The Rollup TV: Tuesday, June 3rd

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live today, Tuesday, June 3rd. Trump has just announced that he's launching a crypto wallet and a platform where you he can where you can trade and he's encouraging people to buy Trumpcoin. Good morning, Rob. Good morning. Yeah, nothing out of the usual here uh at the Rollup TV bringing you the uh most valuable insights from inside the ecosystem and beyond. Trump launching a wallet that looks like a MetaMask clone. I saw an intern post of Trump's face front and center on the wallet. Is that real, Andy? I don't I don't think so, dude.

But I I did see the MetaMask clone wallet. Uh it's just I don't know. I just don't know where this is going to end, but it's just it's comical. So, we get we just got a couple minutes to talk about some of the core topics today and we're gonna jump right into the guests. We got Anil, a thief, we've got Robinson, we've got Douge, and we've got Lauren. So, it should be a fun stream today, uh, with tons of awesome guests, uh, covering a variety of topics. Uh, first one's coming on pretty soon here. So, why don't we jump right into what I thought was one of the more interesting posts of of yesterday from a A6Z guy titling that there is a there is a death of the crypto foundation model coming.

Um, so this has been for those who don't know, there's been a labs and a foundation model for a lot of these companies. Like when Robbie and I invest through our fund, basically what happens is we we you know sign a deal with the uh foundation company usually and then they control the token and then the the the labs like the main contributor. I think this is because there's a lot better regulation now in the space and so um you don't need to do this bifurcation and also because they kind of the foundation I've heard that there's a lot of foundation employees who kind of just riff and siphon off a lot of cash from the labs and don't really contribute much and also just contributes to a bit of bloat in the company itself. So yeah Rob what's your

take here? Is this the end of the regulatory uh kind of shrink on crypto or is this just the natural evolution of efficiency? Yeah, ultimately it was a it was a legal intermediary to try to work around regulatory frameworks. Now that we have more clear regulatory frameworks, I think it it's more it's more direct. You don't have to go through a loophole to do what you want. You can simply go right to the source. So, I think this is a good move. I think we're going to continue to see more and more positive regulation that does bolster innovation and adoption. Uh I think this is a positive move for the industry because like you said these foundations oftentimes don't do a whole lot. They're

almost like token marketing departments and we saw the token be responsible uh the foundations be responsible for the token, the labs corporations responsible for the protocols. Ultimately, these are two products coming out of the same company. To act like, you know, these are two separate companies is a facade. Let's bring them under the same umbrella, under the same roof. And I think a lot more uh benefits uh come from integrating those two. I actually also think that uh quite a few of these are going to actually come into the the US. Um I think they've been avoiding the US for a while. Um so that should be interesting. But look, I just think that like cryptos as an industry is getting

far and far more mature and this is just kind of like the natural evolution. So I I have one one more note there on on them coming to the US because I think you're right, but I think this ties into a conversation we had yesterday with Felix from uh Forward Guidance, a podcast hosted by Blockworks, which is that there we're on the cusp of capital controls and I think there is a reality where there is more significant taxes that are put on businesses that are doiciled outside of America that wish to do business inside and digital businesses. Crypto businesses are a little bit more difficult to to draw that line. But I think this is going to end up extending to digital and crypto businesses for those that are doiciled

outside the US and try to do business inside the US. I see it as well and I think it's a good trend and I think I mean even just here in York has kind of becoming the the capital, right? So the idea is that it it forces uh these companies onshore. Yeah, exactly. I mean all the regulation has basically forced them offshore now which I think has been bad for for the US. But all right shifting gears to the Ethereum uh news today. Uh what what was great is that we actually saw uh Ethereum put the Ethereum Foundation put a post regarding their new model. Um and so uh the kind of uh gist here is that they're basically breaking up the individual

roles in the in scaling Ethereum and focusing on two people uh for each role. So there's like scaling the L1, there's L2s, uh and there's like one or two others. And basically the thing here that they also did was that that they cut a lot of the spending on the research department which I think is indicative of a larger trend that is like yo there's going to be like I think this whole like research meta and such people are shifting to such a strongoriented approach in the space now that there just seems to be like this infra exhaustion research exhaustion and and it's likely that the that the foundation was spending quite a bit on this as well. I mean, we know that they

invested 20 million into, you know, um the ZKEVM efforts and and stuff like that with Alexander Hicks and their group. And so, yeah, I mean, look, I think that this is this is a really positive step for Ethereum and and we will see more uh of these kind of uh abrasive urgent actions happen uh as Ethereum kind of responds to the competition, but also realizes that there's a lot of moving parts under one umbrella. Yeah, I'm looking forward to hosting some members of the Ethereum Foundation on this show. Uh Alexander Hicks has been an advocate of ZK EVMs and formerly verifying the the EVM. Uh he's been on the podcast and and I think we'll have

him on the show in the coming weeks. Uh, one particular thing from this article announcing protocol that Ethereum posted on behalf of the foundation was that there are now three strategic goals that have split from the protocol research and development group. These three goals are scaling the L1, scaling the blobs, and improving UX. And what I found, you know, particularly, you know, some something to note here is that if you if you scroll a little bit further down in the article, uh they rephrase the three goals again and they say scaling the L1.

This is led by Tim Bo and Anscar. Uh scaling L2s, Alex Stokes and Francesco Diamato, and then improving the UX, Barnaby and Josh Rudolph. And so I mean the comments look bullish, man. Like absolutely everyone's excited. The thing to point out here is that scaling the L2 is direct directly equates to scaling the blobs and and as incre there's an increase in blob capacity, this supports the L2. So look, they basically took the community's feedback, they heard it and they implemented it and now they're they're putting scaling the L1 up there right alongside the importance of scaling the L2s and the rollup ccentric roadmap. Yeah. And there's your there's your outline there of the L1, L2, and

the UX and all of it being supported by Dankrad. Um, yeah, man. I mean, look, I think uh ETH's price action has been pretty good relative to Bitcoin. It's been holding up. People are even uh looking at like the Soul ETH or ETH soul chart. Um so look I mean I think I think Ethereum's it has certainly reached its um you know it's kind of like trout in terms of its uh you know like mind share and sentiment and is and is making the right moves to go up uh in terms of product uh community etc. So I mean I was just pretty excited to see this and and wanted to cover it. We we got another couple minutes here before Anil from Delelfi joins us and and so I think there is something else here to mention

which is that um Justin Drake put out uh a piece and he's you know noted for for writing these long form Twitter pieces where he sort of outlined the idea of native roll-ups and he's been a strong strong advocate for native roll-ups and he actually described the paradigm that we're going to soon enter into where native roll-ups become feasible and that's done by snarkification of the L1 and the Ethereum L1 actually becomes the first native rollup because it runs the EVM. It will have this pre-ompile and then it's al also a based rollup, right?

Uh because it uses the L1 for sequencing by definition. And so I I think what the Ethereum Foundation is realizing, and we realize this through our conversations with Celestia and through our conversations with some of the ZK teams like Risk Zero, is that these rollups start to become these amorphous blobs in space. Everything is just uh a blob of state and they're all just sending ZK proofs back to one another. And so I think the L1 really has no differentiation from the L2s and there it's just another blob of state that is going to be interoperating with L2s via via ZK proofs. I think that goes between L1 to L1 as well as L2 to L2 and L1 to

L2. And I think the Ethereum Foundation realized this. They said, "Look, you know, we're going we're not just going to be a proof aggregation chain that that you know is used for settlement. we're gonna have to scale the L1 in order to compete for user relationships uh and consumer relationships that are front-facing. And so I think again this is a demonstration of the fat app thesis. This is the way that the industry is heading and L the L1 realize that it has to compete with the L2s from an app's perspective in order to maintain market share. I mean I think also people like the to the whole like Paris question has become very clear. I think people are now like okay no no no let's just bring value transactions DeFi back to the L1 you know I think that

people have kind of uh kind of had that question answered for them and so when when you think about you know what what Ethereum's end game we have to hear uh you know that that the entire internet a lot of the the financial activity what what what kind of didn't work was the whole okay arbitrum is Ethereum base is Ethereum because we saw that, you know, these these chains, they they really just wanted to kind of focus on their own sequencer fees, their own um, you know, ability to basically generate revenue, run a real business. And so with Ethereum kind of like outsourced a lot of the, uh, a lot of the development, if you will, um, to kind of other other

places rather than kind of internalizing it, um, or, you know, like a lot of like the tech upgrades just seems like that's it. Like the vibe that I'm getting is like Ethereum is coming home type of vibe. So, I'm excited about it. Up next, we do have Anil from Deli. Um, he'll be joining us here shortly. Uh, looking forward to chatting with him about what what the latest is at Deli Digital. Um, met Anil for the first time quite a while ago in um in New York City actually. Um, and yeah, I mean have some questions about what they're doing at Deli Digital, where they're seeing uh the market head, what's coming, stuff

like that. So, and um yeah, he should be right he should be in the mix here shortly. Um, but yeah, Rob, any closing thoughts there on the Ethereum side? Yeah, look, I I think this is the coming out moment for um I think this is a coming out moment for the Ethereum Foundation. Like we're going to continue to see this um restructuring in multiple departments and I think we're seeing that in the protocol and research and development department. I think we're going to continue to see that across the Ethereum Foundation. you know, they're a big ship in the sense that they've got a lot of

resources and they've got a lot of um people and personnel that are working in the foundation. And historically, this has been uh this has been a um a foundation that again just doesn't really prioritize the community. Uh they've kind of been steadfast in their direction towards building something. I don't know about that. I feel like they have prioritized the community a lot. I mean, that's why the community is so strong is because so many people, let me rephrase, community feedback, right? Like, for so long, and maybe it just took up until this point, right? And it's about giving them credit now, but for so long, people were telling them they had to compete with Salana. They had to scale the L1, you

know, they they wanted these things. And and for so long, they were focused on, you know, look, we need to keep uh solo stakers alive. we can't scale the L1 because it's gonna increase the node requirements and that's a non-negotiable and people are like look we don't run our own validators like you know we stake in Lido right and that's the majority of of staked ETH so I I think you know they are starting to take these things to heart because people want to like Ethereum but they were a bit detached from community sentiment for a long time it's it's good to see them start to take community sentiment into account Yeah, I mean that price is doing to reflect it amount

of time. Um, and I also have just a lot of Ethereum as of recently on on Twitter and and whatnot. I mean there's I mean there's the usual suspects and then there's the there's the recent resurgence the like era of being like okay like you know it it's kind of just coming full circle like okay we had we had rollups and you know it it worked like people overindex on the fact that oh interrupt wasn't shipped or oh it didn't work exactly right but like at the end of the day it worked um it's just a matter of of actually solving out how to how you know make that work longer term and then how to compete fast change now just came

up and um you know it's been a it's been a interesting journey for right like we got in in 2019 2020 I kind of found that uh you know everything was happening on on Ethereum right like this when we got into like onchain stuff right because in 2017 there wasn't really much onchain for us um and and Ethereum was like the only thing the only place to operate. It was the only place where things were were happening. And so it grew enough of a moat in terms of its its community, its uh overall uh you know, financial stay, the amount of stake, the market cap. And so um you know, it's it's done a good enough job of of being able to

solidify that, but it's just a matter of of kind of like where we go next and uh how how this thing scales. So yeah, that's real map. Yeah, look, I I I want to like Ethereum. I think most people do. Um the I'm bullish. I think so, too. I I'm trying to think from, you know, a new entrance perspective, right? If I'm an institution, why am I going to buy Ethereum versus something like, you know, one of these up andcoming L1s, right? Maybe it's just that it's been around longer. It's more lindy, and that is going to take, you know, take the cake and and handle it anyway.

Um, I'm struggling a bit to find an investment thesis on behalf of an institution other than I think it's like stable coins and real world assets that that's really the underpinning of what Ethereum is doing these days and the value proposition that it's providing. Well, where do they want to deploy, right? That's, you know, that's the answer or that's the question. and like Salana caught enough of the actual um you know RWAS and stables to be able to kind of compete which I think caught a lot of people offguard. So anyway, up next we got Anil. Um bit of a bit of a backroom setup there but appreciate him hopping in. Uh let's get him up and let's talk about Deli and everything in

between. What's up Anil? Good to see you man. Hey what's going on man? How you doing? Good to have you man. Yeah, it's been a long time since you gave us some sage advice over a coffee in New York City, man. No, definitely. We'll we'll we'll do one this summer. Are you uh are you are you down in PR or are you up in the city? Yep. Yep. I'm going to be back in the city um honestly in like Thursday. So, I I'll be there all summer. We'll uh we'll hang for sure. Sweet, man. Well, I was looking at Twitter, man, and I saw some uh one of your infamous uh merch boxes, the uh the the eye for uh design. I think Simon posted it recently. Um some some care package. Um why does good merch matter

to you, man? Like, you know, what is the importance of getting these care packages out there for the for the community? And uh like there's a bit of an art to these thank yous and merch boxes. Yeah. So, um, there there's some interesting lore here, funny enough. So, before Deli, you know, quote unquote, um, you know, made it, um, most of our good friends and people, you know, outside of the crypto space just saw us as a merch company. We just had really good merch. Um, and that was kind of like our pride and joy. Um, and I think like honestly the way I think about merch is like how you do anything is how you do everything. So, you know, um when we think about merch and like, you know, having like the symbol that our employees kind of wear, obviously hats, everything like that. Um yeah, we just

want it to be good quality. We want people to be like proud and happy to be wearing it. Um and yeah, honestly, it's been like we kind of try and put that care into like every little thing we do, which like, you know, sometimes it is good, sometimes it's bad because like perfection is like the enemy of progress, but we we definitely try and strive for that. Well, it's indicative of the of the brand. And I I love the saying that one how you do one thing is how you do everything because you you start to see that that touch of identity and that's what makes you guys you. And you start to see that run through the work that you guys do, the merch that you guys do, the conversations that you have. There is sort of that that element that that aura that makes you guys

special and you you put it as like a little as a little sauce into everything that you do. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's funny enough like you know we did all that merch without expecting to you know be on the rollup TV talking about it and you know yeah we are we'll definitely need to get your guys addressed so we can send you a box afterwards too. Well, I'd love to dive into all your design um you know, artistic abilities, Anil, but I think there's some crypto and AI stuff to to go over, man. You guys have been I mean, absolutely crushing it since I would say, you know, previously um prior to your actual AI month. You guys had been doing a lot of in investing there on the ventures arm and then kind of post that AI month, I feel like you guys

have captured that niche better than pretty much anyone else. Um you guys have just recently ran this D AGI house accelerator cyber fund. You had a bunch of sweet uh elite type of people. Ben, Jasper Tarun E-mod Shirro these types. Um I mean we we we haven't actually been able to, you know, dive deep into it and I'm sure our audience is kind of new to it. So we're just super curious about uh TLDDR. What advice or insight have you gleaned from interacting with any of these um you know people? What are the key takeaways from Dagi? Kind of what's the state of investing in this sector? Yeah, so that was our Delvi Labs uh company and

they've you know absolutely crushed it. Um you know it was cool because that accelerator was the first time that both uh you know all three actually Ethereum Foundation, Bass and Salana all teamed up together to kind of support you know they threw out some retweets got us like over 400 applicants. Out of those 400, the labs team and cyber fund went through, they picked around, uh, you know, a little bit more than a dozen team, I think like close to 20. Um, you know, flew a bunch of these guys out to Lisbon, sat with them in person. And out of those like you know 20 they basically picked eight that they were just like hey these are the teams projects ideas that we want to back and kind of go like full force and you know dedicate not just our time but all other you know

deli resources to whether it's like design you know um Gabe on the legal side obviously he's leading Metal X which was like an incubation that we spun out. Um so yeah honestly it went really well. They actually just posted this morning um I I was just looking at the tweet um with a whole recap of like all eight of the projects. I I highly recommend people go check it out. I think like, you know, we did the demo day last week that was probably our most successful demo day to to date. We had like 150, you know, investors, um, you know, other entrepreneurs all listening in on it, asking really good questions.

We had breakout rooms afterwards. Um, yeah, honestly, it was like hard for me because, you know, after, you know, the whole demo day, you had to like pick one or two projects to go out and talk to talk to, you know, like basically all of them. So, yeah, it's been it's it's been really cool. I think like you know on this like AI note too like the way that we think about it is and you know we've we've definitely been going as deep as we can in this space um and we just want to get deeper and deeper because we think to be the best you know anything investor not just crypto investor going forward you're going to need to have kind of this really good understanding of what's going on in this like really fast-pacing like fast evolving world of AI right um so yeah we do have another

you know pretty big announcement um coming out you know hopefully later this month obviously have a lot of work to do but um definitely on this AI front um I think you'll see on Twitter and everything like that and you know happy to come on with some of the team uh to chat about it afterwards. Yeah man. So so you mentioned that there was a couple projects that you guys had to kind of like pick to orient your yourselves around and focus on. Is there like a general like problem or like part of AI that is most compelling from from a acceleration point of view or from an investment point of view? like what were like the sectors or or the actual kind of projects that you were most bullish on? Yeah. You know what I I've said this a number of times and and you know we

obviously have we have around a little bit under 100 people across all three um you know companies at Deli. Um but you know I'd say that like some people definitely have way more pointed opinions here. For me, when we first started getting involved about like 18 to, you know, 18 months to two years ago, I'd say I was in the camp of like we should just invest in every area of this because I really had no idea where value was going to acrew. I I still think it's just super early to be honest. I think really just like you want to do in um traditional investing anywhere, you just want to back really strong teams, really strong founders and you know to be honest like you know have them figure it out and kind of like ride the coattails of the intellectual capital they they kind of gain like

solving those problems right um this cohort kind of like mirrors that to be honest I'd say like out of those eight projects um there's very little overlap you have you know projects that are focused on encryption like matlock um you have projects that are focused on um you know actually creating like a UI UX for people to navigate markets and like financial information like True North. Um you have uh companies like Fstats which is like um focused on almost becoming like an Expedia of all these like AI payment APIs right you have like a bunch of these companies um whether it's uh companies like Stripe or credit card companies like Visa as well as obviously a lot of crypto companies um like Coinbase that are creating all these like agent payment kits and I think um what you know I thought few

stats was really interesting because they're basically kind of aggregating that making it one API for any project to go out and immediately offer all these payment options. and essentially like um being the Expedia for it, right? So um a lot of great ideas honestly learned a lot just from you know listening in on the demo day, meeting a lot of these teams. Um yeah, just super excited about it. Yeah, one of one of the things that's super exciting on the AI crypto front is the ability for AI to pay AI and you mentioned kind of these payment APIs and that whole machine economy feels like it's the perfect niche for crypto. Is there any of those projects that are that are working on that problem in particular? Yeah, like I said, I think Fusats was like probably my favorite

approach to it in a kind of differentiated way where, you know, yes, I think a lot of people in crypto take, you know, take it at face value that it's like, hey, listen, you know, agents are going to use crypto to pay, you know, uh, agents uh, with each other. I I go back and forth on this. I think like, you know, we we've talked to Visa a lot. We're, you know, we're potentially working on something cool with them. um as well as uh you know even um Stripe right like these guys have made it really easy for agents to use even things like credit cards and stuff obviously there are still benefits of like you know no chargebacks very low fees um instant transfers etc that I think crypto will kind of like be at least in my case like the premier kind of destination but I do think that like

you know you can't discount like the access to you know everyone has credit cards not everyone's on boarded on crypto yet so um I think things like few stats is like kind of like really interesting there where they kind of, you know, they kind of say, "Hey, we don't give a [ __ ] Like, whatever is easiest for you, we provide it all." Right. And I think that's uh that's pretty cool. Yeah, man. I mean, there's there's a there's this rapid development in AI space that feels like crypto is like lagging by it by like six to eight months like in the developments in the actual progress. So, it feels like you guys are kind of like walking both sides. I saw that the fund also invested into was it wasn't Neurolink it was uh Noose Research um I think that one right

and a couple others um so yeah I just think that there's a lot a lot of progress on kind of like the web two front too and it seems like you guys have your you know your toes in the water there as well as much so as in the crypto space. Yeah, I mean, yeah, definitely leaking into like a bit of an announcement that we have in a couple weeks, but maybe I can, you know, te tease it. Like, we definitely hired up a, you know, team and expanded the team to really get deep um into the AI side. Um, I think like, you know, Yeah. Well, one thing that you've kind of like harped on too, which is like not I don't think just crypto is like, you know, not falling behind by any means. It's just that it can't keep up with how fast AI

is moving. Um I have this thesis that like I think if you pause AI development today, you would actually get um meaningful kind of like efficiency gains in businesses all all around the world. But like you know we see this on our research side. Um we've integrated AI within our portal. It's actually um you know for better for worse kind of become the most used feature which like sucks because a lot of people don't read reports anymore. They just use our like AI oracle to like help summarize. They question it etc. But the thing is like you know every you know every other week basically we're talking about what else can we do with um you know AI um for our you know product for our company and everything like that and I think it's just moving so fast that like you know the big disadvantage is like integrating

a model or you know upending your business and kind of like um integrating some type of AI features or optionality and then like you know weeks go by and immediately it's like displaced by a whole new model or whole new feature set and I think that's Probably the funniest thing about AI is like the thing that is hurting it the most right now from being actually implemented across all these companies um whether it's web 3, web two is that it's moving so [ __ ] fast. So um yeah, I think like even with us uh you know when we first started Deli um you know back in 2018 uh as a research firm, one thing that we saw was like crypto was moving at light speed, right?

Like DeFi hadn't really been invented yet or anything like that. And um that's what was so exciting for us to kind of like start a research firm to keep tabs on it. Um this is the same way we're feeling about AI right now, which is like it's just moving at light speed and like you know even with the whole team dedicated to it, you can't keep up with all the news coming out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Web two companies, AI companies at large are facing this where they're they have to innovate themselves before they get innovated by someone else. Um Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. you you guys you guys are across uh several different verticals and and you kind of described that philosophy early on. You know, how you do one thing is how you do everything. I is there anyone that you see out there at other firms or

that that you see in the industry that shares that philosophy? And if if you could poach some people, bring them onto the Deli team. Do is there a couple people that come to mind? Maybe two or three. Damn. Yeah, that's a really good question. I'd say that like um you know when we first started getting into the um investing space uh we our kind of like eyes were wide open at like how low the bar was of being a fund in the space. Um and so I think a lot of the funds over the years we've kind of like you know not been impressed by or not thought that they've moved the needle. Um that being said I think there are still so you know a lot of great funds out there. Um you know I think this cycle like Dragon and Fly's been absolutely crushing it. Um, and I think

like um, yeah, I think I think like each fund kind of has their own type of culture, their own type of way of doing things. And you know, one thing I've kind of said both internally and you know, sometimes externally as well is that like, you know, for us, um, we're not, you know, when we first started Deli, I think a lot of people as when we started a research room, they said, "Oh, okay. Are you trying to be, you know, the Bloomberg of crypto?" When we started a venture firm and our goal was to be the most value ad fund in crypto, they said, "Are you trying to be the A6Z of crypto?" And then obviously when we started Deli Labs they said are you trying to be like the Y cominator of crypto to be honest along the journey I definitely was like oh yeah that's

probably like a cool analogy to think of and I think over time one thing that myself and the other founders have realized is like um we're not building like the Bloomberg or A6 andZ or anything of crypto we're building the deli right um and I think that's how I think the other top tier funds in the space probably think as well is like they're they're building their own and I think like people who get really caught up in this competition of like hey how can we do that thing that that fund is doing better. Um, you're probably already losing, right? And I think that's one thing that we've really leaned into at Deli is just like do things our own way. Um, as far as like people to snag, um, yeah, that that that's a good question. I'd say that like, you know, there's probably six to

seven people on my list over the years and and a lot of them basically all of them know who they are. Um, if they're listening in on this, um, most of them are not, you know, at funds or anything like that. Most of them are just people who either work for themselves, don't need to work anywhere, and I think those are the best type of people to hire. Um, a lot of the people at Deli don't need to work here for a paycheck or anything like that. They work here because they want to be part of like this greater hive mind um and scale their ability to impact crypto, right? And I think those are the type of people that um I'm always looking out for, people who are like perpetually curious and are perpetually passionate about the space.

Um yeah, so I think uh you know there's six to seven people who know who they are, but maybe I don't leak that alpha here. Yeah. All right. And that's part of the expansion plan to come. Yeah, exactly. Of the AI expansion. One one big part of of Deli has been Tommy. Um he's been tweeting a ton about AI has been kind of on the on the forefront. I'm pretty sure he's building his own agent. Probably still is. Um you know, I'm just curious like what does Tommy bring to to Deli? What is his, you know, unique advantage in the world of investing and building?

Yeah. Yeah. Tom Tommy's the best. I'm seeing him uh in a few weeks for one of our other partners, Pierce's wedding. So, I'm super excited. It's been too long. But I think like, you know, one thing that Tom does, you know, Tom, to your point, Tommy was like the first person at Deli who was really pushing this AI um uh push like really early on. Um to be honest, it was kind of annoying. Uh I was kind of like, Tom, we have a lot of lot at hand. Why are we focusing on this other stuff right now? And to be honest, he really nailed it. Um as far as the agent goes, I think that is one of the coolest things that Tom's really been like working on at Deli. And you know, lot very similar to what I was saying earlier when he first

kind of shipped and basically for people who don't know, we basically been working on this agent for, you know, probably a year at this point. Um, yeah, like at least a year at this point. Um, which basically um has fed all of our investment memos, all of our, you know, a bunch of our call transcripts, all of our research reports, obviously, even our Twitters. Um, and basically has like a good judgment of like what Deli finds interesting, what Deli doesn't find interesting, etc. And so that way people can submit decks to this agent and it this agent can not just um you know provide us insight into like hey this is a project that out of 10 we think seven or eight out of 10 you should talk to.

Um but it also provides feedback to the people who provide decks. Um and I think one thing that we did at the beginning of this year which I I think we should do an update on soon. Um we just got a lot going on but we basically give it a million dollars and said hey you pick over the next three four months on which projects we should invest in. To be honest, the bad thing about it was like it was not great at figuring out how much we should invest. So, we gave it a mill and it was like, "Hey, you should invest, you know, for example, like you should invest in these five projects." So, basically would have split that into 200 grand whereas like maybe one of those projects like we would have a lot of conviction and would want to invest the whole mill in, right? Um, so we're

always iterating. Tom's like really been leading the charge there. he's been adding model and I I think that's the what you know really speaks like how we learn at Deli which is like we need to get our hands dirty. We need to be building. We need to be um using these things ourselves. Um if we're not using it, we're not going to be learning um at the same rate um that we could. So yeah, that's been that's been a lot of fun. That is hilarious, man. I know. Thanks for your time, man. Keep keep crushing. See you in the city soon. Um, and uh, yeah, man, you guys have been a big inspiration on on a lot of fronts for us with the fund, with the with with the media side and more. So, appreciate you, man. Yeah, man. Love what you guys are doing. Keep it up. All right, buddy.

Take care, dude. The million-doll agent aping aping into absolute just nonsense on I I would love to see a portfolio update. Yeah, it sounds like we'll get one soon. And uh you dropped a little bit of alpha on Deli's expansion which I think sounds really exciting. I mean again this goes back to like look you know there are multiple areas where we're going to start to see employees that are AI. We're going to start to see AI that is you know on the scale of 10 20 30 manpower maybe more right and and I think companies are going to look a lot different once that starts to happen.

Yep. I agree man. Um, we are getting ready to bring Aif on. Um, let's get him up here. Um, and good to good to have him in. I know we we've uh been moving some stuff around. We got Aif. Aif, good to see you, man. Yeah. Let's make sure Aif is unmuted in the background uh in the meet as well so that we can hear him. And we're gonna we're gonna make sure that we get him going here. Welcome to the show. Hey, sorry. Is it working now? Yes, sir. Yeah. Okay. Great. Thanks for How you doing, man? Yeah. Yeah. Doing well. You guys are shipping, aren't you? Yeah. Yeah, we're working.

Nice, man. Man, I I uh we got quite a few topics about Ethereal, you know, Athena USD, but I just like to understand a bit of of the lore as well as to kind of how this all came came together first. I mean, so you guys, so obviously Athena had this idea to build Converge. Um, and then, you know, you guys wanted to build Ethereal. I mean, I would just love to understand your your perspective of the lore of of kind of how this whole conversion ethereal institutional approach came together and then we have a ton of good questions for you. Yeah, for sure. I mean, so a lot of it is kind of like just in, you know, in Athena's camp. So I I like we're just building on converge like so Ethereal is an app chain on Converge. Like my own personal story is I I've kind of been a

big fan of Athena since the launch. Um, like it was kind of so like my backstory is I spent a bunch of years at synthetics like building onchain derivatives and like the actually like the initial reason I was excited about building derivatives on chain was to do like a similar style of stable coin to like lema UXD back in the day where like the challenge was always liquidity but I was like this is an awesome use case for building you know composable onchain per so it's it's always been like super uh close to me as like a product and and very cool and so like obviously like Athena's launch was massively successful. Um, so I kind of just got very interested in like building in this ecosystem and building products that kind of like support the long-term vision.

Yeah. Beautiful. So, so Ethereal is actually an app chain on top of Converge. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. No, no. Okay. So, it's this all-in-one USD app for traders, for for kind of um farmers, institutions, etc. Um, but it's it's it's it's built on top of Converge as its own kind of execution environment. That's Yeah, that's exactly right. Like I think we regardless of where Converge landed in terms of technical stuff, it's not I think we kind of all like and we're aligned with this with Athena in terms of like just focusing more on like product than like specific like tech like ultimately it's like which which stack is going to get us the product that we want. So, we had always planned to be an app chain on Converge or

whatever chain is the Athena Athena ecosystem chain because it just makes sense to be on your own block space for a product like this. Got it. And why was this so important to build on Athena which is obviously, you know, leveraging the US stable coin and and they're doing so through funding rates and that's how, you know, interest is paid. What what made it so that you know this e product ethereal was so important to build on Athena you couldn't build it anywhere else? you can build it anywhere else and obviously you know a lot of people have built everywhere else like I think it's exciting to build in the Athena ecosystem because USD is an exciting product like I think it's brought something on chain that you know a lot of people have always you know I think

every bull market I always see people saying like oh you could get like however many APY doing the basis trade but very few people actually have exposure to it right and so Athena like productized it put it in DeFi in a way that like let you use it um you know it like leverage it borrow it whatever um So, I think it's like very cool and it's kind of created this good uh like a really powerful like lever for the ecosystem that can help like bootstrap an exchange in a way that's kind of like difficult to do otherwise, right? So, I think USD is a very unique uh product because it's like so it's like a synthetic dollar. It's not a backed stable coin. The res the the collateral backing it is very different. It's backed by like these like managed positions versus like you know fiat in a

bank or anything like that. Um, so I think there's some interesting synergies with like an exchange using USD, but also it's like it's just like the market best uh, you know, rewards on your on your dollars, right? So it's like kind of like the the best thing to if you were going to start building something for traders, it's a great starting point. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean one potential aspect um that I think about instantly is that um you know one one cool thing about DeFi is that you can have your settlement or your kind of uh your you know your base asset as being yield bearing. And so, you know, there's a world where on Ethereal, you know, the when you're doing PERPS or you're trading, you're consistently coming back to this USDE, it's it it can be this

yield form or this yield bearing form of, you know, collateral or of, you know, if you just want to sign off for the weekend, for the summer, etc. That's one thing that I have in mind. With the rise of basically Hyperlquid dominating the perpex market now there's been I think a shift in the way people are thinking about building onchain exchanges whether it be with the token side or just in general with the product experience. I'm curious how you view Ethereal uh in the landscape of per as it is today. You know, the centralized exchanges, Binance, etc., private and then decentralized exchanges, Hyperliquid, DYDX, and these. How do you kind of see this landscape as a whole and the evolution of it? And then how is how does Ethereal fit in and find that unique differentiation?

Yeah, totally. Like it's it's it's a great question. Like I think um it's it's probably been about a few years since like trading on chain like leveled up to where it started to feel like you were you know closer to trading on Binance or something right like I think like DYDX was quite good a few years ago and it was like it was like zero to one in terms of like what anybody had experienced trading on chain before it's like it's fast but you know obviously it had its limits. Uh there's a lot of debate around like which direction it went versus where it could have went. I think Hyperlquid has also been massively successful in kind of like um pioneering like the community getting to take part and own like certain like functions that normally would be like externalized or something like that. And like I think

like that kind of falls under the umbrella of like the product has to have something net new and interesting that that you know that users will that will keep people coming back to use, right? So like you know like people getting to um like participate in like HLP and like you know like plus EV from liquidations and like I think that was something that was interesting like hyperlquid also like you know pioneered like doing these like hypers like pre-launch per like all these things that are interesting. I I think like ultimately it can just be one in one cool feature that you know like way back in the day when when Binance let people like trade you know gas from the from the Neochain right it was just like one little thing and people are like whoa amazing I'm going to trade there from now on right so like I think

ultimately it's like the name of the game is always like build something new and interesting it could even just be one cool feature that will is like a wedge for people you know to try and get into your product and then like from there it's like okay well now now like Hyperlid had their wedge maybe couple now they have the whole hyper you know EVM ecosystem and they're trying to have all these ways that everything plugs in together and I think the idea is that like if there's enough entropy you know like we have all these new products that are totally different and I think like that's not just the hyperlquid game plan that should be everybody's game plan building on chain is you want to like create weird new combination of things because it's open and transparent and they can plug into each other

permissionlessly that's kind of like the idea like we did a fair bit of this back in synthetics so like it's severely difficult to execute on. Um, but it's like totally worthwhile, you know, to pursue. Yeah. You guys mentioned that, you know, you're obviously starting with per, but there's a bigger road map here. You also talk about the wedge, right, to kind of get your foot in the door and start that momentum. And then there's a bigger picture. Maybe you could allude to what what is part of the bigger picture. What is coming down the pipeline post pers? Yeah, I mean it's a really common thing that like someone will ask me when I tell them I'm working on Ethereal and they're like, "Oh, like is aren't like dexes like way oversaturated already." I think like even going back a couple

years like I would constantly see like new decks flying around for like oh we're building like it's either like we're building this but on this chain or we're building that but you know so like but like as like our kind of like northstar is like okay well what still does not exist in the marketplace today despite people saying it's highly saturated. So like I think most people like who are like onchain power users like they use everything out there. They'll do like all their borrow like typically on on ETH1 right like on a right because that's where everything is that's where the most liquidity maybe a few other like L2s or something on Salana but it's it's generally all in one place and then spot trading will be like kind of literally all over the place like it's aeromer it's uni v3 I think hyperlquid is now like the first

like spot club like in all of DeFi. Uh, and then PERPS is like, you know, used to be super cyclical. It's like DYDX, GMX. Now, most people seem to be trading on hyperlquid. Um, but it's all always in a different place for each one of these, right? And then, like, don't even get me started on RWAS. So, like I think like the idea that we want to what we want to build is something what that gives you all of those in one product that's like going vertically integrated versus horizontally integrated, right? So, there's a lot of people a lot of products out there that are trying to do the horizontal integration strategy.

it's like a super app, but it's like plugging into all of your favorite DeFi apps on different chains and they're trying their best to abstract away the fact that you're on five different chains at once or something like that. And there's pros and cons to both, but I think ultimately like you can there's a lot more you can achieve when it's all in one vertically integrated product which you know to you know to my knowledge hasn't really been successfully scaled on chain. Yeah. And I mean I think that basically what you're describing is this I mean it's it's addressing this fragmentation that exists right between all these different chains and then all these different applications within the chains or applications on separate chains. And I mean it it basically seems like you guys can plug into the uh the the you know let's call it the the DeFi onchain power

user community and then also have this uh link to the RWA issuance hubs through converge um and like the institutional side there. I know that you said don't get you started on RWAs, but just curious like how that issuance kind of hub works or looks and like how that converge integration enables new RWA possibilities uh for Ethereal which are perhaps more difficult for other dexes or per platforms to have within their product suite. Yeah, for sure. So like I think right now most people don't know even how to and there's probably not even much availability to get access to any kind of RWA product on chain. It's

very difficult, right? And I think it has been for a while. There's some like I think the closest is like just getting like like uh like you know treasury yield on your on some stables or something like that, right? So I mean again like a lot of this is kind of like outside of our umbrella. It's it's it's happening between like Athena and Securitize with Converge. But I mean I I think like there's a lot also a lot of positive catalysts you know of the last like year that are going to make it a lot easier to you know bring these products on chain and I think like converge you know Athena securitize converge like their vision of kind of like threading that needle of like bring making it institutional friendly but also on chain it it's like it seems it to me it looks very powerful and if I

wanted to build you know in an ecosystem that is like one of the big reasons why I would I would choose and am choosing to build it in the converge ecosystem because you kind of get like easy interoperability with like all of those all of those features like you know as soon as they are available right um so like that's one of the things that we're really excited about like having kind of folding that into ethereal whether it's like you know uh through other you know like pts from pendle on rwas or like maybe the rwas themselves you know using them as collateral you know spot spot pairs whatever like I think there's a lot of exciting things that haven't really been experimented with that we can, you know, do.

And I take that's part of the strategy here. Like you said, you you probably get this all the time, like why build another decks? You guys are building an L3 on top of Converge on top of right Celestia is underneath uh I believe maybe the L1. And so, you know, again, it's like it's like, you know, some of the common things that we hear in crypto from being around. It's like, well, well, L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, right? like what was the strategic decision to build the L3 on top of converge? Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think there's definitely like from a lot of people who have followed like the scaling roadmap for years there's definitely an aspect of like please bro just one more L right like

this make it work. Um but like ultimately like I said like we definitely approach it from like strictly like what do we need to create the product we want and I think increasingly there is you know bigger focus on on that more than like what infrastructure what tech stack sounds the coolest. Um so like ultimately like like I don't think it's super critical you know what is it is an L2 is an L3 ultimately it's like a rollup right and I think like the rollup model is like uh very powerful but also you know trivally verified like computing servers that are like onchain I think like that vision like resonates a ton with us uh it seems like it's the you know it's the best way like on an application specific chain to to build the product that we want that's

like both highly performant and highly composable with like other with other products in the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, I think that that the the issue with some of the dexes in the past has been around the liquidity more than anything, right? Trying to find where to get out those first LPS and users. Um, and then in addition to that, actually nailing down the infra stack for that is, you know, as you said, it's just it's just a role. It's just a chain. But I think about it, it's just it's just an application on on, you know, block space. That's all it is, right? Uh people have this apprehension right now towards chains, towards L2s in general.

Um you know, I think like again a little bit of infra exhaustion, people wanting to move towards apps. Uh but then people like are very excited about something like hyperlquid or something about uh some of these other applications and then they realize that that's also a chain. Um so so it's kind of an interesting dichotomy there. Um on the liquidity point though, you guys have recently um been on the season zero campaign. So you guys have put up about 1.2 two billion I think right now. We actually had Stephen from DeFi Dojo on uh yesterday and he was he was giving some alpha on this being one of the better current DeFi yield strategies uh depending on his predictions for the Ethereal token launch. Now obviously we won't get too deep into all of that.

Just curious like when we go from here with this $1.2 billion of liquidity as part of the season zero. I think we're getting close to the end here. Um you guys have had a Pendle some of the larger D5 protocols participating. How does this transition into liquidity for the Ethereal DEX um and just generally how are you thinking about solving that problem or even if you have advice for other founders who are looking to solve the liquidity problem when it comes to uh these types of DeFi products? Yeah. Uh yeah, definitely. I mean, I think like the the season zero deposits, I think more than anything else, just speak to like the enthusiasm of people in in wanting to get involved and, you know, participate, right? So, it's kind of just like a cue a line of like here,

if you want to get involved, like tell us you want to get involved and like put, you know, and uh put your money where your mouth is, so to speak, right? So like there's a lot of enthusiasm getting involved and like like I said before there's a lot of lessons to be learned from the last few years in terms of like you know bootstrapping liquidity by letting the community participate you know creating you know building those sorts of products like not just like an automated LP but also like building other infrastructure around it like like like credit and things that make it easier for people to come in and LP. Um, so I think like there's definitely an element of that like it's kind of the easy part to like have a lot of the pieces in place to so that you can like you know initially have some liquidity.

The hard part is obviously like making it worthwhile for the liquidity to exist in the long run like to you know be present there which is obviously about like trading flows and making so kind of ties back into like what we had what we were saying earlier where it's like if you want it to be sustainable ultimately you want to just go down all the list of reasons why people would ever leave and like just cross them off one by one and be like okay like you you might go somewhere else to get this product we're just going to you know build that product so it's here and like so it's like kind of like a virtuous viral flywheel where it's like okay like we have some liquidity at the beginning some people are interested in trying it out we retain some of them we retain

more liquidity it's like the usual cycle like so it's really hard to execute on but I think ultimately like if you want something that'll last like years and not just like one hype cycle uh it's ultimately you have to deliver like all all of the features that users want and will continue to want you know as they figure out that they want them yeah being yeah go ahead Andy no I'm just curious like who do you think your users are Is it institutional people? Is it is it traders? Is it just heavy kind of seasoned onchain power users? Like who who is your who's your user base? I think it's it's like everybody like onchain power users like you know centralized exchange us like anybody in crypto ultimately you want to start with like just like capturing the cryp native audience and then kind of try to expand

from there. Right. So I think like there's a there's there's a few needles to thread. One is like trying to build on chain while also making it institutional friendly. The other is like like I think we have a lot of natural alignment like with the Athena community but like a big contingent in the Athena community like is is like yield seekers so not necessarily active traders but we're also building a product that that is you know a place to trade while you're getting yield or you know loan while you're trading like those borrow while you're trading. So I think there's like a lot of needles to thread. Um ultimately like we want them all to come and trade. If you're if you're mostly a yield seeker, but you occasionally trade, you can just park your capital in Ethereal and when you need to trade, you could just use it as

collateral, right? So, like I think like a really popular trade uh I guess it was earlier this year and last year was like depositing SUSD, you know, into into like Morpho or whatever and levering it up, you know, like I think there was a lot of automated looping tools that that popped up and like I think one like one cool thing is like you can do that, but you could also have that just be your account collateral and you could just trade against it directly, right? like so if you need to open positions like spot per whatever um that's your account right so I think there's a lot of like I said like once the feature set is diverse enough there's a lot of opportunities to like court all sorts of users that you know we wouldn't have expected to court initially y one more question for you thief um you

had mentioned sort of the the playbook to create this virtuous cycle is is you know you build a product you start to track why people may leave and then you build that product too so that they don't have to leave your system in order to go get that. Is there any teams that you've seen do this particularly well in this ecosystem that they they ended up just iterating their product to such an extent that it became extremely valuable to their end their end user base. Uh I mean yeah like I think if you just look at every successful like product I think a lot of them have gotten there through iteration right like so like obviously like Hyperlquid iterated a ton with their users like Athena has like worked tirelessly to like support every integration that people would want to do

with USD so that like they like literally will partner with everybody so that everything is available like I think iterations it's doesn't guarantee success um but it's like obviously super it's it's really important um but yeah like I Think ultimately like you kind of just have to stay nimble and follow along with like what is the latest thing that people want and have a system in place that's easy to adapt. Beautiful. Thanks thanks for your time man. Thanks for joining. Excited to see Converge go live as well as as Ethereal. I know a lot of my yield farming friends are uh pretty active right now in pre-eposits and uh are looking forward to everything that you guys have come in. So keep up the good work, man.

Cheers for coming. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. It was good chatting. Cheers. Thanks. soon, buddy. Peace. Yeah, those guys are going to crush. Um they're they're going to do very well. So, yeah. Up up up next, we got Robinson. Uh yeah, let's make sure uh Robinson's ready before we bring him up and we got we got his handle cut off. Maybe we can fix that as well. But Robinson's a good friend of the show. What What were you going on about there, Andy? No, I was just excited to see that. Um and and I think I mean uh yesterday Stephen from DOA was like you know if they have a token launch that was like in the couple hundred million then the yield is going to be a really really really good opportunity. Um that amongst uh whatever the current PT

yields are. So yeah I mean they have a billion dollars in deposits which is like they're kind of like a silent a silent beast right now amongst all the yield farmers. Anyhow, let's get Robinson up here. Um, and let's talk about some Interup with Inter Rob. What's up, man? What's up, guys? It's good to see you all. Are you in the big city, man? I am. I'm in the city. I was We actually just opened an office and I should have been there today, but um some things came up, but yeah, I'm in I'm in New York. was the things the bright sunny day or I mean it's been I've been promised this New York summer and it's been uh it hasn't been here but now it finally is but no it wasn't. It wasn't. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I mean it's been a bit rainy and uh bit nicer this this week though. I'll tell you that. We got a bunch of questions for you Robin Robinson. You've been on the uh institutional grind you could say. uh wormhole has firmly positioned itself in that realm. We could just start with a quick update, you know, like what's going on? What's the latest? Um yeah, how how's the appetite? What what's the latest? Yeah, I mean you're you're very right. We are focusing a lot on institutions and I think making really really good headway which I of course can get into a bit more. Um I'd say all the biggest right now we're seeing a lot of funds come on chains. It's pretty kind of rudimentary real world assets, if you will, money

market, funds. We're seeing private credit kind of take off. Um, I know I've been on here before talking a little bit about it, but we've we've actually seen a lot of progress since then, particularly in DeFi, which I think is exciting. Um, but for us, we're still just uh kind of replicating this playbook that we have. Our the way wormhole is structured, it's the institutions really like it. It's kind of like in line with what I call the practical era of crypto, right? like what is too many validators or too little validators, what is too much decentralized governance and those types of questions. And for us, our our security model works well. So, we've seen a ton of success. That being said, we can't ignore the the what I I kind of see the Tradfi and the DeFi still, even though it's kind of crossing over. We

can't ignore the DeFi. So, focused a lot on stable coins. Nothing new there. That's like what everyone is talking about for good reason though. I think it's a narrative that's not being not being chased just out of like you know how we kind of do in crypto sometimes as an industry. It's it's for real and it makes you know a good bit more sense to plan your like business goals uh around that. So just continuing to focus on adoption in both both uh DeFi and and Trady and then uh also revenue. I think we're we're we're finally going to migrate from being a just a token protocol to to focusing on revenue. ARR, MR, those like foreign acronyms that that we haven't quite adopted yet. Yeah, that that's particularly important. I

think several projects are facing a a a similar question at hand where they're looking at the landscape and they're actually they're actually seeing this double-edged sword where turning on maybe a fee switch or some monetization strategy to achieve MR ARR is actually detrimental to their long-term strategy of adoption. So I'm curious from your standpoint, how do you balance these two things from trying to bootstrap an ecosystem and generate some some significant adoption over time versus, you know, providing some value to token holders or or stakeholders and generating revenue in the near term. I think it's a you're honing in exactly on the problem. Um, so I think it's really

good that we're we're kind of calling that out. Here's the thing is that a lot of we we came from markets before where you know most protocols we can just from an investor point of view we can just call them alts right like you know you were able to launch a token that token was able to see a lot of success I think over time we've seen kind of alts like that that initial TGE strategy not pan out as well and what's happening is the you know then the VC appetite will wayne so to speak and then what happens is that the liquid fund side is what gets way more interesting and I know liquid funds has now become it a buzz word in and of itself But I like to think about like this these investors with maybe a little bit more of a short-term time

horizon, right? VCs can can invest and and think maybe four, five, six years. And when you talk to these liquid funds, the thing they care about the most is is the fundamentals, right? They they want to see that you have they they care a lot about supply and demand. Maybe that's the first thing, right? Like how much of your token supply is unlocked. Like that's a pretty simple one, but I wouldn't over or I wouldn't uh underindex on how much they care about that. but they care a lot about like fees, revenue, um how how are you going to kind of make the protocol sustainable over time. So I think there's a maybe a little bit of a sweet spot where uh you and this is kind of what we did maybe just kind of putting our the proof in the pudding where we kind of waited a

little bit of time, right? We said for for us too in particular, we we uh were building for years before we even launched a token. So we kind of had a long time to build adoption, build up the brand, these kind of uh these things that are extremely valuable to have staying power and then we felt more comfortable to launch uh to launch revenue. So you know I don't have an exact answer because I think every protocol is different but I think it's going to be harder to push off revenue longer and I think that'll be the case for all these protocols. Um, and so they'll all kind of have to adopt it. And this kind of goes in line also with what I'm saying about like uh crypto's practical era just to tie it back. Like all these kind of basic principles that we've been able to ignore for a while, I

think are coming to a heel. I even think for instance, I'll go out on a limb and say like CT as a whole isn't as uh uh maybe as uh much of a requirement to be successful as a protocol as it once was. Um, and you know, this this goes with validators, this goes with governance, all these different things. I think we're kind of rethinking the model and maybe maturing a little bit. But look, I think it's a challenge if you're starting to launch a token now. Um, when do you launch revenue, when do you not? But the thing that is the most important still besides revenue is that like network effect, making sure your default alive, making sure you have adoption, etc. So, if I were to summarize my feedback, it's, you know, maybe wait until you feel like you have a good bit of

adoption, you have something you can eat off of, um, in terms of whether it's brand integration, etc., and then turn on fees year post TGE, if you will. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like if you if you kind of go for revenue too quickly, there's just going to be consistent competitors who are just basically are willing to to basically bite the bullet, undercut you. And um I mean, frankly, that's kind of what's been happening in the interop landscape for so long. Like there's these tweets that are like tribalism of chains is gone and like oh we've got chain abstraction and interrupt and you know these institutions don't care. But but I think they care and and and I think this tribalism is going to stay along. So it's like like you're fighting battles

on multiple fronts as a protocol, you know, founder as a visionary, right? It's like you're fighting the economic front, the community front, the compet the competition front, the product front, etc. Um so kind of fighting a lot of battles at once. um you know and then and then at the end of the day the sentiment of the entire market still kind of dictates from the from the macro all the way down the performance usually of of the token. So not an easy job man. Yeah, not an easy job at all. I one thing I would say though is like I definitely think tribalism is still alive within like the kind of the DeFi native crypto sector. But at the end of the day like the when you I hate saying institutions. Let's let's let's maybe define like what a lot of them are right now. like these large funds, right?

Really, they care about AUM. Um they don't they they they launch on chains that have a lot of activity. Sure. Because that's an indication of the metrics that they're ultimately beholden to. So like they they really really want to see aumum go up. And so when you think about that, the best way to do that is to spread is like they have the liquidity, right? They have the problem that most people in crypto or teams in crypto are missing is like that kind of like liquidity uh jolt to make anything successful. They they do have some of that. They have access to the exchanges capital etc. But they want to spread it and get get more across all these different chains. So they they will target the most popular ones first. Totally agree. Um and they they see the tribalism with Salana,

Ethereum, etc. But they view crypto as an investor class. And so they want they want it to be as many chains as possible. That's why, you know, I think what biddles on like seven chains now is because each of those chains then is going to push and drive as much adoption of that as possible and their AUM ultimately goes up. And that at the end of the day is really all they care about. Very interesting. But it's a lot to balance. You're right. It's a lot to balance. Who actually owns these inst who who actually owns these relationships with institutions? because you've got a couple players in the space who've been bickering lately about different things and like you know like is there a is there a team or is is there like a way that you have a have an a really strong relationship with these

with these funds these institutions like like is it about is it you know like I'm just trying to wrap my head around like what a typical BD experience is is like in crypto right versus like going out and actually meeting these people where they are um like what's your thoughts there with regards to owning these relationships with these institutions? Yeah, maybe maybe I'll let me take the I'll I'll get to the answer to this question, but one thing that one observation I think is interesting and it kind of goes back to like owning the relationship with institutions is that I think every all protocols especially like you maybe not blockchain but like middleware and those types of things are realizing that in a relationship with the user is one of the most important things and a lot of people know that

right like that's the most stickiest that's the most sticky thing we get that but when you actually like take use cases you can kind of start to see it happen and I think a Good example, we saw it accelerate. I think it was last week Salana's conference in New York. Jupiter launched Jupend, right? They want to be a DeFi like power front end. Uh, you know, there's already a big lending protocol on Salana. They don't care. It's Camino. Uh, you see like uh unis swap obviously is an AMM then launching intense wallets. You see Infinex coming from the other side, right? They're saying, you know what, we're going to start at the user and we're going to aggregate everything. And I think, you know, we're no different.

We see that, you know, we have portal obviously as a front end. So I think like everyone is always in crypto racing because you have this like commoditization of everything racing to grab the user. Uh and I don't think it's necessarily any different uh with when it comes to institutions. I think a lot of the sticking points or the gate at least the gateways today are these like tokenization platforms. Um you know it's it's where the kind of KYC KYB happens. It's you know they're kind of processing your your actual investment etc. It's still pretty manual today if I'm being honest. actually went end to end through the process quite uh recently. Um so I think the the relationship or the bulk of the institutional or the fund manager relationship still resides on these tokenization platforms. That's why

you're seeing I don't know there's I feel like they've cropped up overnight. It's like AMMs in 2020. Like there's just so many tight different tokenization platforms and some of the value props are just like I'm tokenization uh platform for this jurisdiction in this country. I have this large family office behind me. that's enough differentiation to launch and for me to have a business. So it's kind of interest like I think you know follow kind of what the the market's doing and I think that is where the main part of the relationship happens. So for us being more middleware we work closely with the the leading tokenization platforms or at least that's what we we kind of target obviously securityize a close partner as I've come on here and said before um but that's I think where where a lot of at least a relationship

exists today and that stickiness exists today. Could that change? Absolutely. Um, but I think what's an interesting ob observation is just how many tokenization platforms are starting to kind of like come out and and and say they have different value offerings, etc. Stable coins are are definitely an important piece to this because these are the tokenization products that the majority of people understand and and can own once there's proper infrastructure in place. And these are extensions of credit off of something like a treasury fund, right? Like Black Rockck's Bidd. And so the question is, you know, looking at Black Rockck's

Biddle and the billions of dollars that they have in tokenized treasuries, you know, a very common thing to do once you have these reserves sitting on chain is to launch a stable coin. Do you think Black Rockck is going to launch a stable coin based on So they use wormhole that? Yeah, I'll start by saying I have absolutely no clue. I'll speculate. Uh but this is not based on any information inside information that I have, but um you know, I think I think Black Rockck is is pretty strategic, right? I think they're they're I mean, of course they are. Like they wouldn't be where they are today if they weren't. But I think right now they're still like they have the the most valuable resource, right?

They have capital and time. I guess maybe two valuable resources. So they they have the ability to just watch see how things pan out and then kind of like get things at a much later stage if you will. Um so you know I I I think that they are already kind of making certain moves right they're obviously very involved this is public information um you know very involved with with securitize as a large investor. Um so like there is you know uh uh you know them kind of like putting an iron in the fire if you will. I think there's another large tokenization platform called Libre. They've tokenized a few funds. I think Black Rockck is also an investor there. Um, so I I think right now maybe if I were to just from my perspective, I think what they're doing is they're saying, "Okay, where where

are their strategic opportunities for us? Maybe taking some sort of stake." And I think the next move is definitely, you know, could be some sort of stable coin. But uh I I I think that they would probably want to see maybe some sort of stable coin regulation get passed before I mean because tokenization a lot of this stuff is we're just saying like yeah it's a security so there's not there's not much like new gray area so to speak but uh I think when it comes to stable coins they're probably going to want to see some sort of like rags or these acts passed ultimately. I mean, we've been talking about them for months, maybe years at this point before I think that you see a meaningful like them on the cap table type headline, but it's cool to see things like I know Athena has USB already that's biddback

stable coin, so we're already kind of seeing that. Um, but yeah, it's a good question, but I think they're going to need to see some sort of clarity before anything meaningful happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was just at stable con last week here in the city, and it was it was crazy. Like, every small private bank wants to launch a stable coin. some already have but are waiting on the Genius Act and some of the other regulatory clarity to be able to like put it out in the wild, they said. But I spoke to at least like five people from private banks or like you know maybe like fintech financial services companies. They were like yeah we want to launch a stable coin basically just provide the yield back to the shareholders in some capacity. Um and you know just like undercut Tether and

Circle and just be like yeah our stable coin pays you 3% but we're going to keep two and like that's our business. Um, so yeah, I mean a lot of a lot of fugazi going on, but also a lot of like really really strong appetite for uh launching stable coins. Yeah, I think one one thing's cool too, I was talking to a builder recently that's using wormhole to kind of like uh we we do a lot of stable coin settlements. So like I'm a merchant, I want to accept USDC on X, Y, and Z chain, let's say Polygon. Uh but the or the user wants to pay in USDT on let's say Sue, right? we we will facilitate kind of that settlement in the background kind of like a a Visaet if you will. But what I think is pretty cool is like stable coins are like

almost like a it helps you I think Mzero did a good campaign recently like everyone's a bank but like you you can kind of have this engine to make money in a certain way and then provide this social layer on top of it. So for instance, there's like a social application. Imagine an iMessage where you can bet with your friends in app. Use a smart contract to set up whatever the bet is and then like you can just pay each other. There's no fees or anything. It's very like iMessage type experience and then the actual like game provider or the social media provider makes their money by you obviously custoing or leaving some of your stable coins on the platform then making yield etc. So, like there's actually like a cool next layer that I think can happen from a lot of the stable coin

infrastructure that I think we've been talking about for a while, but now might be a kind of a better time or a more mature time to see some of that. Yeah. And what you're talking about, very interesting peer-to-peer electronic cash, the title of the Bitcoin white paper, and you know, Satoshi didn't foresee smart contracts on top of some of these primitives, but that's what you're talking about to help facilitate some of these transfers. And so in in that spirit, you know, we're, you know, seeing the rise of sever several new protocols. Hyperlid is is one. Do do you have any of these on the road map?

Bridging from, you know, Salana to Hyperliquid, ETH to Bitcoin. What are what are, you know, some things that you have on the road map? Absolutely. So, I think like what what I'll say where Wormhole's really strong is obviously the institutional side and and I've said this before, it's because of our security model. However, there's principles in blockchain that do ring somewhat true, right? If something's pretty decentralized, it can be slower in certain aspects, right? So for wormhole, we have a security model that's is is very decentralized and so it's slower to expand to chains. I think that's where we're a little bit like maybe if I were to be super intellectually honest and critical, I would say, you know, we could be faster at that. We just came out with this protocol upgrade that effectively makes uh the actual verification point modular. Why does that matter? Without

getting too technical, it enables us to connect to chains much faster, right? So whereas maybe we could connect the three to five a quarter, we can now connect to 10 a quarter. Um and so the you know when it comes to hyperlquid and maybe I'll just even take a quick aside. The thing the thing in crypto that's interesting is like chains also is a red herring, right? 50 60 70 to 120. I know some interop protocols count. That's great and we want to do that as well. But when you actually look at the data, I think it's I I don't quote me on this, but I think it's something like the top 12 chains do like 90 something% of the actual activity. So when you when when we're actually thinking about where it matters, a lot of you know, we we we tend to cover

that. Now, Hyperlid you're bringing up is obviously the uh you know, the one that we care about a lot and you know, we we were going to be there day one. I think just one thing to call out and this is this is totally a decision on the Hyperlid team. You know, they we connect to chains if their node code is is open source. So we have like a big open source e ethos here at wormhole. Obviously I'm I'm talking about practical era, you know, being a little bit more open to maybe some centralization of validators. How much governance do we want to do? These types of things. So I feel like it's an okay discussion to say maybe not everything has to be open source. I feel like I have to be maybe intellectually honest in that right as well. And so we you

know we are we had to think a little bit about hyper hyperlquid and them not being like the normal you know upstanding to our normal security principles. I think we have a good solution around that. We've been working a lot with the team, really good team over there. And so we have a path forward sooner than you might think. So the same type of firepower we bring to Salana. I was actually an accelerator. I said 11.4 billion since inception. And you know for context obviously that's over all time but for context like Salana's TVL somewhere around 9.2 billion and so we're going to bring the same firepower to hyperl obviously we're talking to you know potentially about rdwas there etc.

I know the unit protocol I was talking to those guys are are focused on that as well. Um but yeah, we'll be there way sooner than you think. Um and we're really excited. Robinson, one last one before you go. You guys just brought Doge over to Salana using your native token transfers. Uh what are your top five assets, memes, or tokens that you would love to bring to Salana next through Wormholes NT? Oh, that's a good that's a good question. I I've uh there's so many. So I I've started to lose track of how many adopt NT. I remember honestly like a year ago or over a year when we launched this like if we got one a week it was the most exciting thing. Now it's like the list I see the list it's like five six a week.

Um, a few I may be excited about that I know top of mind. Um, Red obviously, uh, Redstone. Um, they also expanded their their Oracle product with wormhole, which I think is really cool to salon. So, they use wormhole to to effectively send price feeds to Salana, which I think is like a really cool use case. Um, but red token obviously there, Doge has been great. I want to see more stables. Um, so we've got uh we've got AUSD uh with Agora. I want want to them the transfers to go live there, start getting more AUSD to Salana. Um, we've got, if you look at the top 50 market cap, one thing I think that's interesting is a lot of the UTXO chains, proof of work chains, have been historically really hard to get assets to other chains. Um, you know, Doge is a

really good example. Bitcoin is a really good example. Zcash is a really good example. So, I'm really excited about like that uh cohort of assets that has kind of seemed like they've been on an island for a while. Um, so focused on those a lot. Um, but yeah, stables, UTXO assets, and uh, AUSD. Let's go. All right, Rob. Well, thanks for joining, man. And, uh, we'll see you in the city. I I'll have to swing by the office and come hang. I I heard you guys got a studio as well, man. Yeah, please come by. We do. We do. We're leveling it up. All right, Boss, man. See you soon. See you guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks, Robinson. See you. Peace.

Up next, we got Douggee, the investor at Figment. That was good, man. I mean, Wormhole has done such a good job of positioning in the institutions. Now, what I think is going to continue to happen with the interop protocols is like positioning at that point of tokenization. That's what wormhole was or that's what uh Robinson was pushing on. It's like finding the actual gaps for where the tokenization is happening and then getting into those. Um, we didn't talk too much about the competitors, but some of them are doing well as well. Yeah. Next up, we got Douggee from Figment. Uh, pretty excited for this one because Figment's doing some great work.

Uh, I remember, I think, seeing Douggee on stage at a conference way back, maybe in Istanbul. I think we got Douggee in the stage now. He's ready to go. So, let's bring him up on stage. Yo yo welcome. Yo, what's up, guys? How goes it? What's up, man? you, you know, just asking a VC about what VCs are doing these days, you know, just trying to get a little catch up here. Oh, can't believe you brought a VC on. Can't do that nowadays, man. I'm just [ __ ] with you guys. Right back at you, man. We've moved past a lot of the hate for VCs. There was It was a little sketchy there with the uh low float, high FDV uh dynamic, but it feels like we're past that. Do do you

feel like the sentiment has improved in the VC landscape? I think so. I mean, it's definitely uh above the local bottom. It feels like uh I definitely think like the lowflow high FTV phase was like a weak point for like VC perception. Uh and rightfully so, honestly. Like I I wrote a piece kind of like criticizing a lot of like the bad externalities of low flow high FTV. Also pointed some like externality bad externalities out for like uh fair launches. But um yeah, I think rightfully so. There was a lot of criticism passed on. I think like what brought me into crypto was clearly not what was happening uh for that entire period of time. And it wasn't just VC's fault honestly. I think it was a lot of different people's fault. Uh but like

pointed out as like a bad direction for us to head in because yeah, I don't think anyone was winning during that time. Maybe the people that sold OTC, but besides that, everyone was kind of losing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, dude, you put out a banger tweet um saying more founders should ask VCs what their onchain activity looks like. That was pretty spicy. Honestly, I you know, just from a personal lens though, right? Like doing onchain transactions in like 2019, 2020, man, I probably did thousands, you know, and it's slowly kind of gone down. But I I assume that your point here is that if you're out of touch with what's actually happening from a UX and from what people are actually using, then it's hard to make uh you know, it's hard to reason about um things that are actually investable. Um yeah, you know,

what's your onchain activity look like? What who's laring, Douggee? Who who's laring here? Who's laring? I mean, I think a lot of people are. It's honestly shocking. like I I my whole my myself included, my whole team, we're all very active on chain. Um I think for us, like we try to make sure we're not like going over the top with it because we do have jobs to do. Um but honestly, like I mean what got me into crypto was just like being a user, getting super involved in DeFi and stuff and just like falling in love with it. And then like the way my brain works, I just want to figure out how it all works. And so that like led me going much much deeper over time. Uh and then eventually just like made sense to become like a professional investor, I guess. uh and all these things I was

using. Um but yeah, I mean I spend time in the trenches of all realms. I spent a lot of time on Salana, a lot of time on Hyperlid time everywhere else really. Uh I think I just enjoy doing it and like you know my perspective like from two angles like one uh as an investor if I don't understand the market I'm investing in then I'm probably going to be a bad investor. So actually trying to be a user, talking to people who are using these things, deeply understanding what's happening in Telegram groups, like all of those things are all super informative to like what I choose to invest in. Um, and the second thing is like we do a lot of early stage investing. Like we're very involved with teams from like the ideation standpoint, product design standpoint, so forth. And being a user of these products actually

allows us to give like really deep and nuanced feedback to teams where like if I didn't use you know different dexes, different whatever like I would be just giving feedback that is not grounded at all. And so if we're going to do our jobs like again I know VCs sometimes get a bad rap but like we try our best to like be as hands-on as possible and like actually like support our teams any way we can. And what we found is like our biggest value ad is just like giving them user feedback at all levels from like day one. And we couldn't do that if we're not users. So that's that's why we place such a big emphasis on like being onchain ourselves. Again, like we moderate it, of course, but like I spend I definitely do at least like I don't know 25 to 50 transactions a day easily.

Uh so that's kind of like my approach there. Uh, in terms of who's larping, like I don't know, I'm not going to call out names, but I think you kind of see it like as different cycles evolve, like the guys who were once very active on chain in the past, they probably either made it or like just kind of got out of touch and then their takes kind of resemble that. And so I think there's like certain people at certain funds who have big followings, talk a lot, and I see their takes and I'm just like, I don't agree. You don't sound like you're in the trenches right now. And so again, I'm not gonna call out names, but there's definitely some people out there who I would consider in that category.

Yeah, we we won't put anyone on the spot. Uh I am curious. 25 to 50 transactions a day or a week. Uh I forgot the cadence there, but but what are some of the more active applications? What do you see out there these days that you you particularly enjoy and you see where your your activity is? Yeah, I mean definitely I feel like everyone talks about it all the time, so I'm being a broken record, but like Hyperlid is awesome. Uh I think a big reason for that is like I don't really use centralized exchanges. Uh just kind of an ideological and philosophical thing for me and so be beautiful. Yeah. So like Hyperlid gave me access to like pretty liquid markets for PES and also like spot trading other things now as well. Um that previously I didn't really have access to honestly. And so I think

like uh using that I'm not a great per trader to be honest. Like I I do okay, but like I'm definitely not like up there with some of these these other guys you see. Uh but it's just a great product and I think like really really has shaped this cycle for a lot of people and so I'll always give credit where it's due there. Um I definitely am pretty active on Salana. Uh I have a Jupiter tab open a decent amount of the day. Uh I use that a lot. I have use Camino a lot. Um and then of course like there's like the a and like blue chips of the world. Those are like bank account. Uh, so I don't like check them that nearly as often, but like I definitely think they're great products and like there's things I can trust to leave money in for a long time and like

a put in that category. There's others as well, of course, but that one stands out to me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's been kind of similar here as far as like having a having a hot wallet on the laptop or on the phone for when your group chat pings you with a meme and then having like more secure multi-safe hardwares for different stuff, etc., etc. Um, don't to get too deep into that [ __ ] gives me the EVG talking about it publicly to be honest. Um, same. Especially after recent stuff. Yeah, let's move on. Yeah, dude. Are you going to can TBD? I'm trying to figure that out. Are you guys heading there? You should. You should go, bro. It's going to be fun. I know. It's just I wish it was in Paris, but that's my own perspective. Robbed. That's a good point. Actually, good point. I've just

seen what's happening in Paris. Maybe it's good. It's not there. I run into Mcronone's wife out there. Yeah, the the the grandma. I saw I saw a tweet today from Eddie from uh he's the CTO of A6Z Crypto. Put out this this tweet about the the it's time for crypto to move on from the foundation model. Uh so this guy Miles Jennings wrote a piece as to why it was necessary to have separate companies when making these decentralized projects, which I think could have some air quotes with net with network tokens. But now we can cut complexity and accelerate development without compromising decentralization.

Rob and I talked about this a bit as far as maybe potentially onshoring some of these to the US as a result of more favorable regulatory clarity. Um but more so just from inefficiency and kind of company bloat perspective. So yeah, man, just curious your take on this when experiencing um working with these different foundations, right? Because you know, from the fund side, you typically invest into the foundations and then the the labs or you know the the labs will spin out the foundation when it's ready to launch the token. Um yeah, man. What's your take here? Is is this the end of the foundation era in crypto?

Is it the end? I think is TBD. Uh, I think one thing that I always try to keep in mind is like we do have four-year administrations in the US and so like to say something is the end is sometimes like very shortsighted because like we don't know what's on the other side. Um, but I do see like a trend towards like this definitely changing from the way it has been. And I think it's a positive change. I probably won't get into the nuance like that Eddie did of like what governance looks like all of these things. So like I'm not a governance expert admittedly. Um, but I do think like foundations create a very difficult uh like incentive model and oftentimes misalignment because you have like this core team and this is the team that we usually meet early on invest in and then when it becomes time for a

token generation event. This team basically has to split uh and it becomes very odd in terms of like who stays on the lab side, who stays in the foundation side, how does compensation work, who is actually doing different roles. It's like it's a just a very difficult thing I think for teams to approach and takes like months to a year to actually like do in full. And so I think like eliminating that whole issue is like in my opinion a definite like improvement. Uh I think there's like tax stuff, there's governance issues, all of these things that need to be sorted out.

And again, like not really my place to say what exactly all that means, but I do think like I want crypto companies to be able to operate like traditional companies. I shouldn't even have to even make this distinction. They should just be companies. And if you have a token, you shouldn't have to do all these weird like, you know, you shouldn't have to jump through these hoops to basically do that. And so, we should be promoting revenue. We should be promoting like people to be able to be have access to that revenue and like invest in tokens that actually mean something. And so, anything that steps in that direction, I'm wholly an advocate of. That's obviously like we're in crypto, so we should be an advocate for that. Um, but I also just don't think, you know, companies should be required to launch a token either. Like if you want to just

maintain just not have a token and maybe go down tokenized equity route, like you can do that as well. There's multiple I think options that we're approaching as things change. Um, and so yeah, I'm a fan of like the general direction this is moving in. Again, I think there's a lot of complexity here and I'm not going to say it's the end of foundations, but I do think foundations as we know it are already changing and will continue to change. And I'm optimistic that like structurally it's going to be a lot easier for entrepreneurs in our space to launch products and like capture value however they want to. You know, Douggee, it seems so obvious like you have to have like you got to have revenue. It's a business, right? And you know, the guest before he was Robinson from Wormhole and and he was talking about

launching revenue like it was a new product, which again seems so obvious, but you know, the counterfactual to this is that sometimes monetizing an environment or an uh ecosystem early on will uh stunt its growth. And if we're trying to build the network effects of a really thriving ecosystem, you know, I it's sometimes too early to turn on that fee switch. And so if you're looking at this kind of from an unbiased third party view, what is your analysis as to when is the right time to turn on the fee switch and launch revenue without stunting the growth of your ecosystem?

Yeah, it's very tough. Uh, I think this goes back to like that classic like Silicon Valley scene where they're like, "Wait, revenue?" Like, you don't want to have revenue. Like, revenue is the worst thing because like now you're no longer selling the dream. Like, you have like data points to point to for like how much your company is worth. And so, it kind of goes back into that. Um, which is a thing that applies beyond just crypto, but I think crypto most notably like has things that sometimes trade at insane multiples that are pretty hard to defend. So, it's like particularly uh viable here. Um, timing wise is tough. I think like ideally I actually would like to see companies approach launching a token from the other direction. Like it's the hyperlquid model where you

launch a token when you have PMF and you have revenue that actually like reinforces the value of the token you're launching. Um, I think like I started seeing price to earnings ratios, all these things like just come to the spotlight once Hyperlid did this. It's very hard to do it the other way around for exactly the reason you're saying. Like if you're a token that is trading at an insane like price to sales ratio or whatever, like and all of a sudden you turn on a fee switch and it's $100 a day, that's going to be very bad for you. And so I hope that like people who are going to launch tokens and have real revenue get revenue first and then launch a token. I think it's a better model. But if you're working backwards, like obviously you may have launched a few years ago and it's hard to like

change the past. Um you should be finding ways to become revenue generative uh and maximize that. I think like I I heard Robinson talking about it like wormholes thinking about it. I think many other teams we already have tokens are as well and so ideally they find ways to make money and then when you turn on the fee switch and that gets like you know reflected in the token price hopefully it's a good thing. Um but if not like I don't know I I'm a believer in revenue uh and like having tokens that are backed by real values. I do always think there will be a speculative premium even in like traditional equities like companies are based on future cash flows not on past cash flows in many ways and so there will always be that element to it and there should be um but I do think

companies should be striving towards like maximizing revenue and now that you know it looks like the regulatory scene is going to actually allow that to happen in crypto finally rightfully so there's more of an emphasis put on it today so it's a good change in my opinion yeah I'm I'm just I'm just wondering like how how much of a priority you know investors are placing on it, right? Like like from your lens when you're getting pitched now for you know different infer deals or application deals. Um, are are teams coming with a direct like is there a stark difference between the way teams are approaching their uh business and tokconomics compared to let's say like a year ago even or or like three years ago I'm sure like I feel like at a time it was kind of like well okay you know

we're going to figure it out right at some point but that that that that you know doesn't fly anymore like what's the what's been the the key you know differentiators that you've seen from founders like like what has been the e uh like okay we're doing it this way but no no no now it's now it's we're very clearly thinking about it differently and and any founders that you think have done a particularly good job of this. Yeah. So I guess touching on Andy's question first, I think, uh, absolutely I've seen a change in how founders pitch their projects. Um, even early stage like we do a lot of precede investing and that's usually like could be years from when actually anyone uses these things. But already I'm seeing like on infra at least like which we do a lot of

like it used to always be like oh we're building this beautiful tech. it's going to be massively, you know, better than anything that exists for XYZ reasons. But like you would never really go into like the why this appeals to builders, why it appeals to users is always just like this is a massive efficiency gain. Of course, it's going to win. Um, now we're actually seeing people talk about the why that's going to win, which is like these builders need this, these users need this, we will provide them with this, there will actually be volume, flow, whatever that looks like in this equation uh on these like protocols. And so that's a big difference that I see early stage like people are actually thinking about their customers right away whereas in the past it seemed like it was like let's build this tech and then think about customers

like way down the road. So I like that people are changing like that approach. Uh and then of course applications wise like that's all anyone talks about now. Like if you're talking to a DeFi protocol everyone's always talking about why people are going to use it and how much order flow they expect to see from where who they're going to take it from. if there's new people coming into the space why they're going to use this application like it's entirely user focused as it should be like if you're if you got pitched Netflix years back and they were not pitching why people would be I guess at the time it was renting videos basically but you know streaming it to come like you'd be like what why are you pitching this to me so it's good that crypto is making that shift to pitching applications the same

way that like applications have been historically pitched um in terms of like people who've done it well it's a good question I think um I mean definitely in the Salana space I think there are a lot of founders who always emphasize like user experience and emphasizing like why people will use this. So I think like looking at why Salana stood out in the last few like years I think it's largely that focus. Um I think I think A's done a great job of it. I think Morpho has done a great job. All of these teams that people just like use all the time religiously. Uh it's because of their focus on user experience. Uh and so there's a lot of good examples honestly out there. It's hard to honestly think of name specific names because I've just seen so many people actually like embrace this which is great. Yeah, it's

kind of crazy that one project can actually, you know, cause this entire marketwide shift. Um, you know, it just seems like like teams that teams are literally shifting so hard towards revenue on the in the early stage side, but also in the those that are in their development cycle already. So, um, y looking forward to seeing it. Last one for you, Douggee. Uh before you go, your your Twitter bio is live free or die, which is uh ironically the uh Yes, sir. official state motto of New Hampshire, which is not really talked about as a crypto hub so much, but uh I'm not sure if you're a resident, but is who are the top minds

in in in the space from the Grant State? Is there anybody that would surprise us? Uh is it is New Hampshire that slept on uh CryptoHub or or just just where you call home, man? Yeah, I'm born and raised in New Hampshire. Very proud. Uh there's no name for New Hampshire people, but New Hampshire, right? I guess is what maybe it would be. Uh and also just like very largely identify with that ethos. Like it's definitely part of what got me into crypto. Like New Hampshire is just a very libertarian state and crypto definitely was founded on libertarian roots, especially like Bitcoin, at least a lot of the same ideologies. Uh so it just like it's two birds, one stone. It's just it's a statement that I love, but also where I'm from. Uh, so just proud to represent New Hampshire because it's a small state

and honestly there's not that many like famous people from New Hampshire outside of like Adam Sandler. Uh, in terms of crypto, I would say that there is not a huge like crypto community in New Hampshire. Hopefully one day there will be. Um, it's definitely mostly Bitcoiners, I would say. And it's because of that like libertarian associations that I was just talking about. Like a lot of people who are from New Hampshire just like are anti-government. uh they're very anti- just like centralization like they it's just like a decentral culture in a lot of ways. Uh so people just love Bitcoin for that reason. There are people that I know uh who are from New Hampshire who are very smart people. I don't know of anyone who's like widely known in our space from New Hampshire. Uh but hopefully at

least one of us can make it big and then like that'll be New Hampshire's claim to fame and maybe we can like bring more people to, you know, leave wherever they're from and come to New Hampshire. Uh but there's not really any major cities. So it's a bit tough to like be there uh because of the lack of that. So um yeah, more to come hopefully for New Hampshire in crypto. Like the roots are there because the foundation ideologically is like so crypto aligned. It's crazy. And a lot of people I know like disproportionately how number people I know from New Hampshire own Bitcoin. So that's a start. At least we're getting there. Yeah. Here we go. It's just a matter of time. You're doing your part. Yeah. I will forever represent New Hampshire. So that's my job. Thanks for joining us, Douggee.

It's It's been a pleasure, man. We'll have to link it in the city and if not, come to Can Man. It should be a blast. It'll be fun. Yes, sir. We'll do. Appreciate it, guys. Great great chatting. All right, buddy. Likewise. Thanks, dog. See you. Peace. Revenue, man. Everybody wants revenue. If you don't have revenue, you're you're out. Going out back. Let's see if Lawrence has some revenue. That's be the first question. Lawrence, where's your revenue? Yeah, we're going to get we're going to get Lawrence unmuted in the meet so we can hear him and then we're going to bring him up on stage as well. Where's your revenue, Lawrence?

Lawrence, man. Good to see you, man. How's it going? Gotta get you. Oh, we'll get you We'll get you going. Hold on. Just give me the He's keep the revenue hostage. There we go. There we go. I'm afraid to tell you all that there is no revenue. the revenue is gonna the revenue is gone. I'm um I'm I'm actually lucky to say that there there is revenue for Wildcat. When we decided to launch the V2, it was like right the P switch goes on come what may and uh like we're currently watching it through DeFi Llama's page. Uh makes me very very happy, truth be told.

Yeah. Wow. So wait, so so you when you were pitching your investors, did you pitch them on revenue? No. No, it was very much that we knew that it was going to happen anyway because if you don't have it on, then you end up with the will they won't they forever, right? So, it it wasn't even a thing that came Hang on. Just got back. No, you're all good. Um, it wasn't even a discussion that came up with investors really. Like normally when people talk about things, it's kind of like the value that's added or like potential like network acrruel of anything that like happens down the line rather than how much are you going to be producing in terms of multiples.

It's It's not really something that came up or at least if it has I've memory wiped it. Interesting. Okay, cool. So, because we just had um a you know early stage uh GP from a from a fund doggy from Figment on and we and we're just talking about how in the landscape now raising like there's been a stark change in the way that builders are approaching VCs, right? And thinking about okay like there's no longer like we'll figure it out type of mentality. It's very much no no like it's here. So yeah, I I think like you can see a bunch of discussions that pop up about uh potential multiples um you know in terms of like what you can what you reckon that you can produce

like where you get where you are at a given stage where you think you can get to but uh by and large I I think there is still so a lot of art and science in kind of projecting that forward especially when it comes to valuations of companies that work in crypto. Um, and I I think the the most honest answer that you can give is, especially if you're fairly early stage like Wildcat is in its current iteration, you you just kind of have to go, well, let's have our scale first. Let's have the revenue stream in place and see where it gets to and then you can kind of work out what like the narrative that you want to tell or the story that, you know, you want to kind of like put forward in terms of like revenue in terms of multiples like comes from that,

right? It's all storytelling at the end of the day. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, kind of zooming out from that, Lawrence, you were just at ETH uh Ireland. I was indeed. Um, and we had a we we had an interesting take here from a a fellow uh builder in the space who who tweeted that Ethereum has lost to Salana on the event side. Uh, no, this is not engagement bait. Um, it's close to rage bait. I'll give you that. So, so what is your take on that? Has Ethereum lost to Salana on the event side? I think it really depends on what you're looking for in an event, right? If you're looking for large venues, uh, kind of glitzy stages, um, and and general like polish, then I would give you that. I've always enjoyed how East

Denver, whilst incredibly well put together, is also you can see that it's put together by kind of, you know, passionate um, amateurs is is the best way to do it. Um, Ether Island is a really good example of something that has real railroad network energy. It's hosted in tunnels underneath the startup lab and it's small, right? like the the maximum capacity for the event is something like 100 150. Whereas if you go to a um a Salana event, it's going to be in some you know um bug [ __ ] sized um like aircraft hanger or like some beautiful kind of expo center in the middle of some you know like passionately uh decorated country. And I think that's fine. I um I've been involved in tech for long enough now that I kind of get to see past the uh

the glitz of it all. And sure, if you're going for BD or networking purposes, then I would probably say that just given the network effects in Salana, then yeah, sure, like as an event, that means it's one. But if you're kind of going for maybe Cippher punk principles or you are looking to um mess around with something quite niche in terms of like an Ethereum um like road map or like you know with uh like cryptography rather than just products, then Ethereum still beats Salana stuff hands down. Now, that's not to say that I would not go to Salana events. I just haven't like had the opportunity to go to something like Breakpoint, but my my stated preference is Sle events. And maybe I look like a fool for that.

No, you have some incredible lore, man. I'll tell you that. Yeah. How how did what is what is the lore around uh around Lawrence? How how did that get started? Um, I think the the most obvious one was when so I previously worked um with another co-founder of mine at Wildcat on a product called index finance which was tokenized ETFs and that was uh attacked by an 18-year-old Canadian after about a year of operation. Uh $16 million was stolen. Now, I think the first kind of bump in visibility was because I'd previously been mostly anonymous before that was that we were the first people to identify a DeFi attacker. Um, so this

was a couple of months before I Eisenberg self-reported Mango Markets. So, you know, that's like but like you know, no one does that for for clout. And that became like a real tearing moment about, you know, uh, do you believe in code is law? Um, you know, the same arguments that Abraham like busted out a couple of months later. And then um shortly after that as a joke um Alicia Catz who was the at the time head of marketing at Oiler had made a joke about how I was the worst trader in history and in response I said that I was going to destroy her protocol and six weeks later um Ola was attacked. So um I you're not claiming responsibility.

I I didn't claim anything. I was having a nap with my at the time 10day old daughter and I wake up to my phone buzzing like it was in an earthquake to um to the uh an image from Haka. You know the guy standing outside the SEC on the phone no idea what happened here. So then I ended up picking up this reputation of every hack that ever happened was somehow my responsibility. Um or like you know I'd had a hand in it. um which has admittedly made for some fairly funny conversations when you actually go about like because obviously I then subsequently went and built Wildcat um with Dylan and a bunch of others and uh yeah the conversations that arise from that are uh entertaining to say the best. They're like ah yes one way to make sure that your protocol is secured

is like to get the world's most notorious crypto hacker and have him build his own thing. That's that's what they say is that uh if you if you can't hack it even if you wanted to then then it must be secure. Many are saying this man runs deep. Part of this lore is that you have this group chat called West Ham. I do have a group. Um we're just curious who decides who joins West Ham. Who are the most surprising people in the group? How do you get kicked out?

It's uh it's me in my glorious role as eternal dictator of the group chat. We we briefly tried um politicizing and creating a committee and decided that everyone was bad at it. Um I'm not going to tell you who's in it. I will tell you that you uh you get kicked out by posting particularly soy takes about Salana. Um it's it's a pretty tough bar and to be fair I have recently been flooding it with a bunch of people from East Dublin. Um I'm very much just everyone like I've got real recency bias in terms of who I add. Um I find it really funny because someone came up to me the other day and they said while I was in Dublin and said um you know who are you? And I explained my background as an engineer and then I mentioned the group chat and they go oh

you're the West Ham guy. And I was like oh that's it. That's my legacy. The shitty group chat like not the years and years of engineering. Oh okay. All right let's talk Wildcat man. Um let's just start with some of the marketing. Um you guys have a very unique vibe on the marketing and comm side. Um is that you're doing or why do you think that's the right type of marketing to attract the users that you guys want? It's it's mostly me on the content and then we have Shizawa on the arts. Um so the you know at present uh beyond the occasional like sponsored post or we're going to be going to X or Y place then it is mostly me in the back. In terms of whether we think that's the correct approach or not, I

would uh not go so far as to say that much thought has gone into it. I just I happen to know crypto Twitter pretty well. I happen to know kind of how that works in terms of like what people respond to. Um we haven't even named the mascot. It's just kind of engaging in a way that's like entertaining. I uh I'm not naturally a PR person or a marketer. It's just well I'm just rolling with it because I keep saying this in conversations recently that crypto has this like really weird information problem where you can build the coolest thing in the world. Um but due to the nature of like how it's deployed and how it spreads if no one knows about it then you might as well have not built it at all. And uh I think this is a real many such cases um thing like I've seen some

amazing stuff that's deployed on chain but just no one's cognizant of the fact that it exists. So you it might as well not be there. And so at least while leaning into kind of this initial wave of wildcat publicity to just kind of in, you know, insert itself into conversations in ways that again like I I know from like learned experience manage to like resonate. But uh I I imagine that down the line I will end up being sanded off and uh you know uh I will not be allowed to kind of post the quasi horny mascot uh doing something about 69 million in TBL. I that I I may lose that gem yet. Oh man, you know what's funny is that on the complete other side of the the spectrum, um we we had Robinson from Wormhole on

today and he was talking about the interest from large funds and institutions in private credit markets and in credit markets on chain. Um and so you guys have built a uniquely uh you know inspired product from what I think was a lot of what people in you know DeFi summer kind of wanted was just this next level of credit expansion with regards to current lending in the space has been pretty much restricted to overcolateralized meaning right you have to have some sort of LTV put up capital to be able to borrow against it. Um but I but I remember thinking back in the day like late 2020 like wow you know if we want to keep this keep this thing going we need more credit and we need you know under cloudalized credit. I

always thought it was a problem of uh KYC problem of on onchain identity. Um but it seems like you guys have solved it with the soulbound uh in this with the soulbound token being in the debt token and then these kind of like weekl long withdrawal cycles. maybe you could just walk us through how a life cycle of a transaction works on Wildcat um and where the demand you're seeing comes from. I will start by saying that you know yeah crypto has needed credit expansion for the longest time and it did um have it in the previous cycle but it was all really opaque and uh like private like no market in the history of the world got nuked as hard percentage- wise than like the crypto credit onchain market. It just got absolutely

devastated. the global financial crisis market did not get like did not take as like as much of a beat down as the one that we did. And so what I'd always wanted to build was a fairly bare metal undercolateralized or unsecured depending on like parameters that you pick market, right? The uh the tinder for private credit where effectively borrowers are making RFQS to say like this is what I'm looking for. I can potentially put up some collateral like you know here are some information to allow you to underwrite. I guess air swap for credit is another one that perhaps doesn't like cause the head to tilt quite so much from people that hear it. But by and large what ends up happening is a borrower that's uh present on wildcat who will like at this stage just look institutional. So a market maker, a fund perhaps a defiation

like it's an entity that you'll at least know or will be able to look up for um gets to create a market parameterized however they want. So you know how much they want uh to borrow, what asset of it, what interest rate they're willing to pay, minimum deposits, whether there's, you know, if it's a revolving or a fixed facility, whether the debt is soulbound, all of these things, right? Which creates this frontier that you can present to the market of everyone, you, me, everyone else, capital allocators in Singapore, family offices, and go, does this work for you? And there are going to be parties that create markets the way for which it does. um maybe those like you know as retail or just allocators that look at say the RV or the oiler rates for USDC and go no I'd like to go a bit further out on the risk

curve. One of the other parameters as you say is you get to pick like how long do I have to honor my requests. So if you're a party like a large market maker you maybe you know you just have a constant engine of an ops team. You're like okay we'll do this in 24 hours. We'll just honor any request in 24 hours. If you're slightly smaller you may say like a week two weeks. Um it's very much an alakart credit facility. like it's very unopinionated about how it handles this. It just treats itself as the settlement mechanism. Like this is where the debt is created. This is how it's transferred. This is where you like receive it, which is great for a whole bunch of operational reasons which I will not spur off about on this call.

But you know, um I think going to your point, you know, I felt the same way in late 2020 when DeFi summer got started and I got really excited about, you know, about your ave whatever. I said I worked as an adviser to Oiler, so I clearly put my money where my mouth is on this front. Um, but in terms of expanding the broad money supply, we need something like Wildcat. Like there is no kind of relative comp to it that exists right now, which is a good thing and also makes it hard to go, well, we're like X because there isn't another X right now. Um, the uh, you know, the private credit golden bull run bro thesis was proven right. Um we are seeing it's about $114 million in capital being extended right now through Wildcat across a couple of borrowers. I

said the names of which you'll know. Um up only from here I suspect kind of you know crypto won like we we we we won. We we got what we wanted in terms of institutional acceptance and adoption. It may not be what everyone wanted and sometimes I go was it what I wanted when I got started but no one gets to say that like allocation and involvement in financial markets is not present anymore and Tradfi's greatest weapon is credit. So it's foolish for us to have not attempted or at least given it a solid attempt to kind of integrate that same mechanic into the same like DeFi engine that we work in all the time now. Hence Wildcat. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the alternative economy was something that I

think a lot of people for foresaw. That vision is turning to reality. We have Bitcoin and stable coins as peer-to-peer electronic cash. We now have peer-to-peer electronic credit as a result of smart contracts being layered on top of these cash primitives. And I I think one thing that you know kind of escaped people for a long while. And just one more question about wildcat's mechanism is is liquid liquidations because overcolateralized you know that the cash is there you put it in a smart contract you can take it how does wildcat's liquidation mechanism work since these loans are under collateralized so there isn't a liquidation mechanism as such right mostly because when you're dealing with

like if you're looking at something like um uh one of these platforms like oiler then generally it's going to be one you're depositing one asset you're borrowing another right so like your oracles are involved of that's generally where the liquidation comes from, especially as it relates to LTVs. Wildcat at present in the form that you look at today, um, everyone is opting mostly for completely unsecured lending. Um, you can change other parameters that like increases the capital reserve ratio, but for the most part, everyone's like, well, that tweaks my effective APR. So, I'm just going to basically allow myself to in the market that I set up borrow every single dollar that I have and there's nothing sitting there backing it. Now there is going to like that there is explicit legal agreements that you can tie to these but even if not it's not as if a court will not

impose an agreement in the event of default anyway and Wildcat goes to great lengths in the terms of use to specify this is explicit credit. You don't get to make any coders law arguments here. It says what a default is. It's one of the reasons why we focus on the institutions instead because it's a lot harder for like an institution to just disappear into the phantom zone. Now, with that said, we're about to introduce a feature which allows for arbitrary collateralization. So, if you have a market where you're borrowing, say USDC, you'll be able to back it with, you know, zero to 400 5,000% of say a Stargate wrapped ether, Coinbase wrapped Bitcoin, Trump win if you wanted to, like anything that hasn't chain market.

Um, and that is going to be really interesting because I think what you find with uh people that are borrowing on platforms like Ave and Oiler and Morpho is if they're doing so for like realizing liquidity, they do always have that liquidation risk that's in like related to price, right? They uh they they post a bunch of coinbased wrapped bitcoin, someone posts some like dumb tweet talking about releasing home equity uh in order to release to buy some Bitcoin at a 9% rate and everyone like panic sells. Lo and behold, you're liquidated, right? If we do this through Wildcat, then the liquidation vector becomes time rather than price. So you again, you specify how long you have to honor that call, right? And so like the liquidation mechanism is very implicit

because it's not as if there's anything necessarily sitting there to be liquidated. You do end up finding yourself like in any case where someone has actually just stiffed you on the loan, you do have to resort to a legal system. But let's be honest at this point. I said crypto won, but so did the legal systems that like govern this stuff. It's not as if there are courts that aren't looking at digital asset default cases and going, "Well, this is out of our jurisdiction." And to a degree, that is kind of how it has to be. It's already present on the lender side

where if you're as a borrower you want to have like only KYC lenders you could specify a policy that said you know something to assess to on chain. I think the silly example I give is you can only lend to a particular market if you have a mad in your wallet, right? That you could extend that very easily to something like a ZK pass or some kind of proof or identity like token that's sitting in your wallet. On the borrower side, I think it's a lot further out on the risk curve to have someone who is seeking to borrow 10K in order to kind of finance a car a car payment or or a mortgage down payment. Um, that's not to say that there wouldn't be people that are, you know, willing to do that, but I'm also very security conscious. And I think that, you know, at least for the

borrowers that are there, like they're able to put forward their legal like full name of identity, like their address of their like institution. It's a lot riskier if you're basically saying, "Hey, you can use Wildcat as a person. Where's your address? We're posting it publicly." Um, I would pay a lot more than I could borrow on Wildcat for my address to not be put out there tied to my tied to the addresses that I want. Um there are mechanisms that we're thinking about for this um that are a bit more privacy preserving or kind of vaultified or pulled, but it's going to be a little while down the line before we get there. Lawrence. Oh yeah, go ahead Andy.

I just have one more. A large part of it is just a function of time um and awareness, right? I think uh the the demand from borrowers, you know, institutional borrowers who are looking to access capital that is easy to kind of get to regardless of rate is effectively infinite. Um even in the presence of real interest rates, right? If you're a fund that's able to turn around 30% on your stables, then basically borrowing as much as you can up to 20 provided that you can give enough information for people to underwrite, your bid is infinite. And so we're already speaking to a bunch of like beyond the ones that are already present on the Wildcat

platform, a bunch of names that you know and recognize who are sitting there like kind of, you know, scoring us internally, just like making sense of the protocol and how it works that are eventually going to burst out and start asking for amounts as well. And again, like based on the names, it is going to be a very easy sell for like come six months from now, Wildcat is going to be the place where everyone like or at least the name everyone refers to when you talk about private credit on chain. That's also not to say that again like to looping back to how crypto won like all of these capital allocators that are sitting in places that kind of didn't typically get involved in crypto but now finally have like they've got a little bit of stable coin exposure. Um there's a weird whisper network that's kind of

taking place amongst the borrowers that exist or lenders that are already there going well this is working for us you know have you considered deploying capital there as well and so you know every everyone goes you know what do you think the uh the max cap of this I'm like the max cap of like credit as a whole is sitting in the trillions and I I think you know to name something like that is just like pure San Franciscan like VC rot I think I certainly think you're talking in like in the scale of billions I also think it's not going to just be Wildcat that's going to be playing in this pool in the next couple of months and years. This is far too valuable a market and far too valuable or primitive to leave completely untraled just for us to have by ourselves. But again, like as the scars

of the previous cycle start to heal and everyone goes on chain credit was still important, it never did it never stopped being important, but we just got damaged so badly. Everyone will be coming back. The entities that were borrowing in the past, the deployers that were there again, it's time and it's just name recognition. it will eventually not just be me doing the G2 GTM um you know we're we're expanding on that front as we as we speak and um you know it's it's time to go to Tradfi and tell them to start putting their money in our in our alternative economy.

Yeah. And that that's happening right before our eyes and you guys are leading the charge. So it's incredibly impressive to see. Uh I think that's about all the time we have. Lawrence, thank you so much for coming on. It was an absolute pleasure and uh I'd love to pick this up another time as Wildcat continues to proliferate. Yeah, absolutely love to as well. Thank you very much. Cheers. See you next time. Thanks, Lawrence. Thank you very much. Cheers everyone. Thank Bye. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, peer-to-peer

is the name of the game. Electronic is the name of the game. We're innovating on a system that has been around for thousands of years and hasn't really changed in hundreds of years. So, I think again, peer-to-p peer cash, electronic cash, peer-to-peer electronic credit is where we're headed and and that's happening right before our eyes. We host these teams and founders that are building it. Um, and uh, it's a it's a pleasure learning from them and broadcasting that knowledge right back to you guys. Do you remember the price of Bitcoin when we started, Rob?

I don't, but we we didn't say higher or lower today. 106. All right. Well, guys, thank thanks for joining us, Rob. Great stream. Good, good. Yeah, good guess, good topics, and uh we'll see you guys later in the week. Let's do it. Thanks, guys.