aggressive push finally of, hey, we don't need 10% staking rewards. Like, this doesn't make any sense. Um, you know, Hyperliquid has I think it's like% Yeah. It's like a 2% staking yield. It's like 1% inflation. Like, staking for like seven months. I'm like, dude, I I've barely heard anything. Exactly. Like, it works fine. No one No one's going to like attack the chain. You don't need 100% staking. Like, most of that stuff is a meme. So, people are just going to keep bringing their staking rewards down. Yeah, I mean you saw the push on Salana for the same

reason. That didn't pass in part because I think they tried to get a little too cute and complicated with the mechanism, but there's very clear appetite for hey, what if we just like cut the re is rate in half. Um, and then Celestio's like proposal now for the extreme version of what I had talked about a couple years ago of maybe just get rid of this thing and do I mean just proof of governance just slash the the staking issuance all the way down to effectively what is a 100% commission of we need to pay enough to the validators to service the chain and just like make it very transparent that these are the economics. Um because in practice that's also where validators have been able to make a lot of money is when all the numbers are just they're just complicated to users. There's a

bunch of issuance. There's a bunch of priority fees. There's MV. Yeah. You when the more complicated things are usually the easier it is as one of these businesses to sort of skim off larger pieces. When you make it really transparent of hey here's the amount of issuance that we are coming out of the chain and this is exactly what's going to pay for validities. It's very transparent. You negotiate that very clearly. Um, and you're not going to get these crazy margins anymore because most chains are realizing like this is just a waste of money. Like we're paying out a bunch of inflation where valid it makes it easier for validators to take an unduly large cut. Yeah. Um, and then most of the rest is inflation. We don't actually need to send back to stakers.

It's excessive. It's inefficient on like all the tax inefficiencies and stuff like that. So I definitely think we're going to see this push going forward of like a compression of margins there and a a lot of reduction in staking rates. So hypothetical if you were to part and you were like running the Salana Foundation Lily tolly etc. What would you do immediately to address the application versus validator profit maximization imbalance from the with regard to the actual me situation and and applications really giving a lot of value back to the chain? What would you immediately do? So part I mean yeah so part of the validator profitability

thing is is separate from the app profitability of like a lot of currently most of the value that the validators are taking now at least the way that things are currently constructed today should be going to validators in that like a lot of these priority fees where they're taking crazy margins those should be going to val uh sorry those should be going to stakers today um as opposed to like you know P2P or whoever or Coinbase like taking those that should be going to me as like a sole staker. So I think that's the first step is improving that and that's a lot of just you know reduce the inflation just make better options for people to stake make it easier for people to stake and like the margins won't compress there.

What you really need to do though is also start to squeeze out the soul stakers to that point of helping the applications where okay but these you know a lot of these excessive fees uh the me and stuff like that you know we don't even want that to leak to the soul holders or the validators we want that to go return uh to the applications. Um, and that's part of what we were talking about on the panel yesterday, like with Max, and this is where a lot of the application specific sequencing type of talk comes in because I I do think that is going to matter a lot. Um, that that's the more probably like existential risk of if applications are saying, you know, hey, half of the value that I create as an application is just leaking out to the the soul stakers and

validators because there's just like an inefficient market structure here and I can't capture it well. Um, like I'm going to leave at some point. like why run a 50% margin business on Salana if I can go make my own app chain and get 100%. um that obviously won't make sense for small ones, but at a at a certain point, I mean, this is the conversation that everyone has always with Pump Fund, for example, where I don't think it makes sense for them today, but is there a breaking point in the future where if they're saying like, "Hey, we're, you know, leaking out making up a number 30, 40%, whatever of the value is um if we own the users, at a certain point, it does become rational to go do your own thing." Um I don't think it makes sense today. There's a lot of value to the

distribution and the infrastructure. It's expensive to build it. Um, but yeah, at a certain point you're gonna need a better you're going to need to expose better mechanisms for these applications to re internalize that value. And so that's where the application specific sequencing comes from, which is kind of at least the way that they want to implement it downstream of multiple concurrent leaders. Yes. So that that's concretely the thing at a protocol level that people like Max and Toli have obviously been talking about for a long time because that is particularly now really a path to getting that um which would be super super helpful. So, okay. So, that's Salana. That's kind of this entire staking ecosystem. The other phenomenon that's been happening is that over the last 18 months, there's been an abundance of new chains. Um, and

we we've had a ton of different specialized chains. Um, you know, Hyperlid obviously is dominating in a lot of ways in that specific use case, new general purpose L1s, but like what's what's happening more than ever is like a consolidation process kind of like monolithic modular. Oh, maybe we got to go back closer to like just a couple chains. How are you like how are you seeing the the multi-chain, let's just put it that way, landscape now. like how are you seeing the power law play out from a uh mind share transactions uh users etc. And then like how do you think that that's going to keep playing out in the future? Are we going to have this continue to kind of like crunch and and just have a couple big winners? Um

are the you know are the breakout chains not yet launched? Like we've seen this kind of go and kind of eb and flow. Where are we at now? I I think what we're seeing right now is probably going to hold for at least quite a while where you have this power law of general purpose chains. Yeah. Where I I think the vast majority of applications that are launching today are best served by launching on top of some existing general purpose chain and then depending on what your need is that will depend that will tell you which chain it is. So a lot of simple old school DeFi protocols that aren't like super trading oriented and low latency trading and just need access to a lot of capital. Some of them do still make sense to launch first on Ethereum. Like I was talking to a protocol today. That

was like their early stage. They're going to launch on Ethereum first because it's not it's not a trading oriented thing. They just need access to a certain large pool of capital. Same thing with like like Athena was a perfect example. The last cycle makes sense if you're building something like that. You're going to go launch on Ethereum. You don't need your own chain at least to start. You just want access to a lot of capital infrastructure that works. for most trading and consumer oriented stuff again where you don't really need your own chain for the vast majority of it just go launch it on Salana um and that's where in practice we're seeing most of that stuff today of like most interesting new consumer oriented applications early stage just go launch on Salana it works um and then you're going to get a tail that will

disperse to other places for a variety of needs whether that's monad like if you want you know EVM compatibility um if you know certain will complete on like even lower latency for like certain use cases the vast majority just don't need their own chain though at least to start obvious lift to to make and run your own chain that's just like usually unnecessary where you lose out on the distribution it's I think for most of them that will be like a later stage conversation for most of the really successful ones unless you like really need certain customizations to start like Hyperlid obviously benefited from having their own chain from the start um but I I don't think That's indicative of most things that we're seeing at least. All

right, last one for you. I put out a tweet several weeks back uh kind of a meme and I got absolutely just clobbered for it, which was how long do you think the revenue meta is going to last? And I actually had on like two people prior and he he was actually like, "Look, man, I I think you got clobbered, but unfairly so. Here's why." Because um I think your point was right. The people that were depending on how you meant it. Yeah. The people who are focusing right now on revenue, revenue, revenue, everything are effectively saying that the current amount of adoption that we have today is the the end and that you have you need to be fully maximizing for what that is now and that you're not even thinking about projecting into the future. And so that's all that matters.

And so and so that the people that were angry were kind of too were thinking too too closely into like the here and now and and and not forward. Now, I may or may not have meant that. It may have just been pure troll ragemate, but it was very good. I'd be curious what you think. Like, do you agree with Hib? Do you think that like he has a point? What's your thoughts? Like, like there's been such an emphasis on revenue for the last like month or two. Uh where do we go from here into the future? Yeah. So, I I guess I would broadly bucket it into like three camps where people are right now. uh one is I would say there's a group of people who don't think that you need to make money for a lot of projects in a long-term state where they will

make the argument that for assets particularly large L1 platforms like ETH soul whatever that you don't need to be you know charging a bunch of fees rev like it's totally fine the value of this thing will come as it's a commodity moneylike thing that's like one camp and that's one that I've like largely argued against I think there's like rare exceptions to that like bitcoin obviously I don't think so that I would say anti the revenue meta in the sense that a lot of people like me will say hey this is important like for soul to generate a bunch of rev um so that's like one to argue against and then yeah that middle camp is where I think most people actually are today which is like what I describe as really the revenue meta of it's just now an overfixation on like go to DeFi llama

and sort by like what is the revenue number today and like okay so we put like multiple on this and that's just completely wrong. Um like that that literally just doesn't make any sense. Um for multiple reasons one one being uh that simple fact of most people just aren't like doing the like even one step further analysis of okay but like literally a snapshot today doesn't mean anything. What actually matters is in any kind of like DCF valuation it's like what money am I going to make in the future? And so if you just have [ __ ] revenue quality and it's just going to go down, well, that is not a better thing to hold than the thing which has zero revenue today, but I think it's going to thousand x tomorrow. Well, then the thing that's actually has no revenue today is the better like cash flow bet.

Um and so people like ju just have a really hard time grasping I think particularly these kind of just exponential leaps in crypto where it can be very rational as a cash flow and based investor to prefer an asset which has absolutely no cash flow today because I think that it's going to th00and 10,000x in the amount of cash flows that it's going to get in the future. Um and that's how like all early stage investing works. That's how all equity investing works. Exactly. And like people just have a really hard time getting their heads around that I think particularly because crypto people just we haven't thought about revenue and cash flows for a long time. Um but I mean the very simple once you dig one level deeper onto it is like most of the tokens that people are valuing is like

oh this is value because of cash flow is revenue today like look at the numbers they don't actually like make sense on any reasonable valuation basis. I know like like one of the one of the like I would say one of the most emblematic ones of it today is like Syrup uh Maple, which I think is like a great protocol. I I think it's like a really cool idea. I think it's like future growth, but everyone is basing it off of like, you know, everyone was like, "Oh, they're like they're making so much revenue today like compared to all these other applications, that's why it should be valuable." If you just like look at what the multiple valuations on these things are today, it's like, "All right, the thing is making like 10 mil in revenue and spending like a little under 10 mil a year. It's like maybe like making a

million dollars a year in profit. So like a 600 PE multiple is like not it's not a reasonable valuation. Like even there you're doing this you know like okay the bet is that we think this thing is going to grow 100x in the future. Like sure it makes sense. Um but yeah way too many people are just taking this simplistic look of like what is the number today and then project this forward. Yeah. It's it's it's really like looking backwards instead of looking forwards which all investing is really always looking forward. Exactly. And so that's what I think is going to die out at some point as the like revenue meta right now where we're going to just get past this overfixation where it's like crypto people just discovered revenue and they're like wow this is like an amazing thing. How did we like not look at this before? And they're

like this is this is all we need to look at now and then we're going to go back to this middle ground where it's like no a lot of the infrastructure stuff will for example make sense. It's just that for some of it it may not generate cash flows today. what you need to be making a reasonable argument for all these is what are the cash flows that it's going to generate in the future. um because like that's what's actually going to matter and for a lot of it it won't matter uh for a lot sorry for a lot of it like it won't capture value like I I think the future that we're going to head towards is 95% or whatever the value is going to go to applications um like I I do think that is going to be the general trend but that doesn't mean

that you can't have like any infrastructure winners for example like if Salana is the platform that just most stuff is built on top of even if it's just squeezing out 5% margins at the end of the day on a huge pie like that could be many billions of dollars per year exactly um and that could be a super valuable thing So, um, last thing for you actually that that Crypto Twitter has recently discovered is, uh, clubs. Uh, we we we've, uh, recently realized that clubs exist. So, shout out to Crypto Twitter. Um, and my question to you is, do you think that there is a specific infrastructure architecture that is ideal for clubs? I think there's like four options more or less. You got like a hyperl like a L1 basically, that's a app chain L1, app L1. You got a

general purpose L1 like a monet with like a kuru or something. Um you've got like a general purpose L2 like a mega ETH super high throughput. Um you know again these kind of all kind of converge in some ways and then like a custom specific L2 app chain for a club like is there a infrastructure that you find to be ideal somewhere in the middle like kind of what's your thoughts here? I I don't think there's any ideal one. I do think there are tradeoffs to all of them. I I think a lot of it comes down to what is the best in practice today.

Um because I think there's a good argument that if you take the Salana end vision which is we're doing a million TPS and we have like effectively instant blocks instant finality, we have multiple current leaders, we have app specific sequencing, we have like all these you know fancy things, there's no reason for you to need their own chain that like might be true in the ideal state. Yeah. But we just like we just obvious we obviously don't live there today and that's like probably years away. So in practice in the real world if you want to launch the best thing today you need your own chain to do it. Yeah. Um and right now that's Hyperlquid. I'd say like without a doubt that is obviously just like the best application uh and just implementation of this today that people just like love using. It works really well. Yeah. In

general the way that it is easiest to launch a thing is going to be just what's the most centralized version of it. Yeah. Exactly. Like like what's the fastest most centralized version? Exactly. And so I mean Hyperliquid basically just went max centralized. They looked at Salana. I was like, "Nah, [ __ ] you, man. I'm going to do way better than that." Exactly. And like they basically just went max centralized particularly at the start. Um and they're like progressively decentralizing. Now I mean when they started it was four nodes all ran by the team. Yeah. Um obviously and like now it's you know it's 16 but they're all coll-located one you know still region right. Yeah. still the foundation has super majority stake but like okay like this will hopefully broaden out over time in general the easiest way to do things today is just start super

centralized and so in practice like usually the easiest way to do that today is just by launching some sort of L2 there's like a lot of frameworks and stuff to build that um and I mean the other part of it is that obviously just like with launching some sort if you actually have real decentralization and proofs along with the thing that allows you to keep the thing super centralized while having actual like security fallbacks um where I like people handwave it away, but I I I do think the bridge security risks on Hyperl would like actually matter today. I like I would put a different amount of money on the chain if I had zero security risks with it. Scary actually. Um like I I like they can clearly overcome it because it's the best product that there is today. But I I I don't think it's

reasonable to say that like this wouldn't be a better product if people had like zero security risks about the bridge. If I had 100% certainty that like hey I could just withdraw my money. there's nothing that they can do to censor or shut down the bridge or like anything like that like I would put more money on it. Um and I I think that like on the margin that does matter and 100% does and so it like that that is the way that if you're going to have like completely centralized operations um with a rollup that's the way you're going to get that the tough the tough part is that this again is like what exists in practice versus today. In practice, most of the roll-ups today don't actually give you those guarantees that I just described. And they're slower, whatever it is. Right. Exactly.

And less efficiency. And so I I think Hyperlid took the correct route of saying like, hey, in practice, most of this rollup stuff is also an ideal end state. That's going to give you perfect security guarantees. Today, in practice, most of them are still it's a security council. You're taking security questions with them. You know, you're taking some trust. And so they said, "All right, we're just like we're just going to ship an L1 with a few validators and like it'll work." Um, I think that was the right trade-off today. But I think that what the right trade-off is just it will evolve over time. Um it may be implementing more of like a ZK bridge kind of thing. If that tech just becomes commoditized then Hyperl should just like slap it on there. Um that's what they should use.

Um if it becomes a general purpose chain and Salana is like the thing in 5 years once it's an ideal end state and like sure you should just launch there. Um so the infrastructure is just going to keep evolving and applications just need to at any given time to say like what what's the infrastructure that's going to give me the best experience for my users right now. Y um right now it's Hyperlid. Tomorrow it might be something else. John, I appreciate your time. I know it's been a busy week for you. Um thanks for the chat and uh we'll see you soon. Yeah, buddy. Cheers, man. All righty, guys. Uh up next, we've got uh we've got good friend Weey. I'm going to bring him up here. Hello, Kates. How are you? Good to see you. We're live running around.

We've got Weey on. What's up, boy? How are you, man? Good. Have you been in the trenches this week in meetings and calls and doing investments? Always. Always. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I maybe not so not as much as you guys, right? You've been you've been here for like this our second day doing Yeah. doing 15 20 podcasts. Yeah. But very short ones. Yeah. But fun ones though. Uh this new format's been a bit more It's I I I think it's a bit less dense conversations. seems like it's hard to get into really really deep, but you get more kind of breadth of topics and Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.

Pulse check. Pulse check. All right. So, let's do a little pulse check then. Uh I I got quite a few of your tweets pulled up um that I'd like to talk to you about. Um okay, so this one is actually yesterday about what apps and infrastruation specific L1s, which I was just talking to John about. um product specs of apps determine the required infrastructure. Let's unpack. Yeah. So, traditionally we have been building infrastructure that use tech to unlock something but we don't know what that something is. you know if you look at uh you know Ethereum sol generalized infrastructure right and I think um hyperlquid taught us that you you had to have a list of product

requirements that you're actually building towards is what type of digitalization what's the latency how many TPS and what's the semantics of the transactions uh of of your application so if we're building for end users building for if you're building something real uh with real revenue real users we'll have to come up with list product spec, right? And connect that with a technology that can give us those product spec. Okay? And and so for apps, uh this is, you know, you should come up with a product list of product spec to to to best build your products and and think about what's an infrastructure that gives unlock that, you know, list of list of features and and sometimes you might not be able to find that. And I think for hyperlquid the situation was

okay we need something that's minimally decentralized and and that gives us like 200k TPS and we can tune down the latency to like 80 milliseconds that they have right now. And what they found was that okay we can't actually build this on any R1. We had to build our own. And so so that's I think what apps should take away just don't be afraid to build your own infra if it doesn't exist. And for infra um you have to understand the product spec of your targeted apps. You can't just build in the infrastructure anymore. You have to understand your exact targets apps and understand the product spec build your infrastructure to unlock the product spec. So could you maybe then give us a couple examples of like uh Okay, so obviously like high throughput trading is what Hyper's doing, right?

But maybe a couple other examples of like teams either you guys have backed or or what you've seen out there in the wild that is like okay this product spec clearly makes sense for this use case. Yeah. So let's talk about um let's say latency right latency for trading is the most important thing uh when you're talking about like liquidity market makers um and and if you're building a DEX it's clear that that that's something you should minimize. But if you're talking about something like uh NFT project know or like uh you know a a social app right may maybe like you know for for those applications latency is not doesn't matter as much right um and you know if you talk about um fees

sometimes fees actually you know congestion fee doesn't matter like for example if you if you have like if you have a really congested market people will pay to get to get in front of the line and that's Okay, that that's just the structure of of of of the application, right? Uh and people will get will pay to to get in front. Uh and so you can build like this priority fee market. But for something like a like a for example like a block fee market where it's more like commodity, it's more about inclusion. Then the you know it's more about the base fee. So so maybe the kind of priority fee market doesn't matter as much and it's all about kind of can I get my transaction through. So for payments for example, it doesn't really matter whether my payment goes in at the top of the block or like

you know um what was literally the first thing that's processed. Right. Right. And so so like understanding kind of what are what are the priorities um um you know for each application. It's going to be different depending on application. I mean, yeah, like payments is a good example of there's there's even applications out there and use cases that are that have like a um a communive property where like 2 plus 3 is five or 3 plus two is five. Like sometimes ordering doesn't matter. Exactly. You know what I'm saying? Sometimes sometimes it does matter though, right? And so so so that was the idea behind that. Thanks for the heads up there way. Uh, next one that I got for you is um a separate tweet which is uh being slow

to pull up but but I think you said okay here we go. You recently imagine a 2026 where Bitcoin has DeFi, Ethereum has full rollup interop, Salana becomes a decentralized NASDAQ. My question is which one of these bets do you think will happen first and why? Oh good question. So yeah so so let's say more about one right. So Bitcoin shipping uh trust minimized bridges and unlocking Bitcoin DeFi. So lending yields, you know, restaking things like that. Uh Ethereum unlocking interop, right? We're finally like we're getting network effects and Solana becoming, you know, literatively or figuratively the dig. I think um clearly um Salana ships the fastest so far. So perhaps that's um you know the there's a

good reason why they'll keep shipping and I think based on recent data points, they already have designs. there, you know, some some of it is already in test nets. I know openlow is, you know, is on internal test nets, you know. Um, Ethereum is 200 faster. So, I I'll rank that as um the you most likely. And Bitcoin, I think, um, well, we don't actually need Bitcoin core to change for trust miniz bridges, right? We'll have all these construct to get around it. But nevertheless, I think it it's just so complex right now. there's all these competing solutions. uh you know the technical the technical approach is getting better and better right so not people are talking about gobble circuits

now as as a way to minimize the onchain part of the you know BVM bridge BVM um uh BVM bridge construction and and and that's like completely new within the past three months and so um so yeah there's still a very fast pace of like research innovation it's just going to take a while to to get to um you know practical implementation so I would rank maybe Solana most likely Ethereum and then Bitcoin. Yeah. Al although I did hear from Jeremy Rubin, a core developer, that um actually at a dinner the other night that covenants are closer than they ever have been for Bitcoin, like in the next month or two.

But then I had Jeff Garzik on a core OG guy and he he he made a claim that he would make a prediction market and put 0.1 Bitcoin on it that there's no covenants in the next 60 days. So yeah, Bitcoiners, man. Um or decentralized. Um, no. I I And that's that's what makes Bitcoin strong, right? Oh, man. All right. So, um I'm curious like what you can tell us about some of the coolest ideas you've seen in the consumer app space recently. I know that you guys have been doing uh investing and and work there. Um what are some of the ideas that have been cool that that that you can share that are public um that you find compelling? You know, tell us about some some of the teams. Yeah.

So, I think Rodeo is the most recent app that we invested in. And um you know, I I'll try to try my best to speak uh to Rodeo, but you know, keep in mind this this actually Peter uh who's on the Onecast team um you know, led the deal and but anyway, so Rodeo is this app for to collect um is effectively kind of like NFT collection app, right? But but it's but there's a social experience behind it. And so it's almost like Instagram uh you know for for collecting art and um and and it's clear that the NFT cycle where we had a lot of um you know equivalent of users that type of dynamic is is is only scalable within like a core community I think and to

really expand a consumer experience to the broad audience we need to actually think about how like the broader consumer base like consume and share and like have social experiences. Um, and I think, yeah, and it's, you know, I think we'll see more and more of these like customized experiences um, in a form of apps that's that's not really like it's not really a crypto app, right? It's it's like you're creating new experiences. So, so it's it's a socialbased application. Yeah, it's a social based NFT uh, collection app. Cool. Um, last time we spoke with Tun, we we talked a lot about a quantum, but b AI and kind of like the agent side of things. Um, have you been having any kind of

esoteric or uh deep reflections about uh AI in the last couple months or weeks since we last spoke? Yeah. Let's see. What did we talk about? So, we spoke about MCP. We we we spoke about that, you know, agents why agents kind of didn't catch on. Yeah. Yeah. I I think let's see. So MCP allowed, you know, a allowed these all these different open- source um we're closed source AI language models to connect with data sources and A2A agent to agent communication allowed different LLMs to communicate but really I think we we still don't really have a way for them to discover each other. I think um when we have these inter protocols, it's like

the internet, right? Like before Google, there's it's it's really hard to actually discover the best thing for for your for your for your needs. But with Google, you just Google search. Um and and I think something like that would need to exist. And currently it seems that you know it's pretty ad hoc people when you when you use like cloud codes or other other other type of tools you know the type of the best type of MCP servers for your for a particular use case. Yes. Uh but when we think about like actually developing a product for end users where you know your your agent can can discover many many things for you like okay you know it's late night in um uh you know at a conference I

haven't you know had real food yet like you know my agent is going to order me door dash right that type of that and then what type what type of like data sources we need to find like what type of food I like that that type of experience um I think the idea is there but the concrete infrastructure is is still lacking I would say. Yeah. Um I mean like the whole crypto AI space feels like it's like two three years out. Yeah. And I would say it's not even crypto, right? I think it's like how would how would crypto insert itself into the broader AI um paradigm shift uh instead of how how do we really force crypto AI to to to go together. Yeah. Um I think digitalized training is interesting. Um but really using using

using crypto to solve like discovery coordination and and like reputation is potentially more interesting. So we're seeing builders building in in that in that direction but so so early. Kind of a more broad question for you. What what are you bullish and excited about and and what are you bearish on or fearful about? Um I think looking back to my first first tweet, right? Um we want full stack infrastructure applications and um we we increasingly we're we're seeing teams you need to get good at all three things right which is um the time to

unlock the product experience in terms of okay what do we prioritize you know is it latency is that fees is you know or not and how do we get distribution how do we actually get this into the hands of people that needs it and build build a network uh and build a platform and and that's what I'm bullish on. It's it's really um teams that can understand and you know be the top 1 percentile at all three. It's really hard to be one top one percentile on a single one of them. But you know I I think it's required right o over time o over the live life live um life cycle of of of the project to do that. uh I'm going to bearish on is um you know if if you're still kind of focused on the existing kind of very

saturated market um or if you're you know really focusing on just one thing but it's unable to expand to like I I think it's give us an example here yeah example is I I think a lot of times if you focus just on distribution okay and you don't focus on like a technical unlock then I think you know there there's limited upsides to um the outcome of of that, you know, of of of that project because because of the saturation of of the amount of people that would be able to do the same thing. Yeah. Right. So, if you don't have the fundamental innovation, then a lot of times you're not in the business of market creation, right? So, like that's really truly what creates venture style outcomes is if you if you actually have the tech that can change your world.

Yes. But you know, but if you're just building another uh uh you know, another chain where another predation market app uh like it's yes, there's already a market for that, but you're you're there to disrupt the existing players, right? But if you're in the business of market creation, you have to think about what actually creates that market. Okay. Well, then if I push back and said if I hypothetically if I told you that I believe moes in open source crypto don't exist, what would you respond? Let's unpack that. Mostly open source crypto don't exist. Um what what do you mean by that? It it's a silly oneliner, but in in in a world of of um open source code, in a world of the ability

to to spin up infrastructure, the the ability to create ideas, fork easily, um and basically undercut all competition with, you know, raising venture. um moes don't exist because there's there's always somebody who can come out and do what you're doing in either cheaper or for a different audience or uh better in some trade-off way. And so we get a lot of the same ideas fighting for a a closed amount of of resources and modes don't exist because you can you can optimize for something based on the nature of the entire industry. Yeah, I think this this is true for one category

of projects. And so I think there's two categories of um products and and projects, right? And actually there's another tweet of mine recently um and it's the idea you're either a product business Yeah. or you're a platform business. Okay. So if you're a product business meaning you're in the you know I'm selling this specific uh software with specific hardware and if you open source that and allow anyone to make it at cost obviously you don't have a mode if anyone can make an iPhone and sell it at cheaper than than you know Apple's cost and run all the same software why would you pay Apple right so I think so for product exactly so I agree with you right so for product businesses there's

very little modes outside of right your IP like your exclusiveness in producing that product right um so if you open source obviously for software you don't have no longer have that mode on the other hand for platform businesses the the mode is not the process to produce the product is that cononical network that canonical platform so you know like a chain is a platform yeah so a chain is a platform for for decentralized applications right a you know a marketplace is a platform right for that for a particular product category like you know Amazon is a platform um you know an app store is a platform and Uber is a platform for you know uh right hitting services so platforms are often

times winner take all because because of the network effects and so this is what kind of web two VCs have you know been investing in this is why Uber is valuable right they can effectively take over the market and ramp up the ramp up the fees and people will pay that because you know it's it's the the one place where you get really quick services rise and and upstars are really hard uh have really hard time disrupting that right and so for network uh you know platform businesses or platform networks there there is a mode even if you you open source it because it's really hard to disrupt right so there's distinct two categories and in that tweet of mine I actually mentioned every technology um can be built in two different ways

you can build a product business with a piece technology or you can build a platform business and so um I I think I wrote that response to Mer's tweets which is you know he said don't invest in infrastructure but invest in platforms and and you know things were natural requests and my point is look you can you can build around technology and build a product first and then expand into a platform right and then open source it's not really um you know it doesn't really move your mouth so what are the platform businesses in crypto today that Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana. I would say like the big like the big chains. Yeah, exactly. And I think all the big chains are platforms, right? Even hyper liquid,

you know, you're seeing we're seeing applications been on hyperlquid today. And why why do people been on Hyperlid is because there's already users there, right? So they have that network effects because of the mind of of traders. Um and so um so I think yeah so so chain platform for launching these applications. Yeah you know in a way bitcoin is also a platform for store of value right the the more people that holds bitcoin I mean the more valuable it is and so um I I so in a way like even the past like two decades in venture it's like everyone just investing in um platform businesses right and infra platform businesses.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So when it comes to like the monetization of block space of some of these platforms, do you believe that like a lot of the block space will trend to zero across platforms that don't have that much value and there will be some platforms or chains that have a lot of value that that are able to charge for the block space? It's like is that like a pretty like consensus view? Yeah, really good question. I think so first of all, why do we even have the idea of a block space? And so currently what happens with EVM or it's a lot of chains is we we try to have a upper bounds on the amount of data that we can push through the network per unit of

time. Right. And if there's more data that want to get in what happen is that we will increase the fees. So this is EIP559. Yeah. We increase the fees so that we price out certain transactions, right? So we're working on an assumption that there's a limit to block space and that there's we just raise fees. But think from the product perspective. Why do we actually want that? Why do we actually want to raise the fees? Um, you know, we like what if you do a Google search and Google says, "Oh, pay me a dollar." And you know, because because um uh you know, I'm congested right now, right? We're like, "Oh, you're watching Netflix." And wait a second, everybody's else is watching, therefore I'm going to charge you more money, right? Businesses don't usually operate like that. if there's enough capacity if there's a way

to add more capacity. So I think the other way to look at this question is how do we increase block space as in response to demand and I call that dynamic scalability right altos can already do this if you look at base has been increasing their gas limit so in a way they understand the this dynamic let's just produce more block space yeah yeah yeah just yeah just limit exactly so so I think current chains are um are still kind of thinking let's have a bound and raise fees but the extra of chains will will think let's just create more and more of these right and and we'll charge a bare minimum base fee for inclusion so that there's um so there's no enough fees to go around but right

it's it's more about creating more and charging less per per unit why does raising the gas limit uh help scalability like directly like like why does that I'm sorry it's a noob question but yeah okay so so there's actually two two things in a blog right one is how big the block is. Yeah. And one is how how much computation right uh is in that block. A lot of times uh when you throw them with design these two things are super intertwined that you know you can you can put a lot of data in a block or you can just have like a lot of computation in a block that computing a lot of hash functions and it's really hard to kind of uh you know price relative these two relative differently different resources but nowadays right

you look at Celestia it's all about posting data and if you look at kind of what an L2 sequencer is doing what these fat proof watchtowers are doing they're getting the data and and re-executing, right? So, uh we're increasingly breaking down these resources separately. So, that um gas limits when people say gas limit often times refer to the the combined two things which is data and execution. But but I I personally like to think of it as data and computation. How much do you charge to to get that data to through to to to you know DA layer like like Celestia?

Yeah. And how much does it cost to actually um you know do a computation on chain? Okay. So you can you can expand the amount of data by increasing the gas limit and then that allows you to have more transactions per block basically. Yeah. So this is what Celeste is doing. Um and then and then on the computation side um could you just could you just close that up one more time? Yeah. So um it turns out right let's let's look at the slice of secure web design. Um if you decouple posting all the data and exe execution of the computation right right then as you increase the the data throughput you can increase the

execution of it in a in a different manner. So for data you only need one out of so right and so let's just sh the data and for execution it turns out you you only need one prover right to prove the entire thing and talking about bass though so I was I was confused base will be zikarola by at some point that's my prediction okay okay cool um last thing we what what are you uh what are you dejening on chain these days if if the answer is nothing you're going to get roasted Um yeah uh so rodeo there we go. Yeah. Uh I I think I think um you know we're going to talk

with our own um portfolio projects and and you know we've yeah you know it's what web two products are uh the web two lag experience is what we need in in crypto. I I think you know I like these days I don't I don't really bridge around and you know to like get this new tokens anymore like D5 farming and things like that but you know like easy to use webu products yeah uh is it's you know it's just easy to use way I appreciate your time man have a great rest of your week here uh it's always a pleasure you're welcome on whenever man all right it's been fun cheers man see you soon guys just on the final stretch here couple more people Robbie maybe coming back. I think we've got Ivan up next. Um,

yeah, guys. 312 here. Nice day. Up next, we'll get Ivan up. Hey, Ivan. How you doing? Nice to meet you. Welcome on, man. Nice nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. Yes, sir. Um, well, welcome to the to the studio.

How's your week been? It's been great. You know, never dull a moment in crypto. Yeah, it's busy, right? Always busy, but good busy. Well, all right. So, let's just get right into it. I've got an idea and many people have this idea I think and it's something that we've prioritized building media and just you know uh building a personal brand is that distribution is king and so when you look at at what you guys are doing with moon it feels like being very like closest to the user and having maximum distribution through the app store etc has been what has basically driven a lot of your success. talk to me about your thesis on distribution for crypto apps and why you guys have done so well on that front. I appreciate it. Well, first

I totally agree with distribution is king. Uh it's something that you learn as an entrepreneur. Uh this is my first rodeo. Yeah. In your first one, you don't say in the first time founders. Yeah. You have stars in your eyes. Exactly. And then the second time focus on distribution. You realize oh you build it and then they don't come and then you're like oh no. Uh and so then you start to realize that distribution is really important. Um you know I really see wallets as the future of your bank. Um I think they will ultimately replace your bank account. It's built on fundamentally better rails. And so when we started Moon it was really around the focus of how do we make these wallets more usable? And if you think about it there's people with uh a Visa or Mastercard in their pocket. Um and so

how do we make people that have that in their pocket able to come into the crypto ecosystem easily? That's where we started. It was really cards directly into crypto on ramp off ramp. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And you know when we started it was let's not build our own consumer experience but let's focus on enabling this capability for the biggest wallets in the world. So when we started we went live was March of 2019. Our very first transaction on bitcoin.com. I remember it. I remember the day that it actually happened. Uh and it's crazy to fast forward to today. You know I think we have 500 partners across the crypto ecosystem inside of me. And really the goal is every single day making the experience better, adding more payment methods. We want to localize the Moon Pay experience for every single part of the world. Uh you

know, I reflect on last year this partnership with PayPal was a really big deal for us. Uh I think we're now the only player that you can use Venmo inside of a crypto app to top up your wallet. Uh and we look forward to announcing more partnerships like that over the over the coming year and really thinking how do we add more more and more payment methods into Moon Pay. So no matter where you are in the world, your favorite payment method can be used on the platform. And then really when we talk about distribution, you know, we really think about how do we reduce that friction for the user. You know, it's not a good experience if every customer that comes into your platform has to go through KYC to onboard uh across every single wallet. And so we, you know, one of the benefits of the Moonay

infrastructure, the Moon Pay account, uh, we want to ultimately be seen as like a payment method, like a new payment method where you have your KYC on file, uh, you have your card credentials on file, you have your linked bank accounts on file, you have any of your linked payment methods on file, you have your crypto on file, and you can use that to spend anywhere. And our goal is, you know, being the trusted partner to pretty much everywhere uh, that you want to enter the ecosystem, you see Moon Pay, and we make it easy for you to start. Yeah. Yeah, you guys recently did a a larger partnership announcement with Mastercard. They've been getting into the space in a big way. What is it about Moon Pay and about Crypto Rails that Mastercard is specifically interested in? Is it is it the speed? Is it the cost? Is it the

stable coin yield? Is it new user base? What what is it that they are excited about that you guys are are uh providing? So, Mastercard's been a phenomenal partner. We've been working with them not just now, but really over the last couple years. Yes, first it was really thinking around how could they take loyalty and rewards you know most people know Mastercard for the slogan priceless. So a lot of the work that we did was how do we take that priceless initiative and put it on chain and so we did a lot of really cool activations over the last couple years where uh from a marketing perspective you could start to earn NFTts for doing things within the Mastercard network. Uh really now this this recent amount of activity that we can do at Mastercard has really been focused around stable coins. Uh and you

know really how do we leverage our infrastructure to make it easy for people to take you know a stable coin that's sitting in their non-custodial crypto wallet and be able to spend it anywhere that Mastercard's accepted. Uh you know virtual accounts has been a big initiative for Moon. We just acquired a company called Iron that really helps us supercharge our developer capability where any non-custodial wallet can now spin up a virtual account. You know you could receive salary deposits into it. you can receive third party payments into it. We can automatically convert that into a stable coin. And then the next step is okay, if we actually want this wallet to replace your bank account. Uh you're going to want a card attached to it. And so who that who should that card be attached to? We'll say Mastercard. We love Mastercard. And so really, they saw an opportunity to

work with us, work with our existing distribution to put more people on the Mastercard network. Uh but I think for them you know being close to stable coins being close to innovation you know this is essentially a new form of payment that it's growing rapidly. US dollars 1.1% of the US dollar supply has been put on uh stable coins. That's an incredible stat just thinking about how early we are in the relative grand scheme of things. My view is it doesn't change overnight. It's not like you're going to stop using your Mastercard to pay for things but over time you might start to use stable coins. And so I think you know Moon and Mastercard was a natural partnership to think okay how do we stay ahead of that trend how do we make sure that people can use both formats and I think you know we're going

to continue to see more and more innovation I think more and more merchants are going to start to accept stable coins more and more businesses are going to recognize that this is a new form of money that they need to you know have the rails have the infrastructure and we really see our role at Moonay is playing the role of enabler. How do we make it easy for them to to come in the crypto economy in the same way that we've helped a lot of these non-custodial wallets in the ecosystem do it as well. Yeah. Yeah. So, so when when I have a a virtual account on Moonay, um, and I use a Mastercard, which is effectively like a credit card, uh, but but it it more so operates like a debit card in in in the sense that it'll it'll take it'll take my stable

coin balance directly from my non-custodial account and, you know, when I pay, there's no like credit like we like know it, debit card, but like but but like they frame it as a credit card in in a sense or no. No. Well, I think there are some there's a bunch of different card offerings coming for crypto. There are some that are credit cards that just act like a normal credit card except pay you crypto awards. We've seen a couple of those offerings come to market like Coinbase and Gemini. I think what we're really focused on is okay, well, there's this new thing like a crypto wallet where especially the younger generation, you know, you're finding if you ask someone sometimes they're holding more money in their Phantom wallet or their Bitcoin.com wallet or their MetaMask and they're holding their actual bank account. And if that's the case, well, it should be

equipped with the same functionality that you have in your bank account. And so you want to be able to receive your salary into it. That's where comes in. Okay. Now you've got stable coins there. How do you make that spendable any merchant anywhere in the world? That's where, you know, issuance is a really, you know, important next step and that's where we're we're focused next. You guys are going to launch your own stable coin. Uh we're not launching our own stable coin per se. We're going to announce it yet, but you know, we're obviously thinking in that direction. Uh we we see ourselves as partnering with pretty much every major stable coin out there today. We want to make our infrastructure compatible. Yeah, when we think about Moon, we've never taken a particular view on a particular blockchain or a particular asset. We ultimately going back to what you said

about distribution is king. We want to go to where the points of distribution, where's the activity happening? Who's killing it in the distribution game in the stable coin arena? Like the stable coin sandwich, right? Like who's who Yeah. Well, you obviously have the biggest issuers in the world, both Tether and Circle. Um, you know, I do think that there will be more stable coins that come to market. Uh, we're starting to see new competitive entrance. Um, you know, but I I think what also is interesting is just on chain. You know, if we think about uh putting stable coins on different blockchains, we've been seeing an incredible amount of activity in the Salana ecosystem. We uh we're biased a little bit because we've been helping Salana around their Salana Pay offering, but for merchants uh we're already seeing huge outcomes for them in the sense that uh we we help Salana with

their Salana mobile phone. You can pre-order the Salana mobile phone uh using crypto in your wallet. So you integrated via Shopify, it's called Salana Pay. you connect your non-custodial wallet and rather paying the very expensive fee to settle a card payment instead you can use your stable coin uh at a fraction of the cost happens instantly and so for merchants I think it's going to be one of those things where okay in the traditional system sometimes it would take days to get settled they're going to now opt for this new uh method where they can get settled instantly and so we're starting to see that take off where I think you're going to see more and more merchants uh be willing to accept and receive stable coins you're already seeing that get embeded into the biggest technology players and so I think it's just a matter of time

that more and more people are going to start opting into uh receiving stable coin payments. What's your take on some of these stable coin chains like plasma like stable and these kind of like newer developments and like the stable coin specific chain? Yeah, well I think I think there are a couple things. Um, you know, a lot of it is around how do you deal with like this cross-chain complexity because there's just all these different blockchains and ultimately you want stable coins to be interoperable across a whole range of different chains. I think some of the solutions are coming to market are trying to solve some of the fragmentation that you have in some of these ecosystems. Like it's complex to basically have to bridge uh one of your assets into another layer two so it can get accepted. And so I think a lot of

the technology been focused around how do we abstract all that techn you know no one I don't I don't think the user ultimately cares. They just want ultimately want to get their stable coin. and they want to get it quickly, they want to get it cheap, they want to have to think about things like gas and network fees. How can you just abstract that all away, offer an API and make that easy? And we've been following that really closely. And then as as it comes to some of the new blockchains, you know, I think I feel like it's the new blockchain every week. And so for us, we're always just trying to stay ahead of those developments and make sure that we can make that infrastructure compatible with our infrastructure here at Moon. How would you describe the cultural difference between Ethereum and Salana?

Well, it's interesting. I you know I think Ethereum obviously was uh earlier to the market. Um I still think there's incredible application you know for me I'm most focused on the application layer like what are the application what are the builders what are the things that you can do on each of these chains and I think you can do different things. Um you know I particularly love uh poly market on Ethereum. I think that's been a phenomenal application on the platform that actually uh has real utility. You know the idea that you can uh see what people are doing and be able to predict outcomes of results. It's a new form of news essentially. I'm I'm really excited about all the work that's happening there. Uh on Salana, you're seeing, you know, I think there there's a lot of advantages in the sense that uh less

fragmentation. Uh so you're seeing less layer 2 on Salana. The base chain, you know, you works. I think, you know, when I surveyed builders now, I'm starting to see really incredible applications built being built on Salana. And a lot of them was, you know, was they just didn't want to deal with having to bridge uh your Ethereum into a layer 2 to then interact with that application. And I think layer 2 has got into a lot of the speed, a lot of efficiencies that you're seeing on the layer 1 of of Salana, but I'm starting to see a lot of builders in Salana ecosystem. So, we're obviously focused on on both. Uh, but I think, you know, we follow where the builders are and I'm I'm really excited about uh a lot of the new applications that are getting rolled out in Salana. Yeah. How

uh how much have you had to deal with like regulatory problems with the app store in the past? Yeah. Well, that's a that's an interesting one. I mean, uh you know, it seems all good and well now. Well, you know, the the rules inside the Apple App Store uh you know, they they are constantly being modified and adapted. Um I think uh for many reasons, you know, it makes sense to be slower to change. You can remember the the Epic Games lawsuit uh just got resolved recently where uh you can now link to external apps for payment, which wasn't necessarily possible before. Uh which I think is a good thing, right?

before they were charging their Apple tax on digital goods like NFTTS. Uh and you know even if you had a book right you couldn't you you couldn't you had to go to an external uh link you couldn't do it inside the app. Um you know I think you know it's one of those things where each app has their own you know set of nuances around getting accepted on the app store. I think that's why you know the Salana ecosystem one of the things that they've focused on is building their own phone so they can control that experience and let more applications through right. Um, but you know, I think Apple will have to adapt. You know, the it's it's where you know, they're ultimately going to want distribution of these incredible apps.

But, uh, you know, it's one of those one of those really challenging issues and a lot of stuff that we work through with a lot of the companies that work with Moon is how do we make sure that their apps get approved in the app store. So, some of our time is actually being spent on making sure that their apps can actually go live with Moon Pay installed inside of them. What are the most su what are the most either used or successful apps that have integrated Moon? like with what are the applications that are driving the most amount of users and transaction flow. Yeah, I think right now uh wallets are are kind of our bread and butter where we see the most activities. So all the usual spe suspect names you'd imagine the the Metamas of this world, the Phantoms of this world,

the bitcoin.coms of this world, the exoduses of this world. Um and so obviously really important part of our user base offering them you know really swift slick on-ramps and for them uh you know I think for a lot of the companies that we work with it's quite unique you know when we think about moon's journey uh a lot of people compare us to PayPal if you remember early days of PayPal it was hard to interact with e-commerce right it was scary to put your debit card or credit card online you were scared to get fished PayPal built this passport that is embedded uh you know is embedded platform inside things like eBay where you could have this oneclick checkout experience The difference with crypto is sometimes we're not just even interacting with companies. We're interacting with software layers and we're interacting with uh companies that are fully non you

know fully decentralized. And so um you know I think from our perspective how do we offer you know developers you know having them spend less time on getting regulatory licenses less time on being PCI compliant. Uh how do we offer that as a service? How do we make that really easy so people can get started relatively quickly? And so that was, you know, I think a lot of the reason the advantage of Moonpay is we have this, you know, large user base now 30 million customers in counting with KYC on file that can start to interact with this whole range of applications where they can quickly get in. So if they've used one experience before, they're not going to have to go through a whole new onboarding experience and a new platform. And some of those platforms just don't want to be regulated. They don't want in some cases to hold any

form of user data uh you know for various reasons because they're software layers, they're smart contracts. And so I think that's where Moon can provide a lot of value. Very very cool man. The the the rise of stable coins is just changing the business model of of so many teams and just just injecting such a a acceleration into the space. It's it's been it's been wild. Well, more money has been settled on stable coins than Visa and Mastercard combined in the last year in terms of uh the amount of money movement that you're seeing through. I think it was 36 trillion. uh if you think about um you know the US dollar supply you know 1.1% that's a huge number as what I mentioned before I mean it's it's really staggering when you really start to think about that um

I think every company you know is now thinking can stable coins be used in my business to make uh settlements cheaper faster um and so I think we're just going to continue to see the rise and uh you know I think the good the good news is um you know for the United States specifically um it's in our national interest to see stable coins uh persist especially US dollar denominated stable coins. So many different parts of the world have huge problems with inflation. We also have a problem where we don't want too much concentration of debt in some foreign countries. Uh you know we don't want China to hold all the US treasury debt. This is a good way to diversify the mix uh to a retail audience and so I think it's it's definitely United States interest for stable coins to continue to propagate uh

to continue to see US dollar dominance across the financial ecosystem. Ian I appreciate your time. I hope it's been a good week, a busy one I'm sure. Um, and thanks for joining us on on the rollup. Congrats on the success. Use Moon Pay in 2019 2020. Great. When I was on boarding crypto on chain directly, uh, I've seen you guys grow and it's been a pleasure to watch, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for using us. Awesome. Cheers. All righty, guys. 3:30. Just one or two more.

We got the next guest coming on. Uh we're gonna get Rob up here. Rob's coming in taking over. Good to see you, brother. How you how you been doing? Hanging out. We're on day two. Got two more. Diego, everyone listening, we've got a happy hour in about two hours. If uh if you're in the city, head out to the happy hour. us and our good friends Magic Newton are going to be hosting it at their office. We've got I don't know where Diego is. We've got Diego coming up next. He uh you know it's we're starting to wind down here at Permissionless. We're taking it all the

way through. We're running through the finish line and so uh we're going to see you on the other side. We're over the hill now. This is the home stretch. I think we've got two or so guests still to go. It's been an absolute ride. 've had two days of six-hour streams. We've had our man Brendan drawing every guest. We've had our whole team back at home clipping. We've been doing panels. We've been moderating. We've been chopping it up with the best VCs in the business.

An absolute blast. And this is something that we uh intend on continuing. If you host a conference, if you're throwing a conference, hit us up. We may broadcast live from your venue. Andy, I'm out of it. It's been a long day. Been a long few days. Long couple days, your your facial hair has grown since we've started streaming today. I know. It's crazy. You didn't start with a mustache. Now you have.

We're going on standby. Let's get Rob fired up. Hey, I'm fired up. Let's go. Let's get Rob fired up. Standby. Cool. [Music]

Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] out.

[Music] [Music] [Music] All right,

we are locked. All right, we're on. Diego Gutierrez, co-founder of Rootstock. How How you doing today, man? I'm doing great. Has been some busy days. Yeah, but I think the hot is like, you know, slowing down a little bit like going a little bit down, easing easing up. So, it's a lot more comfortable. Yeah. More much more comfortable. Oh, yeah. We're on the home stretch. [Music] Okay.

Patagonia say Patagonia for me, you know, is paradise. Oh, yeah. So, it's like a one of the places that every time I go there, I say, you know, this is paradise. It's like very few places in the world had that quality. I don't know what it is, but it's so beautiful. Yeah. [Laughter] Uh, Dev Connect is in Buenosares.

Buenosiris at the end of November. Yeah. Are you looking forward? Yeah. And on the same month is La Vitcoms. That is the the biggest and longest running Bitcoin conference in the world. Ah uh I mean is the longest running Bitcoin conference in the world is not the biggest because I think the one here in the US is bigger but the La Vitcom is still very big. It's 11,000 people every every year and it happens on the first week of November. Two weeks later you have Devcon. So I think we'll be like a month for crypto and and Bitcoin. It will be a very interesting month in Buenosirus. So what are you actually seeing as far as adoption in uh Buenosades? Like I remember being there

being on Florida Street, people trying to get me to to buy uh pesos for bitco for dollars. Uh but like what what other adoption, you know, are are you seeing on the ground in Argentina and in Latin America? What are the main venues of adoption? I think there's I mean Argentina has like a huge Bitcoiner community because we were we started building the communities uh in 2013. So as early as 2013 and we I mean with my two partners we created La Vitcom in 2013 in December 2013 and helped create Bitcoin communities in all Latin America but

also like some of the top developer teams of Ethereum are there in Argentina. So you have a combination where you have like developers that are building like top technology you know from Argentina for the main networks. Cardano had one of the first developer teams in Argentina when when Charles came to to Wenos Cyrus I he visit the Spasio Bitcoin that is another place that we created with my co-founders of the Bitcoin uh NGO bitcoin Latin American go um same you know most of EOS has some of the top developers of EOS uh there beach share

so it's very interesting because you have like some of the people with most knowledge in terms of building the deep tech, building the protocols plus a community that understands crypto natively. It's like but why? Because in Argentina we had every crisis that people that people willing you to to give the the dollars in exchange for pesos. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Basically those pesos go under the mattress of the families and that's how people save and hedge against the misbehavior of the governments because we had every financial crisis you can imagine like we had hyperinflation devaluation bailings. So everything you can think of we had it in Argentina. So what happens

is like people is always seeing how the governments will trick them into losing their money. So they are always hedging and they hedge in ways that are not rational anywhere else in the world like they buy things they buy car as a way of protecting their wealth. things that you in a regular economy you know that they that's losing value but in our economy is a way to preserve value against until this year Argentina had like 25% inflation for 15 years and in the last year it almost got to 200% per year so that's the level of instability we live that's why people is hedging naturally into dollars when cryp when bitcoin came

you know it was clear. It was another way of hedging out like bailing out of the traditional financial system and protecting your wealth. But then what happened is like people come when the bitcoin or the crypto price like goes up course but a part a portion of that people stays because they understand there's much more than this. So they understand the true value because we had all these crisis. So and then when the new next Christ comes then you know that idea they had is like cemented. So so they say okay you know I stood because I had the feeling this was escape hatch from a financial system that is completely broken but now that I passed

through my first crisis thanks to Bitcoin thanks to cryptocurrencies then I say you know I'm here to stay. It's like I'm no longer going back to the other things. You know, and one thing that is very interesting is like Bitcoin was the first thing, but stable assets became like a big big thing in Latin America for the same reason. Yeah. Yeah. But also because if you add the concept of like is it's not only like protecting wealth from you know the local currencies that were losing value all the time and inflation and so on but also to do crossborder payments to do remittances to send money abroad. So people started using USDT mainly. Uh and the interesting thing is

like it was UST on Tron not because they understood the I mean the security of Tron or anything. It's like but because it was the cheapest way back in the day and now there there are other options. People is like rebalancing and moving you know to other networks that are like arbitrum or ones that are like more efficient in in in terms of cost. But for transactionality, people don't care much about technology. It's like because they are exposed to the thing like for a very short term. No, it's like you know as long as I can do what I want to do if the network is here in two three years I don't care but I want it to be running properly today. Yeah. So so is it like just so outside of storing value what

other use cases are happening like payments remittances? I think what what I say but it's mostly the driver is a store of value. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Whether if you have it shortterm time horizon like uh financial horizon if let's say you can store value six to nine months then you will go for the dollar but if you you have the ability to store value for two three years you will go for for bitcoin no so so it depends on your savings capabilities that you will go for one asset or the other but conceptually store of value is the main driver and on top of that yield generation for some people but they want something that is safe. It's not about like making it's not the gen mindset.

It's more like I had the dollars and if you if you can give me six 7% that's great. It's like that's what I want like preserve my value and and make some what what companies are doing the best work at like blockchain adoption in Latin America like which teams are doing the best I think you know the the if you look in terms of amount of accounts it's like it's not necessarily one blockchain it's more the the wallets the crypto wallets that created the bridge so there you have Ripio Lemon Wimbit are the ones who are like over a million users no in uh and at the end what they ended up is like bridging the traditional like the legacy financial system with with the

crypto financial system and that's what they are doing. Some of them are offering like investment opportunities like deploy your capital here and you will get some yield but it doesn't go much further than that. It's like manage your assets, get some yield, transform your assets into a into a traditional banking system for payments for your everyday needs and that's what is tractioning the most. No. Well, Binance is also big in Latin America. Um, so I would say those are the players that are moving. It Mexico in particular is a little bit different. So you have pizza there huge. they are like the ones leading the the the industry. Brazil is another case

that is different. Those are economies that have a weight by themselves. It's like you know Brazil is twice Mexico, Mexico is twice Argentina. No, it's double. So basically because the the economies are so big they have like their own ecosystem. So maybe in Brazil is Marcado Bitcoin. So it you have some players in the major economies that are like the dominant players and in the rest of Latin America you have um in Chile, Peru, you have Buddha. So it's more fragmented everywhere else, you know? Um I I feel I'm I'm curious about the situation with uh Malay like did you see

any uh like people were using uh stable coins and bitcoin and and and using it for payments and store of value before that happened right for years. Right. Yes. Did you see any less after it happened? Did people start to say, "Oh, this thing we, you know, because of the the did it did it go away?" I I think people went there because in Argentina in particular, we had capital controls. So, it was almost impossible for regular people to operate in dollars. It's like you had to have the connections, know who could do the arbitrage of the dollars in Argentina with dollars abroad. So people went to USDT because it was or USDC or stable coins because it was the way to like jump this fence

that the government artificially created. No, these capital controls that the government created. But I think there's no way there's no going back. So the people who move there is like there's no reason to go back to cash. It's like a the people who move there stays there and tries even like tries everybody to move there because it's so much more convenient than using cash that they will they will move there. Um in terms of MLE, MLE is is is an arco capitalist. Arco capitalist. Yes. And and people sometimes like compare they they think he's leftwing sorry right wing but he's not rightwing. He's anti-state conceptually. So what he's doing is trying to reduce the state but

also he's not pro crypto or pro bitcoin. It's like because in his mindset is like you know bitcoin crypto is one more you know mean like medium of exchange one more store of value and in his mindset is like it's about allowing everything to exist and and let let the market figure it out. Exactly. So it's a more hayekian approach. is like he it's not that he's pro something he's saying you know I remove all the controls of the state I remove like the friction that the state and then let the people do whatever they want you know unless there is a crime involved or anything we don't care so it's not that necessarily he's pro

Bitcoin or pro crypto he's pro freedom of of uh trading and commerce so got it Um I'm excited for Buenos. I'm excited for Dev Connect. I think you know to see everything in action. Are you coming? I think so. Yeah. Oh, definitely. You You'll have a blast. I Buenosis for me is one of the best cities in the world. It's like mixture of Europe with Latin America. Still has the Latin American spirit. So, calls it his favorite Latin American country or city. Favorite European city. Europe. Yes.

Um and and then we'll have like these huge crypto communities that have been growing in Latin America plus people coming from abroad from all over the place. So so that will be a lot of fun. Yeah. Uh and we see you there. Huh. Absolutely. With rooto we will be like hosting some side events you know it's like a rooto in a way like when we were born like Nick Sabo where we shared the white paper with Nick Sabo in 2015 in October. 2015 he got excited and tweeted it's like rooto is the best of bitcoin and ethereum under one roof and so for us it's like we are like connecting the two worlds it's like you know it's smart contracts EVM smart contracts uh the the

ethereum way so you can port any ethereum protocol into into rooto but secured by bitcoin and with bitcoin as a native asset so so in that sense this situation where you have LA Vitcon the longest running Bitcoin conference and DevCon in the same city with two two weeks apart. I think we will be right in the middle like working on both sides like joining the because for us it's always about like the real challenge is how we create this new financial infrastructure and we bring it for the people you know uh and and and it's not about like the fight between like one the Ethereum camp and the Bitcoin camp.

It's like the best of both together. The best of both together and bringing it to the people so we can change people's life like and when I say people it's not only individuals ismemes formemes getting capital lending is almost impossible in Latin America. So when you go to the emerging market is helping business helping individuals helping everybody you know live better and prosper through the technologies we all have been building like the Bitcoin and crypto community as a whole has been building. Yeah. Diego, thank you for your time, man. I hope you have a great rest of your time here. Good good flight home and we'll see you see you soon. See you, Monoses. Cheers. Thank you. Good to meet you.

All righty, sir. Pleasure. See you. All righty guys. 3:54. Do we have one last one? You have the last one? I think we have one more. Yeah. Good. We're going to see Robinson come up here. Very, very well, guys. After it's been a good one. We have a happy hour tonight. Yes. Cheers. Thank you guys. Thanks for coming. See you. All righty, boys. What are we thinking? I saw Robinson walking around. Yeah. All right, let's just call it.

Yeah. Final thoughts. It has been a good day. Um Robin's not not going to make it. We'll have to catch him virtually. Final thoughts. What a what a two-day sprint. Great experiment. Let's reflect. Didn't didn't cost us. Uh didn't wasn't cheap. Uh had a ton of great conversations. And um yeah, it was fun. Follow the rollup. If you're not if you're not already following, follow. If you're not already subscribing, subscribe. Follow all of our partners. And I I think I think we must give one final shout out to the AMX of crypto. Get your EtherFi cash card. Yes. Sign up. Link below.

Sign up now. $50 cash back. First $1,000 spent. You don't have one. You need to get one. I don't know how you don't have one. I got one. Let's see yours one more time. This card is amazing. Just just tap just tap to pay right there on the phone. Easy. I've got my own. I'm borrowing against my wrapped ETH e right my we e using stable coins to pay for it. Shout out to Ether. Shout out to Mike. Guys, thank you for tuning in. What a permissionless. What a conference. We'll see you in Can we'll see you at the happy hour tonight. We'll see you in Buenos Sares. And we'll see you around the timeline.

Feels good to be back.