The Rollup TV: Tuesday, June 10th

Transcript

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Heat. Heat. [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] What's up, guys? Welcome back to the

Rollup TV. Uh, today I have Robbie with me. No, I'm just messing around. What's up, Nick? Nick's in the building. I wish I was Robbie. Robbie's out this week. So, uh, Nick's gonna jump in today and have some fun with us. We have five awesome guests. But before we get into that, Nick, for anybody who's new to yourself and what you do in the space, would love just a super brief intro about yourself and then we can just jump in, man. Sure. I'm Nick White. I'm a vice president of Celestia Labs. Been building in the crypto space for almost eight years now. Um, and obviously a big fan of modular blockchains and roll-ups.

That's what Celestia is. It's a uh new layer one that's just focused specifically on data availability and uh giving developers ability to build full stack applications. So um big fan of the pod obviously known you for a while uh and thrilled to be on today. Sweet man. Yeah, we have five awesome guests. Welcome on as a co-host. Sh should have some fun here today with the guests. We have uh Dimmitri, friend of mine from Archetype, going to be asking him questions just around the state of things in the VC. I'm I'm really curious what he's thinking about with the Pump Fund ICO. Um I've I've been talking to a lot of people like on the ground kind of more in the retail crowd, very bearish.

Then like the VCs that I talked to, they're excited and they want to do the ICO. So curious what he thinks about that and some other stuff. Uh, we got Defi Dad, Shiv from Boundless, um, Omar from Chaos Labs, who's getting into some scruffles with the chain link guys. That'll be interesting, and Camila from the Defiant. So, um, that's the list for today. Welcome back again, guys, to the rollup TV. Uh, we got just a couple minutes before we uh get into the guests. So, we'll roll right into some of the first uh recent announcements. Uh, one is Nick, I didn't I'm not sure if you saw as of yesterday, there was a DeFi roundt in DC. So, the SEC held a uh a DeFi roundt to basically discuss a lot of the broker dealer uh kind of rulings,

uh, what makes a DeFi protocol autonomous, um, insiders, uh, token launches, um, how to actually, uh, you know, think about these protocols as a whole. Um, and I think we have a tweet to pull up from the SEC account actually uh that like overviews what uh I think this Tom App Atkins was saying and we can just kind of scroll down and or Paul Atkins kind of scroll down and read this one. And um yeah, basically what what we have here is the key points from this uh from this day. For some reason it's a little bit blurry on my side, but I'm just going to pull it up. Um but yeah, very clearly we are seeing the uh tide shift towards more and more actual uh

regulatory action from the SEC. So I'm just going to read some of the most important points here um that are on the screen and then we can kind of just give our takes um where we go. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So, here we go. I think um Paul Atkins says he's grateful for the division of corporation finance for clarifying its view that voluntary participation of proof of work or proof ofstake network as a minor validator or staking as a service provider is not within the scope of federal securities laws. So, that's pretty cool. Um what else? Greater flexibility to market

participants to self-custody crypto assets. pretty important part of of the ethos especially where intermediation imposes unnecessary transaction costs or restricts the ability to engage in staking. Uh many entrepreneurs are developing software applications to function without administration by any operator. Think of this kind of as like blockchains or networks. Um so yeah, a lot of just kind of like important uh things that came out of this yesterday. And um I know that we've kind of been in this space for a while, Nick, where there's been more like, you know, fuzziness than there has been clarity.

Um but I think one interesting result of that has actually been a bit more leniency. You know, I'm curious if you're like what your take on this general direction of actually finding regulatory clarity is. you know, are we are we moving towards something where there's going to be more restrictive behavior for entrepreneurs kind of getting rid of some of the legal arbitrage that the space has had for a while? Um, you know, is this healthy for the space as a whole to eliminate bad actors? What's your take on on this kind of uh development from yesterday? I'm glad that we're starting with this because um this is honestly one of the most bullish threads I've seen from a regulatory body uh in my time in crypto.

Um and for me, I mean, I tweeted this, but it it actually restored my faith in the SEC and uh my faith in like the the United States. Uh, frankly, um, I mean, I think you missed the the the the second tweet in the thread, but it says, "The American values of economic liberty, private property rights, and innovation are in the DNA of of the DeFi or decentralized finance movement." And I'm so glad to hear people say that because when I see, you know, Liz Warren out there saying like, I'm building an anti-crypto army. Crypto is evil, all this stuff. I can't help but think to myself, actually crypto is America's like the values of America are exactly

the kinds of values that crypto kind of exists to defend like giving people more autonomy uh defending their rights. And uh it's so cool to see that the SEC is like actually saying that. Um, and I mean the I mean the rest of the thread is also just there's banger after banger where they're just kind of like kind of finally just like saying all the things that the people that are in the space and understand how this stuff works have been trying to get across. And yet, you know, instead of anyone hearing us, it's felt like they're actively ignoring the truth or the the reality of what the technology does and trying to say like, oh, well, if you have a, you know, a wallet, you are, you know, uh, a broker

or something or whatever. Yeah. Like, you're just like, dude, this is so absurd. like how are how are these people in charge of regulating us when they don't even understand how this stuff works or they're just their opinion is so far off of what is reasonable. Um it's like how could we ever find like a common ground and this thread to me is like wow they get it for the first time and I feel like we're gonna find like the the path forward and when we can be on the same side you know what I mean because there are bad actors like regulation is not I mean some people are crypto an anarchists like that's cool but I I do think there is room for regulation there's like there are positive aspects of that and um and I'm actually you know feeling excited

that that we can get to something real and productive. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think when when you know, Sachs was implemented as the cryptozar and then Bohe came in, which I think Bohines might have been like a is that like a former college football quarterback or something like that, but maybe I'm mistaken. Um, you know, he came in, he was like now he's the head of digital assets. Stani from a was just meeting with him yesterday at the White House. The Genius Act may pass this week. So, I mean, just broadly, the the act the activity that's been happening is just extremely extremely bullish. Um, and and I agree. I mean, it felt like there was this massive disconnect between uh where the where the actual people in the space were and what they were trying to get

across versus how uh the regulatory bodies were um you know, reacting to it. And I mean, now it feels, as you say, it it feels like there's a throughine that we can kind of both get behind. Um yeah, and I agree on the thread. I mean that second tweet is just I mean it's it's pretty it's pretty bullish. So um yeah. Now what I will say though I mean this is just a thread right? So um we shouldn't get our get like ahead of our ourselves here. Um and like hopefully this actually turns into something real. Um, but yeah, I mean it's funny to think back to when uh SBF was still around and and like the kind of regulation that he was trying to push on DeFi, which I

think was actually not really it was more motivated from a regulatory capture perspective. Um, so I don't know, it's cool just been we've been on such a journey, you know, over the past five 10 years here. Yeah, man. Yeah. Um, rolling into the next one. I saw you engage on this tweet earlier uh in the I think it was yesterday. Um, H put out a a hot take, which I think is pretty funny. I don't know if I don't know who started that, but I know that I was early to this hot take idea. Now it's like kind of like Twitter's turning into LinkedIn a bit.

Um, where you've got hot take as a title followed by uh, you know, semi spicy at best take. But I think this this from Hib was particularly compelling for people who are analyzing how to think about uh you know crypto networks and you know metaf's law and things things of that nature. Uh so hast basically says we should stop talking about moes right almost no products have moes which I think that I think is like a pretty that's the hot take um no products have moes um you know the better question is is this product defensible and I think you actually commented uh and said something about with regards to network effects being akin to moes uh so maybe

you could just explain your thinking there because I I think I may have a differing opinion but but I'm just curious kind of what what your reaction to this was yeah I think um you know it's just a off-the cuff thing but I was thinking to myself to me the mo the most powerful modes are network effects right because those are very once they once a network effect sort of manifests and takes hold it's it's pretty hard to unseat because um it just they have such gravity you know what I mean and you have to kind of escape the gravity well or pull people out of that you know into a new network and so uh I feel like that's kind of what I was trying to say but then Uh hib was saying that actually most moes are not network effects. Most are regulatory modes and lockin modes

which um you know I kind of understand like a regulatory mo like you know I think we've seen that throughout history where tech companies will go and lobby and like all of a sudden you know convince the government to like put in these regulations to make it difficult for new entrance to come into the market. and they're so big and they they know how to navigate these things and all of a sudden like they kind of you know lock lock it down. Um the lock in mode is maybe less clear to me. Maybe that's something similar to like AWS where they have like an egress uh cost. So it's really hard to take your data outside of of AWS. Um but yeah to me the locking mode if it feels like

you know let's say you're building an integration for a certain protocol or for a certain company and uh you know you go through all this that you know work with your dev team to get this thing going and to get this integration live and then you know the moat for that company that earned that integration is like well they the the team would have to then go allocate all this you know dev resources to go and you know use a different company for an adj like like a an adjacent company for a similar product suite. So it's like you're kind of locked in by software or by your own internal budgeting or or resources or just like maybe like some sort of like contractual agreement. But I think more so what Hib's getting at here is actually just like and Nick we've talked

about this right where uh you know there's the bottom of the stack for a lot of these different uh networks and the top of the stack where it's very like user uh you know touchpoint oriented and a lot of like the middle stuff is kind of just it's just it's hard to see how long term it has sticky value and I think what what's kind of saying is like a lot of things in the world are just being uh or or are um commoditized able like for example AI is like every two three weeks there's a new model that's better um you know there's a new company that's coming out with something better in crypto there's been so many different uh you know infrastructure products applications that take the entire market by storm and then you know somebody creates something

different and then boom um so I think maybe he's trying to get at more of like this like uh there's just a lot of this uh commoditizable things being built but um yeah I don't know I just wanted to bring it up to your take and just understand maybe a bit better what he's thinking. But um yeah, I mean I think it's at least an interesting tweet. It was it was definitely an interesting tweet. I think one of the takeaways I saw in the rest of the discussion was just you got to execute. Like a lot of times um that's how you win is just staying ahead, working harder. Um yeah. So cool. All righty. Up next, guys, we have Dimmitri. He's he's he's

he's in the back end here. Um Dimmitri is a good friend of the show. Actually, the first time probably on the show, but good friend uh from New York, from Architect VC. Um and I I've been starting all of these VC conversations with the question about pumpf fun and what they are seeing with regards to the appetite for that. Uh so I think we'll start that one here as well. uh and get de Dimmitri up um and just get get some insights on the state of the VC landscape and what's going on. So, and he's got the Jack Ber or Jack Butcher checks in the back which uh was a bare market classic from the uh from

the NFT cycle. Demetri, how are you man? Good. Good. Thanks for having me. I see you're in the office today working hard. Yes, sir. Hey, Nick. Good to see you. What's up? What What Tell us the story of the blue checks. What is that? Is that like UI design or something or like reference to something? We have some good artwork here. Um it's the work of Ash. Um also he he he painted this one right here. So So we're very art forward over here. We have a couple. Great. I think I've been to your guys office.

It's in Soho, right? Yeah. Yeah, we do a lot here. We do uh monthly events. We have about 2,000 people come here every year across all the events that we do. So, I think we we saw each other at some point last year. You're in the epicenter. Are you guys hosting some stuff around uh around permissionless? Sorry. Are you guys going to host um some happy hours or meetups around permissionless? We are. We are doing a happy hour the week of permissionless and we are likely also doing one of our monthly research days. Um topic TBD. Um but yeah, that should be a fun one.

Cool. Cool. All right, let's get into the meat and potatoes. Demetri, appreciate you hopping on today. As I said, I' I've been asking a lot of my just general venture friends and uh people in the fund space what their thoughts are regarding this $1 billion raise from Pump at a $4 billion FTV. And again, the consensus that I've found within the retail markets on Twitter has been very bearish, very extractive, uh which is kind of classic crypto Twitter. But then on the venture side and in some of the fund side, they're seeing real appetite for wanting to actually participate and valuing this thing. uh something like a a hyperlquid L1 like kind of you know somewhere in that in that like frame of of of reference. So

I'm curious you know are you bullish or bearish on on pumpf fun at 4 bill and um you know what's the kind of right way to think about this raise? Yeah, I think it's going to depend on to what extent they actually want to have direct value acute and the token. I think that's the the simple answer. I have a ton of respect for the team around their execution, around their hustle. Are we participating? No. Am I participating personally? No. Do I think it'll make money? Yes. Um I I I think a lot of the the narrative which we've seen with with Hyperlid is is you know like to like to what extent is value being passed on to the uh the actual token holders? I would

actually disagree in that it's an extractive protocol um because there's a willingness to pay like if you don't want to speculate don't don't use the the the website you know so so so I think it's not wrong for there to be a take rate um it's more of the question around what percentage of that take rate is being passed on to the token holders yeah and I saw that they were putting out or you know I the block put something out that said that they were going to return that to investors like of some or stakers or you know holders of some capacity. So all right well you're not going to participate. That's

good to know. I'm just kind of you know uh getting the overall overall uh consensus here. So moving on to some of the more technical stuff um and some of your latest research. you guys have been kind of going deeper into some of these quantum networks and um you know I think there's this there's this larger idea that kind of haunts some of the Bitcoin community which is and just general proofof work community which is that quantum could take down their consensus algorithm. Um I'm curious through your work or kind of what you're seeing like will quantum take down Bitcoin? I think the short answer is yes and no.

on uh on the yes side I think the developments in quantum are happening faster than we originally thought. So I remember going to a talk um seeing a talk from Dan Benet in 2019 and he said that if you apply Moore's law to the number of cubits that we can sustainably produce so it doubles about every two years it would take about 30 years before you can break RSA. um that that would be around 20 million cubits or so. Um a few weeks ago there was a um uh an announcement from Google that said that they had increased um the effectness effectively of improving uh breaking RSA

um by about 20x. And this is using, you know, clever error correction tricks and better algorithms. And where we had previously thought it would take, you know, 20 million cubits, now it seems like we could do it um with a million. Um so I'm not a cryptographer or a physicist. Um but you can imagine that the the curve is arguably shifting faster than than we thought it would. I think the timeline that I've heard from from folks is between five and 15 years um around being able to to to start to break these uh a prime numberbased um encryption uh algorithms. Why is it

scary for Bitcoin? Um because the the entire premise of ownership in crypto is based on digital signatures and private keys. And if I can forge a signature, I can claim to be anyone because there's no actual identity tied to the private key. So I think that's a very real concern. The reason why I say it won't take down Bitcoin is very simply because there's too much value at risk. And it's not a research problem. It's actually a implementation and coordination problem because we already know how to do postquantum secure signature schemes.

But it's like how do you actually get the ecosystem to adopt it? And we generally understand the design pattern of how this might work and and you can effectively wrap um a a a public private key pair and a postquantum pair. Um, so you effectively have almost like a bullet like a bulletin board of ownership to to go back to. Um, that is a userdriven approach where where where you could have users opting into actually doing this at testation at some point. I do think there will likely be a hard fork. Um the scary part about postquantum is you don't know when an

adversary has the actual capabilities and if they are going to be public about it. So there's some weird game theory around when you should actually start to worry. Um and I think that's more of the conversation now wi with founders and with the broader community. It's like when do we actually start to credibly move towards um some postquantum secure scheme. Yeah. So are are these projects then like investable from a from from a venture perspective that are aiming to like either solve this or build a a a resistant blockchain then? Is that kind of how to think about it? Like like there's quantum resistant blockchains being built. It's a known unknown. Um

there there are quantum resistant chains are also um other flavors almost like quantum resistant like wallets um or or um custodians uh is maybe a closer analogy. Um there are projects out there that are anticipating some willingness to pay. Um maybe a framing is uh insurance, you know, for from an ecosystemwide pu uh uh perspective. Um how much is an individual or an ecosystem willing to pay? Um that is I mean I think we're we're we're still a bit too early in in and really you know understanding that. Um but I do

generally think there's going to be um a coordination failure you know like like we have seen how slow an ecosystem like Bitcoin is around um uh any real software upgrades. Um I think it's high probability that that this would probably need to come from users first. You know whales who are are too scared of that possibility and so they might say okay I'm going to like take this action. I might be willing to pay some percentage of it. Um, that's what a couple of these projects are are banking on uh right now. Um, philosophically, you know, that probably does not um feel good with a lot of the hardcore uh Bitcoiners. Um, yeah, but but that's

that's the thinking right now. Very interesting. The interesting thing to me is that uh it's not just blockchains and crypto that uh have this problem. Like the whole world runs on cryptography like the internet runs on cryptography. We're going to like everyone's going to have a problem here, not just crypto in isolation. Um so how is the whole world going to manage this whole coordination thing um is also an interesting question. So people I guess people shouldn't just single out crypto and say oh crypto is screwed. It's like everyone's equally kind of screwed. I think totally. Yeah. I mean, if encryption breaks, we have quite a bit of issues to to deal with. Yeah, you can say that.

So um another kind of uh sector that we've been actively investing in a bit with our fund and have really actually seen more growth than you know in the real kind of lens of of adoption outside of the digital world in the physical world has been around uh some of these decentralized physical infrastructure networks deepen networks. Um you you guys have been pretty active in that space from what I understand. I'm just curious right now like what is the what is the landscape for deep pin? Like who are the top projects um that are that are actually moving the needle in terms of like real users and getting serious adoption whether they're in your portfolio codes or not. And then I'd like to kind of just get a a better understanding as to where you're seeing

like actual either niches or way of areas where there's actually like untapped potential kind of how you're thinking about it as well. Yeah, for sure. Um I think a lot of this data is is public. You know I think Helium hit um a million monthly active users. Um uh fact check that. Um uh and Dawn are are doing great. They're they're more on the fixed uh uh internet side of things. Um real uh users. Um so I think on like the telecom side I think that's super interesting. Um I think Glow is doing some really cool stuff on the energy

side around solar. Um a lot of tailwinds um there. Um I think on the compute side is where I'm particularly interested in over the next few years. Um because it it the the the scale of demand for that I think is going to be much larger than we think. Um just today we saw Open AAI uh sign a deal with Google. um uh cloud or on compute capacity um and that's a direct competitor you know so so this company has 10 billion dollars in ARR and they're saying we need to work with a competitor because we do not have enough compute and then on the micro side I've been chatting with companies

that you know they're doing multimodal inference um this one's particularly around deep fake video which is uh separately terrifying um but they it cost them $140 cents per inference and that does not scale. You know, the moment they hit PMF, they're they're probably out of money in a few months. Um, and so we're seeing on both the macro and the micro side, um, there's quite a bit of of demand for compute and it's crazy to to me to think that it will not be um decentralized compute providers that are filling that gap. I think the issues historically has been

around SLAs's and Devx. Um, and I think a lot of the teams are are waking up to understanding they need to to solve that painpoint and it needs to feel like a web 2 um uh product or service. Um, but I think a lot of the decentralized compute plays are going to be um uh looking quite good in a few years. I have I have a question on the decentralized compute thing. Um, from what I understand, it's not just, you know, h getting enough GPUs and things like that, but also a power like we just don't have enough power on the grid. Do you think that deepin I've often heard about like power deepin plays, do you think there's something to that as well?

I guess power generation might be a little bit difficult to do um using deepin, but I guess yeah, maybe not. potentially I think there might be an analogy with how the Bitcoin mining industry played out where you saw uh pockets of data centers pop up in regions and geographies where the cost of electricity is cheaper. Yeah. Um and I think we are probably going to see a very similar thing but those data centers are not going to be hosting A6 but they'll be hosting A100s H100s uh 590s. Um, so that makes a lot of sense to me. Um, and so we're just

having economics uh, uh, dictate the actual geographies. And then the the hard part about um, deepen uh, compute coordination is how do you um, uh, effectively coordinate heterogeneous resources in a way that your overall network is not the slowest link or the weakest link. M and and especially if those resources are very globally distributed um and there's some clever ideas around how to to to do that well.

Um but yeah, I think that's the initial thought. So if your core thesis then is around uh commute or sorry compute demand being consistently uh increasing which it it really has over the last you know couple years. Hospitals used to be the largest um you know intakes for energy. Couple hundred kilowatts per hour I believe or up to a gigawatt. Now data centers have like tripled what hospitals even have. Um you know Chamath has just bought a ton of land out west to uh build his own data center for a company. Um so you know if this is the the core thesis that you and I suppose others have uh with regards to uh where the future of AI and

deepen is headed what are some of the second and third order consequences? you know, you mentioned decentralized compute. Um, you know, I'm I'm curious from your investment portfolio perspective or or your thesis perspective, like if the demand continues, then how does that value kind of streamline down towards other parts of the stack or even other industries and, you know, maybe you could talk about some of the players that you guys have invested in or or just general sectors that you see as being uplifted as a result of this trend. Yeah, I think there's a lot on the application layer.

um especially once you're able to collapse the inference costs down to to something that's consumer friendly. Um, this can be like vibe coding games for example. Um, like there's a project called Farcade um that allows you to to to effectively have a prompt that says I want to create some gate and it's it's it's very elementary. It's hyper casual mobile first. Um, I can imagine there being potentially a found foundational model or a fine-tuned model just for game generation. Um, and then you have um uh you effectively open up the universe of content creators because you're you're

you're no longer bottlenecked by the actual technical capabilities of creating a game. Um, so I think that's one example. I think there's a lot of very interesting um AI based social networks that that can pop up um where you are actually interacting with content that um uh is not generated by a human. Um there's a lot of profound um effects I think that will happen around like how how people are interacting with content that is not generated by humans themselves. Um, and I think to to get there, we need to collapse the cost structure of um, uh,

inference. So, so, so, so I think that's going to be um, a pretty exciting enabler for applications that we, um, previously couldn't have. Demetri, I think we're running low on time. I appreciate you coming out today, joining us. Uh, look forward to hanging out later this month around permissionless. And you know, I'm sure you guys will have a happy hour. I think we're going to host one as well. Um, and uh, yeah, thanks for the thanks for the insights on deepen and how you're thinking about things. It's always it's always good to hear because, you know, we we don't spend much time on these topics, but it's good to just understand them more holistically. Yeah, for sure.

Thanks for having me. Cheers, man. Yeah, I mean that the the compute thing, Nick, is something that's been particularly interesting because I think like like there's got to be a point where this like it's it's the demand is going higher and higher and higher, but you know, at some point something like Deep Seek is going to keep happening where you get the same or very close to the level of of performance on some of these models for much less. And and I I I just can't help but think that all these people that are investing into compute, compute, compute, perhaps in I don't know five to 10 years there may be a bit of a of a slowdown. But at the same time, I don't know that the whole

world's heading online. Everybody is going to want to run LLM locally. Um maybe this compute demand just goes up exponentially for a lot longer than a lot of us think. I mean, I think it's pretty clear. I think we're still very early in this whole AI sort of macro wave. Um, so I definitely would not uh underestimate the demand growth in the future. So I personally feel like we need to keep building um and not just for inference but for pre-training. And the irony is that the AI industry is kind of running into the same like different kinds of red tape, but like it's just hard to build new data centers, hard to get like, you know, new

power sources online and things like that. And that's one of the constraints um similar to how I don't know crypto's just been like red taped off of innovation. And I think this is what like the the challenges facing the US is like how do you stay competitive in a global stage in technology when uh you you have so many limitations into what businesses can do and how fast they can move right um it's clear that people like Elon Musk or Sam Alman can move as fast as anyone else any other entrepreneur anywhere in the world but you know a player like China with the actual sort of like government's backing um can supercharge these things and so we got to stay competitive. Maybe deep

can help. Yeah, I mean I think um he mentioned Helium heading having I think 1 million monthly active users but I think actually they had a million phones on their signal network in a day. Um which I thought was pretty interesting. And so basically like what I also heard with this which is a little bit you know tangential to the AI stuff is that um these these kind of telecombased uh service providers. So Helium does a lot of like Wi-Fi uh you know they have like these little boxes that do Wi-Fi kind of like a router. They've actually uh they've gotten into you know their hands full from having uh telecom companies, Wi-Fi providers like your Spectrums, your Comcasts etc.

um actually, you know, it's it it's it goes against their terms of service. And so they're trying to figure out how we can implement these tools into our consumers uh homes without having them do illegal like something illegal to their current contract. Um so that's also like kind of like this red tape that you speak about as well. Yeah. Interesting. Up next, I think we got DeFi dad coming up. Um he's been really bull posting Ethereum. Uh I think he's been he's been holding he's been holding on to Ethereum quite tight. Um and is going to be uh talking to us about the state of DeFi, some of the crypto media work that he's

doing. Um and more. Um it was good to have. So I I think the Ethereum bulls will be uh vindicated. Um I I think it's actually pretty absurd that ETH went down back down to like 17 or 1400 like just just like a month or two ago is pretty absurd to me. Um I mean it is after Bitcoin the most important most significant most lindy mo like largest community biggest mind share protocol uh in the in the industry. And I don't think that that doesn't just evaporate overnight. Um you know I'm Yeah. Yeah.

And it's not like, oh, Salana's success means necessarily Ethereum fails. You know what I mean? I I just don't think it's necessarily zero sum. They each have their strengths and weaknesses. Um, so excited to have here hear the bull perspective from DeFi Dad. He's been in the space. I mean, I remember like in 2019, I feel like even before it was like officially DeFi summer, I feel like Defi Dad was a was out there creating content. He's like a true OG. Yeah, he definitely is. Um, and actually have some interesting things more with this like kind of K uh uh marketing meta as well. Some thoughts about like uh his, you know,

just being a dad in the space I think is is uh is is interesting. Like I'm just gonna ask him like so what like what do you tell your kids that you do? You know, yeah, it's probably easier to explain to your kids than your your parents. Yeah. Yeah. I bet I bet his kids have a crypto wall. I think he should be coming in in just one minute. I think he just got caught up a bit there. Um, usually play this game with Rob here where you check the price of BTC the beginning of the stream and you predict whether it's going to go higher or lower. Uh, it's it's looking pretty good right now. 1089 across the board. Stocks looking like they might go to all-time highs pretty soon. Um yeah, I think people got really really scared in in the in the broad macro sense. And

um you know, today USA and China also had some of their last talks uh around um you know, just kind of like coming to terms on the tariff side of things. It it just seems like Trump is doing the old like, you know, swing the bat hard and then, you know, walk back home walk back to home plate after you get called out at first base type of vibe. just this constant like treadmill of spinning. Um, which I think I think is a strategy of his. It's like flood the zone. It's like a neg like flood the zone. Just give it give him hell and every which way. Um. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. It's so hard to tell with Trump whether he's actually playing for DHS or if he's just a very volatile person. Uh maybe a bit of both. But

there's the rip whiplash is real. And the crazy thing is when you have someone like that as president, yeah, it just causes crazy stuff in the markets because I mean the guy says something and like all of a sudden things can just change, you know, on on a dime. Um, so it's it's it's it's entertaining. It makes for good television. Yeah, it it does feel like American politics is a bit of like the world's theater. It's like a reality show. Yeah. Right. I mean, with Elon Musk crash out last week, huge like a reality show, dude. Yeah, man. So, do you think that uh Trump's actually in the Epstein files?

I mean, probably. Yeah. I mean, but I mean, is there anything damning? Like, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. Yeah. Trump. Uh, and and then now there's there's tweets today from like, you know, some of the news accounts like JP Morgan CEO or you know, executive says that he thinks uh Elon Musk was doing a calculated move and that he's trying to get more attention to the fiscal policy of the US and things. So, I don't know. There's just a lot of stuff going on. But it it does feel like the the accelerated timeline of of of you know just kind of like variable randomness just like just things just keep happening has has been speeding up more more quickly than we than we've ever

really seen. I think it is kind of like a byproduct of Trump's uh volatility from the top per se. Yeah. When when uh when Trump got elected I thought there's like two two possible things that can happen. One is um and they're not mutually exclusive. One is like he actually does follow through in his pro crypto promises. That's actually come true. And then the other one was uh I just had a feeling that he's going to be very volatile and destabilize the world. And frankly that's actually like also bullish for crypto in a sense. You know destabilized markets maybe not bullish for crypto in the short term but definitely bullish for crypto in the long term because it makes it more obvious we need a new coordination layer. We need non-s sovereign money.

mean a new financial system. Yeah. I mean, I think Bitcoin's uh narrative has never been stronger, right, for just the entire use case of Bitcoin. Uh yeah, it's finally getting into that it's finally getting into that like, you know, digital gold store value uh you know, place. So, yeah. All right, we got Defi Dad joining in. Um get getting him him set up and we'll get him up in here. get you unmuted in the meat.

Yo yo. Oh, you're muted. How are you, man? There we go. I love the hat, man. Yeah. Nice to meet you, too, same same to you. I I was just telling Andy before you hopped on that I think I've been following you since like 2019 or I don't know even before DeFi was really a thing. I feel like you were one of the first people to really like double down on it. Um Well, I I wish I doubled down on Celestia. I wish I saw the light earlier. So, yeah. Yeah, it's it's been

remarkable to watch watch you guys grow. Thanks. Yeah, man. Um, it's good to have you back. I think last time we spoke on on air, I think I Rob and I were on your show. I think that was like maybe like the end of last year or early last year or something. Um, yeah, you you guys have I mean you were already you had a clearly like a big following and and a lot of success. But, um, it's really cool to see you guys running the the rollup TV here. I uh I I've done a few live streams like for uh big conferences online. Um this was back during COVID. I think we did one of the ethereals through Vimeo and man I learned an appreciation for everything that's going

on here. I don't think people realize like how difficult it is to pull it off. So um shout out to Alex here who runs everything behind the scenes. Like yeah, it's really really not an easy job. But yeah, but yeah, excited to talk DeFi and crypto and the bull market. Yeah, what whatever you're up for today. Yeah, man. Nick and I were just saying that you are have just been a steadfast ETH bull and Nick was saying that we uh you know, he thinks you'll be vindicated in a big way. Uh we had Arthur Hayes on the podcast maybe just like three months ago or so and he was like, "Look, I think ETH ETH is getting hated on too much.

It's going to be one of the leading L1s off of the lows." Here we are today. Um, man, what is your h has your bullishness on ETH been shaken up in the last six months? Um, has it not been have has your conviction been tested? How are you feeling just overall? I I've definitely never had my conviction tested so much in the past year, maybe two years. Um, I still look at all of this through the lens of being a user. you know, I'd love to wax on with different thesis as an investor, but you know, because I I keep the majority of my, you know, wealth on chain and I'm, you know, I'm actively using old and new DeFi, I I'm well aware of like the the decision process that I

go through and I'm imagining folks with lots more money to manage are going through. And so something like Ethereum L1, I it remains this, you know, credibly neutral platform that, you know, we know when we go to sleep that we'll be able to retrieve our assets. Um, I remain extremely bullish on like the multi-chain thesis. I I think it's actually already played out. I think we've got these like very unique economies on uh L1's and L2s and and I'm absolutely all for it but at the end of the day there's a reason that so much liquidity has you know acrewed to Ethereum L1. So I think my own portfolio reflects this. Like I'm on Salana, I'm on every like L2, you know, I'm on

Cosmos. I I'm I'm extremely grateful for all the builders across these different uh networks. But at the end of the day, again, I am most confident to retrieve my assets from L1. And that that also too is probably due to a number of protocols there like a that have just been battle tested for so long. So yeah, that that's that's how I'm thinking about it from a user standpoint. And I guess as long as ETH remains this pristine collateral that we rely on to borrow against and, you know, create a leveraged position and be able to stake and be able to lend, uh, I think things will play out. But no doubt it's it's been brutal. Like I I will not pretend like it's been an easy last few years.

Have you been um actively trying out any particularly new primitives that you think are exciting? Right? Because I think a lot of the a lot of the DeFi stuff that we originally got involved in both of us was like it felt like there was something new uh quite often, right? It was, you know, there was unis swap and and then there was X and then there was Y and then there was Z and it just kind of kept coming. um things have things have gotten marginally like marginal improvements across the board for different you know specs on a DEX or different ideas on lending but there's also been some kind of standout winners in the last you know 18 months or so in in DeFi curious like who you think these are or if there's any onchain primitives that you've been particularly exciting uh or excited about that are compelling

okay so above all else I'm I'm as bullish as everyone on uh stable coins. Uh now what I'm bullish around is the the yield that you can achieve on chain. I think the fact that it is simple to get, you know, double-digit yield. Uh even though like I think of something like a as like the benchmark rate still, you know, I I I can earn like five or six% on on a just lending something like tether or uh USDC. We actually just did a podcast with the folks at Level. And uh by the way, I'll call out if I'm ever invested in a team. I'm I'm not invested in Level, but just kind of blown away by, you know, their vision to create more competitive yields, yields that,

you know, I want to say are ballpark around like 7 to 10%. They're recognizing that there's uh an appetite on chain among DGENs to be able to earn uh much more competitive yields, but that there's big money coming on chain now that you know the the US government has signaled that they're they're actually looking to encourage money coming on chain that they're looking to encourage uh the use of stable coins. So, level has been one that is is really like capturing my attention. I mean, I want to call out fluid. Fluid is, you know, being the the team behind Instadap. They reimagined how you can blend lending and uh a swap or a DEX.

And you know, there's some real innovation there like being able to hold a a debt position or just a loan. you know, if I put up something like CBBTC or Ether and I borrow, normally I would borrow in in a single stable coin like, you know, Tether, USDC, but for someone like me, I don't really care if the debts denominated in either. I see both of them as extremely reliable. And uh so anyways, you can hold an LP position where basically someone comes in and they're ultimately swapping through something like Cow Swap. it gets routed through fluid decks and then my debt is actually denominated then in tether and

USDC and so I'm earning these little trading fees along the way. So that there's been radical innovation there from the likes of of fluid. Uh another protocol that recently launched is called Infinifi. This one full disclosure I I invested in this in the seed stage. Uh but Infinifi is looking to trunch uh basically two different types of lenders. Folks who want uh a more conservative yield, but they want to be able to instantly withdraw versus those who are willing to lock up for let's say 90 days. And so the folks money that is locked up for 90 days, they're using, you know, basically the model that like a bank would use and they're they're taking a portion of that

money and they're earning an amplified yield for both parties. So the folks that are locked up longer earn a bigger yield and then the folks that are locked up for a shorter amount of time can instantly redeem their money. Those folks are actually also earning an amplified larger yield. Um that one other one uh Oiler just I think Oiler's been a remarkable story. Yeah man, insane right. They they went to almost zero in terms of liquidity on the platform and uh the the founder uh he he actually was uh uh with his wife. They were like having I think their second child and this was like days after it.

So, it's a it's a pretty brutal story for anyone who can like empathize with another human human being like beyond what we see on chain. And so, uh, Michael and them kind of went back to the drawing board and thought about modularity. Uh, very appropriate for this show. They thought about a more modular lending platform and they foresaw this. This is something I personally never I I absolutely never foresaw this trend. I think like Stephen from Defi Dojo was really on top of this trend with looping just the fact that we would see more reliable money Legos. We would see more competitive yieldbearing stable coins and by having that yield bearing stable coin and a borrowing rate

that is less than whatever the the assumed you know yield is let's say you you have something like syrup USDC I think earns around 10%. if you can borrow at a lower rate, you loop that up and now you're earning something like, you know, 20%. Um, so the there's there's been a number of teams that just really foresaw that trend. Um, Maple, too, I guess. Maple that that's maybe one last one to really call out. Maple uh came back from the ashes. I mean, they they got absolutely wrecked by Alamita. Uh they were doing unsecured loans. They had a a model that was really compelling, but that model got blown up by bad actors. And they went back to the drawing board and thought

about how can we work with what is working for our users and and our our our borrowers and how can we redesign it so that folks, you know, can earn reliable yield and we can get back to doing what we do, you know, lending to uh institutional borrowers on chain. So like just blown away by what those guys have accomplished. I mean that there are many founders that would have just called it quits and walked away from it. And um I think we should be celebrating these founders who really stick with hard problems over you know the long term. Nick, you you guys too like it just you you saw something that none of us saw early on or actually there are a

few. Maven 11 saw what you guys were building. So thanks. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think part of being a founder or builder is just having the the conviction in what you're building and uh seeing it through. And someone, you know, like the Oiler founder to go through something as I mean, I feel like most almost like 90% of 99% of people that go through a hack, I mean, it just devastates the community. It devastates everything. So to come back from that is uber bullish. Like that's insane. Um yeah, I agree. Um and I think uh um Maple in particular was actually doing Yeah, as you said, they were doing unsecured loans. They had very little

demand actually. Then it kind of started to pick up finally and then FTX happened. So it was like they they were getting going and then boom, instantly wrecked. Um and now they're like, you know, if you look at the revenues and their TVL, um you know, it's it's very impressive. I think we'll have Sid on here pretty soon uh to talk about that and kind of the uh the comeback story there. I had a a different kind of uh question here for you guys. Ignis DeFi Ignis tweeted unpopular opinion airdrop should be vested especially for Koss current playbook is claim airdrop ASAP and sell move on. The vesting playbook is airdrop launches at a high FTV. you get a huge airdrop, you feel rich, but

you need six months until tokens slowly unlock. What do you do? Continue to be bullish. Post about it, check on the community sentiment. Um, you know, and and you're aligned in in the longer run. And and I think this is he's getting at a bigger problem here, which is that um there's there's just a shift happening I believe with some of the Kaido mind share stuff with different ways that teams are thinking about allocating capital to you know Koss to podcast to advertising like you know you and and ourselves. Um, and so I'm I'm I'm just curious your thoughts on this tweet and really um on this broad like change in how you're seeing teams allocate uh whether it's like advertising dollars or

marketing spend or um just you know kind of broadly thinking about how to do community building nowadays. I I can speak firsthand to why they should vest those those airdrops. You know, whether it's a K or or anyone, you know, I I think Koss have been at the forefront because Kaido has figured out a way to uh quantify mind share and as a result, we have all these folks competing. I I think there there are folks like like probably us here where I I just tweet about what's interesting to me. Like I don't have any sort of paid tweet model like I I I sometimes I wish I did like given the rates I've seen going for other folks out there but like

what happens is we're so we're we're tweeting about what's interesting to us. There's other folks that I I give them credit like they're grinding to contribute to early stage protocols so they can earn that airdrop. There's nothing I think malevolent about that. And so at the end of the day, when you get that airdrop, um I I'll speak as a US citizen. As a US citizen, I have been through pure pain for years. This goes back to 2020, 2021. I didn't sell a single airdrop. I held on to absolutely everything. For the longest time, it was the greatest reward. I felt like a like a complete genius, you know, for holding on to these tokens. And then at some point those tokens fell off a cliff in

2022. So le let's use unis swap for example. I earned that I think I earned let's let's estimate that it was at some point worth like I don't know$10,000 or $20,000. By the end of 2022 it had dropped to below where I to below the price point at which I received it. Yeah, IRS doesn't say, "Hey, we understand you were extremely loyal to unis swap." You know, kudos to you. Imagine if they did, though. They they just want to get paid.

They want to get paid based on the USD value. So, you know, this is something that uh I I can't recall the dynamic that you guys would have been through, Nick, with uh with Tia, but for anyone that received an airdrop, a life-changing airdrop, I mean, good for those folks, but like as a US citizen, we are we are fully incentivized to sell it on day one because if you don't, you risk holding something that drops in value to a point that it could actually be worth less than what you owe in taxes. Yeah. if they vest it, they actually solve all of the problems. I love um Sablier is a tool that um teams have been using to vest tokens. There's there's all sorts of other tools and folks will uh they'll create their own

contracts to to vest these. But you are doing us a favor even though like maybe from a a a profit perspective, you know, if if you let everyone just claim on day one and sell, um the folks that get in the fastest and choose to sell, they might do well. I hope they like live in pain as the token goes up, but like I I think they they're actually doing you a favor to vest those tokens. And um I I know the defi.app team just went live today with their token. Um and full disclosure, I invested in that team. Um they have vesting terms that carry everyone out. I I believe like a year this was all public uh because of uh there was an echo round. Um these are terms that are demanded by tier one

exchanges. I'll let everyone know. I'll let everyone in on a little secret. I've seen this happen so many times that like it's it's actually not a big deal. Like I I know like you signed up for XYZ terms, but this is what really the best teams are having to adhere to and and to Binance's credit like criticize them for whatever else. They haven't they have pushed for some like higher standards there recently. I I don't know what they did in the past. So, I like the idea of vesting. I think it actually protects everyone from day one dumping. You also then have to like be mindful of like where does the cliff happen. You don't want too much liquidity dumped on the

market at once. So, yeah. Yeah. I think uh that that tax nightmare is uh something that all of us are familiar with who are active on chain. So, uh I'm glad that you bring it up. Terrible stories. One last one for you. This is actually from our good friend Grant from Blockmates and I think it's kind of something similar uh you know a similar thought process which is around this this Kaido and this mind share thing um which is you know he he he wrote the problem with crypto marketing roles you know assuming you're a CMO or a marketer at a company is that if you dare to deviate from the current meta and don't see immediate result you run the risk of being fired. It's much easier for your career safety to just do

what everyone else is doing and because the best teams have founders who get out of the way and let marketing creatives go to work and create the new thing that works for everyone else to copy. Um, you know, so I'm just curious what your take is here on on Grant. Is Grant right? Have we reached a point where, you know, deviating from the marketing meta gets you fired faster than failing? um or you know kind of how are you seeing this like the strategy from teams that you're working with or projects that you invest in um you know uh create their own path kind of do the copycat model what are you seeing out there yeah so there is an expectation of how marketers or business development folks community builders uh

how they should go about their job and th this is also reflected in investing in the space that you know if um If you're working in a fund or you run a fund, uh a year ago, people people LPs, investors were asking you, what sort of memecoin exposure do you have? Now, if you had a thesis that memecoins were uh probably like a fleeting narrative, but like there's a long-term uh value to specific meme coins that uh cross the chasm and become, you know, viewed as like a blue chip, like something like Doge or Bonk. like they they have these really great stories behind them and they have such uh such a distributed token holder base that they're able to

be viewed as more blue chip. But I guess my point in in all is saying this is it's very difficult to be left to your own devices to do your job. And I think like as an investor your job is to seek outsized returns I guess unless you're running a liquid fund and then that's that's a totally different approach. Um, on the marketing side, I I mean, you're you're just under the gun because at the end of the day, there's a scoreboard that is the price of the token. So, if you're in a project before the token has gone live, I do believe you have a bit of patience, you know, on your side. Yeah. However, there's there's again there's metrics out there like your follower count on Twitter. I've seen this with, you know,

so many different teams and, you know, like word to the wise, like most of the followers out there for projects, you know, they're they're bought or they're, you know, acquired through some sort of like click farm. Um, it's it's very rare that you will find, you know, like a 100,000 real followers. And I think this this extends also to the new mind share campaigns. I think what Kaido's doing is compelling. I do think it's here to stay. Uh, but there is a problem with like they call it the AI slot butts.

Actually, Grant has been a lot of this. Grant from Block Makes like they're just really messy uh uh conversations that we see when I post something on Twitter or X. I rarely see what what I know to be like real humans anymore. And it's I I've got to say it it sometimes gets a little dystopian. almost feels like c- crypto Twitter looks more to me like what I thought of as LinkedIn. Lots of like canned responses, lots of uh people sort of like policing what they say. Um and for I think for the three of us here and lots of other folks in the space, I think we come from like an era where there was really thoughtful conversation

and there was lots of fighting online, but you learned a lot from that. It's still there. Nick can attest to this. he he has to, you know, wade through all sorts of debates to defend Celestia over the years. Um, it's it's not easy, but that's where we learn the most from having those sorts of conversations. So, anyways, I have a lot of empathy for the for the marketers out there. And, um, I think it's one of the hardest jobs. They're handicapped and not able to use like they're maybe the term is handcuffed. What's what's Yeah. Yeah. They're they're not able to access web two tools that are accepted in the web two like tech world because those tend to you know rely on you know data that

we would all frown upon pixel stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's hard a like whoever is a marketer out there if you can do your job well you are going to be you're going to be paid very well in the future. Uh just one thing ma make sure you get you know uh some sort of token allocation because like I don't know why anyone would work on a protocol without a token allocation like that's that's what it that's the real yes diva I appreciate your time man thanks for coming out have a great thanks for having me guys and uh I'm cheering for ETH right alongside you both oh please please yeah my my bags need it but yeah the sentiment has shifted we are we are on the upswing new new all-time highs very soon so oh look

at There we go. All right, buddy. See you soon, man. Thanks, guys. Bye, Andy. See you, Nick. That's That's some good stuff. I actually think uh I think he's right, though, about ETH ETH price, but we don't need to speculate too much, but it it it feels way way better than uh previous. All right. Yeah, when whenever something is like the most hated, that's when it has the most opportunity to to bounce back, you know? Yeah. the first cringe point of maximum financial opportunity.

Yep. Right. So, yeah, it takes a while to learn that, but basically the more hated something is actually the more um you know, people can potentially be off sides if things reverse. Yeah, DA is just an allaround nice guy and just has like a lot to say. Very bullish on DeFi, has has experience and yeah, I mean, I just I enjoyed that segment. Up next, we've got Shiv. uh the new CEO of Boundless excited to talk to Shave about what he's seeing in the ZK market. Um I know that you guys are doing some work together in some capacity uh as well. So uh yeah, let's let's get them up here.

Sorry for the delay. We're running a little bit behind today. Just typical founder of Ris Zero myself. Yeah. Hey Shiv, what's up man? Yeah, everything's going well. Hi Nick. Nice to see you here as well. I didn't realize you were doing the call, so this is a great good surprise. It was a surprise to me, too. Andy needed a special co-host, so just hopped on. Yeah, Robbie's out this week, so we just uh doing doing what we can here. Um and yeah, man. Shiv, where are you calling from? I'm actually calling from uh Seattle, of course. Um that's where a lot of the leadership team of Rio is based. We are um uh Seattle first company, but uh as you know from like uh talking to Jacob and the rest of the crew, we have a strong New York base now

as well. But I'm I'm personally based in Seattle. Sweet. Yeah. One last one before we jump into to some of the meat and potatoes here. I know that you were recently brought up into uh the CEO position of Boundless uh you know, which is nothing new from your previous kind of web 2 experience uh with regards to some of the bigger software and tech companies in the space. Um I'm just curious about like kind of what's the what's the story um behind you jumping into this role and then how has it been for the last couple of weeks uh getting acclimated? Yeah, I think um I I think it is still a huge step up uh from my previous roles in tech companies because I was uh you know

always behind like a good leader. Um, for example, my background in web3 is uh helping manage um Avalaps, the company behind the Avalanche L1 and uh Coinbase as well where managed quite a lot of divisions and also like help launch countries like Japan and India. Um wasn't the best launches. We got shut down in India in like an hour or so. Um but uh it's always a learning experience. But before that in web 2, I I held quite a lot of leadership positions in uh Lyft, in Amazon. Um I worked at Microsoft. Um I was one of the first ems for Grab which is a Southeast Asian right share company that a lot of people will recognize if you travel to Thailand or Singapore or Malaysia or any any of these places. So uh that's that that's that's that that was my

background coming in managing engineering teams um that have a focus on like product you know revenue growth um I was u I was my career really took off in the phase when there was quite a lot of capital flowing around. So the the question was can you make your idea work with enough capital? Can how hard can you push creativity? It was the era of Travis Kalnick. It was the era of Airbnb growing. So that was that was like a really good experience and that's how I really cut my teeth and then got into crypto of course and and um that's always been like um a much more interesting journey because the industry itself is nent. Um, so there's there is some novelty here in my own learning

experience of how do you navigate a new industry. Um, use any institutional wisdom you've garnered from your previous experiences. How do you adapt it here? Um, there are some things that change and some things that never change. Um, I think your big tagline on Twitter, which I really like, is the return to fundamentals. Uh, fundamentals were of course forged in web 2. Um and what we're trying to do is to like recreate them in web 3 to like create a industry that lasts decade decades and doesn't sort of you know wimper out but the spider is zero in my journey I've been here like a a year and eight months I helped manage most of product and engineering uh except for the two co-founders who I reported to who are

also part of engineering uh but coordinating engineering making sure we're productive over a period of time is something um I focus on a lot um as we move towards boundless which has um a focus on customers, applications, growth, um markets as well. Um those are all sort of things I dealt with for most of my career. Um um some people feel in the company that I have an intuitive understanding of this. Um I I like their praise, but it's always a challenge. Um but but it is one that I'm going to try and help navigate. Um as as folks like Jeremy and Frank sort of focus more on the ZK tech which is of course a core pillar like a technology pillar by

itself um in theory like blockchain is one core pillar. ZK is can live by itself as its own core technology and you want um someone to keep investigating that and uh I think in a lot of ways Jeremy was put on earth to like advance ZK. So I want to make sure like he gets the time and bandwidth to like push that as well. So while I focus on the business side a little bit which is what boundless is. Yeah, man. Yeah. And I think the uh the tides are shifting ever so much in the in the favor of ZK and in ZKVMs with Ethereum as well, right? Ethereum just announced this protocol design thing uh from their foundation. Uh you know, and you put out a tweet saying that ZKevms have rapidly accelerated enabling us to rearchitect

the L1 to simultaneous to simultaneously support scale, verifiability, security, and censorship resistance. And so it it feels like um you know the ZK EVM and ZKVM teams are are being kind of like vindicated in this way around okay the L1 is very aggressively going towards this kind of like zkification this snarkification um you know I I'm I'm curious when you're looking at what the future of Ethereum is and you're looking at what you guys are building at Boundless um does it feel like these two worlds are are coming to intersect uh ever so more a and with a much more direct path uh than let's say a year or two ago. 100%.

I think like uh two years I mean everybody's been early on ZK uh for a long time. Um finally it feels like we're on time. The train's here and we're ready to get on get on board. we've um bought our tickets and uh um I think I'm so happy to see the ETH foundation and all the sort of thought leaders in that space as well um align on on the goals if not the mechanism right like uh when you make a decision on one architectural choice versus another obviously some folks are going to be unhappy if you know the it's not the it's not the direction that maybe they thought the e foundation might make in techn specific choices in technology But the ultimate direction is extremely complimentary and supplementary to where

we're headed. Um I will say that two years ago we thought we'd be here in 5 years. So we ended up speedr runninging our own road map. Um a lot of it comes down to the encouragement of folks like Vitalik who you know write a lot of like these blog posts and um put out thoughts around where they expect ZK to be or in what form will it be useful. Um and also generally the competition in the area is heated up as well. When we uh open sourced our ZKVM, one of the key things we understood even from a business perspective is that there isn't a lot of a moat in an open source product. Um but we need a lot of people to buy into the design. We need a lot of people to

validate this approach. And that's happened right now. We we have like some 30 ZK VMs, a tad more than we thought like would be possible in such a short period of time. But it's good. It it means people understand that this is how you platformize ZK. Um and I use that term quite intentionally. Um ZK before this was not really a platform. U we have Nick here. So like think of it as modularity in a lot of ways as well. Like when you have different layering in your offering, you can actually have different teams work on different layers. you can accelerate the entire product by having parallel work streams making things better. Um, and ZK is going to be doing that in a lot of ways.

ETH ETH foundation all chains like we're not just focused on ETH like all chains are going to see the benefit of ZK in scaling computation in scaling rich user experiences um creating more value uh and utility right like um one of the key things that everyone's talking about is how do you create revenue well you have to create utility for revenue people pay for a thing when they find the thing useful otherwise they don't pay for a thing it's it's literally that simple so and utility is a you know it's a cost of like function how do you create function well you need computational complexity That's literally what verifiable computation brings to you. Um so I'm I'm really really um you know bullish on the next sort of 12 months because every time I say something's going to happen

in two three years, it tends to happen in 3 months. Um so uh you know I I just stopped giving timelines. I'm just going to like keep my eyes on the next 12 months. I'm sure it's going to be amazing for everybody. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think people appreciate how fast the ZK space has moved in the past few years. Like I think even people who were bullish on it uh would never have predicted that we'd be where we are today. And I think a lot of that comes down to teams like you guys, RZero, for pushing forward the state of the art and innovating non-stop. Um it's been remarkable to witness from the outside and uh as a modular bull myself generally like ZK is one of the most

important pieces to making that reality possible where we don't have to have everything on one single state machine. We can have you know just like programs with verifiable state running in parallel um and you know coexisting and inter interoperating and things like that. I'm curious, you know, now that there's been a little bit more of a wake up or resurgence in the privacy side of of crypto. Um, both because, you know, maybe reg regulation around privacy is changing, but also because I think enterprises and and some of the new use cases are coming online like how do you you know, that's the other whole side of ZK that it's not just about scaling and interoperability, but privacy itself. So

how do you guys think about Yeah, I mean that's a that's a that's a great question like um so I mean the thing is if you go back whatever 15 odd years when ZK was being studied in universities the whole focus was privacy. ZK's killer functionality is privacy. It also has this property of succinctness or having like fixed proof size for arbitrary large computation. That's really what helps scale blockchains. But people completely forget that like ZK was studied under this whole guise of privacy. How do I protect information? How do I give you limited access to whatever you need to have and so on? Um I think it's being so I think there are two or three unlocks that need to happen um that have happened. One is of course Perf is

already at a point where um we can factor in most privacy use cases. Um people are willing it's not like you don't log in all the time. You don't authorize things all the time. It isn't actually that jarring to UX. you don't you it's part of the critical flow of path but it's only a one-time hit. Um this is something that's well understood in the you know the octas and the web two world when you work in like a large company it takes like half a second people are just okay with it right so the UX is actually um pretty compatible with ZK solutions we just need to make ZK faster uh sorry more compatible with devices your browsers and your apps uh your mobile apps and so on there's quite a lot of work being done by a variety of

teams as well as ris zero in trying to get to that fe u get to that space. Client side proving is going to be one of the largest unlocks for privacy based applications. Uh once you're able to run stuff on a browser or on your phone without really um impacting your user experience or like keeping it at par with web two, it's going to become a no-brainer. Now there are like you suggested there are three or four challenges towards that from an external point of view. One is the regulators. Um I think um I talk to a lot of privacy teams because if I if you're on boundless if you're in the ZK space a lot of people come up to you and talk to you about that. I actually have a background in compliance and security and privacy. I tell them well it's not a

two-sided problem. It's not that you are securing me and I you get into a conversation with me. There's also the regulator. They need to be like there's so compliance. There's all of these like compliance requirements that you need to fulfill for which you need to have a broader conversation with the regulators as well especially if you want adoption and then you want to crack Fortune 500 and like make money off of these products. This there's a uphill battle having this conversation with regulators. I think the industry would be very well served if we are able to attract some of the movers and shakers in the security business. Get them more interested in the ZK conversation. and based out of being based out of Seattle, we actually have some access to some of

these folks who with whom we're working a little bit on like you know writing specs or RFC's for W3C conferences and so on. We need to it's going to be a little bit of a long game. It's going to be a silent game one that people aren't going to observe on crypto Twitter because it's not sloganering. These guys just you know you need to like sit with them for hours and like convince them of certain approaches and then they want to test it out. They need sec ops to approve. It's going to be a long haul. um the ZK teams that are willing to do that work, wait for the year, year and a half, willing to go to the, you know, the 20 odd boring meetings that go on forever, you know, scratch your head, come back again. Those are the things that get this over the line. The return

to fundamentals that, you know, Andy talks about, I love that phrase by the way, return to fundamentals. I try and repeat is is about doing that hard work up front to unlock business opportunities. There is this like small myth in our industry where you know you will build and they shall come. Yeah. Has never happened ever in the history of computing. You got to build, you got to sell, you got to do all the normal things. You got to sometimes put on a suit and sometimes put on even more so now, right? Yeah. Exactly. Put on your battle armor, get in get in the game. Um and keep your eye on the ball. Uh don't get distracted. Right. So there are privacy teams working out there who are, you know, similar minded to us. Like I love chatting with these folks. I love

that they have the fight in them um to go up and like you know break through some of these barriers which seem impenetrable. Yeah. So, Shiv, when you're looking at at either in this privacy sector or just more generally with um teams that you guys are working with at Boundless and Vers Zero in the application space, you know, what are some of the the use cases or ZK apps as we could call them that you're particularly excited by? Um, you know, whether it it's in payments or it's in more noninancialized sectors. What are some of the the ZK apps that are uh compelling right now in the space? Um yeah yeah I think um you you'll probably get a common answer from

all the ZK players but because it's actually a larger movement when you go back to the basics of what a lot of these applications are doing um we call them ZK apps or verifiable apps or you know boundless applications they all kind of mean the same thing which is how do you run an application as you would in web 2 but somehow get the guarantees of web 3. the properties of decentralization, the properties of censorship resistance in the periods or in the periods of the application that you care about or with the data that you care about, right? So, if there is a dog walking app, I'm not super concerned about censorship resistance. Yeah, whatever, man. Like, just take my dog out for a walk and work. Thanks a lot. But if it is a financial application, if it is

something that deals with PII, if it deals with sensitive information, how do I know you're not doing something weird? How do I know you're managing my money effectively? How do I know that you are taking my instructions and following through in the precise manner in which we signed our contract? Either its terms and conditions or like specific contracts. Um, if you actually go at a high level, um, all of these actually look like state transitions, right? right in a state machine they kind of like basically state transitions. It's like oh I used applied a bunch of rules in this case this was the transaction type and your state changed um ZK is really really good for like verifying state transitions. That's what DKEVMs are. All of these like bubble up to the

same design. Um, we're seeing some standardization across all of these applications and how they go about doing state transitions and how they verify them in ZKVMs. And that's fantastic news because once you tell us to optimize for a thing, I think the industry, the ZKVM industry has shown that if you tell us this is what it looks like, we will crush it. Um, like real-time proving was not supposed to happen for like a really long time, but everyone's like this is what the block looks like. Oh, okay then. Watch us hold my beer, right? Like it just go and just crush performance there. Once you see the pattern and we are with these state transitions and how exchanges want to operate, how D5 applications want to operate, we are going to try try and focus in on that provide other pre-ompiles or like focus on how these are implemented or even get

our hands dirty and start building some of this stuff ourselves to like feel the pain of our customers. Um, which is something like I highly encourage all young teams to do which is uh don't just yap about it like get in there like you'll realize how hard it is to deploy your own application if you deploy your own application. It's always hard the first 200 times. You got to like feel that pain. We're learning a lot about these things. Um again like the next 12 months you're going to see optimizations at the ZKVM at the uh implementation layer which is boundless or the or the or the layer at which like people build ZK applications to make lives easier and faster. if you want a a bet from me like in 12 months I think there'll be

something like a Ruby on Rails for ZK applications where the people will be like you know don't worry about any of this middleware you don't need to study ZK anymore uh just write your application here's the APIs that you need to use and people will be writing hello worlds in like 30 seconds and so on um and that's that's going to be like a massive unlock when you are able to do that um people who are maybe in my age group remember uh when it was quite hard to write a actual web service you had to download a stack called lamp um with and write your application in PHP. That was around the time when Facebook was also written. Uh Ruby on Rails and Python, Django, all these you know frameworks showed up and overnight everything was a microser. I I bought my house and pay my

mortgage with like the microservices I built in my earlier days. Like it's uh it's it's going to be that and I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah, I mean I think I mean ZKVMs as a whole just brought generalization to the space away from circuits and now it just feels like once you kind of open that can of worms, it's just going to be accelerated and just pushed to the basically to the logical extreme of of of ease of use and ease of deployment. So I'm excited to to kind of watch the boundless journey as as you guys go to uh prove Ethereum's entire consensus uh in in a single proof. I I know that the to prove a an L2 block right now is getting cheaper and cheaper um to to the

point where it's actually kind of feasible to you know to just maybe just make an optimistic roll up into a ZK rollup just on your own. Um but uh once we can get that on the L1 then I think that's when the Pandora's box really opens up for interop uh and for just general uh pace of you know solving some of the problems that are plaguing some of the this like modular design of Ethereum's architecture when it comes to scaling. I I have two just two quick really quick questions on on that stuff that I'm just curious and about personally. one is how do you guys see the cost of proving currently on like you know standard EVM chains and do you still because I see a lot of teams go

opting for fault proofs rather than just fully ZK proving because that's a cheaper way to to operate and then the second is like where do you think real time proving is today and how close are we because that's really the the the thing that's going to unlock like interop that we couldn't have really fathomemed than before. 100%. So let's let's talk a little bit about cost. I think um there's two things here. One is of course the raw cost and we're in a so the most important innovation from the web 3 ecosystem for me is really the launch of tokconomics to like create subsidy effects uh in a network. Um so a costs are going down. They're on a

massive like the the graph looks hilarious. you have to expand on the X-axis to make the graph look a little bit more real worldish. Um but um the cost of like ZK probing are coming down and with you know people launching AS6 and so on either by the end of the year or uh you know early next year you're going to see cost come down even further. Uh but another way to actually like bring cost down is through subsidy effects. So that's what Boundless is actually designed to do. Um our our you know um innovation in how we actually create the network and keep um uh all the provers incentivized is through a mechanism called proof of verifiable work uh which actually creates more incentives for doing work and

participating in the network which provide a subsidy effect to proving already um and similar sort of mechanisms of course proof of work being one of them is already subsidizing you know it subsidizes the cost of bitcoin by 1995%. And so we see the subsidy effect being uh not just uh big but like massive. So if something is 120 at the cost because of tokconomics that's going to solve a lot of the cost problems. But irrespective of that the cost of proving on raw hardware is also coming down. It's going to continue coming down. There's actually a bunch of teams u fabric is one of them who are like amazingly invested in like making this future happen for us and that's that's that's great news for us. Right. The other one is real time proving. Um, I'm

going to say most teams are there. Um, they're within a line of sight. They can't write code fast enough, right? It's like the question is going to be like, oh, can we just, you know, uh, test it out properly? Now, the question is, how many blocks can you like make guarantee are going to be like proven in under 12 seconds? What is the fattest block? What is the theoretically fattest block that we can make? People have already moved on to that question. It's a I think internally we've achieved um you know real-time proving with like a setup even in the cloud to be honest but we want to like actually publish um a config. So we're completely open source.

Our prover is open source. Nothing about what we do is closed source. So we'll give you the code. We'll also tell you how much money you need to spend and what machines you need to get and you can become a real-time prover. Um we want to make sure that future is also available so everybody can grant and verify that this is happening. um this is going to happen in like a matter of weeks mostly because like you know we we just can't type fast enough. Uh the path to real time proving in my opinion is mostly solved. Um I'm I'm glad we're still celebrating it on Twitter. We want to make sure everybody understands the impact of real time proving and what it does for people. Um I think uh Justin's been like a really good uh spokesperson u for that. I know a lot of like privacy

hawks are like oh real time proving doesn't matter for me or my project. uh it matters for the ecosystem. Um I'll also say it's a 4-minute mile in a lot of ways. Like now that we've broken it, people everybody I was in Japan um uh and at a crypto conference and obviously not everyone speaks English. A lot of people came up to me, brought up their phone, typed up a bunch of stuff and they were like take a look at this and all the questions were about real time proving or how fast proving it's a the 4-minute mile encourages people to like think about a thing and start taking it up. um it's a performance milestone that doesn't necessarily by itself uh stop us from going getting faster or or uh investing more in performance but just encourages everybody to think about what's possible and I think that has

started happening that to me is the most important signal of all it's like builders are like oh it's not some weird thing that I don't need to worry about now I either get in now or my competition is going to eat me and that's where that's why I feel like boundless is so well timed as Well, um our our ability to make DevX better, cheaper, faster, safer, more secure, more trusted, all these things put together, it's going to encourage more boundless applications, more verifiable applications. Um and and overall just, you know, lift the entire system up. If we if we have a lot of killer applications, I think all of us would love to compete against each other in that sort of scenario versus go in a circle with like, you know, 40

successful companies at any given point and go in a circle again and again. the cycle to be different. Yeah. Well, Shiv, I appreciate the insights and the time today. Um, it's been an absolute pleasure. Again, as we roll towards real time proving and again proving Ethereum L1 in entirely, I think we'll see a lot of these problems that are uh yeah, as as I said, kind of have band-aids on them right now in certain sense that are working, but can eventually be solved in a more uh, you know, concrete manner. So, appreciate your time uh and and insights and we'll see you soon, man. Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks, Andy. Thank you. All right, Shiff. Every time I speak to people from the ZK land, it's just like it just it's always just, okay, this is, you know, I'm bullish. I'm I'm, you know, we're going to solve everything. Um, but it does sometimes feel that like people just apply ZK as a as a solution uh to like create a problem as well sometimes. Um, I don't know how to expl. It's like I don't know. There's an interesting framing. I'm not saying that shape and balance, but it's just that, oh, we have this problem. Let's just put ZK on it.

Yeah. Doesn't always work that way quite yet. I've definitely seen narratives like that, but I think I mean the real applications of it are like everywhere. And and they even go outside of crypto, you know what I like when he was talking about the privacy stuff and client side proving that's that's going to be used, you know, outside of blockchains, you know, for maybe even Google, right? You know, they talk they released that whole thing about their ZK identity thing. Um, so this I I mean ZK is is real. It's a new computing paradigm like full stop. So don't never fade a new computing paradigm. That's my uh don't let the Twitter FUD get to you. Up next, we got Omar, the founder of Chaos Labs. Uh, doing great work in DeFi. Uh, there's there's quite a bit going on in the in

the DeFi world today. We'll get him up here. And um, and yeah. Hey guys. Hey Nick. Hey Andy. Can you guys hear me? Yeah, man. Yeah. What's going on? See you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. All good. How are you guys? You uh you are you in the city today in the office? Yeah, I'm in our New York office in Brooklyn. Yeah, man. You guys are doing some events around permissionless, right? Uh I think we're gonna have a few things running in the office and if you're in town, definitely let us know. Would love to hang out in person.

Yeah, man. Um well, we brought you up here today because you found yourself in the middle of a lot of fun uh Twitter content over the last uh week or so. Um I I saw this tweet that you put out around um some of the the Oracle problems that a user had last week. Uh, and then obviously you, you know, going back and forth with some of the chain link guys. Maybe you could just like give us the TLDDR of of, you know, what Chaos Labs does and then kind of what happened last week and your perspective on that. Uh, so so we can have a mental refresh uh, as to kind of the state of things there. Yeah. So, u, happy to jump into it. So, generally, Chaos Labs, um, I think what we're known for is being

the leading risk platform, uh, across onchain finance. So over the past years uh we've built our platform that has powered several trillions in volume uh settlements liquidations generally onchain credit um and volume and it's really kind of the engine that's powering a lot of applications uh today like a GMX Jupiter uh Ether Renzo Dydx uh layer zero and a great group of teams who we work with um and the way that we kind of provide uh our real- time data is via um the chaos Oracle. So we launched that about a year ago uh a little less around nine months ago growing really fast rolling out um across all the protocols that I just

mentioned. So that's like the context like we we spend a lot of time uh in risk in security um and understanding markets and also just like shipping products that are used by protocols today. Got it. Okay. And so you guys are also bringing this this this kind of uh new oracle design around this this AI oracle. And so so so part of this marketing campaign for for you was to uh put this tweet out because because uh chain link was under duress after a a wrong there was an incorrect price feed and some are arguing that it was is a a result of a lack of liquidity on a certain token. Others were were arguing that it was a a oracle problem.

we we could just broadly understand like what that like problem space was and just kind of how that even happened um to better understand kind of like how oracles are are so important in the in the DeFi landscape when it comes to liquidations and and pricing. Yeah, for for sure. So, I mean I think a like an area where we spend a lot of time writing about is is risk, market dynamics, uh liquidity, uh game theory and security. So this definitely kind of like falls um under that. Um these instruments particularly against oracles in this case are responsible for powering every single transaction like in the market are ultimately kind of uh

touched in one way or another by oracles but they're not really well understood. So kind of taking a step back um in v 0ero of like onchain finance like really the vast majority of volume was attributed and powered by kind of feeds or or or products that were pricing Bitcoin, Ethereum uh and just like major als at the time. Um, and really like the main challenge in bringing offchain data on chain during the like the early days of kind of DeFi summer was simply having a reliable feed because anyways most of the activity and interest was around things like Bitcoin. Uh, and when that's the case, you can simply take like a median. A median means that like you

take you sample a price from like three, four, seven different venues at once and you take what's in the middle. And Bitcoin is like traded uh pretty obviously really heavily across the world. So it it's pretty representative. But what we've been seeing over the past like two and three years and this was like part of like the motivation that gave us conviction to to continue building in the space is that tokenization is exploding um a in crosschain assets but b and also tokenized assets. Now, when you have tokenization that's exploding and living across all of these blockchain networks, one of the challenges that you have is fragmentation of liquidity. And what fragmentation of liquidity manifests itself in is basically thin liquidity and prices which can move uh with

relatively small trades in a significant way. Yeah, specifically that's what we saw last week um on Avalanche with the DE USD feed um that chain chain link had shipped. But I will say this is like not like a new thing. I think previously like mango markets had the same issue and kind of like every week or two you hear something in the news about feeds that are being manipulated or moved uh in ways that they shouldn't be. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I mean I I mean it's also part of the the you know if you want to call them exploiters or you know people that see opportunity it's part of their it's part of their kind of job to keep the system in check by by trying to make these things happen to further um

you know further make teams build out more resilient systems right and I think that's that's a lot of the work that you guys are doing uh as well and it just so happens that this is something that is a very highly competitive space with regards to oracles and and this kind security models. It's it's it's very much like a uh you know it's it's like a a Lindy thing, right? You if you don't if you are very strong for a long period of time, that is the most important uh measure I believe, right? And and so I think that that's something that a lot of teams try to try to create. Um yeah, I I'll just say on that because I think it's important like Yeah. Yeah. Um it's not only exploiters like right like actually like what moved this price was

just a regular arbitrage trade. So it wasn't somebody that was manipulating oiler or something like that and trying to like screw users. It was literally just a trade balancing market prices. Um so I think that all that makes it even more important right because like the the feed this is something that happens as a natural organic course of kind of markets and trading. Um and just a feed needs to kind of uh encompass that in terms of its design. So this isn't some like weird edge case where somebody kind of took a lot of resources to manipulate and hurt users. it was a side effect of something that happens organically uh the course of a market.

Okay. I mean just in terms of one thing about the lendiness is like yes lendiness is important like obviously you don't want to um like depend on something that's completely untested but um all of this stuff is like really asymmetric right so like one bad block one bad print of an oracle can cause losses of hundreds of millions of dollars and lindiness is maybe like a proxy for security but you see time and time again that if you're not continuously like innovating updating the oracles, the designs, the algorithms to meet the market where it's at. Uh you're it doesn't mean that you're going to be kind of robust in in the face of these things. So lending is a good proxy, but you like protocol founders,

developers also need to understand is the oracle designed to handle my use case. So for those who are, you know, somewhat involved on chain using using DeFi, what would you say are the more resilient designs or protocols today uh either that Chaos Labs works with or that are just in existence as a whole? And then what really makes a protocol resilient from this smart contract risk perspective that I think a lot of people like myself who are involved on chain like 2019 2020 we we kind of learn the hard way quite a bit and and somewhat reluctant to try every new thing now but but I'm just curious like from the lens

of DeFi today where are the most resilient protocols standing and and what do you look for uh when it comes to these kind of risk assessment ments to make a protocol resilient onchain. Yeah. So, I I'll say this like a when it comes to like the nitty-gritty of like an oracle design, it's my view that the like the user shouldn't have to like be an expert on the Oracle design because it should just work. Um and the onus of that is is like on the teams that are building the oracles or the integrating uh engineers on the application side.

Having said that, um I think there's like a few buckets that like you can look at like a today the market is advancing and getting quite sophisticated. Uh and in 2020 there was just literally like one type of push oracle that every application uh adopted. But today there are different requirements. You have like high throughput low latency uh chains that enable uh derivative applications like perks. A per application needs a super sensitive super low latency application because you're trading on really high leverage. So if you're trading on a 100x leverage, any deviation or misprint that you have, you multiply that by 100, right? So the requirements that you have there are very very different than an oracle for an application like a for

example that every loan is over collateralized um and you have kind of like this margin of error and can update uh w with kind of larger time. So it depends. I'll say what I will say and then the other way to really think about this in an easy manner is this. If your team is using like only major um like crypto assets that have heavy liquidity like Bitcoin, Salana, Ethereum, some of the other L1s and L2s, you're probably fine taking like a simple or oracle that does like a median uh because it's traded heavily enough such that the kind of the venues in centralized exchanges where the price is being discovered is reflective. If you're experimenting, if you're an up andcoming application,

you're experimenting with new tokenized assets, something that lives across many chain and has fragmented liquidity and you're depending on an onchain pool, um, or some venue where there's very little volume, that's when you absolutely have to have some special kind of consideration or thinking about how this feed works because it's just simply a matter of time until you kind of start printing kind of spikes and prices which are not representative uh, or expected. I hope that breaks it down a little bit. Okay, so the the only other uh like idea that I'm starting to get around and Nick and I have been talking about this for quite a while just and especially over the last like two weeks is, you know, you mentioned perplexes, but you know, I

think CLABS, these central limit order books are very uh are going to become more prominent in the space. you know, Hyperlquid is really pushing it with with theirs again, more perh on on Meg, on Monad, on Celestia. There's going to be more of these very high performance clubs come to market. I'm just curious, what is your uh broad kind of stroke opinion on clubs? What's your take as far as their uh what that is going to do to the DeFi market? Um, and then what are some of the potential infrastructure changes that are going to be needed to require or you know that are going to be required to actually be able to facilitate this type of high

throughput transactions. Yeah, know it's great. I'm super excited for for clubs and we're starting to see it too with all of the teams that we're working with. Uh, we're working with a few of the names that you just mentioned. Um, the club in itself though is just like it's like a data structure or like way to kind of store the orders here. you're still kind of uh exposed uh to the same challenges and security issues that and it's just really dependent on like what is the depth of the club because you it's great that you have a club if there's 20k liquidity in your book and you're determining the price based on what the mid is there then you're you can easily be manipulated right so it's the same type of solutions and considerations looking at the depth of liquidity the activity of the market um how efficient is the

market that you're going to need to employ it doesn't go away with the club uh but hopefully it should allow us to kind of price things in a way that's more efficient uh from like gas and and like precision uh moving forward. So it's great for the space. Oracle like AMMs are we all know what the challenges are around that but it doesn't like absolve of like the security checks and risk and a good example is like the NASDAQ right so like even the NASDAQ uh or a lot of these kind of stock exchanges are using clubs behind the scenes uh if we're going to oversimplify but they also have uh things like circuit breakers uh for when prices are are too volatile or moving too quickly to protect the users. So I think though if I had to say like one thing that for

anyone who's like building an oracle, building an exchange, building like a lending market, yeah, we just always try and look at it from the perspective of like the user, right? And like if you have like a stable coin market that you're like looping, is the user expected to get like uh liquidated if the stable coin hasn't really like deped or nothing really happened? And like the answer is no. So okay, like you should work to kind of like design a feed which reflects that. And here it's like you also don't need to do it in some centralized like crazy way like we do this for a right we have like a capital oracle which is in production a correlated asset price oracle um and it takes all these things into consideration so this is just like part of scaling it's not even a trade-off like oracles can be smarter you don't

need to do it in some opaque blackbox way and it's just I think the future what we're going to see in the next generation I have a question which is I think one of the things that uh one of selling points of clubs essentially is that the the latency is so much lower for trading. I'm curious if like can can uh oracles actually keep up with the speed of clubs and like is that a problem that you think about? Yeah. So I mean like the speed and the latency is just all downstream of like the what are the block times, right? So, I mean, like your your upper bound for your speed is like what is the the block time on the

chain. Um, I think that's like less of of the issue because when you're using a club, uh, you're using the typically you're using the price that's like the mid price in the book. Um, and then you're using external like marktomarket prices, um, for things like funding rates, right? So like I I they should update like in theory at the same cadence like the the mid price of the book and the price that you're fetching from the oracle. So it shouldn't be an issue. And this is exactly how the centralized exchanges work too. So uh the paradigm is there.

Yeah. But you do need a fast oracle like if you take like a push or like the oracles that are legacy are not built for this type of speed. Um so you need to kind of redesign your oracle but there there's no like fundamental issue with it. Interesting. Thank you. Yeah. And so the there has to be enough up like there has to be an oracle update for every block, right? Or or does it have Yeah. Okay. So like if it's a heavily traded market. Yeah. Like it should be like every block. Um like perexes and derivatives are just really interesting because that question of like leverage. So, if you look at a chain like Ethereum, there's like a 12 second or 7second, I guess, depends on the congestion of the network

block time. Yeah. Um, you would get absolutely wrecked if you had uh prices update every 10 seconds on a per market because basically you'd have 10 seconds where you would know what the next price would be. You can take a 100x lever trade and basically place like a risk-free trade. And that's the reason why her dexes don't use uh push oracles. uh they actually use something that's called pull oracles and that's moving a lot closer uh to like what we're going to see in clubs ultimately too. Very cool. Omar, I appreciate your time and coming on and fighting the good fight and I thought you're uh I thought your last few weeks has has been a masterclass in founder marketing. So I don't I don't know if beef is the

strategy, but I would keep it up. I would keep uh keep the Twitter fire and it'll it'll do magic for Chaos Labs BD and Inbound. probably the most uh successful form actually. So, just trying to push the space forward. Uh but yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you for having us on. Uh Nick, Andy, appreciate it. Cheers, guys. All right, man. See you soon. See you guys. Bye, man. Nick, last one. It's been a bit of a marathon here, but we got some crazy news from Block Works on Twitter. There is rumors that Salana ETFs will be passed in three to five weeks.

That's epic. I mean, yeah, this is not a market to be bearish in, I think, in general. Um, no, congrats. I mean, obviously it's still a rumor, but huge win for the Salana community, obviously. And, uh, yeah, I think it's also just a sign of the times that we're living through where I think crypto is going mainstream in a big way. And I don't think it stops at Salana, frankly. I think it keeps going and accelerates. Yeah, that's the that's the beauty of it, right? is that like we saw Bitcoin and then Ethereum ETF and it was very clear that those would be the first two.

You know, even Ethereum was kind of questionable. It was like is it going to happen? Then it was like yes, of course. And now there's been this this this long pause. But assuming that we get the Salana one through that to me then then opens up a world where there could be like an index of like the top 50 crypto assets on on the NASDAQ or something to that extent. So something else interesting to to watch too is I think there was guidance last week or something around uh making staking uh in in the ETFs actually like okay uh because I think there's a lot of tax questions around that. So it be interesting. I don't know if there's anything in the news here or or maybe it will we'll have more information when

there's a more official announcement but that's something that I'm paying attention to too is like can we can we bake staking into these ETFs? A lot of the products in the European markets have staking. Um, and that's a huge benefit, right, to an advantage of like ETH or soul or any proofofstake asset versus something like Bitcoin. So, yeah, and I think a lot of the institutions will will want that yield. That'll give them a reason to allocate outside of just just Bitcoin as well. So, up next, we got our last one for the day. Camila, good friend of mine, inspired us to start our media company way back in late 2019, early 2020. She was one of the only ones doing crypto media back in the day. Um, and uh, let's get her up here

and welcome her up. Thank you so much, Andy. That's that's incredible to hear. Like, I'm I'm inspired by you being inspired. It's good to see you. You're one of my uh favorite Ethereum bulls out there. you've you've been fighting the good fight as well. We had DeFi data on and uh between the two you guys have done quite a bit to push crypto media and Ethereum forward in general. Um well, yeah, I try not to frame myself as an Ethereum bull. I I try to cover DeFi objectively, but you know, yeah, at 2K, but at at 10K, you're going to be like, I was calling it. I was calling it. Maybe. We'll see when we get there.

Yeah. Well, thanks for coming. Wanted to just chat to you about the state of things in crypto media. Um, you know, what's going on with the Defiant, what you're seeing more broadly. Um, so just kind of like kick off um how's the Defiant going? How is what changes have you seen in crypto media? Have you been uh paying attention to more of these like mind share things that um you know Kaido's been running and that and that these companies have been running? There's also been a large shift towards institutional interest and appealing to that crowd. I'm just curious kind of like where your head's at and uh kind of what you guys are focused on and how things are going. Yeah, so at at the Defiant obviously our focus has always

been DeFi. Um and I think you know it's become more clear that owning a niche in media is the way to go. Uh I think it's extremely hard to be a generalist and be successful as a media company unless you have infinite resources which we don't. Um so h so our you know deep focus on defi uh trying to really level up the quality of the content that we produce um with a new studio here in New York. So, we're hoping to do more and more IRL interviews, uh, you know, just like more highly produced podcasts. So, really

looking forward to that. Um, and then looking to grow on more DeFi adjacent um, uh, niches. Uh, so, you know, stable coin is is a big one. H, we might have, you know, an announcement soon on on that front. So, that's that's what we're looking at. And I think you're totally right that there's a lot more um enterprise and institutional focus. Uh so so that's kind of a new audience that we're looking to target as well. I mean we've been super den focused, but now I think there's like this great um bridge happening between DeFi and more like Trafi like we see Black Rockck and and Franklin Templeton launching uh

tokenized funds. Uh so I think there's there's a lot more appetite for DeFi news coming from institutions. So we're we're you know definitely looking to get that piece of that audience too. Very cool. Very cool. All right. So kind of uh down into the meat and potatoes today. We had quite a few cool tweets that we found from you that I wanted to get your take on and Nick's. Uh the first one is this Poly Market and X announcement from a couple days ago. Actually, yesterday you put out this tweet. Poly Market Plus X is rightly hailed as the triumph of a blockchain based application that has properly gone mainstream. Yes, it's a Trojan horse of crypto, but no, it's not the future of news. And so, I'm curious what your uh

perspective is on this partnership more broadly. Uh and and why this this is not the future of news. Yeah, totally. So, um, I I didn't want to see him as throwing shade on Poly Market at all. I think what they've accomplished is just remarkable kind of really bringing crypto to the mainstream without uh users even knowing that they're using crypto, which is I think what everyone tries to achieve. So, I think they've done great work. Uh but in their announcement with X um I was to be honest a little bit annoyed uh because they they said let me find it. Um so they said

uh the the next information age won't be driven by 20th century media monolith. It'll be driven by markets. Our partnership with X marks a new chapter on the internet. the future of news is optimized for truth, rooted in transparency, and anchored in reality. So, the the reason why this kind of annoyed me a little bit is because I've I I've been hearing for for many years now um you know, big tech titans kind of proclaim the death of news, the death of journalism, and for journalists and media to be replaced with just, you know, people tweeting on their armchair.

um and tech and like AI and algorithms and I think yes like all those things are great together with professional journalism. I think AI I think uh prediction markets are great to provide additional context but you still need actual news reporting like you need journalists to uncover you know the the things that people want to keep secret you know the the actually important stories fraud corruption um backroom dealings like all those things that are not just you know willingly announced on X or or tweeted or or or posted on a blog you need like you know deep sourcing you know you need

deep research you need human reporters to do that work and I think it for you know people not in the media business it's really overlooked how hard that that work actually is so so I have this this uh theory that I think is is tying into what you're saying which is just that there's there's this um really advanced accelerated pace of moving moving towards um speculation and financialization of a lot of things. And I think that's what this that this collaboration is more so about, right?

It's like it's like this markets and media. It's like the the gamification and the like financialization of news of outcomes of of of all these different ways of um basically like creating a market for you know a certain event or a certain outcome. A and I just think that we see this more and more accelerating and I'm personally trying to figure out how to get how to be positioned to be like long on that trend. I think obviously if you invested in Poly Market or you know maybe Kaido as an example or maybe um you know some some of these types of of of new platforms but that's generally like how I saw it. Um but but I but I understand your your perspective

right like like uh right we we will see the overall kind of like dethroning of like the Atlantic and the New York Times is going to you know I'm all for that for sure. Yeah. Like personal creators are now kind of taking those roles in a way I think more. Yeah. People want to buy from people more now than ever. I think so. I think I think that's true. But I I I I think it would be a huge loss to society if all of news and and content comes from, you know, just individual creators and influencers and and actually professional journalism like the work of, you know, like reporting, uncovering scoops, um factchecking, being balanced in in your

articles. Like if all of that went away, I think it'll be a huge loss to society. So, but I agree that there is this kind of financialization of media and news and I think that's great. Um, you know, I I I love DeFi. I love, you know, bringing kind of a money layer to the internet and I think that obviously includes news, but I would love to see more experimentation on the actual media model uh side of things on how how could we use that financialization of of news to reinvent or or improve our current broken media models? like can we use these markets to

incentivize this like actual you know investigative journalism that's so needed and that's dying. So that's what I'm interested in and I I'd be super long a project like that. I think the interesting thing is that kind of prediction markets can incentivize that, right? Where if there's a market that is really offsides and you like there's an incentive to try to find out information that no one else is aware of almost like to be an investigative journalist uncover that and you can like take a position and actually profit off of like what you discovered. That's that's kind of an interesting angle. Um I think I agree. I think the the the issue there like I say in in my newsletter um

hashubscribe but when what I say there is that right now current prediction markets are focused on predicting known outcomes. So I think Nick what what you're saying I think it'd be super interesting to see a prediction markets that's focused on the opposite on you know on uncovering unknown or like uncovering secrets um which I don't think there is any any platform like that yet but we'll see what would an example of that be like you could make a prediction market about the Epstein files and then have incentivize people to find out I don't know yeah like you hear all all sort of

rules rumors on crypto Twitter, but they haven't been verified. Um like um I don't know like say before the the Tether was um forced to to be more transparent with uh with its collateral, there was this overhanging um you know concern on crypto that Tether was insolvent. So like an obvious market to create would have been is tethering solvent? Like it's not a known outcome. It's a secret. But you know if you allow people to bet on that maybe you know that that can actually be uncovered. So I think it'd be really

cool to like incentivize secrets to become public. Interesting. Very interesting. So, so outside of then of some of the larger uh you know media companies of of the world, uh who are some of the other mustf follow media minds and personalities in in our space that you look up to? Um well uh let's see. I think uh Laura Shin uh she's an OG. She also has her own media company. Um also started out in kind of traditional media. So really respect her and she always has really top-notch guests. I love her interviews. Uh so yeah, her for

sure. Um I well I follow Nick Carter. I I I love his um his takes and and research. Um uh uh who else? I'm kind of like blanking on. No, it's all good. Um you just put you on the spot. a big fan of Laura as well. I feel like she also is not afraid to interview people and stick it to them. You know what I mean? She doesn't sugarcoat. She just goes in and tries to be unbiased. Um I have a lot of respect for that. Yeah, same. Um also want to give a shout out to Christine Kim who recently uh quit Galaxy to start her own Ethereum um newsletter. Um and

yeah, I've known her for a long time. She was at CoinDesk before. She's a like really good uh researcher. So yeah, shout out uh for people who want to go really deep on Ethereum. Her newsletter is great uh for that. Um I think Paky McCormack is also great for kind of media um related stuff. Um I don't know. Yeah, other like great cryptojournalists. Uh, Nicholas D, Michael Del Castillo, um, Sakur, I don't know. I like I'm leaving so many out, but there there's there's a lot. There's many of us. Yeah.

Crypto cryptojours. All right. Coming back towards the uh the EF and Ethereum. Um, there's this new EFDI pivot around DeFi punk. Uh, which which you wrote a bit about in one of the newsletters. um I think it was last week basically around this new you know term for the original DeFi promise right DeFi punk and then you know a new treasury allocation towards uh supporting this effort you know I'm curious what your your take is on this and who are some of the most exciting builders and projects leading this uh DeFi this DeFi punk thing and this kind of like pivot uh for the EF.

Yeah, I thought this this was huge. Um first because the EF was this was in in the context of them uh publishing their treasury strategy for the first time and the EF has traditionally been super KY and secretive and opaque. Um and I've been you know I've been a huge critic of this like Ethereum is supposed to be open and transparent but the EF has been not that at all. um for for my book the infinited machine that was like one of the hardest interviews I did um with with with ya at the time like she did not want to give anything away about finances about like

orc structure and I'm like come on like you're supposed to be transparent like what so yeah I but now there is this whole shift and beyond just just the the EF and and it's like transparency and so on but more broadly on Ethereum um after a really big uh push from the community who you know just like wasn't happy with how things were going um I think mainly because like the ETH price was underperforming um everything else honestly but in in any case this uh Treasury policy was a great step forward uh because it gave more transparency on how the EF will handle its treasury

going forward um In the past, it was seen to just like opportunistic opportunistically sell ETH whenever kind of the price rose. Um, and it proved to be very good traders and like perfectly time the market. Um, but you know, it wasn't it wasn't great for for a foundation to be just like trading E, right? Um, so now they gave like a specific guideline on like how and when they would sell. Um, but beyond that, what I thought was really interesting in this document is that they say they will use DeFi as much as possible and they um they came up with this new term DeFi punk um which you know it it it kind of

the the the meaning of it goes back to all the original promise of of DeFi when it started which is it's supposed to beh non-custodial, permissionless, open um uh censorship resistant and now they have this new aspect of it which is private which now there is a technology to to to do that. Uh when DeFi started we really didn't have very you know like CK technology wasn't very developed but but now it is. Uh so this was a huge shift like before the EF would never talk about DeFi. Um, Vitalic um kind of dismissed it as kind of this

thing that's a bit of like a little bit scammy. Like when I had him on whenever I had him on my podcast, like I asked him about DeFi and I asked him about like, "Hey, like what are the what are your favorite Ethereum use cases?" And it was always like, "Oh, like public goods or like governance." And I'm like, "Come on, like talk about DeFi." Yeah. Yeah. Kane would get mad too, right? like uh you know Kane and him had this uh public public kind of like uh clash I think and then I I remember speaking to Kane about it I think it was like it was probably about a year ago and it was like why won't Vitalik or the EF recognize DeFi and it was this very like negative perception. Yeah. Right. As if it was just like this gambling onchain

kind of gambling thing. It's so it was so weird. Um and it's just crazy like DeFi is the thing that makes Ethereum tick. like it's the heart of Ethereum. It it you know it it accounts for all like most of its revenue, all of its TVL. Um and it's by far its most successful use case. So, you know, it's it just like it made no sense. Like they should be so proud that they that this this uh platform is what encouraged like one of crypto's most successful use cases. Um but I think they're coming around to that now. Y um and um and yeah, so I think that this is this was a really bullish shift and the um the plan

is to actually deploy most of the ETH that so so they they're holding uh 2.5 years of runway in fiat. Uh but outside of that they their goal is to deploy all of their ETH in DeFi, which is huge. like they they have um the EF is holding over 600 million um dollars now. I don't know what their runway is, but whatever you know like is left over from their 2.5 years of runway will be deployed in DeFi and they already made a first move in that direction recently. Um so yeah, I think it's it's a really good sign um coming from the EF. Yeah. So my my hunch

on why both potentially there they were you know IO was so opaque when you were interviewing her and also very much why they did not deploy into DeFi and did not endorse it I think is regulatory there like the the the regulatory perspective on DeFi was it was just it's a very hot like topic that I think they didn't want to endanger themselves. I think in general if you look at Ethereum's strategy, Ethereum Foundation strategy, it was very sort of riskoff from a regulatory perspective over the past, I don't know, eight years basically. And I think that's a lot of why they also couldn't struggle to execute as quickly as other teams and other protocols. And so I think the that's another reason to frankly be be

super bullish on ETH uh is coming into this new regulatory paradigm. They're shedding a lot of that baggage. I think and they're they're moving in a way that where they're going to execute much faster um and they're going to endorse these applications um because they don't they no longer have that uh sort of you know thing hanging over them of like I don't know the SEC is going to come and make our lives a living hell. So um I think that's like the simplest like they're not dumb right like there there's a lot of really smart people there. I think it was just they were forced into that uh into doing that.

That's my own hunch. Again, I don't maybe we can verify this with a prediction market. I don't know. Could be. Um yeah, but in in any case, like who knows why uh that was the case, but um I think you're right. I think it's a a reason to be bullish. Defi more generally is just the regulatory shift that we're seeing. Uh I think it's great news for crypto broadly. Yeah, Camila, appreciate your time today and always always been a fan of you and the Defiant. Oh, likewise, Andy. It was a pleasure. Thank you for looking forward to your to your inerson pods and and more work as Ethereum comes up from the ashes here and uh I appreciate your

bullishness. It keeps us all quite quite bullish as well. Okay. Well, thanks again. a pleasure being here and maybe uh you could come on my podcast uh soon. Sounds good. Thanks for coming. See you soon. All right, Nick, the marathon's over. Welcome to a day in the life here. That one went a little longer than uh than than it should have. We had some technical stuff going on, but yeah, I I don't know how you how you do it, man. This is like uh it's really intense. I mean, it's non-stop. Um but it's super fun, too. I feel like I'm being forced to learn uh you know so many different things that happening in

the space. Like typically I kind of just stay in my lane in you know specifically Celestia ecosystem modular blockchains um and the teams that we're working with applications that are being built. So this is it's fun to like open up the aperture a little bit and see um the space from a from a higher perspective. So you're you're you guys are lucky in a sense but yeah it's a lot of work. People should not discount that. Yeah. I mean, we had we had, you know, VC, media, builder, found like it's just like constant just like and it's a different conversation each time. It's it actually makes me feel like going back to starting podcasting again. Like I I get a little nervous. I'm just kind of like questions got, you know, timing like it's it's far different than just,

you know, having that the hourlong conversation where you go deep and just like kind of, you know, it's just faster paced and yeah, I mean, it's just it's fun. So, it's been a long one. Appreciate you joining and filling in. Um, and yeah, I mean, you're welcome back anytime, man. It's my pleasure. All righty. Thanks, guys. And, uh, great stream. See you guys later in the week.