The Rollup TV: Thursday, June 5th

Transcript

[Music] down. Hey [Music] Hey hey

[Music] hey. Heat. Hey, Heat. [Music] Hey hey

hey. [Music] Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. Heat. Heat. [Music] [Music]

Hey. Hey. Hey. [Music] Nat.

[Music] Welcome back to the Rollup TV. It's the premier show face to face with the most important people in digital assets, tech, and AI. Today we have Elon and Trump in a absolute catfight, you could say. Um, going at it. Rob, did you see any of the Trump and Elon stuff yet? I love it. I I mean it's just now now it's every hour. Trump has never seen an internet troll or dealt with one. This is no Xi Jinping on the tariff trade war. This is Elon on his home turf serving absolute troll troll troll thoughts left and

right on Twitter. I I love to see it. I think it's hilarious. What What do you think? So Trump said Trump said uh well well so Trump kind of started in in the news at least the way that they reported it. Trump said uh Elon and I had a great relationship. I don't know if we will anymore. Trump said I'm very disappointed in Elon. I helped him a lot. Then Elon says without me Trump would have lost the election. Such ingratitude. Trump he he says he hasn't said anything bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. I'm very disappointed in Elon. Tesla shares down 10%. Yeah. And Elon's digging up tweets

from 2012 back when Trump was still on Twitter. No member of Congress should be re eligible for re-election if our country's budget is not balanced. Deficits not allowed. Elon quotes it and says this is this is what he voted for. This guy was in a landslide. I saw a tweet that was like Teslas are officially a left-wing car again. Yeah. Um I remember when I used to have one back in like 2020. Uh it was very much a it was very much a like a leftwing vibe and then it went pretty hard right and then people were like people would put on their Teslas like uh don't blame me for Elon being crazy. Uh like I don't support Elon or or stuff like that. So uh yeah kind of interesting dynamic but again all of this is because uh Trump's

big beautiful bill which was to deregulate a lot of the AI uh you know spending basically and then enable uh basically the signing of another large bill for uh for the debt and the deficit basically increasing the debt and the deficit and basically putting a total end to Elon's doge efforts. So I mean it is contradictory to to Elon's do efforts to begin with, right? The whole austerity measure was to try to, you know, balance the budget, reduce the national debt, and it seemed like that was working. They were going to cut a trillion dollars, right? And balance the budget. Yeah. And then honestly, Trump comes back in and just reverses course, right? That's

that's the taco thing. Trump always chickens out. So he chickenened out of the austerity measures. Elon came in, he was very clear with what his motivations were. And he, you know, it makes a ton of sense. He's amassed this massive wealth in US dollars and Trump and Congress is there spending it away, just inflating it and printing to to spend it away and uh and in debt, the US people and all the people that have amassed US dollars as a result of it. So, this is where this is the Elon Trump breakup. We're seeing it happen. people were people were actually predicting it um back in the day as well which is pretty funny. So all right let's move on to some of the more positive stuff though.

We had a pretty big day today for Circle. Um Circle has has gone and IPOed uh currently trading at I believe at $93 opened up at I think 63. Uh the IPO price I believe was $31. Yeah. 200% from IPO. Is the era of IPOs and ICOs back? It does feel like it. It does feel like this is the first of other crypto ICOs. I did not play this trade. I was at the gym when it happened. Uh that's why my hair is wet. Just took a shower. Um but I think that I think that this is the start of a new of a new crypto IPO kind of frenzy, right? I mean, look, think

about it. What have been the most successful IPOs as of recent? Uh there was that one AI startup that's done really well that that was advertising in Times Square. Um oh man, it's like uh it's ends with MV, but other other than like something like in the AI space, I haven't seen many successful IPOs. So this to me is what the beginning of the new crypto ICO ICICO era is going to be. And I think this is only the first. Um and yeah, I mean this is huge. This is stable coin super cycle. Let's hear it go right here. Look at look if if Circle is up 200% from its IPO price almost at

$100 puts it in the camp of how many billions? 25, maybe more. What does this mean for Tether? This means Tether is like approaching a trillion dollar company. Maybe the multiples aren't aren't quite that that vast and that you know there isn't so much room between those two. But I I think you know everyone is buying these. There's some contrarian takes on the timeline that say you know Circle right now 75% of its business comes from Coinbase and they actually pay all of the revenue that they generate on Coinbase deposits. They pay back to Coinbase. That's 75% of its revenue that they're not even monetizing. Maybe they end up monetizing that later on down the

road. Ultimately, this is super super bullish for the industry at large. And I think it this is great because now re retail has a vehicle to invest in stable coins and I think that was lacking from the from the public markets for some time. Yeah. Arthur Hayes tweeted like, "Oh, it's good that that they that you know that people are buying what we're selling." And I thought that was pretty funny. I was like, "Yep, as long as the institutions are buying what we're selling, then you know, we're in a good spot." Look, I think this pulls back.

Um, I don't think this is going to sustain. I think it's kind of like a a one day thing, per se. Uh, you know, maybe in in the rest of the week it does well, perform strongly. I wouldn't be buying here. Uh, but, you know, obviously it's a big moment for the space and, uh, it's it's exciting. So, that comes on the the heels of Pump. Funds massive announcement, which actually got leaked to me like last week in the city. A friend told me that they were doing a big ICO. Obviously, not the actual information about the terms, but I got the news last week and started kind of trolling on Twitter about if they're going to launch a chain or not, which seemingly they're not going to do.

Um, and well, I mean, they could, but doesn't seem likely. Also, the Robin Hood rumor, I'm now hearing it's basically between Arbitum and Salana. They may not use the chain actually that much. and it's more on the Salana side. So, not sure if they'll end up launching an arbitrum like orbit chain or just kind of use both of those uh you know chains. But anyhow, Pump is trying to do a $1 billion raise for their token launch with a $4 billion FTV. What you see on the screen here is Miles uh which is quite funny because he was arguing on TW or he put out a tweet that was like

what is you know all the bad things about crypto and I think Pump was included and then Mike Dudas who we recently had the had on the podcast quote tweeted and and said Miles's name which I thought was pretty funny and then basically what we're looking at here is we're looking at the amount of P&L from the number of wallets who have traded on pumpf fun um as of some arbitrary time period. A and what you'll see is the majority of the wallets are losers. If you scroll up a bit to try to keep it the majority is putting it lightly, 99% of the wallets are losers. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Five wallets have made over 50 grand and 166,000 wallets have lost less than 500

bucks and then it goes down. I mean, one one angle here is like, look, people have only lost a little bit, but the majority just loses a little bit and taps out, and then there's some people that have lost quite quite a bit. Um, are is Pump raising because they know that there's a lot of other products that they want to build out and launch or are they raising because their fees are going down, the amount of activity is going down, and they're trying to exit? What's your take? Look the t the trenches have been replaced with the institutions. You think I mean you look at circle's IPO like this is a product

that is going to theoretically stand the test of time. They have a sustainable business model. Maybe you could argue Pump Fund has a sustainable business model, but it's built on the retail gambling sentiment of the trenches. So, you know, are the best days of the trenches behind us? Maybe. But, you know, when this nihilistic philosophy tends to arise in these markets, that's when products like Pump Fund tend to do really well. Nihilism is going to return. We're going to see these cyclical philosophies pop up, come that come back. I don't think Pump Fund is going to go anywhere. But I I can't help

but look at the comparison that someone made to the Board Ape yacht club and their token launch. At the absolute like peak of mania around Board Ape is when they launched their token. It feels very exit driven. people were were uh comparing the um board ape other side NFTt mint with this pumpf fun token launch which Mike Dudus was like look that was that's really silly you know pumped fun is making a ton of revenue uh that's a stupid thing to say but you're trying to sound smart type of vibe look the numbers down so much since the the peak levels of the trenches well yeah

basically since Trumpcoin launched so I mean to me they have the chance to do an innovative like revenue kind of buyback type model. We'll see if they do that. History tells us that they will just keep making the profit by themselves. Um but again, we will see what they end up doing in the future. Um and look, my take is that it's a bit of both. They're they're going to fund their future, but they're going to cash out a big check here. um and you know hopefully be able to keep working on the product and hopefully be able to leverage the pump token in the future. Uh a lot of debate on Twitter about whether it's good or bad. So you know kind of my take is that it's a bit of both. They're going to cash out of course and then they're also going to hopefully continue building.

Look here here's the one metric that I think is important to mention here and you know take this or leave this. Yeah. I'm pretty sure four billion is around the same amount of value of e the combined value of every token that's been launched on Pump Fund. And so when you look at the sheer magnitude of value, don't get me wrong, $4 half billion dollars is a lot of money when you know it's for a launchpad, right? That has been created, that still exists. But to think that the launchpad itself is is on the par of all of the cumulative value that it's been launched. I don't know. Maybe there's some launchpads that we could go back

and look at like you know you know here's an example, right? Like this is a little bit of a stringent analogy, but look at Airbnb, right? Yeah. Look at all the houses that are listed on Airbnb. What's more valuable? The commulative value of all the houses or Airbnb? What's more valuable? all the all the cars that are you that people use to Uber or the value of Uber. I I think these analogies are some similar to Pump Fund launching at a valuation that is on par with the rest of the the sum value of all the tokens that haven't been launched on Pump Fund. Yeah, that's a hot take. We'll have to get you on with Mike and see what he thinks about that. Um all right, so that's Pump. I

mean, pretty interesting stuff. Uh this is gonna be like very very I I think like like the other core point here is based off circle is we got this this kind of IPO ICO movement coming back. Um up next a very interesting uh segment here regarding Gan editing your kids. And before we get into that I got the uh the merch kit from Dream Temple yesterday in the mail. I got like five shirts. I don't know if you've gotten this yet, Rob. Did did you get your uh your your gear yet? I believe it is in the package awaiting me as we speak. Okay, so this shirt's pretty sick. Uh kind of like like a baggy feel. Um and yeah, I mean shout out to Dream Temple, Arthur Hayes, our

resident macro analyst. All right, so um getting into gene editing children, which is a really really weird concept. Um this anon account Vtori put out a tweet. Holy it's happening. can now screen embryos from 900 diseases and traits including cancer, heart disease, and a bunch of others before children are even born. You don't just pick a child, you rank them by longevity potential. Um, okay. Let me ask you, Andy, if you're looking at this analysis and you're thinking to yourself, okay, here are the parameters, like you're building your 2K player, what are you optimizing for? Is it height? Is it

weight? Is it longevity? What are some of the traits that you're optimizing for in your theoretical hypothetical child? Yeah. I mean, first and foremost, uh to be uh rid of all of the life-threatening and uh dehabilitating uh uh conditions, right? Those are those are those are that just starts you off on the wrong foot from the entire from the entire jump. Uh then uh more of like brain development type of things or yeah I mean like just like a you know a a normal uh height and weight for for birth but like if you can actually choose embryos I mean you start to think about it like it's like okay uh you know

you can select the future of your own bloodline with a dashboard you know this this isn't sci-fi they've already analyzed 120,000 embryos with their partner uh it works with these IVF clinics. So for me it's like I mean maybe I can actually have this choice in real life uh and get back to you on my final answer. Um but yeah, I mean obviously just testing for all of the really bad dehabilitating uh uh syndromes and diseases and then uh optimizing for uh just the best possible uh outcome with regards to uh health I think is is more the way I think about it rather than like a eugenic perspective. I I find this kind of stuff

fascinating to the extent that technology has progressed. They also used not gene uh predictivity around embryos, but they did use crisper to edit a gene of a Philadelphia baby that was uh uh victim of a dehabilitating a dehabilitating disease. They were able to go in edit the DNA code, I think from a G to an A, something like that. they were able to pinpoint it and and make that edit and submit it so that the the child no longer had that disease which I think is incredible that now we have that technology. I think this is as basic as this technology is going to be it's only going to get more accurate

from here. Yeah. I think what is particularly interesting is once they start to put together multi-dimensional aspects of life. think about choosing for um friendliness or kindness or some of these more um qualitative aspects of life. Not something that is as you know as simple or or basic as or as height as eye color. But if we're able to sequence the gene pool to such an extent where we have an understanding of oh these are the genes that make up someone who has a good sense of humor or is kind. I I think that is when this stuff goes absolutely bonkers. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty it's pretty nuts. Um I I don't

really know how to react to this. Um, but when when I see this kind of stuff, I'm just like, okay, well, the world that our children are going to live in is going to be far different than the world that others are. So, that's my take there. All right, let's let's move on to uh uh three Jane uh raises 5 million about for credit based money market. So, actually, interestingly enough, shout out to Lawrence from uh Wildcat. So we had him on recently um and he basically said like we are the only person in this private credit market that's like doing well and we expect to see other people come into the market and I think that's exactly what

this 3G company is doing now slightly different backed by paradigm meaning that paradigm took a lot of the funding round um they raised 5.2 2 million to enable the first scalable creditbased money market on Ethereum. Um, cryptonative credit creation and economic growth. Again, if you'll recall from DeFi summer, we had the end of the cycle because we couldn't create more credit or debt effectively. Uh, this is now getting us into the undercolateralized or uncolateralized versions of DeFi. So um my take here is that this is what is this this is what is uh the logical next step for credit expansion right stable coins are already getting under regulatory uh scrutiny over the last

couple years because they have been this potential form of credit expansion especially if you share the yield back to your consumers. Now, this is like a whole another level where we're actually creating credit on chain uh with with you know, underwriters uh and uh you know, secured loans and things like this. So, yeah, Rob, I mean, what's your take as far as the uncolateralized underateralized uh loan area here in DeFi and um and the expansion of credit as a means to to you know, reignite this market? I think that's exactly it. the the expansion of credit and the extension of the US dollar makes this particular uh aspect of DeFi interesting for the powers that

be like you you hear um like Donald Trump Jr. and Trump himself that are talking about the uh beneficial aspects of DeFi and underolateralized loans is one of them. We're expanding the the banking system and we're expanding it in a way that is not going to debank people for arbitrary reasons. were doing it in a permissionless and peer-to-peer fashion. And I think it was it was either Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump that was on CNBC last week talking about why they have such a passionate take on DeFi. And it is because they were debanked themselves. Yeah. Donald Trump Jr. went and he said, "Look, I could have called up any banker in New York, gotten basically as much credit as they were looking to to fund some some

building project." And they said look with a flip of a switch once they got into politics and their family got into politics they took that away and they said DeFi was the answer and the solution to the debanking arbitrary debanking problem that that they had faced. And this is a the problem that other people are faced too. This administration is extremely anti-censorship. They're doing that not only in the social media realm, they're also doing that in the banking realm. And so I think there is broad support at a fundamental level for permissionless and censorship resistant finance. I think that is some of the best criteria of DeFi. I think with this space in in in general, you mentioned Lawrence from Wildcat. He's doing great uh uh in

Wildcat Finance with under collateralized loans. Congrats to him. He was an angel in three Jane. And so I think this is something that we're going to see a lot more. This may occur on KYC chains. Ultimately, I think even if this happens on a KYC chain or private chain, I'm not advocating that for this, but it is still better than the current banking system. I think ultimately this is the progression and expansion of the banking system and this is in the best interest of finance in general because the whole purpose of the dollar is to extend the credit supply. I think as this happens, as we um we bring more issuers of dollars into uh the Overton window, into the light and prevent them from

operating in the darkness, we're going to have a better idea of what the credit supply really is and what the state of that is, consumers are going to be a lot more protected because these are going to have to exist in a regulatory environment. And I think ultimately uh three Jane is going to execute on this vision. And I I agree with Lawrence. I expect a lot more uh of these projects to pop up and do particularly well over the coming months and years. Yeah, I'm actually surprised that uh that um Lawrence was an angel, but I guess that makes sense. I I I think that he was kind of more on the uh on the on the competitive side more than anything.

But uh but I I generally agree with your take and that's an interesting story with regards to the um to the to the Trump admin stuff. Ultimately, I think, you know, there's capital efficiency and then there's capital extension. And I think these undercolateralized DeFi venues do enable both. And so, it's going to be it's going to be particularly interesting to see how these progress. I think we've got very interesting uh Mr. Yanowitz that is uh poised to join us here in a little bit. So, let's make sure that he's unmuted in Google Meet before you bring him up. And uh I'm particularly excited because Permission List is one of the flagship conferences of the year and uh I am I am quite excited to to uh to go to New York and join you up there

in the big Yeah, man. You you got to get up here, man. One last thought on this credit market thing is that I think that um this is only going to accelerate and I think that that the next DeFi wave will probably be funded by these underateralized uncolateralized loans like in a similar way that the C like the CFI the opakqueness of it caused a lot of issues in the last bear. I think that uh the more openness of the of and transparency of now doing this kind of like like uncolateralized or underlized stuff onchain uh is going to be really really compelling for effectively dens on chain. So um but yeah man we have Yano up next. Uh we'll bring him up and let's talk about circle man. Yano's been

in the trenches with the institutions um and I I know he's got some takes on circle so let's jump in here. There he is. What's up, Jason? How are you, man? Welcome to the show. Robbie, Andy, what's up, guys? How we doing? Good to see you, man. It's good to see you. I was I was watching the show. You guys were talking about lending. I made me um I don't know if we'll end up talking about uh like where we're at in the cycle, but when the lending comes back, you know, we're getting late stage. Yeah, man. We Yeah. I mean I mean, we were talking about how in DeFi summer, right, it it kind of ended because we didn't have more credit.

Like, we needed more credit. we needed more and but it was all happening in the CFI world and now it seems like we're you know they're trying to create mechanisms to to do that on chain right yeah I mean if you look at the lending so the biggest lender in the last cycle was Genesis Genesis was moving by Q4 of 2021 they were doing 50 billion in loan originations 12 a.5 billion in loans just in Q4 um they were doing like 30 to 35 billion in spot volume traded and over 20 billion in derivatives so like those are numbers we have we we still don't even see today but I mean I I would guess the next six months we'll see lending just blow past some of the all-time highs.

And is that what creates the blowoff tops at towards the top of the cycle is we get all this influx of credit. It all flows into the market and then there's there's really no forwardlooking extension of that to continue the cycle. It's all Yeah, it's all leverage driven, right? So I actually I think we're getting I don't like Well, I think we're getting later in the cycle. I don't know probably 70 to 80% of the way through. But what people So when people hear that, they start to get a little bit scared, right? They're like, "Oh my god, end of the cycle. I haven't made the money I thought I would make." Like, I thought this was the cycle I was getting rich. What people forget is that the biggest gains and the biggest returns in the cycle are the last 30 to 60 days,

right? It's not just the last cycle. It's uh, you know, 2017, if you guys remember, you know, Bitcoin ripped from 10 to 20 in like 30 days there at the end in November, December. So, it's the last 30 to 60 days are when a lot of the returns are made. You just got to start understanding are when am I gonna take chips off the table, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you put out that tweet about the the four phases, which I thought was like quite compelling during the last bear because I was like, "All right, you know, if Yano's thinking that it's phase two now, that's probably, you know, we're getting out of phase one. All right, we're looking good." And then I I don't think you've you've updated it as of recent to be phase four. Maybe you have. Um, is that Are we in phase four

now? Is that kind of what you think? I haven't shared it publicly, but yeah, I was going to get something together. I'll share it here. We're officially in stage four. And as a as a reminder for everyone, stage one is rebirth. And so for in this cycle, this was like, let's call it January 2023 to January 2024. And like bare market exhaustion is still kind of the prevailing feeling. Apathy ends up killing a lot of the narratives. your friends in the media still super focused on the bare market blow up blowups like uh you know FTXs of the world Celsius Teral Luna layoffs keep happening and I mean you you guys remember that but what ends up actually happening if you look at the charts is prices are steadily recovering right Bitcoin could rally three or four times in stage one and I mean we saw Salana go

up we saw Bitcoin go up all right so that's stage one stage two ends up being excitement and this is where like some narratives start coming back there's not many narratives but it's like once a quarter or something like that but No, like normie homies are texting you. It's all just like your crypto homies are are getting excited and you're kind of this weird feeling of like excited and anxious. You're like, "Okay, what's what what's what's happening? Are we back? Are we back?" Stage three ends up being euphoria. So that's where we were for like the last several months, I'd call it. Euphoria is the best stage, right? It's like beautiful time. Everyone's making money, but the grifters haven't entered the industry yet. Now we are officially in stage four. And stage four is what I call disconnection, which is when I actually wrote this like two

years ago. I was like, the first thing that happens is Fortune 500s start announcing Bitcoin purchases on their treasury and uh VCs throw due diligence out the door, grifters come into the industry, random coins 10x in a week, and yeah, not to go on a long-winded tangent, we are definitely in stage four, which is disconnection from reality. And yeah, this is mostly a sentiment analysis. This isn't really looking at prices because most alts have not even come close to all-time highs, let alone all-time highs against Bitcoin. And so when you're judging this, it's it's maybe a progression of time, not so much a progression of price. I don't look at um uh yeah, I don't look at the price, especially not of the alts in in in this. I would say it's more sentiment in what I see

happening. Also, this is the first cycle where there's been uh like a decoupling of the industry, right? There's like like alts will most of the alts will never get back to their all-time high unfortunately. Uh so this is like a liquid liquid funds market right because it's a picker market for the first time in history. So uh yeah I don't I don't really look at that. I start to look at things like um you know micro strategy clones circle IPO priced at 31. What's it trading at now? Like 90 or 100 bucks. Uh pump fund raising at four billion. Trump putting two and a half billion in to buy Bitcoin. Uh I saw some company launch to lever up your Bitcoin to buy your lever up your house on Bitcoin. Uh that's when you start to see things like

that. Leverage coming back. Public companies saying that it's a good idea to put 50% of their treasury into Bitcoin. That's not sensible. So yeah, and you know what's funny, Anna, is like from our perspective, from the kind of service-based in in the media side, I tend to think that we get a bit of a leading indicator in stage one and two because business starts to kind of come back in a more consistent manner. Um, and then a bit of a lagging indicator towards the end because business continues very very strongly even to like some of the highest points possible in that stage four. But then kind of after, you know, what what in hindsight is like, you know, the end of the cycle, you still get a quite a bit of of length

of really really strong business, but then eventually it just kind of dwindles down a little bit. Um, and then you start to realize like, oh, okay, like that was kind of like a lagging indicator. Whereas in the bear, I found it to kind of be more of like leading as as far as like, okay, business is picking up, but the market hasn't really yet, but like that's a good sign. The maybe the way to summarize that Andy would be audience metrics are a leading indicator. Revenue metrics are a lagging indicator. So we like you and I are running a similar business and Robbie too in media uh advertising revenue tends to lag the market by six months.

So you know we actually doubled revenue in 2020 from 2021 to 2022. Media and by the way one one day we'll nerd out on media businesses but uh 2021 to 2022 we doubled revenue even though prices had gone down. Why did that happen? is because uh you know advertising lags the market. But audience metrics, you and I have a better sense of what people are interested in than pretty much anyone else in the industry because the audience metrics are a leading indicator. I completely agree and I mean you you also kind of have to think about like like seizing the opportunity when it's there. So um a lot of a lot of uh a lot of interesting things happening more broadly in the space. Um kind of zooming out from the cycle. Couple more like

personal questions for you. Um, in in a hypothetical world, if you weren't building Blockworks and you could work for any company in the space, where would you want to work? In a hypothetical word, if I wasn't running Block Works, um, okay, I'll give you a kind of so Mike and I have thought about this before like if okay, let's say we like sold Blockworks or let's say we like, you know, hand didn't didn't run Block Works, what would we go do? The beautiful thing media is a weird business model because it's not you get low multiples and it's like not as like sexy of a business model as running a protocol. But the beautiful thing I actually think of media as a the single best business you should go launch if you are an first-time founder like in

your 20s. It's the it's a beautiful business to go launch as your first business. The second is it's actually a launchpad. So, we're seeing all these launchpads. Believe I don't even know that obviously pumped up. Fun. There's there's a million others that are launching soon as I'm sure you guys probably know. Uh those are launchpads for tokens. Media is a launchpad for businesses and products. So, I think of Blockworks as like a 50-year business where the business model of Blockworks for for Mike and me is not actually like the end state. It ends up being a launchpad to go launch other things. We launched events. We launched research.

we launched a data business and eventually we'll launch onchain products from the media business. So it's like yeah would I want to go build a prediction market? Maybe that actually sounds really cool, but what if we just did it from the backbone of having a media company, you know? Right. Right. Because ultimately the these are uh leverage pulls for all of those existing and future products that are going to have to tap into some networks. And if you already have the network first off, right, then then you can launch those and they can tap into the existing network that you've already built from the media business. Right. Exactly. I mean, think about a world, okay, so I'm sure you guys have played with like cursor and replet and versel and vzero and all that kind of stuff. So, it's

obvious that tech is getting commoditized. So, close your eyes. Think about a world where tech gets commoditized. There's only two things that matter. Proprietary data and proprietary distribution. And everybody focuses on the proprietary data because that's gets big multiples, go raise a bunch of venture money, go build like, you know, raise it a billion dollars and all that kind of stuff. What not enough people focus on is proprietary distribution. And there's that maybe overused saying which is like first- time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution. I think the thing that will become overwhelmingly obvious is that distribution is the most most most valuable thing outside of proprietary data. So yeah, that that's what I mean that's why like that's why I love media.

It's because like we get to have this launchpad to launch other products and businesses. And speaking of the of the kind of evolution, right, I kind of think of it as like uh like tree roots for you guys. Started off as as as media events, data research, you know, potentially protocols in the future. We have permissionless coming up and I feel like a like I feel like you you guys cracked events probably like like in the last two years but it felt like D this year was like the big like okay like these guys really got the events down with the amount of in institutions you guys had Trump call in. Um you know obviously permissionless is coming up.

Would love to get some alpha leaks there in a sec. just like broadly curious like what do you guys think changed from uh like you know two years ago even to to DS this year and then permissionless this year like like how are you thinking about creating these conferences with energy? What have been some of the key ingredients to making something feel important to the industry uh and the people on the ground and beyond? Yeah. Um so we already had an events business. We launched our events business. Our first event ever was February of 2018, right? So, we've been building events for seven over seven years now. The main thing that changed is that in 2023 when Gensler and the SEC cracked down on the industry, everybody punted and went to

Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Korea, and we had a really, really, really important decision to make which took up many board meetings. And Mike and I had too many calls about this, which was, do we chase international or do we double down on the US and bet that the US will one day come back? And we bet that the US would one day come back. And we got freaking punched in the face, man. Like we got just like over I mean revenue fell. Like we just got clocked in the face over and over again betting that the US would come back. But finally, look like the U November 2024 big change happens in administration. crypto comes back to the US and we were the only only only media and events company that had bet that that would happen and everybody you know consensus had moved to Hong

Kong and Toronto like everybody else had left the US we were the only ones remaining and so we had built that trust and credibility across our two brands with DS and permissionless so yeah I mean it wasn't wasn't fun in 23 and 24 but we're now finally like that's the thing with media is like it ends up being a trust game and if you build the trust and credibility over the years, you can actually reap the reward. So that that's why DAS was so crazy. Um, and that's why permissionless is going to be I mean I think permissionless will be the single greatest event for crypto founders, builders, and developers that the industry has ever seen. All right. So that's a bold claim. Jana, what any hints, Alpha Leagues, Polymace? Is there any policy makers, surprise guests? What

do you have what do you have in store for us that you can share? Yeah, I um I'm I'm sworn to secret secrecy by the marketing team. They the marketing team knew I was going on this and they were like you cannot tell Andy and Robbie what's happening. But what I will say like basically the vision of permissionless was that there were there all these great developers right in the industry but for some reason the develop there's two problems. One is all the developer conferences are international. They're in places like Taipei or Argentina or Venezuela like and that that's great but the US is the heart of crypto capital markets right the the US is the new home for crypto so we thought that there was it was deserving to have a big developer conference in the US and then the second thing is that the

developer conferences were kind of run by the I'd call it the old ETH cabal and there's all these interesting things happening outside of ETH and maybe they're happening on top of ETH or whatever you want to call it but like it's not the old school eth cabal and we were like all right there needs to be a US developer conference that's incorporates all the interesting things that are happening in the industry on all the chains and so that's really what the goal is for permissionless I think the one thing that differentiates DS is that we're able to bring the non-crypto institutional audience the thing that will differentiate permissionless is that we're able to bring the non-crypto kind of web 2 tech enterprise audience so the stripes the JP Morgans the Facebooks of the world there and so Yeah, hopefully hopefully keep an eye

out for some announcements there. Yeah, one one thing that I think you guys have done extremely well is is bridge those two gaps and this is something that we've seen over and over again is that the the crypto echo chamber continues to to live like these people hear the same things from the same projects told the same things that they already know and ultimately they're trying to tap into new networks and and reach a new audience and that that goes for you know these these projects inside the industry. It also goes for those companies and institutions outside that are trying to tap in to the crypto native. You guys have done a great job of coordinating those two worlds and building a bridge between them. And so, you know, we're we're extremely excited.

We're going to be doing lots of things at permissionless as well both basically to try to shed more light on how these worlds are colliding. Is there any particular insights that you've seen maybe as you have your finger on the pulse with respect to web 2 or or a more non-cryptonative audience once they do come into contact with this weird crypto world? What is their what is their intuition? What's their initial impression? So the greatest thing in the history of crypto for the for the industry was stable coins, right? st in the in the last several years like stable coins have broken the reputa like this bad reputation of crypto that's kind of hung over all of us for 15 years stable coins have broken that and by the way Robbie if you want the biggest

indicator of disconnect between crypto Twitter and reality crypto Twitter was probably 99% bearish on circle that thing priced at n at 31 bucks traded up to 100 today so that's you know clear disconnect by the way we also have a discount code for permissionless which is circle we'll get you a couple hundred bucks off so I think we're gonna I don't know how long that thing runs. Either just today or tomorrow or something like that. But if your audience wants to come to permissionless, there's a code called Circle. So, we're gonna we're gonna clip that. Make sure that our our whole audience knows. Yeah, man. I mean, look, I was at Stablecon and it felt that was like two weeks ago in the city and it felt like um going to one of the older type of conferences where you walk around and you don't know anybody and

it's completely different crowd. Um and and they were all interested like tons of private banks I spoke to were trying to launch stable coins. Uh small companies were were interested in using them for crossborder stuff. I I generally agree but I also think that the important thing for like like like the ETH cabal conferences can often feel similar people similar kind of energy and and still be kind of in that in that intrinsic you know circle if you will. And so I'm personally looking forward to uh you know having the some of the best minds in the space be exposed to uh these these new types of of people. And then as as Rob said uh we're finalizing some details. Yano we will uh we will be doing a ton of fun live streaming

covering permission list alongside some of the best guests there as well. Um and yeah man thanks for your time. Appreciate you uh coming on and looking forward to yeah jamming about some media stuff soon as well. Awesome. Thanks, guys. All right, buddy. Thanks, man. See you. Exciting stuff. Permissionless. Yeah, I you know, I think it's so easy to get sucked into that classic crypto cabal, crypto Twitter, that echo chamber. And as Yano mentioned, often proved wrong, right? And just look at the circle IPO. Um, pricing pump pumped on IPO. Crypto Twitter had that one wrong. And so I think it's uh it's quite important to to stay well-rounded when

it comes to these perspectives. Yeah, man. I mean, I I think uh I think we're we're spot on with regards to uh if we can get these new types of people in the space, then uh and change the perception, then we're going to be in a much stronger spot than we've previously been. And so to kind of see that play out is something that's exciting. So, yeah, see how it goes. Absolutely. Well, next up I think we've got uh Bobin from Miden. These guys just recently announced uh pretty sizable raise $25 million. Um and and you know they've got a pretty untraditional uh design for their blockchain architecture. So I think again as you know we continue to push the envelope

when it comes to finance and technology you know the these innovative designs are going to become increasingly important. So, I think we're going to get Bobin unmuted. Make sure that he can hear us and we can hear him and then we are going to be ready to go. Let's get there. He is welcome. Good to see you, man. I think the last time I saw you was was on that panel in Denver. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Good to see you guys and excited to be here. Yes, sir. Thanks for coming. Congrats on the raise. Been a been a long time coming.

Is there anything any any word of advice that you uh that you could offer anyone who's kind of going through that fundraising process now or is thinking about it? Should they should they not? Um I mean should they should they not? It really depends on specifics of a project I would say. But like my learning from this and I guess it like it is you learn every time is that it takes longer than you expect almost every time. Uh you think it's going to be you know three months it takes four or five months or you know things like that. So uh always anticipate it taking longer but like whether you should raise in this environment or not like really depend on the project and then I guess there are other universal advisor you try to raise when you don't need the money that that helps a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. So you guys have have kind of spun off from Polygon to build Maiden which has been in the works for a long time has been in in this kind of like alt VM camp that we are subscribed to as far as scaling different types of chains. Um, recently Weey D mentioned that Miden isn't just a roll up with with fancier branding. Um, you know, it's it it's it's something different. How do you handle crypto's constant comparison culture and just kind of like different FUDs about what it really is or or what Miden is? And maybe you can explain what Way meant when he said Maiden isn't just a roll up with fancier branding. Yeah. So, I think uh the way I

think about Miden is like and we try to call it an uh kind of the concept of edge blockchains, right? It is a fundamentally different way to think about like how a blockchain operates uh uh and trying to reimagine it from first principle so to say. So um and the core part of this is ZK tech right? So the idea here is that like how would we design a blockchain um you know whether layer 1 or layer 2 or whatever but how we would design a blockchain protocol if uh we had ZK as a core primitive that was available to us like when Satoshi designed Bitcoin ZK wasn't available when Vitalic designed Ethereum ZK wasn't really available was kind of like coming about but uh I would say something like an edge blockchain like uh really you know wasn't really possible I would say

happened until like maybe very very recently and even right now we're on like on the cutting edge And the core idea here is that you let users to execute and prove their transactions and you just they would just send transaction proofs to the network and the network verifies those proofs uh rather than trying to execute for every user. Now um no this is very different from how a usual blockchain operates right in the usual blockchain users send transactions and then the network executes those transactions. And so um I think from the standpoint of uh um you know like why we would want a users to do that like what the benefit does it bring right so I can think of two primary reasons and then reason number one if the users execute their own transactions uh you know and they can also store their own state that kind of

like unbburdens the rest of the network so you kind of get scalability and in some ways this is thinking about like um kind of like Ethereum's L2 approach and pushing it to the very edge where basically every every account is an L2 of sorts Um and so uh and this gives you you know very uh I would say horizontal scalability but more practically like it um almost unbounded scalability in some um metrics like there are still resource constraints but from computation standpoint you know every transaction could be 10 million gas and it doesn't matter for the network because verifying the proof is very cheap. Um the second thing that you get is the privacy. um right because if you're executing your own transactions and if you're storing your own state the network doesn't need

to do it for you and so the network doesn't really need to know what your state is and what your uh what computations have you run and so like you get kind of this idea of privacy by default and so this is what what like a lot of the existing rollups or L2s more broadly um they kind of like take the concept of existing blockchain and they just add ZK on top of it to like you know make it more verifiable and things like that But uh pushing this computation and state to the edge requires like fundamentally different um design. I think it requires different design in the VM that is involved because it needs to be efficient to run on the client side. know you ideally you should be able to run it in the browser and it also is a very different state

model where um you know if you try to apply it for kind of apply the concept of age computation to an existing state model whether it is I don't know uh EVM based or even salon or many others like it just won't work because um you will end up with like state contention so you need to be able to prove things locally and do it in a way that will not contend or like will not conflict with somebody else proving a transaction against uh um you know what they want to do at the same time. This is this is so fascinating because you've put into words a mental model that has been described for some time now once and as ZK continues to accelerate and that's the idea of this

unbundling. Uh we had a hierarchical model L1 L2 L3 everything rolls up to the ultimate settlement layer. Um, now what you're describing is these edge blockchains where in fact we we sort of just have these abstract uh state blobs that kind of exist in the void and they're sharing proofs with one another. They don't even need a blockchain to execute transactions. They're just interoperating with one another via ZK. They're achieving settlement and finality via ZK verifications. And so this feels like the endgame where we're no longer bottlenecked by these L1, L2, L3, and so on. And ultimately, as you

describe, every account is its own rollup. And so this takes the roll up to its absolute logical conclusion. And with the power of ZK, this is now possible. So absolutely. Was there was there a realization or a light bulb moment that you had where this v vision was realized? Did ZK get to a certain point and you said, "Oh, this is this is now possible. We're going to start to execute that." What what were some of the milestones that and realizations and breakthroughs along the the journey that that ultimately brought you to this end state? Yeah, I think I mean um I wouldn't say there was like a single moment but like there were a few smaller moments where I kind of like realized how this could be done. I think uh you

know a little bit of history like I got into the space in like around 2017 2018 and I was uh very excited about the technology but I kind of always saw these two fundamental issues where like I didn't think it was going to be scalable uh at least not easily scalable and also I realized like there's not much privacy that you can get and so like uh uh I the way u I approached it like okay how can we figure out how to solve these two problems and like even you know I did some work with uh EF early on where I was working on the kind of zero knowledge proofs because I understood the zero knowledge proofs are the ones that will allow us to solve both of the problems at the same time.

Uh and so the first light bulb for me was when I realized that like ZK virtual machines were possible like it wasn't just a theoretical concept and that you know happened around 2020 2021 I think when uh you could say it's like you know we could do ZK circuits for a while but uh doing actually like very complex computations because I do think to um bring this to the masses you do need to have something like you know allow people to code in rust and like now with uh you know let's say risk five approach is possible you run just a rust program and to uh compile it and runs on a risk 5 VM that is ZK croable. On Maiden we take a slightly different approach. We have a different VM but we have a compiler that takes RA and compiles it to this VM. But I do think to make it

accessible you ZKVMs is like one of the critical things that you need to have. Uh and so this was one uh kind of like such moment where okay aha now we can do ZKVMs and they would be performant enough. I think the second one is like understanding how we can do a different state model. um um in Maida we call it an actorbased state model but where you can say okay instead of trying to have this monolithic let's say uh contracts that control everything and it's basically like if you think about ERC20 it's like a giant hashmap and how do you prevent state contention in that context it's very difficult um I think uh for me was okay understanding like you can actually segregate the state and have a different asset model that uh people still can update their states independently and transfer assets

between each other uh this was kind of like a combination like I I used to work so um at Facebook at the project that Libra/GM project and uh some of the concept of that baked into the move programming language was like concept of resources that I uh objects that are treated independently and kind of like I saw that and like that evolved into this new state model that I realized and like I said okay now I know how to do state and I know how to do the efficiency KVMs and those two combined together can give us something like an edge blockchain. So I would say those were the two major milestones understanding how to prevent state contention and that ZKVMs are now truly possible. So Bob and then when you think about these uh kind of milestones and and enablements if you will of uh

the technology what are some of the ZK teams that you're currently most impressed with across the industry who are pushing the agenda for uh performance and technology and in which in which uh specific sectors? Yeah, I think uh there are quite a few ZK teams that are uh I respect a lot. I think um you know I I do have to say that the starware team is probably one of the uh uh best in terms of uh like you know pushing to the next level of performance in terms of uh uh with their two prover and things like that. I think polygon team is like uh right up there with that with like long 3 that is now being used uh across the industry in many uh in many different projects. Um I do think

uh risk zero guys have like a very very strong uh uh like cryptography team that is changing uh kind of a lot on I I should say my kind of view of the industry is a bit biased towards ZKVM. So there's also a lot of non-ZKVM based projects that are uh have stellar teams but I think on the ZKVM front I think uh um you know polygon um starkware and risk zero teams are extremely strong not to say the same team is also extremely strong especially like uh now that they've uh came up with like the new proving system that uh is powering the next generation. So I think I don't want to offend anyone but like in my mind like these four teams are really really strong and there's a lot of other very strong teams in the ZK space. I could

probably give a laundry list of them. Everybody's strong in different ways. I think on the prover side uh um like Polygon and Starkware are probably some of the strongest teams on kind of arithmetization side. Uh I do like like both risk zero arithmetization is how do you encode the different uh uh constraints to describe a specific virtual machine? uh I think risk zero and succinct guys are very uh are very strong and there is a bunch of others that working in uh let's say how do you uh make it so that we don't have mis compulation bugs for example uh and things like that uh but yeah so those are the strongest teams but I think there's probably like uh very very close runner-ups uh and you know if I didn't mention you don't be

offended yeah we're we're big fans of all the teams that you mentioned and and a lot of the ones that you didn't and ultimately these guys are all friends of the show. We'd love to see the the technological acceleration on ZK. Bobin, could you make this a little bit more tangible for the audience? Like, you know, we're we're familiar with ZK. We we understand some of the interoperability and and even the privacy benefits of it. Could you kind of translate all of the technological achievements that yourself, Maiden, and the rest of the teams that you mentioned are are are working on? what are the enduser benefits that end up making it down to the end consumer that that are really tangible for them to understand?

Yeah, I think uh and maybe somewhat of a controversial take. I do think what we have right now is a very niche if uh in terms of blockchains of where like in terms of the number of use cases that we're covering with blockchains are very niche uh of what it is possible what where we could get right and so all of these technologies are absolutely needed to unlock the rest of the use cases I think um um there is you know if I were to separate it in two categories there's the scalability aspect of it and then there is a privacy aspect of it and those are two uh most important things in my mind and a lot has been focused Scalability I would say not as much in privacy. I think scalability you know uh having unbounded computations or like ability to unlock this local client side

proving and uh uh just in general like speed up blockchains like has obvious benefits right for one we can have uh you know faster transactions or more transactions like I think one of the issues with blockchains in general is like if you have one application scale like it brings down kind of like uh you know slows down the rest so like you could like the example I use like let's say you have like Taylor Swift concert ticket sales happen on uh on a blockchain they need to sell like 150,000 tickets in 5 minutes or less and like that like will slow down the rest of the use cases and with like disagregation into like you know L1's L2s or like pushing things to the edge you can actually process transactions in the in one kind of enclave so to say without affecting everything else and

this is important because you don't want like a a truly global system should not be you know I just because somebody's selling tickets uh for a concert right now my payment shouldn't be slowed down by like you uh by a few minutes. So my fees shouldn't go up by like a 10x just because somebody is selling tickets at the same time. So being able to segregate things is super important and we can get there with like you know ZK unlocks truly like this uh um you know either edge compute or L102 or whatever approach you have like you you were able to do that. I think uh privacy is super important and frequently underappreciated. uh I actually uh don't think we can bring a lot of real world use cases like we talk about institutions a lot and I spoken with

quite a few but like institutions absolutely need privacy you can't like put like users or like business data on chain in a way that is fully transparent right so like and for this uh um ZK is absolutely crucial like again with age computation there are other approaches but uh you know we believe with age blockchains that uh is one of the better approaches here um and I think people sometimes underappreciate the uh the urgency of privacy as well because um we live in a world right now where it's kind of like you know semi-private people like yeah you can use uh tools that will deanonymize people or trace their histories but those tools are very accessible to very few entities uh like to the fullest extent and you know you

need to be a nation state or like a large uh uh player to be able to like do this tracing in in a meaningful way like link uh accounts to real world identities and all that stuff But I think in with AI over the next three four years this will be become much more accessible. You'll have AI trained on multiple chains where uh you type in somebody's ETH address and you will get their history like how they breach to which uh network what they did on that network and then it will also put their picture and address next to this and in three years like I don't know how this is going to function if there is no privacy uh because you'll have this tools accessible basically you'll have chain analysis in your pocket for all practical purposes.

Yeah, we're looking forward to that era as well. It feels like it's been coming for some time and the the entire kind of like sector died out but but kind of has came back. Who are some of your favorite privacy uh ZK projects that are are doing kind of unique things in the space? I mean uh there are quite a few. So I think obviously there's like um the OGs like Zcash uh guys that been working on this. Uh um I think more recently like uh more similar to what we're doing. Uh AEC is obviously as a company that has been doing uh pushing the envelope on this for uh quite a few years. Um Alio launched recently uh separat but u you know they're trying to solve we're all trying to solve the same

problem. There are different approaches to this but I think uh uh we're getting u I think this these are the teams that put privacy first. There's other teams that are working on um you know trying to integrate privacy. So we've taken an approach where it's difficult to add privacy to existing chains and I can elaborate on that. Uh but there are also teams that are trying to add privacy to existing chains like uh you know we can talk about inco or rail gun for example team. Uh so there are different approaches. I think uh you know I'm excited more kind of like I do think um adding privacy to an existing uh uh chain is a bit challenging but there are obviously benefits for this. So like the approach that let's say US A have taken where we do a separate L2 to uh provide

privacy. I think this is uh you know in this space and there's a bunch of others like again I don't want to mention there's quite a few good projects out there who uh yeah yeah who uh who are working on this issue. It's not a simple problem to solve, right? Because um I think previously and even still now privacy meant that you have to give up like uh something in the UX or whatever. Even I remember like when you know I was using cash cache when uh back in the day you had to pay like almost 10x or 100x in fees to use it. Uh and I think it is tough like where you have to ask users to do more to achieve private to be become private. A lot of people will kind of like you don't want to put this trade-off in front of somebody. Okay,

you can do this and do be public or you can pay 10x more or go through 10x worse UX and be uh and be private. And so the idea and this is I think where we're trying to converge is where it actually should be simpler to be private. And I think one of the things I should mention like the edge blockchain concept is actually I think aligning the incentives correctly because in that concept it is actually cheaper to be private than to be public. Right? you're if you're doing things if you're running computations yourself, if you're storing your own state, you don't asking the network to do a lot of work for you and so um you can be public if you want, but it will cost you more money and I think like uh paying for being public is the right incentive alignment in this case. Yeah,

very very cool. Absolutely. Bobby, just Yeah, go ahead, Andy. Yeah. Yeah. Just one last one for you. Do you have any other other uh So, we've been, you know, kind of orienting around this idea of ZK apps. Just one last quick one for you. Is there any ZK apps that are particularly compelling that you like out there and why? Right? Like app like new applications powered by ZK. I think um I mean there are a few emerging ones um um I I would butcher the names to be honest but like I think there is a very cool one that is being done uh like a ZK passport right like where you can prove the passport details. I don't remember the name of the project exactly to be honest. Uh um I think the concept of like um it's not

quite an app but ZKTLS is as a concept is very interesting where you can like plug it into web two uh existing web two data and proof things in ZK and this kind of allows you to bridge uh uh the gap not the gap necessarily but like basically bring in things from web two world into web 3 world more easily. Um there is uh a bunch of others that I mean there's like a very important uh work being done on GK based voting and you know things like that but as far as the name of specific projects like I would probably butcher them right now so I'm not going to mention any specific one. No worries man. Hey Bobin thanks for joining us today man it's been a pleasure and uh glad to see that mine is coming to life uh and uh just the world

of ZK is accelerating at such at such a fast pace. Excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me and yes uh looking forward to putting this in the hands of users. Oh yeah, buddy. Looking forward to it. Thanks. See you soon, man. See you next time. Talk to you later. Bye. Yeah, I think those guys are going to do really well. Um you just love to every time that that we speak to people from the ZK realm, you just get excited about what's what's coming. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, the the adage is, you know, the the the casino funds the research lab, right? And you know, we may have memecoin speculation and and you know, the DGEN casino on on chain right now. Uh but ultimately, this is what this is what people want. This

is what generates a lot of the fees. And you know, the idea is that we're going to we're going to use that to fund some of the tech that's going to be worldshaping in the next 5, 10, 15 years and beyond. And I I do think ZK is one of those. Um, and so yeah, you know, we got we got some memecoin speculation going on right now, but I think uh we're using it to fund ZK, and that that's here for the long haul. Yeah, man. Um, I think that we have our good friend Jeff coming up next um to talk about some of the recent developments with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Fi, Hemi, and more. Uh, so we'll get him up up in the screen pretty shortly. I I mean I I gotta ask Jeff

first off what his take is on this recent Bitcoin, you know, just Treasury debt yield, everything. So, we got Jeff up here now. Um Jeff, good to see you, man. Um welcome to the show, Jeff. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Yeah, man. Um yeah, man. As I was just saying, we have just so we just had Jason from Blockworks on Jason Yanowitz talking about the uh stage four of the bull cycle where we see companies advising for 50% of their treasuries into Bitcoin. And now what we're seeing is even more debt vehicles across the board, ETH, XRP getting included in these conversations. Um so and and we

also had Jordi Alexander the founder of Selen on kind of talking about the game theory of this micro strategy accumulation vehicle. So from your perspective being a core developer back in 2010 on Bitcoin to seeing the the financialization of Bitcoin as an asset now really reaching that you know digital gold store of value status. What is your perspective on these treasury vehicles and just the general evolution of Bitcoin as an asset? Well, I think it's it's maturing. Bitcoin is finally attaining the status that other assets have. And so that I think is just another step in Bitcoin's evolution. Bitcoin. Uh I I like to talk

about it in uh you know breakout your LinkedIn.com post SAS web two cloud type of terminology. And what I mean by that is what's happening now with Bitcoin is kind of at the edge. You don't see a ton of core protocol upgrades like you do with Ethereum. It's uh it's bombproof. It is uh you know trusted. it's going to be there for the next century and people then build that next layer and that's what uh you know for that's what I'm doing with Hemi and the L2 space that's what a ton of other people are doing in Bitcoin is they're building at the edge

and that's where institutional is coming in as well and so there you know everyone else in the moon uh like mortgages or collateralizes like Tesla stock or you know every single Fortune 500 company CEO and executive team are collateralizing their equity and it's kind of a uh you know I'm very egalitarian very bring it to the masses type of person and it's uh you know collateralization does enable more uh financialization type games but at the same time why should uh Bitcoin be excluded from uh the trady uh memecoins circus and all the other tradi circuses.

So, it's it's more about Bitcoin is becoming uh you know a first class asset on the world stage and that's why corporations are putting it on their balance sheet. Governments are creating strategic Bitcoin reserves. Um, I don't think you'll see any strategic Jeffcoin reserves in, you know, anytime soon, but uh, Bitcoin itself makes all the sense in the world, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Be before we get too deep into Jeffcoin and all the things that are happening on Hemi, I I am curious because I think it was some time ago that we last had you on the show and since then Ross Olrich uh was was let let free and I think that

is a significant story in in Bitcoin's history and so you were there before Ross during and and you know now with some of the late stages of his development. I'm curious if you were to kind of, you know, send a message from, you know, you on this show out to Ross, if he's listening out there somewhere, what what would be uh what would be some of the things that you would you would say? That that's like a question out of left field. Uh I have no idea. You know, I'm I'm kind of a law and order type and so, you know, don't break the law again would be my uh would be my message.

Yeah, man. Yeah, I mean that was a pivotal moment in the history of of uh of Bitcoin as a as a whole. And you mentioned we're we're kind of shifting in, you know, like the institutions are coming in for the digital goal, but we're actually uh kind of pushing towards Bitcoin as being this global base layer. Um, right. And with with Hemi pushing high throughput and secure computation anchored to Bitcoin, we're actually able to see some more of that programmability come to the space, which I think is something that that you guys are very very focused on. um you know you know I'm curious from this lens what what has been the uh most uh you know most well-received aspects of of Hemi or just of this broad landscape towards uh

kind of scaling Bitcoin in this programmable manner. Um right there's you know you guys have have an interesting consensus mechanism. Is it on the tech side? Are there particular applications that you're seeing um on Hemi or on other of these kind of uh programmable chains that that you're excited about or that are getting traction? What is kind of the the the the state of traction uh when it comes to these more programmable uh Bitcoin chains leading to this more base layer uh framing? Yeah. That uh is really where Hemy's bread and butter is. And for those uh just tuning in, uh check us out at him.xyz. We're a programmable Bitcoin

layer uh the biggest Bitcoin side chain uh as we record this uh.xyz_xyz on Twitter. Um, I'd say to answer your question, we're really at the nexus of Bitcoin programmability and Bitcoin pragmatism uh equals Bitcoin DeFi. That's kind of how it uh teases out in my brain. And what I mean by that is uh the programmability aspect. Bitcoin has its own Bitcoin script. It's super secure, but it's very difficult to program. And so we build on top of Bitcoin over at Hemi using the proof of proof protocol uh to uh secure and we can talk about

that uh in a minute. And the programmability aspect comes from the EVM which uh we have extended to talk directly to the Bitcoin L2. So that creates this DeFi effect of it's real Bitcoin and you can yield as well. It's real Bitcoin and you can take it a little bit farther. That's the first component, but it wouldn't work at all without the second component which is Bitcoin maximalism is melting I think into Bitcoin pragmatism. It's uh you know if we uh and the gray hairs on my chin sort of you know take me back uh 10 years or so

uh it was very much a mentality and maybe a little bit less mature mentality of Bitcoin versus the world bitcoin versus other coins uh bitcoin uh you know versus x y and z whereas I think the pragmatic view is that bitcoin is a component in everyone's portfolio, but it's not the you can't live man cannot live on Bitcoin alone. Uh you know, you you got to pay bills at the end of the day and not all bills are sadly yet denominated in Bitcoin. So that's where the pragmatism comes in and I think that's where the institutional adoption started the corporate adoption the

government adoption when uh it's ju just super obvious statement super real world bitcoin has to exist alongside the US dollar and the euro and gold and all these other currencies and so we you know we gota all play nice at the d dinner table and that's the Bitcoin pragmatism. Once that started, people said, "Oh, I can, you know, have my Bitcoin and eat it too. I can have my cake and eat it too. I can have my Bitcoin and, you know, have a mortgage on my house." And, uh, Matt Lango, uh, great guy. Follow him on Twitter. He used Bitcoin DeFi to mortgage, uh, to

buy his house. And it's deni, it's a debt. it's denominated in USD, but it's backed by the SATs that he's been stacking all these years. And so that is an excellent microcosm example of Bitcoin pragmatism. And so I think that's that's where Hemi sits is at that uh nexus of added Bitcoin programmability, you're going to want to come to Hemi. And then Bitcoin pragmatism, you're going to want to come to Hemi. And yes, so that comes down to that kind of philosophy of pragmatism and practicality. It comes down towards um it comes all the way down to like the bare metal if you will of the

infrastructure stack as you mentioned with the proof of proof. Um and so proof of proof is is a unique consensus mechanism that that Hemi has has pioneered. You know, I'm curious if if in two years if proof of proof will, you know, remain a category of its own or it, you know, and be adopted or, you know, if you think that this is just going to be something that is an advantage for Hemi. Well, uh, there, you know, there's the the selfish answer and then there's the abstract answer. I think the uh the selfish answer is uh you know I'd love for the rest of the world to remain uh ignorant and hem continues to use the most amazing uh anchoring protocol in

the world proof of proof. Uh but yeah, fast forward this uh 5 10 years, I think proof of proof uh absolutely will be anchoring other chains, L2s, L3s, uh etc. to compare and contrast with merged mining, which is another way to secure and anchor chains into Bitcoin. Merge mining involves making specific deals with specific mining consortia. And so you're almost forced to cartelize mining in order to secure your chain, which is kind of, you know, you're poisoning the network at step one. Uh to be be a little bit bombastic. Uh but

you, you know, I'd rather not mining be centralized, mining be peer-to-peer, mining not be glombmed into a singular cartel that you have to make a deal with. uh that was never uh the vision you know 10-15 years ago for Bitcoin mining which was far more flat far more decentralized far more peer-to-peer and so I think merge mining creates the wrong incentives for the Bitcoin network and uh even as uh chains that pursue it seek to secure their own chain I think it makes Bitcoin less secure whereas proof of proof we use the Bitcoin network as God and nature intended. It's

a normal Bitcoin transaction. It's mined normally alongside other transactions. It's looks like other transactions. It's censorship resistant. So, it uh it uses and relies on those core values of freedom and censorship resistance that Bitcoin has. So, I think proof of proof is far more aligned with decentralization and with Bitcoin's core values. And Jeff kind of thinking outward into the future is and actually uh Justin Drake from the Ethereum Foundation had a had a post about the Bitcoin security model. Maybe you saw it and it it described uh the security budget was

part of the inspiration for Hemi to increase the programmability the the usage of Bitcoin and therefore generate more transaction fees for the network and ultimately help secure the network for the long haul. Is that part of the inspiration for Hemi? Is it generally to help the adoption of Bitcoin? Could could you maybe speak to the original inspiration and and if it does tie into the Bitcoin uh longevity? It absolutely ties into Bitcoin longevity. I'm uh to step even away from Bitcoin and get philosophical. Uh one of my phil philanthropic pursuits is Long Now Foundation longnow.org.

And that's all about uh you know we should not be looking at the next day's results the next month next quarter's results but what are the results over the next two years the next five years the next 10 years the next 50 to 100red years uh as a side note I would love to see 50 and 100year bonds on hem network uh because longevity is absolutely how Bitcoin was engineered it was engineered to be selfbalancing self-regul ulating uh as a quick case study example, the Bitcoin difficulty algorithm. The more miners you put on, the harder it is to mine a Bitcoin. The less miners you have, the easier it is to mine a Bitcoin. And every two weeks, that

difficulty readjusts to be again self-balancing. And I think Bitcoin is very self-regulating. And what we're doing at Hemi is part of that is it's very natural to for Bitcoin to become a base layer and to be fully maximally usable you need the greater programmability of hemi lower fees etc. And so the thesis was uh not so much uh you know increasing utilization of Bitcoin. Uh it was more e even stronger. You're going to be using Bitcoin. That's the thing.

And so you're going to be using Bitcoin. How do we build out and help and accelerate and accentuate based on that core assumption? And so that's where the extended programmability comes from. That's where uh the the the lower fees, the the hemi tunnels come from. It's it's all a thesis around Bitcoin primacy. Yeah. Yeah. So the the tunnels as as it relates to this, you know, Bitcoin uh longevity and primacy and just philosophically but also practically speaking, um you guys have been working on on this uh kind of uh you know, the documentation around these tunnels and actually implementing that on the tech side. Where are you guys at

in the progress of of you know going from phase zero to phase one on the tunnel side of things? Well, I'm uh pretty excited that real Bitcoin comes on and off of the Hemi network. Uh you go from Hemi BTC on the Hemi chain directly to uh BTC on the BTC L1 and back again. Uh but that's what a bridge does. We and we call that a tunnel. But we do more in that we extended the EVM to directly talk to the Bitcoin network. So, your Solidity smart contracts, they're not only looking at that EVM state, that smart contract information, they can look at the

Bitcoin UTXOs and check your balance and see, okay, he has the Bitcoin to spend to do X, Y, and Z. And so, it's that uh embedding of a Bitcoin node inside the Ethereum EVM node that no one else has done. And that really takes Hemi uh sets us apart. Jeff, who are some of your favorite builders in the Bitcoin Fi space? Um, you know, and the work that they're doing that separates them from the rest as far as uh programmability goes or scaling Bitcoin. Um, you know, I know that you guys have number one has got to be uh Jeff Garzik. He is doing an amazing job of ex Bitcoin extensibility. Uh, the second builder in

the space that comes to mind is Max Sanchez. He's this other uh internet rando that uh invented proof of proof. Uh he's absolutely an amazing builder in the space. Uh I got a number of other team members that uh I can uh name. Uh but yeah, you know, egotistically I think we're ahead of the pack. There we go. And uh I think uh the Hemi community, the Hemi uh uh foundation, the Hemi devs internally and externally uh selfishly uh I think we're far ahead of the pack doing some really interesting, amazing stuff. Jeff, you have such a great sense of humor. I I I love all of your appearances on our

show. I I've really only got one maybe one more question. And and you know, you were in Vegas for Bitcoin Vegas. you guys hosted a pizza party for Bitcoin Pizza Day in New York. What are some general takeaways that you've had over these events with the community? You know, what's been the spirit and and the sentiment there? Any any takeaways? Yeah, the the the takeaway and again the long view is we've come around to Bitcoin is it's taken 10 or 15 years. We've had to go on the altcoin journey, uh, you know, the Ethereum journey, the the other L1's, L2s, etc. journey. And I think people are are coming back to the idea that

yes, you build on Bitcoin. And Hemi is one of the ways that you do it. And so it was always true that all the coffees in the world are never going to fit on Bitcoin L1 at the same time. But it is true that Bitcoin could be that monetary backbone, that monetary infrastructure for the globe. And I think that people are starting to realize that both monetarily with putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet and also technologically with doing what he does and settling to Bitcoin L1 is that original source of truth. So, uh, I, you know, many of my endeavors, I'm I'm always accused of, uh, not being wrong, but being early.

And so, I was in 2010, 15 years early to the Bitcoin success case that I think we're now seeing today. Yeah, man. I mean, I I I think that undoubtedly Bitcoin has achieved that um you know, it's achieved that that that store of value level of asset class. Um which has been great to see. One last thing for you, Jeff. Um there there there's been over a billion dollars of TVL on Hemi. Um you know, there's there's more to come. A lot of Bitcoin. um you know it fluctuates within the days and weeks and whatnot but but what is a lot of that user base and capital doing onchain and

what would you like to see your community do more of? Yeah, a lot of that uh billion plus in TVL right now is entirely Bitcoin and Bitcoin based and so it's all about again leaning into Bitcoin DeFi. What they're doing right now is the familiar DeFi actions of trading it on dexes, uh, putting it into a lending market, the familiar pattern of my Bitcoin needs to go farther, so I'm going to borrow, I'm going to collateralize it and borrow US dollars and uh, whether I'm a minor and I'm paying my bills or I'm just a Bitcoin hodler and I want it to go

farther, that's the first step in that journey. And so I think that uh that's that's what we're going to continue to see is again uh making your Bitcoin go farther and we're going to help with that. Beautiful. Jeff, thanks for joining us, man. And um congrats on the success of Hemi and of of seeing this long-term vision through with regards to Bitcoin and the entire space. Um and much more to come. Amazing. Thanks for having me on. We'll mint some Jeffcoin next time. Everybody check out him.xyz him_xyzonx.

Thank you, sir. Absolutely. Thanks, Jeff. See you next time. Jeff's such a great guy. You can see like that. That's the kind of he just had, you know, he just stuck through it, saw the long-term vision and just kept on keeping on. Man, you know what's hilarious though is there is an absolute mad amount of these like Bitcoin dgens coming in um and just trying to absolutely cause chaos and and I just wonder like where do we where does this end with with the the leverage stuff, right? Like again, we talked about it. Jordy talked about it with uh you know, different people like like I

just I don't know. Trump is going crazy. Um yeah, where does this end, man? It's just it's wild. I'm curious if we've ever if if we've even seen like the real capital flow into the market yet? Like is Bitcoin where it is today? because there's so much hype and speculation around these these leverage funds and that's what's trading it. Has any of that those millions or billions of dollars that these teams have announced, has any of that actually entered the market yet? I believe so. At least some of it, right? Of course, sailors and such, but I think on the Ethereum side, I'm not exactly sure um either. But yeah, we have to get a it'd be great if

there was a dashboard of that. um like how much of that is and and these are public companies meaning that they do have to disclose in their they have to disclose financial statements um to comply with public company regulations and so they will have to disclose their assets whenever they have those quarterly earnings calls and such. So we will get insight into this at some point but I I I would love to see a dashboard as well. Yes, same. Up next, we got Benji, uh, former Coinbase lead strategy, things, optimism, been pushing the agenda on the timeline as well as behind the scenes.

Um, meanwhile, it appears Elon and Trump's crash is only getting worse. Uh, we'll have to discuss that with Benji and get his take on the Elon Trump crash. Uh, our boys a little jetlagged, so we'll take it easy on him. But, uh, let's get Benji up here and, uh, let's get firing away. Benji, what's going on, man? What's up? How are you guys? Thanks for having me. Good. Good, man. Thanks for being here. Are you watching the crash out of Elon and Trump or or No, it's wild. You know, you know, I'm chronically online. I'm seeing that.

Okay. So, what's the latest? We've been streaming, but like I I just went on Twitter to make sure we had the PFP, and I just I was, it was, it was wild. It's a little more direct. It's interesting how conflicts start, right? generally like regardless of who it is, it's like one person suddenly says something, someone else picks it up and then it's just like right now it's all kind of all out direct bar forbar um brawl on the timeline. So it's getting it's getting pretty spicy for sure. So it's definitely an official breakup. It's done. I think so. I think so. I think Elon just posted um I believe he just posted should there be a third party that we establish. So yeah, things are heating up. It's definitely interesting.

Wow. I like the sound of that. I like the sound of a third party. Let's Let's get some new ideas flowing. I saw Trump also said uh the easiest way to save the government money is to terminate Elon's governmental subsidies and contracts. So stock is down 9% right right now. Yeah. Yeah, I saw that as well. Benji, what's your take on the uh on the Circle IPO today? Uh did it surprise you the performance or or anything or or you know just generally bullish stable coins like I'm just curious more broadly. You know you know what I think honestly there's uh two things here like one being a onchain maximalist dude like I'm just like damn this would be way better if it was on chain, right? Like you're seeing this IPO just rock it up and I'm

curious like who's behind it, who's buying it, where is it coming from? Like if this stuff was on chain you actually see it. Um also I believe the underwriter got this drastically wrong. I think they priced at $30. is that what 100 or something. Um and uh Austin from Doppler Protocol, he had a piece. I haven't had the time to read it yet on how actually we can create more efficient, better markets to price these things. Um so that's kind of where my interest lies mainly. It's like okay like awesome to see this, right? Like wow, great like for crypto in in some senses perhaps not. Some may argue it takes away from alts because it's stocks are more institutionally validated. Um, but on the flip side, on the blockchain side, it's like, okay, can we actually make these major listings more efficient and obviously like being a bull within

the whole like everything will be tokenized mindset. Like I'm willing to bet yes. Um, so it's very cool to see this kind of emerge and be seen as like being like, wow, these whoever predicted this uh $30 price is like pretty wrong. Um, and I think some people are pretty upset. So yeah, just always thinking about how we can actually solve some of these things by bringing them on chain and make them better. Uh but obviously happy for crypto being validated more and more. I think it'll be interesting on the market side. What this means you're getting a lot of these like IPO crypto companies um that are performing better than all currencies are. Um so you know I I don't know how long that trend will continue but it is it's definitely here right now. So we'll yeah passively observe it over time.

What what do you think is more extractive? The circle IPO or the pump fund token launch? Interesting. Yeah, I think wow that's a great question. I think generally it's hard to say exactly what is extractive out of the out of either ones depending on like I mean I don't know the circle IPO just mechanically is set up in a different way than like pump fun is I guess would need to double down on like what extractive exactly means here like is does extractive mean like you're taking money that could have gone elsewhere and it's kind of like vacuuming all that money grabs a communist there there was that tweet yesterday that said uh most of most the

people on crypto Twitter are uh just learning about communism and gambling at the same time. They're teenage high schoolers and so they're confused about what extractive really means. I I think in the context of the question it's you know you know I is is this giving back to the industry that made this company uh successful? Um, and ultimately, you know, are are they uh kind of maximizing shareholder value, but also are they uh gatekeeping that value from a public open free market? That's my best attempt at extractive definition.

Yeah, that's that's honestly as good as it gets. I think I think it's like it gets really nuanced to fully determine what is extractive at the end of the day because like for example right let's be like very optimistic like uh bull case here it circle IPO goes really well um circle now has more capital to spread like USDC across the world like more institutions adopt USDC all these rails on the USDC's on Ethereum all these on all these blockchains these blockchains get more activity because it's now more institutionally validated via circle uh awesome Right? Like then it's like okay sure like you know my alt didn't pump this month but like longterm like adoption of this stable coin world kind

of blossomed which led to more network activity which actually meant to more fundamental increases in um price and revenue and whatnot. Um so that's one way for circle for pump fund bull case it's like okay like you know they raised a billion dollars which is a lot of course. Um is that enough to retire though? Not sure, but like you raise a billion dollars and they go all in on the kick model. They basically try to compete with kick directly. Um, now they have money to pay like some of the biggest streamers in the world. Streaming is definitely going to become continuously become a larger thing, especially as people are more and more online. Um, and yeah, that leads to more exposure for like streamers and different community members kind of getting into crypto. Uh, but then the question is like, okay, like are they

all just trading memes all the time? Like are they just losing money? you know, we saw that chart um earlier in your guys' segment of like how many people actually made money on pump fund. So, so I think, you know, there's both um but I think there's cases too, right? It's like, okay, like people invest in the circle IPO, you know, it doesn't perform as well over time and people are like, okay, this was the last hope of like validated crypto and it didn't perform well. So, they're just like, okay, let's get do something else. Um let's go on to AI stock or something. So, like, yeah, it's a bit nuance. I wouldn't say I have a direct answer on it, but yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, zooming out from the kind of current events, you put out a pretty good tweet uh today or no not two days

ago uh that that got a good bit of traction with regards to people looking at it which was about the best mentors in crypto. Um you know, I'm just curious if you've had, you know, or who are your biggest mentors and some of the best advice that that they've given you. Yeah, I so it's funny because I think like a lot of my mentors actually come from outside of crypto um and from different parts of my life. Um I think one is uh so my aunt has always been like an entrepreneur um like my mom's sister and it's always like kind of learning from her like just being so like she's started multiple different businesses like she's always

been on top of things like she's like really into crypto. She's really into Yeah. Like she's like constantly been around that. Honestly, having seen that growing up and seeing kind of the range of work that she's done, it was always like, okay, this is awesome. Um, but how why is this person always doing things? Like, you know, it's like why why are you always going from like one business to another business? So, I actually at a young age, I asked her like, hey, like why, you know, what is it that you're after? And I think that her explanation, I can't recall it specifically, but it's like it was the idea of like if you make what you work in and what you like find interested in, what you're interested in, uh, into something that you actually pursue full-time or build businesses

around, like there that is it basically just like the ability to kind of chase after things that you're interested in and like know that you can do it is inspiring. I think that's like a form of mentorship which I think has really shaped my life in different ways where I'm like okay uh you know traditionally working in crypto doing having the career path that I have currently was seen as like a impossible task um but having had mentors who like have always and like family who kind of pushed the edge in that sense um has been very helpful so I'd say I'd say her most likely uh right now um especially had a recent conversation with her was awesome very very Cool. Yeah. I mean, you've been putting out a ton of really good

content. I I pretty much read most of all the bangers and uh uh you had another really good one that was about uh it was eight actionable tips on product and user empathy. I think you've been like pretty product focused. Um I'm curious what what is one product that everyone who's listening has to check out to understand what a great product design is from your perspective? Um, this gonna sound wild, dude, but like Instagram reels and like, you know, and I I say that because like these Facebook dudes, they get it, man. They they they get how to build a sticky product. And I think the main thing from the eight actual tips is like more so like product thinking than a specific product. And like why I say reals, man,

is like, dude, I I never downloaded Tik Toks. I was just not I I didn't never did that. Probably should have. That's why I suck at mink coining. But like, you know, like I never did that, but like obviously landed on reals and now reals launches new features which are like more social. Like you can actually start a kind of like a Spotify blend for reals with your friends through group chat. So I can see what my friends are looking at and things and I I just sense more and more people sending me reels than ever before. And why do the product is because it's actually understood like the consumer psychology behind why the product exists. It's like it's a form of staying in touch, right? increasingly whether that's good or bad up to others to decide it's like in an increasingly um social media field world like a lot

of people stay in touch by sending each other memes um yeah and real has built probably the best distribution platform obviously for Instagram everyone's already on there um to a to be able to do that to also like position themselves in a way where they could potentially over time go toe-to-toe with Tik Tok I think it depends of content probably at that point um but I think that is actually a really really good product Um, another good product like is probably like um thinking like physical like our rings honestly and and why I say that again is like it it's we're in a more health consscious world.

It's like okay let's build something for people who are more health conscious people are more and more like want like fashion becomes a big part of people's lives like let's make something sleek so make a ring that ushers everything um the steps in which people went through to kind of build something like an Instagram reels build something like an hourrain is they spent so much time probably understanding what the consumer is and understanding the consumer psychology um they probably did things like focus groups they probably tried and iterated on various different ideas before going to market with one um and you know they probably have rocky starts and I think like there's some principles that we can learn from these different types of product um products out there

in the world that'll probably help crypto a lot. I think my like I guess negative take on crypto product today is it operates within an echo chamber um and it doesn't necessarily spread outside of it enough. I think there's some teams that really try to do that. I think some of the teams that have obviously generated the most revenue in the space and this will continue are the ones who have the best front ends, right? Like Phantom's been killing it. Act's been killing it. Pump Fun's been killing it because they're front ends. They understand their user and they build from them. Um, so there's obviously more of that thinking and I I just use those wheels and our main example because like it's helpful to look at our industry sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, it definitely is. Um, you know, speaking of kind of on that on that mix, you know, if if you will, between our industry and and others, World Chain and Worldcoin has been doing some really cool stuff. Um, I know that you you guys are pretty close to that team. They they've they've hinted at a new World app coming this summer, ID, money, chat, and apps all in one place. Um, what's going on there? Do do you do you uh do you have any hints? Do you know what what have they been cooking? I don't I don't have hints per se, but I think uh I think they're cooking for sure. Okay. I think like I mean if you look at their daily numbers and know

like world is a contentious project for some people, right? It's like okay this is like it sounds scary. I will say in their defense and like I'll probably say this is like their tech is very legitimate. Like it's actually using ZK. People don't understand what ZK is. So it's like okay like scallops freaky. I think that'll that'll pass. Um, but I think they're doing a great job on the tech side. Like truly on the protocol side, they are doing a fantastic job. Um, now on the distribution side, that's something that's really just I've seen that pick up at a rate that I haven't seen many teams move at. Um if you look at their signups on a daily level there I I believe yesterday uh they onboarded like 70 23,000 people um on the actual like scanning and then I think like

70,000 overall. I might be very wrong here. I can double check and get my sources together but like the rate of growth is actually insane right now. Like it's it's getting very very fast and they have these flagship stores. I mean I look at some of the WorldCoin stuff. I look at some of their ads. I look at some of their content. I look at the fact that they have like basically a crypto version of an Apple store. Um I look at like the trend that OpenAI is heading towards. I look at like Johnny IV and all those things and like seeing these like devices and these hardware devices. I'm like damn like these guys have a pretty good setup right now. Like they can really execute and like I've seen this team execute at levels that I have not seen other crypto teams necessarily execute in. Um and this is

by function of working with them, right? I've seen how professional and how like talented their entire team is and that's that's very very um exciting for them to execute on their vision. Um I think that is definitely like their mini apps and stuff. I've used some uh we've there's been some have been retrofunded through optimism as well. So like I've kind of discovered some through that. Um yeah I think they're going to continue man like what are you guys thinking? You guys see anything? I mean it just seems like I talked to Jordy from Seleni about it and they they obviously just did a big investment there on liquid side. Um, and I think just think that their collaboration with SAM, you know, and the OpenAI stuff is is kind of propelling them into a different direction than most of the crypto companies. And then if they can get

integrated to be, you know, if if if they can be something like a proof of personhood for for for kind of I mean that's that's the general trend, right? As you all these agents, you got you can't really tell some point in the future. Yeah. I mean obviously they're trading at an insanely high valuation as well. Yeah. Um, so yeah, just just very interested to seeing what what they ship. Yeah. Yeah, they can they can ship like really really well. So I think we'll we'll all be pretty impressed at what happens over the summer for sure. Um, yeah, like the the general dynamic of world, which I find interesting, is it's a crypto product that you can explain in a non-crypto way. Uh, it's one of the easier ones to do. So, right, like I can go and tell my mom, hey, uh, prove that you're a human. Uh, scan your

eyeball. And if she's like, I don't want to scan my eyeball. I'm like, you use Face ID. same thing. Actually, this is ZK encrypted. It's a bit safer. Um, so like, you know, I think there's ways to kind of get to an audience outside, especially with the push that they're doing within the US. Like the US is the center of a lot of like culture and a lot of like adoption for any mobile technology. So, um, yeah, man. I'm actually it's one of those teams that I'm very much keeping an eye on and like seeing um, and trying to help out with as best I can. There. Also, the mini apps are pretty good. If you guys haven't checked them out, there's some pretty there's a lot of users like there's like thousands of users on there. 100. There's also sort of this more futuristic use case that I've heard

a lot of just general Silicon Valley tech people, non-crypto people talk about, which is like watermarking a piece of content. And this is sort of to combat the deep fake thing. We saw Sandeep get deep faked and that was a real issue there for a little while. And so I I anticipate that there is sort of this authentication layer for content. And I do think ZK and World Chain is probably in a great position to capitalize on that to prove that a piece of content really did have the person that appears in there that was really them in that video or that tweeted that thing. Yeah. Yeah. I I I'm really excited to see where it goes

because I think a lot of this stuff is very still just very early. Um Yeah. I'm curious any any other projects that you think are doing particularly well or if you have any more comments on World Chain. Also curious. Yeah. So I yeah on the world side so the the fundamental thing of like going to the world and saying hey look like everyone in the world is knowing that a like sees AI infiltrating social media. Everyone in the world is on social media every single day of their life right um the second you kind of tell people hey there's a solution to prove you're human when the bot when the dead internet theory gets realized more and more and there's more slop on the timeline which is going to only this just inevitable at this point um then I think it gets more and more compelling.

I think the way that we tell these stories of these projects to the greater world will become more and more important on a broader crypto level as crypto adoption grows, right? Like the average person walking around the street is not going to think of crypto stable coins as like crypto per se. It's more so like how does crypto impact your daily life. Um, and I'd say social media is a massive part of daily life for most people and they look at social media more than they look at their bank accounts u for for the majority of the world. And so World Coin has a pretty compelling pitch on that side. Um, I think I'd love to see their revenue business lines also like grow into things like privacy uh and KYC stuff in a way where it's like you know all these data leaks are crazy and they're only

like Cardier the watch brand had a data leak right it's just a random like it's not Coinbase it's not tech it's like a random place they even have that much data in the first place but this is just going to continue the hackers get more sophisticated so hopefully there's that privacy side too quick one one quick question. It's I I'm curious what's your take on this this Yapper leaderboard Yapper meta because in the context of you know the way that we communicate these crypto projects to real people that really clicked in my mind right if if WorldChain has some public database of people that opt into sharing their email and they want to hear about these things we can directly com communicate to real humans and prove and we know

that these are real humans whereas you go and you shout and you yap on the Twitter verse you don't really know the percentage of real people that might end up using the app versus siblers or bots. So, how do you think the evolution of this yapper meta may change? Yeah. Uh, that's a awesome question. Thanks for asking that. And honestly, like I think my take here is something that came up literally two days ago. I was in a panel with a from Salana. Uh, we're talking about events script thief versus soul and he he said something that was really profound. I thought it was actually really really really awesome. He said decentralization doesn't mean the absence of leaders. It means the abundance of them, right? It means an abundance of good, strong voices. Now,

what what does this mean with Yapper leaderboard, right? It seems very out of context. What I'm going to is like the Yapper leaderboard right now probably rewards everyone who produces content, but I'm I'm I'm excited to see the Kaido team kind of work more and more on like specifically filtering out quality. Um at the end of the day, quality is what's going to matter. And I think today quality is seen as like what you write is your quality. But maybe over time as more and more things come on chain uh you can measure like okay not just what you write but what it leads to what's the outcome who sees it what what that what is the action that they take afterwards how valuable is the action they take afterwards so you can actually like truly use um the blockchain really to record more of these actions

hopefully in a privacy preserving way to give a more overall estimate because um you know we we index sometimes so heavily on attention but attention isn't what you want really it's not attention is a piece of The puzzle outcome is what you want. I can go and write a thread and you know get views but if no one really does anything after hearing about it or no one tells their friend or no one actually feels impacted by it and no one actually learns something from it then there's no point. Then it's a vanity metric completely. So I think attention is just a piece of the puzzle. Um the issues that people may come up to with the with things like the leaderboard which I don't think is like something the Kaido team would fall into. Honestly I think I'm really bullish on their ability to kind of

solve through these things. um is like attention as the endgame. Attention is not the end game. It's a part of the puzzle. Like outcome is the end. Yeah, I think that was the that was the the you know it's not failed but that was the clear outcome of this Loudio thing right was that attention is just part of the game. So Benjamin I I really appreciate your insights. Uh running low on time here. We'll have to run it back turbo in three or six months and uh see what we didn't get to our ETH questions, but um you know uh pleasure to have you on. Hope you uh get some rest and um yeah, bullish on ETH, man all the way. Yeah, that's good. It's just the beginning. Um I'm excited for what's coming next and thank you guys for doing this. I love

the TV segments. So this is it's short and sweet and awesome. Appreciate you guys. Thank you, man. Appreciate see you soon. Cheers. All right. What a stream. Um, love it. Wow, another fun show. Holy crap. Um, the timeline's crashing out. I just Twitter for like Let's do it. Let's do it. Um, wow. So, dude, check this out. Trump is in the Epstein files. So, Trump's in the Epstein files. That's why they're not getting released. We're about to see Elon on Joe Rogan exposing.

Okay, but that's not even the craziest thing that I just saw. Uh Trump just said just put out a tweet on Trust Social saying that or Truth Social saying that the easiest way to get rid of all the overspending is by getting rid of Elon's government subsidies. Tesla's down 18% today. Oh my gosh, that's slaughter. I mean, this is crazy. But that is crazy, too. If Trump's threatening to those contracts contracts, it's a it's a true breakup. Terminating those contracts would actually prevent the International Space Station from orbiting the Earth.

Wow. And so Elon puts a tweet under this tweet, I think, if you refresh, and he says, "Bookmark this. The truth is going to come out." Which is, you know, bonkers. He also put up a poll, maybe not under this one. He also put up a poll that said, "Should we start a new political party?" If that's the case, you know, he's preparing to run in 2028. This is crazy, man. I'mma tweet it. Elon 2028. You think he's going to try to run for president?

I think the poll that he released on his Twitter and is I think it might be pinned is about 80% yes to 20% no that he should indeed create a new political party. And if he's suggesting a new political party, who better to lead this political party than himself? Dude, I would 100% vote for Elon. Get the Tesla back. No, but I would for sure vote for Elon over the previous two. Uh, wow, look at that. I just voted I voted yes. I mean, look, Elon's not exactly the the cleanest character either, but uh but uh I mean, better than these old farts,

man. These these old farts are just full of it. They have no clue what's going on. And if Elon runs in 2028, who who's his vice president? Who's his running mate? I have no idea. But now I'm seeing photos of Trump and Epstein like hanging out. Oh yeah, they went way back. Everyone that that's not even that uh that crazy. Of course, these guys were basically playing playing right alongside each other. Can't believe Trump and Elon broke up during Pride Month. Oh my gosh. Here, I'll I'll float one. I am curious in case you do have any ideas, but I would I would like to see a uh you remember Andrew Yang, okay? The

guy that was way early to automation and AI and starting to preach UBI back in 2016, maybe it was 2020. Elon Andrew Yang ticket would go hard. Okay. Um I don't really have an opinion there. I'm still just so caught up in freaking Trump. Uh Trump's now saying Elon was wearing thin. I asked him to leave. I took away his EV mandate that forced everyone to buy electric cars that nobody else wanted that he knew for months that I was going to do and he just went crazy. And so now the never Trumpers, the liberals are they like Elon again, right? That's

that's the play here. Elon now is supported by the entire uh Trump opposition. I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. This is so This is such page for a sec here if we can. Yeah. There's so much going on right now. Okay. So, such an obvious lie. So sad. Wow.

Wow. Oh my goodness. Elon's crashing out, too. Well, so is Trump, but this is not out of the ordinary. Like, this is pretty common place. Um, this is what he said about Jared. Congress is spending America into bankruptcy. If we vote on that poll, what what does not Jerome Powell say? Yeah. No surprise that Twitter verse supports Elon. Yeah, of course. When Elon retweets it.

Wow. And this was this all stems from the big beautiful bill that may or may not go in said, you know, she voted for it and then once she discover once Elon tweeted about it and and kind of shed some light on some of the things that were in there, she actually said, "Wait, I didn't see that. If I knew this was in here, I would have voted no." Wow. H how many how many Republicans would flip and support Elon over Trump right now? Wow. Tesla down 18%.

17.5%. Let's look at the comments. I bet it's hilarious. I bet Elon's comments are still higher than 30 days ago. Elon wins. Tesla shareholders. Oh my goodness. Wow. Yeah. I mean I mean this was just so bound to happen, wasn't it? Like two very volatile characters. so bound to happen. And it honestly does feel like uh Trump won because of Elon being on the actual uh like being on his side. I mean that was like a big part of it. I feel like I mean he campaigned. I mean there's just no way those two minds were ever

going to get along. Like there's just like no way. Yeah. They had you know oppositional forces. the austerity was never going to h I mean there's no pol politicians that are going to cut spending. This was Arthur Hayes's macro thesis as well is that you know Doge isn't going to be able to get it done. They're going to continue to print. They're well they're going to continue to spend. They need to finance that spend. So they're going to print so that they can spend and they're going to have to print for this bill. People aren't realizing it yet, but today is the day that Trump as a political asset has started decaying. Mark the day.

Honestly, I feel it inside as well. It's kind of like a bit half and half maybe. I don't know. Uh but it just feels like Yeah, this just feels wrong. It It does show that Elon was a significant portion of this campaign and Trump and Elon breakup is fracturing the administration into parts. Wow. Will must create a new political party by question mark June 30th 17% chance on poly market end of the year 40% chance I you know you can go and create a new political party what what that just takes some registration on a federal or state website I'd imagine

what the real effect of that is is going and running for something under that party dude that'd be so funny if Elon ran against Trump well Trump's not going to run again but I could see Elon running against like a JD Vance, right? Vance represents the Republicans. Elon runs as some new party member. Wow. I think this is going to have this is going to have effects. Like, what are we going to see going forward? We're going to start to see the separation of the technocrats from the Republicans. And that's going to end up like you could see this main street

uh you know Trump administration really just consolidate around their base because the technocrats were never their base. They were just the rich you know that financed this administration and ultimately got it elected and they ended up doing really well. They were aligned with this administration because of deregulation. Yeah. Now, there could be a new political class that comes out focused on deregulation and sort of borrows a lot of the concepts from the right and the left. I mean, maybe that's what Elon's saying, but I'm not sure. Fartcoin's up 5% on on the news. Yeah. What does this do to

crypto? Yeah. What does this have to do with our bags? Huh? All righty, guys. Thanks for tuning in. Uh, good stream today. See you guys next week.