The Rollup TV: Tuesday, May 20th 🦣

Transcript

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GM GM Robbie's no longer in the city. Robbie had a uh three-day stint here and he he's burned out. I uh I did have a three-day stint. You know, the noise of the city to the signal and connectiveness connectivity to uh the external world just really feels like there's a frequency in the air. Don't get me wrong, there's a frequency with the people in New York. We attended a ton of great events. We did our event, Andy, our event co-hosted by Magic at the office. Phenomenal. So much fun. So much fun. We had so many familiar faces, so many friends, tons of new friends, and it was the first time

that we hosted a real event. Um, really on our own. We had a great co-host in Magic, but that was uh our breakthrough into the event space, followed up by Research Day, followed up by Mammoth New York City. The vibes were immaculate. We're tuned into the frequency in the mix, shaking hands, having drinks, having fun. I think you were the only one that had any espresso martinis. Those aren't really my my stickick, man. But uh you know, I'm I'm glad you got to enjoy that. I think it's a New York staple from uh from what I had seen looking around. People were they were flowing. They were What were you What were you drinking up there? You had Moscow mule, vodka soda, a bunch of water, or orange juice, and more. So, man, we got some cool guests today.

We've got um Zack Chainlink god of chain link. I've been following his content for a long time. Fortunately, we had Tom Dunleia of Varys Capital unfortunately reschedule. That's all right. And then we've also got Cedo who runs Emotion at Initia. We spent some time with Zan last week. That was fun as well. Um so looking forward to that. Welcome back guys to the show The Rollup TV on the frontier uh of all things tech, AI, finance, crypto, and more. Um, yeah, third week in the books here on the stream. So, it's going to be a good one.

We'll dive right into some of the topics. There's been a lot happening in the last even like 24 hours. Finding it that it's funny to even set up these run of shows because literally just last night there was more things that happened. So, um, why don't we jump right into to the first topic, man. Circle in informal talks to sell for 9 billion or more to Ripple. I I thought it was fake when it first came out. Well, the Ripple thing is is pretty funny because everyone thinks Ripple's dead. They don't ship. Where have they been? They've just been getting sued to an oblivion. Look, the fact that Circle is selling doesn't come as much of a surprise. I think the front leader and and still a co- co-front leader to

acquire Circle with Ripple is Coinbase. So, I I I thought Coinbase was fighting Ripple for the bid here. Basically, I think they are. I think they are. They're not going to acquire them together. I think these are the two leaders in the race to acquire Circle. Coin Coinbase is a significant partner. Circle has been operating almost as a sister company to to Coinbase for such a long time. Coinbase helps prioritize USDC among Coinbase customers. So, it really seemed like a no-brainer that when Circle announced their IPO, that sort of turned some heads because it always seemed like C Circle was going to get acquired by Coinbase, which still could happen. I think Ripple is the

darkhorse uh in this acquisition. Ultimately, this has implications for the stable coin market, regulatory considerations as well. What does this mean for USDC holders and the crypto market as a whole? What What's your take here, Andy? Well, okay. So, obviously our fund invested in Plasma, the kind of Tether chain, right? I don't know if they call themselves that. I think there's other kind of tether chains. But to me, I think that Circle kind of realizes that their moat is up on stable coins. Um I think they even with the genius bill uh passing the closure voting yesterday, which effectively means it's going to make it to the Senate. I think it was like 63 to 20 votes positively which was a turnaround

from the Democratic party was kind of originally against this. Uh shout out to Sam from Fracks for uh being in in the mix shaking hands and making stuff happen there. Uh as as far as implications for the stable coin market goes, you know, honestly I just wouldn't I don't want to see this go to Ripple. Um that's my take. I just think that'd be a terrible thing for the entire space. Um if Coinbase acquires them, it's almost one and the same in my view. I I just think that uh Tether is a runaway train right now and Circle is kind of on the on the hook for uh distribution, right? They they have Coinbase obviously they've got Coinbase wallet uh within but but Circle itself is on the hook for distribution when it

comes to companies like Stripe, like PayPal, like Bank America, like like even like um Facebook and Meta. So, you know what? I think that that that there's going to be a bit of a shakeup here, but again, my my thesis is just that Tether's dominating and this is kind of a sign of weakness for Circle. Um, and that I think that we'll cons we'll continue to see Tether grow at a much faster rate than Circle. I if you look at the numbers, last time I saw Tether is I think the eighth if you classify them along with the other Goliath, they're one of the top 10 banks in the world. Yeah, they just passed Germany in US Treasury holdings. They're like they just passed them. I think I I think you're right. I think they were

maybe the eighth biggest holder of US treasuries. Circle is not even in the same playing. They're not even in the same same world when it comes to the assets under management that Tether has. Also, Tether is monetizing the entirety of their balance sheet. Circle is only doing a fraction. And so, yes, Circle may be making millions of dollars on their deposits with USDC. Tether's making on an order of magnitude larger revenue and and therefore profits as a result. And so one thing that Circle had going for it uh over and beyond Tether was it had a regulatory moat in the United States due to this almost favored uh perception by US regulator regulator

regulators. Tether was classified as kind of sketchy because it originated from Bitfinex. It was always the eastern hemisphere stable coin. Circle and USDC was the golden child of the western hemisphere and the US regulated it as such. That regulatory moat is no longer USDC and circle lost the bid to Howard Lutnik's past Cantor Fitzgerald. 21 Capital is co-leading this massive Bitcoin investment with Tether uh and Jack Morers from Strike. These are they that was Circle's deal to lose. And to see Tether come in and partner with these Western Hemisphere giants

effectively means that Circle lost its regulatory moat. It no longer has an edge in the stable coin game. And I think uh Tether is a runaway train. I think that's the correct analysis. This train only goes in one direction. Speaking of that, we've seen some really interesting macro economic um kind of uh moves in the last 24 to 48 hours. So, part of the stable coin thesis is expanding the the USD's dominance globally. Um and I think that's going to be a very important part of the stable coin thesis, but part of that comes at the potential expense of other uh other nations fiscal and monetary policy situations. And right

now in Japan, we're seeing some really really interesting dynamics here where um their their bond yields are increasing at such a rate that is extremely rare for the Japanese economy. And so, you know, for for basically like what this means is that um Japan has been running at a very low interest rate um you know, low inflation environment for a while, but I think that's flipping on its head where the inflation is starting to pick up, the bond yields are starting to pick up, and you know, the their prime prime minister um made a stark comparison to the recent Greek debt crisis, saying that it's something similar. So I know Arthur

Hayes when he's came on our show he's talked a lot about yield curve control u and that's been something that Japan has effectively consistently done as you can see they will always keep the the USD JPY ratio uh somewhere above that 140 or in that range but I think things are starting to kind of spin out a bit here. So look man I just see this and I'm just like more and more reasoning to buy Bitcoin. like it's just so obvious to me that this is just a bullish Bitcoin um scenario and that that the fiat experiment is is unraveling slightly uh in Japan. And look, I think that I think they'll be they're going to be fine, but it's just it's just crazy to see that in

a matter of days just explode as they have. What we're seeing in Japan is not uncommon. Japan's financial minister did allude to Greece. Other countries have faced this as well in Argentina. This is the debt death curve, the debt death spiral, excuse me. And and I mean every crypton native DGEN saw this in Teraluna. And I'm not going to draw comparisons between Japan's fiat currency and and the USD native stable coin in Teraluna, but this is what happens. Ray Dallio is calling for this.

And it's basically a look at the situation as it unfolds in America and globally. And that is where we have interest rates that are high because people are worried that the US and countries globally are going to default on its debt. And so yes, you look at the national debt and you're look you're looking at upwards of 35 36 trillion. That is a large principle of debt and that would be okay if you know debt uh interest rates were manageable. you know, we've accumulated all of this, but also debt is a tool. It's a technology that we can use for leverage. And because America has so many assets on its books, I mean, America is the the

third large American government is the third largest uh land owner of America. You you accumulate all of uh the the in aggregate the value of all the land, all the gold, all of the all of the monetary assets on the balance sheet of America and it's significant. It's probably more than 36 trillion. I think they're they're working to put a number on it. And so it's not necessarily a bad thing that we have all of this debt. The scary thing here is the interest rates on this debt. And so right now 10-year treasuries are upwards of four or 5%. Uh 30-year treasuries are starting to kiss 5%. This means that we're starting to pay this much much

interest on that national debt. The interest that we pay on national debt is now 6% of GDP. We're also at a deficit of 3% of GDP. This is an unsustainable trajectory because at a certain point we're going to be spending and printing more than we're producing on a given year annual basis. And so what happens here is as debt increases and interest rates increase, it starts to eat up more and more of the money that we produce goes to financing the debt that exists. As that happens, the consumers of US debt become even more worried that we're going to default on our payments. This

is why Moody's just downgraded US credit to like a double A instead of a AAA. And so what happens here is that uh sentiment worsens. People think that the US debt is no longer good. We're going to default on the debt. It's probably not going to happen. I'll explain why. But this is the spiral that tends to take place as interest rates go up and debt becomes more and more uh a percentage of our GDP and what we produce. It means more is going to interest and it means that interest rate continues to go up and it spirals and feedback loops one after the other and causes uh uh even more of a interest rate increase in the treasury markets which causes us to pay even more

interest on this massive debt. Now, the reason that uh that that is the reason Moody's downgraded US debt, the reason why that is basically nonsense and the US credit rating is a special case is because it's almost impossible for the US to default on its debt. And here's why. The US controls the money printer. And so, if you're a consumer of US debt and you're thinking to yourself, well, is the US going to default on its debt? Is it going to pay the interest on these bonds even if treasury rates are seven eight nine percent and interest is nine 10% of GDP? Of course the US is going to pay its obligations because it controls the money printer. It can print its way

out of these situations. And so this is the reality is that look we may have a a debt crisis in the US but we have the solution. The solution is the money printer. And so we can always print our way out of these situations. We can either let these things get really bad really quickly and default or we can print our way out. And Andy, you you had a great screenshot of a great Ansom tweet the other day, which is basically, look, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. We can inflate the currency extremely quickly and enter some sort of hyperinflation, or we can do it gradually over time. It's really just a matter of how we want to go about doing this. And so when we look at fiat systems, this is the inevitable reality

of hyperinflation slowly. I'm glad we have our I'm glad we have our our local macro analyst in the building. That was uh that was that was impressive, man. There are solutions that the administration is working on to get this under control. But ultimately, this is the one monetary lever that every administration has in its power to to pull or to not pull. Well, I I object to to all the money printing simply by holding a majority of my net worth in crypto and will continue to do so. Um, and I I think that that there's going to be more of these situations globally. help. On a more lighter heart note, did you know that

human gene editing is now a thing? Um, this is something that has exploded since I guess a couple years back. Um, I don't know how or what this has really came about or what the moral or ethical dilemmas are, but I'm kind of wondering like if I can just have my my genes edited in real time through some sort of like is this going to be like a rich person thing? Um, you know, like there there there's a real human trial here of of gene editing. Uh, what's your what's your take here?

Look, man. I I'm bullish on uh experimentation. I think in this situation, um there was a teenager with a rare immune disorder. Um and he decided of his own free will to have his genes edited to remove these stem cells uh and correct his missing DNA and re-implant the cells after chemotherapy. Now, 66% of his function has returned normally with no major side effects for now. This is a first ever in the world for sure.

Absolutely. It's the first ever successful trial here. I think crisper has been used before, but it's very controversial. And I if you look at this, my I tend towards this philosophy, which is that you can't argue with the outcome. Like, you know, I I used to have a basketball coach that said, "Look, if you're not going to do it my way, it better work." And you can quibble about whether or not this is moral or immoral. the ethics around this. But ultimately, if this I if if this patient had his genes corrected and he avoids some long and and distraught chemotherapy process or or succumbing to his disease, you can't argue with the

outcome and and I think it must authoritative uh you know view of of the world. I I think the key thing here is that the patient decided to do this of his own free will. I think the authoritative view would be forcing people with a particular disease to follow this line of treatment or forcing anyone not to follow this line of treatment. The purpose of technology and free will is that we have options available. I think maybe this is where our libertarian cryptonative ideologies could come out where ultimately our job is to provide people options. It is their job to freely decide whether to take these options or not. Yeah. I mean, look, we had that we had Jan from Open Mind on

last week and he was talking about, you know, transhuman and whatnot. This just feels eerily close to moving towards a world where there's a intersection of of AI and humans. Like it just feels like we're just going to move closer and closer to where robotics and humans are coming into the same same picture. you know, we'll we'll have AI or some sort of like editing program that allows us to uh implement some sort of like, you know, things like Neurolink and things like like these uh very high performance technologies into human DNA. Um which, you know, you think about how evolution actually works, it really makes you makes you wonder what somebody like Darwin would think about um human gene

editing in the real world today. So, uh, you know, I I'm quite cautious with these types of things. It's a great thought experiment. So, let me ask you, you sound a little bit, um, apprehensive around this sort of technology. I if we had the opportunity to, um, you know, edit our genes and maybe make it, you know, we could jump another six inches, we could, you know, bench press another 100 pounds. Are you are you taking that opportunity? Am I taking opportunity to jump higher and bench press more? Maybe in when I was on a basketball team in high school. Uh the question becomes what is the what is like the side effects or the potential negative

outcomes of this? Um and I just feel like sure everything went well for this person uh in this trial, but what about a year from now or two years from now or five years from now in a you know I I I I think that is the the right question to ask, right? Right? It's a procon analysis. You look at the pros. You say, "Look, I can I can do this. I can be faster. I can think smarter. I can jump higher. I can do all these things. What are the negative side effects?" I think that's the right question to ask. I I I also think, you know, we see these GLP1s and these another example of the technology where, you know, I can choose not to be hungry, right? And if I'm an overweight person that struggles with

that, I can choose uh to Yeah. You could also just take the Olympic shot right up your butt. you know, it's not much different. That is the GLP1. There's Zmpic. There's Waggavei that right. So, at a certain point, you're editing your hunger just like you could edit your DNA. How much of this is innate to our human nature? I think Darwin would definitely have some things to say about this, but ultimately these these inventions are man-made, right? And so is it our natural selective process to create these things that can continue our ability to survive as a human race? Maybe that is part of natural selection. We got to get Brian Johnson on the on the show. Anyway,

moving towards uh exchange as a service war. So basically what's happening here is uh traditional finance is starting to embrace crypto rails which is really really really bullish. Um, Coinbase is partnering with Weeble, cracking with Bunk. Um, and and it just feels like mainstream adoption is happening through these established financial platforms, crossing the chasm for retail investors. Um, you know, there's like this new there's this new meta happening of NEO banks where um, you know, the these people are coming out and they're no longer uh, you know, purely chasing users. Exchanges are are trying to basically off offer crypto access at scale. um and they're trying to

basically verticalize their entire stack. So we we kind of see this exchange as a service where moving from just trading and just onboard users having you know trading custody stable coins on and off ramps um you know other sort of like even like AI influenced services. So uh you know then think about L2s Kraken Inc. uh Coinbase base. Also, Kraken just announced their token, the Krakcoin. I don't know if you saw that. Um, so I mean, to me, it just feels like more and more of these exchanges are are basically fighting over new users, but also net new institutions and trying to figure out where that where that kind of line in

the sand is going to be for, you know, how do we how do we step into this new world. Well, look, exchange exchange as a service wars is nothing really new in crypto per se. You know, I think we've seen decentralized exchange wars happen for a while. Enis swap was then, you know, vampire attack by sushi swap was then, you know, attacked by different dex designs. Andre Cron's B33 designs. Then the same thing has happened with centralized exchanges, right? We had we had base for Coinbase as I mentioned. Then we had Krakens Inc. then we had the then we had the uh stable coins, right?

some of these exchanges may launch their own stable coins. Now we have custody and now we have these kind of institutional partnership um uh kind of uh wars. So look man, a lot happening on this on the on the front of crypto adoption and um pretty pretty interesting to see who of these exchanges last and who will the biggest my bet is still going to be in obviously uh that's where a lot of my stock holdings are but I mean Kraken's an OG and and uh you know IBIT and some of these others are are also huge obviously Binance as as well but it does kind of seem like Kraken and Coinbase are playing in the more institutional regulated game than the B bits, Binancees, cryptocoms of the world. But

at the same time, they are all making progress in that direction as as well. So, um, yeah, man. I mean, look, yeah, we're we're we're doing the show from from the west, right? And absolutely, Bybit, OKX might, you know, be running the same playbook and and starting to form these institutional relationships in the east. He here's why I think exchanges as a service are a fascinating concept uh happening in the banking space because ultimately these are neo banks. The whole thing about going bankless was never really the answer.

Self-custody has some problems. It's really about creating a better bank, one that is more peer-to-peer and is structured in such a way that's not predatory to its customers. And and so this is what's happening here. ultimately a deregulation is free markets and you may fall on you know free market side and I think it's interesting to think about why the Democrats are now taking the side of free markets as an opposition to tariffs uh and uh that that is something that we could talk more about. And so if we look here at what is happening in in the exchange space right now you're seeing crypto exchanges partner with with brokerages and stock exchanges.

Ultimately, we're we do see exchanges and banks, it's a slippery slope and these cascade onto one another. And so what what deregulation creates is a lowering of barriers to enter the market and it also separates these moes. So you know Coinbase, Robin Hood, JP Morgan, TDmirit Trade, they had massive moes because they had done the regulatory work and compliance work and spent the resources to create this moat around them and basically put up the walls behind them so that no one else could enter. Deregulation allows these banks and these existing players to capitalize more on their opportunity and their

current position as an incumbent, but it also lowers the barrier of entry and allows new players into the market. And so what this creates is this dynamic where yes, the incumbents see more opportunities, but also there's new players that enter the market. And this is where innovation can really thrive. And I think this is true to the rollup TV because ultimately we're at the frontier of innovation here. And we're seeing multiple companies and multiple ideas push from different angles. And I think ultimately as a technologist and someone who wants to see innovation and experimentation, this is what gets you really excited because you can see Coinbase push from their end. You can see Robin Hood

exploit and capitalize on their edge just like Uniswap and Sushi Swap are capitalizing on their edges. you see these players start to move into a particular domain from different edges in the market and I think as deregulation continues to happen we're going to see this more and more and the best of the best are going to win out and that's that's the opportunity here of free markets and so without getting too caught up on whether free markets are a leftist idea or a rightist idea I think ultimately we can argue for the sake of capitalism and free markets and and may the best company win yeah I mean We're we're going to see um we're we're we're going to see some of the best companies in the world end up

uh trans transitioning into uh these these verticalized suites especially when it comes to crypto. I think so. And this gets back to a a segment that we had during the last week, which was, you know, is it does it make more sense for Solana to acquire Robin Hood or Robin Hood to acquire Solana? As these players start to get deeper and deeper into these new domains, they're either going to merge and acquire with existing players or they're going to build it out themselves. And I think again this just goes back to crypto coming out of the echo chamber and breaking into the new chasm, which is to say that it's important now more so than ever for crypto companies and cryptos and

companies in our space to start driving real revenue, talk to real customers because this is the coming out moment. If you're going to get acquired or you're going to exit to a greater company or you're gonna collab on some major institutionalsized deal, this is now the time and it's going to take changing our vernacular, changing the language that we have with businesses so that we integrate more with the the existing incumbents of the world that are already at scale. Yeah, I mean I think um I think the funny thing about this exchange as a service wars is just all the growth of Hyperlid recently. Um and I think we'll talk about it pretty soon. Um I think up next we have Cedo from Anisha as part of

Mammoth May. Nisha has been building on Mammoth May on Celestia for a while. Um but just kind of close the loop here on Exchange as a service wars. You know, I think that there's there's a reason to that um that Coinbase is trying to acquire Circle. There's a reason that um you know, that Coinbase space Kraken has it's this very clear uh path to okay, how do we own everything from when the user first comes into the space to if they decide to go all the way deep down on chain, how do we own that entire stack? like that user has some sort of like LTV like some sort of lifetime value for that company. Um you know right like they

come into Coinbase to make an account they uh you know they use the sequencer on base they pay fees they m NFT that goes back to the Coinbase things they do they offramp via Coinbase like these like full verticalized stack um idea which I think Hyperlid is is doing quite well. Um, and so, you know, I think that that there's going to be more of a push towards uh, Hyperlquid and what they're doing. Um, but we're going to talk about that in a few. I think I think up next we've got CEDO from Anisha. Um, we're going to be talking about uh, well, it's Mammoth May, right? So, uh, we're going to be talking about their mainet, some of the tips to be successful, what's

going on on Initia recently. I hung out with ZH last week in New York City uh at Mammo NYC and research day. Um so it' be good to kind of get the gist there. Um Cedto describes himself as motion at Initia, whatever the hell that means. About to find out probably to find out. Um so why don't we do that? Welcome Cedto. What's the motion? Hey, how's it going guys? What's up man? Yeah the the the motion I think motion. How you doing? Good to see you live. Welcome to the rollup TV. Uh, let's go. Go ahead and uh unmute there. Yeah, we can hear you now. There we go. Welcome. There we go. How's it going, guys? Good, man. Looks like you calling in from your mansion. Uh, yeah, a little empty room. This is a little

little office at the parents house. Not at the mansion level just yet. Where are you calling from? Uh, Maryland. All right. Nice. Nice. Little small town in Maryland. You didn't want to come up to the city? I'll be back there soon. I'll be back there in a few weeks. We got some we got some stuff cooking up with some some teams in the ecosystem there as well. So that'll be really fun. We missed you at the rollup TV launch party in New York. We saw ZH so initia was well represented. But tell us a little bit about the ecosystem post mainet launch. Congrats first off. Yeah, I mean appreciate it. I definitely won't take all of the credit. I I joined kind of after all of the hard work was done, but

the last few weeks have been super amazing. I think um Initia is pretty unique in the fact that the mechanisms in place around incentives and uh VIP and all the different apps that you're able to try on day one. Um there were some there were a few kinks in the interop um kind of like bridging and the UX there, but uh we've kind of worked those out and we're upgrading a lot of the things that are happening there. And yeah, it's been super fun. Um some projects have already like sold out um really high ticket NFTts with Kamagotchi and their uh Yamet gaming chain. Um, Echelon, which is a movebased money

market, has their roll up uh, live and they've already have like around 30 mil in in TVL. Um, so yeah, things are things are going really really good. Um, I think almost 95% of the airdrop was claimed. So, um, users are generally happy and, uh, yeah, things are moving along. Nice. Yeah, I mean I was talking to Zan and he mentioned just kind of the uh a bit of a consolidation pro uh process with focus on the quality there uh in terms of different things and so I'm just kind of curious what you guys think has been your kind of like what's your star of your metrics for success post mainet right because a lot of teams

deal with all right you know got the mo the maximum amount of hype pre-t everyone's so excited Kaido leaderboards airdrop farmers, everything else in between, you know, and then mainet comes in and sometimes it can feel like like all this work and then just kind of quiet again. Um, so you know, I'm just curious what your perception is and perspective around how to have a successful post-launch, right? like like what that has has meant for you guys and kind of what metrics, numbers, stats that you guys are really trying to optimize for as you go to scale post launch here in the coming months. Yeah.

So, um me specifically, I focus on the ecosystem and the growth there. Um and so I think Inisha is easily described as like an L1 for the multi-chain future for app chains. Um, and for me, I think the determination of success is around the success of the applications. We want to see an application get closer and closer to PMF and really find that user growth and then also retain all of that value. What you'll see a lot of ecosystems do post mainet is they're is they're highlighting the applications.

They're highlighting the growth of the applications in their ecosystem. But I think another important metric that is like tough to measure and highlight is that retention element. Like you said, a lot of people are leaving an ecosystem after an airdrop. Um so what you want to see amongst the apps is that user retention. Um and luckily it's it's a lot easier to track with games. Um uh TVL is is sticky, but as you can tell like in other ecosystems it can be very mercenary. Um, but with games, you can really see users and the consistent activity that they're they're doing. And so, um, we've really seen that with, uh, Kamagotchi and, um, their Yamet chain.

Um, like I said, they sold out their their NFTts and now they have these guilds and these users, uh, uh, playing the game to earn. Um, and yeah, it's been really interesting to to track that. like there are people on our team that are pretty addicted um of playing the game and and not doing as much work. Um but that is a that's a really good sign for us to see in the ecosystem. So helping applications do more of that is is really what we want to see and yummy with uh Kamagotchi their chain is named Yamet. Um they actually are retaining that value as well. So like as an

application on a general purpose chain um you know you usually sign up to get that extra distribution that an L1 brings you. Um and I our belief is that is not worth it for uh chains when they're giving up the transaction fees. They're giving up a bunch of different things when they're kind of doing things on an L1 and not owning their stack vertically. And you you're seeing it happening with a bunch of other ecosystems. Most of the successful applications are doing everything they can to like vertically integrate their infrastructure and own that entire stack. They don't want to leak the revenue to like a random general purpose chain. So, Yaminet has earned Kamagotchi in the last couple weeks uh like mid

five figures um in fees. So, when you're a team that's, you know, building something, you're you're, you know, maybe you didn't raise like a 1020 million round. Um, you th those fees, those rewards are uh valuable for the longevity of your application. Um, and so I think that's super awesome to see. Definitely. So when you guys are thinking about these these applications, it's got to be like this very mutually beneficial, you know, relationship and kind of symbiotic setup where you have this base layer that is meant for all these different applications as their own chains and then effectively being able to produce and share value with a focus on

retention as you mentioned um uh with the VIP program. and and so you kind of get this this ecosystem where uh people want to stay, they want to stick, and same with users. And so I think that you're spot on for thinking that retention is is going to be like the main thing to optimize for because I I do just feel like, you know, there's a lot of learnings from from the airrop. I mean, I'm curious like what you yours are, right? Because people do come, they do follow and then they go. anything that you guys wish you would have done differently or any key learnings from the initial airdrop?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, I'd say some of the things that I think are the most important um around that time because it can be like super hectic, right? Like ultimately you can't please everyone. Um, and there are communities that are just blatantly extractive. the the benefit that we have is like our uh incentive mechanism. You you can basically advertise, hey, come come kind of be try and be that mercenary capital. Try and be extractive. Our incentive mechanisms with VIP make it so you're almost forced to be a genuine user and forced to kind of have a longer time frame through the

like escro in it um that's built into VIP. Um, so we add it a little bit easier. I'd say like the the number one thing is definitely just communication. I mean, it's a bit cliche, but just being as clear as you can and communicating every every element of the airdrop um and and proving it, I think, is probably the the biggest lesson for for anyone thinking about um that for their future. Yep. you know, you mentioned uh app revenue, retention, and just generally communication, making sure that the these apps have product market fit. That's ultimately how an L1 and a blockchain achieve success being motion at Initia. I I've thought about this concept of monetary

velocity and almost chains are almost like their own like little siloed economies. And normally the health of an economy isn't, you know, just stockpiling cash, right? It's all about people transacting back and forth. And the more times that a a dollar changes hands in a given set of time, it's like this frequency of transactions increases. There's a lot of monetary activity, a lot of commerce that's happening on a particular chain or economy. So what are some lessons that you've learned about motion at Initia doing this kind of sparking more and more motion amongst these apps with the chain doing transactions back and forth among users? How do you stimulate

economic motion at Initia? Yeah. So that's a great example. That's actually a metaphor that we use the uh to to kind of describe VIP. So, like when you're thinking about L1's as these small cities with economies, uh you you can't just, you know, like typically L1's have these foundations set up and, you know, uh if you and I um are friends and I'm building an app on your L1, you know, uh a few conversations lead to me getting the grant. Um at Initia the with VIP and with gauge voting, it's all like meritocracy based. So we have 25% of the uh token allocation dedicated to

rewarding uh two rollups. Um and the roll-ups kind of decide which action they are rewarding. So if you're thinking about it like a city, you want to be rewarding the person like you like you said that is spending money at the local shop, that is helping pave the roads, that is like contributing to the city over a long time frame. What you see with other ecosystems is um they're not just incentivizing actual economic activity. They're just incentivizing um like things like stagnant liquidity.

Um and that you can kind of see kills the the growth and it shortens people's mind frame when they're participating in that city and their timeline to multi-week, multimonth. Um with with VIP um you're forced to think on basically a year time frame. Um and you have to continue that activity to unlock your escro in it that you're being rewarded. So if you're a gamer, you would obviously vote for Kamagotchi to have more allocation of the epoch reward. And as you game, you earn. But if you stop gaming, your VIP score diminishes and you lose a bit of the rewards that you would have gotten unlocked at a later

period in time. So anyone that's participating now is already embedding a year-long timeline in their mind. And I think that is a really unique uh differentiator. And so we have like a few other uh applications that are kind of joining this city, joining this economy. Um if you think of VIP with the gauge voting like curve um there is basically a bribe market coming um called cabal. They will be launching super soon. Um and what that will allow is people that don't really want to deal with understanding um some of the mechanisms um but want to earn and be aligned to be able to do that. Um so

it's kind of like the convex curve. Cabal is going to be that incentive layer and bribe market for the ecosystem. So that'll be really cool to see how maybe like the short termminded person um participates in the ecosystem because uh attracting that user base is also important as well. Yeah. Yeah. We did a pretty wild podcast with Cabal in Denver and um the the founder had this crazy hood on it. It was it was pretty intense.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's going on there, but that's going to be exciting to see. I think that's indicative of the vibes on Inisha. Like everything's very Well, it's kind of like magician and like very I mean it's focused on fun, but it almost reminds me of like a Pokemon vibe or like an anime vibe where it's like kind of like sleek and dark like a Dark Knight type vibe. Is that what are like generally what's like the brand archetype of Inisha? like if some what is kind of the what what are the characteristics of of the initia users when you go and you describe them to someone who are you looking for? Yeah, most of the time the users are actually a lot smarter than even I am. Um, and

that's not really saying much, but a lot of them are like embedding these strategies into the like I've met with some of the Kamagotchi users and you can see some of them on Twitter and it's like it kind of takes you back to some of the old like D5, you know, farming days where you'd have the the Excel sheets trying to calculate how much you're going to be rewarding. And these guys are running like you know 50 to 100 uh kamagotchi pets in this game and like mapping out you know different elements of it. Um and I think because they're thinking like I said they're thinking on such a long time frame when they're being rewarded with that escro in it. Um that they map out and they strategize in such a big brain way. So, I think like

things like that and like things like Cabal like being this like uh kind of weird group that is uh mysterious in some ways I think is uh a good description of the vibe, but it's all covered up with just like cute pixelated characters. Yeah, it is. It's got this like eastern eastern influence as well, which I think is particularly for the crypto community at large. One other thing that that we have for you is we're celebrating Mamo May which is about thinking bigger and exiting the crypto e echo chamber trying to expand past uh kind of uh traditional ideas and thoughts. I'm curious if any of the uh initia chains or ecosystem

teams or founders are are what we would call a mammo founder where they they stand out from from the rest and are taking big swings, big shots. Um you know, is is there any chains or founders that you want to shout out here as part of Mammoth May as they're thinking bigger, trying to push forward initia and the broader space as a whole? Yeah, Celestia is a a partner of ours as well. Most of the uh app chains in our ecosystem um they they have Celestia built in underneath. Um so yeah, I think the teams that are kind of pushing the boundaries um that's a great question. I'd

say that's a good that's actually a really good question there. I think it's a little bit early for a lot of the teams. They're they're still trying to like iterate on the current user base um that you see a lot in crypto. Um and so I don't think most of them have thought that far out, but I'd say like most of them will have iterations on their product that will reach out to um other ecosystems. So um for instance like there is a launchpad that launched actually today um named Ember. Uh it's like these ex gauntlet guys that basically created a new type of launchpad mechanism that to summarize basically it disincentivizes the

rotation element that you see in in memes, right? like the the infamous rotator where you know coins don't last more than two days because people are just jumping and liquidity is leaving uh consistently and uh what they basically have done is they've added this like gamified element to it where uh users um can basically steal liquidity from other memes by and bring it to their own. So it disincentivizes that rotation and allows memes to kind of fight for the liquidity that exists into the protocol.

Um it's wrapped up in this game for now. I think ultimately the underlying mechanism is the most interesting part to me. I think um the way that liquidity moves in traditional launchpads is kind of broken and I think this could provide a very unique mechanism for something to really really shine um and grow a lot of liquidity and a lot of strength. Yeah, man. Yeah. I saw the one of the founders was at uh Mammo NYC on Friday last week doing a presentation about it and it looked particularly interesting but um they yeah they're still pre-launch effectively so uh looking to see that come out. Um but Cino man it's been an

absolute pleasure having you on on the rollup TV. Just kind of last thing man what are you most focused on on Initia now? What's the what's the one to two month plan here? Yeah, one to two month plan is really uh nurturing the the apps and I think this initial cohort will have some real like winners and I think it's really just focusing on uh the next cohort as well trying to attract uh new uh applications hungry developers to the ecosystem. Love it. Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on. Let us know when you're in the city, man. Yep. Yeah. And I love the new setup. This is uh super robust and professional. There's a lot going on in

the background. I don't know if people know, but this is this is a machine you guys have going here. It's a team effort. We're going to turn it up and make it even better. So, thanks for joining us, man. See you next time. Cheers. All right, buddy. Coo and Initia. Look, man. I can you point to a better launch than Inisha in the last six months with all these infrastructure launches? I think obviously there's quite a few apps that have launched and you know attempted to gain liquidity. Hyperlid also had a had you know a very successful token launch you know quite a few months ago at this point. I mean I I think Inisha is up there when it comes to the to the

quality of launch that took place just a few weeks ago. Yeah man. I mean I think uh I I think that the the launch was done correctly. I think it's pulled back a bit now, but um you know, I think they actually launched with real teams and real users. So, I mean, I'm excited to see kind of what comes next. We got a little bit of a 20-minut break here before, uh Zach jumps on. So, we're actually going to switch back to uh some of the the topics that we didn't get to cover earlier. I think notably, I think we left off on the hyperlquid top. I definitely wanted to cover um hype hype hit 28 last week, uh which was really good to see. Um, obviously we have a good position in

Hype here. Um, and yeah, now we're talking about the amount of app spending that Hype Liquid has. So, um, we'll pull up a tweet and talk about that. But Rob, what's your, uh, what's your sentiment analysis on Hype? Is it early still or is it late? Uh, what's your what's your take on? I would hesitate on sentiment analysis and and go towards more fundamental analysis here. like you you don't have to look too deep to understand why hype is doing well. Look at the tokconomics and the product and crossing the chasm and mammoth May is all about going bigger and breaking out of the echo chamber and riding this mammoth from

this crypto echo echo chamber into the real business world. And if you you look at this project from a real business perspective, you see why it has held up as one of the best tokens in the entire space. They've got buybacks and they're generating millions of dollars in revenue per day and almost all of that is flowing to token holders. And so when we it's another one doing buybacks, right? Compared to Hyperlid, right? So if you look at Hyperlid and you know

there was some some CT drama going back and forth about look what is the right way the right metric to value a chain or an app. And ultimately, you know, there's a couple of these these metrics going around. You could look at GDP of this app, just essentially how much uh customers are spending on uh transactions flowing through this app. Or you could look at real economic value, which kind of takes aside some of the extrane extraneous metrics uh and focuses on um the value that customers are gaining from using these apps. I think ultimately if you if you look at the protocol revenue that's coming through just like a pure app product

market fit perspective you look at the business model I mean the fundamentals here they don't leave room for speculation everyone's going to apply their speculative multiples to whichever you know project they decide to believe in but at a certain point you can't argue with the outcome you see millions of dollars of revenue per day that's flowing into the token that is buy pressure and creating a floor on the token. Well, they're buying like 50 million of it a month or something right now, which is which is crazy. So look, if we click on the picture here in the in the middle of of the frame uh with the chart, we'll see we'll see the uh like the like the big idea here, which

is effectively that um in this we Hyperlquid has one of every eight dollars spent across all apps on all chain is spent on Hyperlquid. And so this means that um it literally is accounting for 12 and a half percent of the of application revenue of all across every single chain. Like incre that's incred like that's mindboggling when we think about like what is the killer app of crypto. I mean poly market had it during election season. Let's not get it twisted. But that has changed. Hyperlid is the killer app of crypto in this moment. It's just a per text.

So that begs the question of look like if Coinbase, Binance, right? It has buybacks and it has real revenue. I mean that's the killer that's the killer app here. They took the protocol and they said look we we created a successful protocol. Then they said look we're going to launch a second product. It's called the hype token. And we know the value proposition of a token is to go up. And so, how are we going to manufacture a successful token? How are we going to find product market fit for a market that wants the token to go up?

They're going to create a token that goes up and they're going to have buybacks that help that value proposition take place. Well, it's just so easy to hold the token because it's like, you know, that they're going to be t-wopping millions of dollars into it every single day. And so, look, the counterargument to Hyperlid is one, Hib told us about this, right? He said, "Look, if I'm Brian or I'm CZ, I'm going to US regulators and I'm saying, look, this is not okay. These guys are stealing our lunch and he they're going to find some reason to to bring the regulatory hammer down on these guys."

The the second counterargument is look Coinbase well first let's back up a little bit the regulators are looking at per they there's studies going on at the CFTC that are saying look let's see if this is a an in a financial instrument that ought to take place and happen in our regulated markets. Yeah. And it if the CFTC comes out and they say yes, per are okay to have on licensed exchanges, we could see Coinbases and Krakens and these of the world launch Perpexes themselves and theoretically that eats into Hyperlid's market share. Do you think that's the case? If Coinbase launches per is that eating into Hype's profits or do you see a way that

Hyperlid navigates around that? I don't know. I just think that Hyperlid has all the onchain traders that would want to trade per um those are a special market and that you know I think the big breakthrough here is actually the it's the lack of KYC more than anything like I I I think there's a reason why people use hyperl to trade is because you don't have to KYC to trade per Coinbase would would obviously have KYC would so I think that they would take a dent in the market for sure if they launch 247 PES similar fee structures, but again like the the people are using Hyperlquid and are staking the token to get fee reductions, to get better pricing, and they don't

have KYC. So, my takeaway is that look, I mean, I don't know where this thing goes or what the market's going to do, but as long as the the the amount of volume in trading continues to stay up, we know there's going to be a significant amount of buybacks. And if we think Bitcoin is going to perform well, then you could just probably assume that something like Hype will do well. And I also think that Jeff fits in this mammo founder arc where it's like realized he needs full stack control, launches his own chain, breaks the entire mechanism of air drops and points and all that and does it in a way different way. Um and and then has one of the most successful of a new token in in a while that I can. So man, I mean that's all I really have on Hyperlquid.

And I think that let's just be patient here with our position. Um, you know, I think I was saying 50, you were calling me bearish, now you're saying 75, I'm saying like maybe not. You're saying 100. Twitter's telling me 200. Flipping Salana, Kobe's trying to escrow a bet. So like, let's just stay stay grounded here. But look, man, I think if we get some some nice moves, 50 to 75 is is in the cards. It's one thing I think you're known for, Andy, is staying grounded, 10 toes down. And I think you're right. I think generally patience is a virtue here.

Ultimately, I like to take a thesis bet on whether or not this is going to happen within a certain time horizon. And I think given that there's two significant events, one be bearish, one bullish, I think this is where we take these into account. And to me the question is like does the bullish thing happen before the bearish thing? Does Hyperlquid achieve greater product market fit or some sort of for for the token? Right? So does Hype achieve exchange listings before Coinbase launches PERPS or the regulatory hammer comes down? Right? Because ultimately this is going to be steady as it goes.

We know that just staying patient as long as things remain in a vacuum, these this thing is going to continue to do well, but we don't live in a vacuum. And so we have to look at the factors at play and we have to consider like do these things happen? What happens first? Is it the bullish thing or the bearish thing? And I think the bullish route is exchanges come around. I don't think that's going to happen. I just think at a certain point exchanges are going to look and they're going to say look like people want to own this token. Separate the token from the protocol for a certain for for a moment. And if you put the protocol aside and you see how many what the value proposition is around the token, I

think centralized exchanges are missing out on trading fees by not listing this thing. Yeah, of course. and also um more price discovery and whatnot and being able to maybe like um you know have their way of controlling it. So let's see what happens. Um I I I just don't see them listing it. If they list it, it's just going to give it more legitimacy. Um and right now they're like playing the game of like we're not going to list it because it goes against our listing guidelines because like you know North Korea like trades on there or something. So, you know, I think they had to keep the facade up for a while.

Anyhow, we got Trump and Trump Trump's private dinner in his memecoin. Um, on May 22nd, which is Thursday, the top 220 Trump holders are invited to a dinner with the president at his Virginia golf club outside of Washington DC. It was announced last month and the tally closed Monday night. Um, nobody has any idea who is going to be there. Obviously, it's just wallet addresses with the amount of Trump tokens onchain on Salana. You got random people buying a seat with the um many people are obviously not going to be from the US. I don't know who's going to be there. Um and apparently an

analysis by Bloomberg revealed that 19 of the top 25 wallets are almost certainly owned by non US individuals. Um Justin Sun bought $75 million worth of Trump's World Liberty financial token. His excellency, he's also believed to be at one of the large meme token leader boards. You know what's crazy is this thing came out and I was in Austria skiing and I was with some Swedish kids and I was telling them that Trump going to do a like gated event token thing and of course it went from like $10 to $80 that day or that two-day period. Um but I was right and I definitely did not make money on that

but but I was right. So well that's the age-old question. Do you want to be right or do you want to make money? and you chose to be right. And I think a lot of people make that same choice ultimately. I think I just didn't sell, dude. Yeah. I mean, look, I I don't think dude at Apprisky and like dude, the Phantom Wall was absolutely pinging. Like just ping. I just didn't I mean, that was peak that was peak trenches season, right? That was the day or two before the inauguration. timing of that was impeccable to launch the day or two before you go into the office. Well, he had to do it, right? Because I don't he would have got in trouble maybe if he

launched it while in office. Yeah, he definitely didn't have to do it. But circling back to a previous conversation about Hyperliquid is that they have launched Trump on centralized exchanges. What a surprise. What do you mean? Oh, right. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course they did. But that was quick. Um I'm not sure if Melania made it though. But you know what's you know what's also crazy is that uh today the Libra guy, the Malay from Argentina, he literally just stopped the own his the investigation against himself in Argentina. He like stopped it. He was like no no no it's done. This investigation's over. Yeah. It's like what the How do you just stop an investigation that's coming after your own freedom? They nah we're all good

here. Yeah. And they we're done here. And they just they just said, you know, after revisiting Jeffrey Epstein, he did kill himself. Yeah. Right. No, I mean, yeah, it's just it's just it's just hectic out there. I mean, look, honestly, the the other crazy thing about Trump's coin is that there's unlocks that are just firing right now. Like, they're absolutely firing. They've started. I I think um this this lunch that's happening on Thursday will be televised or documented. They're not going to take people's phones. There is going to be some element of publicity around this event. And look, we will get a sense of who owns this token for better or worse.

Justin Sun, I think, is confirmed. Otherwise, I imagine there is going to be people in the US as well as people outside the US that are buying this token for political access. You could argue this is more open access than previously done, right? How would you have thought to get access to a particular person or position uh position in government before this token that you could purchase on the open market? I mean, look, man, Trump is just a master uh perpetrator of creating ways to make money and ideas and thoughts and and

whole just this is like this inner circle thing. Look, I I agree. Look, I think at $8, if you could have bid it down there with size and then if you had some sort of like idea that this may come or or that that that there was some some way that Trump was going to uh launch this, then I mean, great. But I I don't really see that much val. I mean, I I guess being at a dinner with Trump is going to be valuable, but like realistically, how much facetime are you getting with Trump? I I would imagine it's it's more so the actual people in the room with you that are the the the valuable connections and conversations to be had like like like I I I just don't imagine you're going to be able to like sit down and be like, "Yo, Donald,

like like Rob, what would you talk to Trump about?" If you were sitting there with Trump, what what would you tell Trump? So, I think this is very similar to the narrative that you see go around sometimes. It's like, would you rather have a million dollars right now or a dinner with Jay-Z and it's the same thing. It's like, give me a million dollars right now. Like I don't know how much it takes to be in the top 200 holders of Trump token, but you would probably rather have the the cash than the access to Trump for five minutes. Yeah, but you get both with the token. You get the Well, no, you give up you give up the cash in order to hold the the token.

Yeah, but the token is liquidated. So, you get the cash back. Would you I Yeah, I don't know. I just don't even know what I would talk to Trump about to be honest. But it's get it would definitely be interesting. uh interesting kind of characters at that. I I'm curious how they're how they're gonna have people prove that they own the tokens. Like they're gonna do some elements of KYC. No, they already verified that. They they already took the tally on on on the Trump website and stuff. So, so you had to you had to go to the Trump website and spend a token or put in your wallet address in order to Yeah. Just like sign or whatever.

So, some element they're going to have security. So there has to be for sure there has to be some element of KYC right like suppose to to right for instance I am a big holder right I want to send a representative I can transfer my tokens to someone else yeah I mean I don't think I don't think you can transfer them but like they're liquid they're on yeah I mean theoretically yeah so anyway we'll see how how that turns out that's going to come on today um it should be an interesting interesting dinner. I mean, I don't know how much publicity is going to come out of it, but not I think we're gonna see pictures and I think there is going to be some people at that event that turn some heads for better or for worse. I think

there's going to be lots of crypto advocates, but I can also anticipate that there's going to be lots of um interested business uh men and women that are there to uh make propositions. And we'll see we'll see what happens for the broader market as a whole. Um, he's been avoiding any sort of affiliation with his meme coin up until this point, but you can't really get around it when you're at a dinner for a particular reason. Not really, but I know what you mean. I I I'm not sure how excited Trump is about this dinner.

Let's just put it that way. We'll see. We'll see how how he how he reacts. I think he's pretty excited about his million dollars of fun locks. Yeah. So, in other news, we got JP Morgan um is going to enable clients to uh buy Bitcoin. Um Jamie Diamond has been a really weird proposition, like really weird person, let's just say figure in the space, um who basically has been calling Bitcoin a fraud. Uh and now is acknowledging that his bank will allow customers to buy Bitcoin um but it will not custody it. So this also so where I

I saw this tweet and then I saw another tweet that was like Bitcoin is a fraud, don't buy it or something and then right under it was this tweet. So crypto Twitter algorithm never fails. But yeah, I don't really know what to think of this. I mean it just kind of comes back to that Neoank conversation that we had uh where we're just starting to see more and more of these people uh and these institutions come into the space. The question is like who is JP Morgan going to use for their u custody like you know somebody like Fireblocks perhaps right so like and how how do they choose how do they make this choice um either way $4 trillion asset manager or something5 trillion dollar asset manager coming in it's very bullish um you know probably

an additional buy pressure but not sure what the big like net new or new kind of buying force is until we see like maximum FOMO uh on the Bitcoin chart. So yeah, I think it's important to remember that um JP Morgan as an asset manager works with um portfolio managers and it works with financial institutions. And so this is primarily going to be driven by a retail frenzy. People calling up their brokers, calling up their uh their financial planners and saying, "Look, I want to buy some Bitcoin. I'm hearing about inflation.

I'm hearing about my bond portfolio at super high rates. Uh, and stocks not doing particularly well. I want to get a piece of Bitcoin. I don't want to mess with any of that other risky crypto stuff, but I think it's responsible to own some portion of portfolio in Bitcoin. Retail drives that communication up the ladder to their brokers and their financial planners and it ends up at JP Morgan. And up until this point, JP Morgan has only been able to tell them, look, no, go buy it somewhere else. But now we have institutions like BlackRock. We have the ETFs. JP Morgan will have financial instruments to start to pull fiat from their customers into Bitcoin. I think

once again, you look at you look at these ETFs. I think I saw a graphic just today and it said Black Rockck is now the second largest holder of Bitcoin after Satoshi. Satoshi's holdings are theor in theory frozen, never to be moved. Think of them as burned, right? And so that just takes, you know, about takes about 5% of the Bitcoin supply out of circulation, right? Oh, looks like we lost Andy. Andy has left the building.

My laptop in Um and so you know I I think that indicates what is happening with Bitcoin and what is happening in the in the macroeconomic condition and situation overall is that look we have massive institutions even custody providers that are that are accumulating all of the Bitcoin. You know I prescribe not your keys not your coins but ultimately these institutions are scooping up Bitcoin left and right and it's going to put on a massive short squeeze and supply shock in the Bitcoin market. I think ultimately like as we see more and more accumulation, you know, first it's Binance and then it's treasuries, eventually Bitcoin's just going to just going to run out and it's really just a

matter of time. So, I just I just think it's at this point it's irresponsible not to own Bitcoin. Yeah, I think that's been the case for a while as well. So, I mean, we'll see kind of what the what the market and what the like institutions continue to think as Bitcoin kind of runs away from them if that's what happens. Um, I think that'll be interesting. That that'll be the real tell because everyone's calm and collected when it's like kind of going up. But when it's, you know, Mania season, people get really excited. So, up next, we got our our guy Zack Ryan's uh known as Chain Link God. should be a interesting conversation about the state of chain link institutional adoption.

It's also been uh going hard on Twitter um with some different L1s and Oracle companies and uh the the usual. So excited to chat with Zach. Let's bring him up here um and get him in the mix on the rollup TV. Welcome Zack. Welcome Zach. Hey everyone. Thanks for having me on. How you doing man? the original uh 4chan Pepe community leader here calling in the OG frog. Yes. But now docs, no more frog. You doxed yourself. That was crazy.

Yeah. Yeah. That was about a year ago. I I felt like it's more genuine to present myself as a human at this stage. I mean, now Chandlink's working with Swift and DTCC, all these big entities, and then I'm just like this frog on Twitter. It felt like a time for evolution. It felt It felt like the right moment. Have you noticed any significant differences with how crypto Twitter interacts with you and and you kind of go about navigating this industry from a non to a real doxed person? Not too much of a difference for me personally just cuz I think I had I had like a level of reputation with CG that obviously carried over to when I was docked. But I think it's different for people who just entered the space and they're already doxed and they were an

before. I think it's a bit of a culture shock to see all these frogs and anins running around because I think there's pros and cons to each of them. I think there's, you know, it's easier to ditch an an identity if you mess up and then you go to a new identity and, you know, there's that whole kind of dynamic. But I think for people entering the space, what I recommend personally is go in doxed and then you can or go in anon and then you can always dox later because you can't go the other way if for whatever reason you want to go back. You don't have that option anymore. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I uh we kind of came in uh starting this podcast like four or five years ago and it's been a it's it's been a nice journey to to be like kind

of in the middle always like you know penguin or NF or whatever it is on Twitter. So um any Zack we brought you on today to get the update on on on chain link and um you know kind of what's what's been going on but before we get into that I'm just curious your perspective about some of the community building stuff. Um, what do you think makes being a chain link chain link marine so attractive to uh the community broadly? I think what it really comes down to is what chain link is building and what it's always represented. Like even going back to the early 2017 ICO era days, I think the vision around chain link is really in order for, you know, this

whole technology, this whole crypto smart contract blockchain thing to work, you really need this additional infrastructure. And then here's this team who's actually putting in the effort and putting in the work to actually build this infrastructure and is working with some of the largest institutions. Even back in the day in 2017, they're already working with Swift at that time. So it was seen as like these guys actually know what they're doing. They're well connected and they're building infrastructure that can take crypto global like in terms of billions of people actually using crypto technology. And I think people really rally behind that vision. And I think that's only been validated over time where in my mind crypto is uh bifurcated into what I call the casino which is like the meme coins, the NFTts, you know, the profit maximism side and then building the other side is the

decentralized financial system side. I think chain link has leaned even more into the decentralized financial system side. So a lot of people who are feeling you know financial nihilism that you know what are we even building this technology for? I think for a lot of people chain link is like this shining light this shining beacon of like okay there actually is real value here. If we can bring institutions on board and bring trillions of tokenized assets on board then maybe this infrastructure that we've been spending you know 15 years building can actually be used at a at a global scale beyond just kind of memecoin gambling. So I think a lot of people rally behind uh just the utility and the the value that chain link provides the ecosystem. That's how I've always seen it at least. Yeah we we've seen a similar bifurcation. It creates

this barbell where you've got things like stable coins and very uh traditional business models on on the left and you've got the memecoin casino and pure speculation on the right. So speaking a little bit more about kind of the institutional adoption that has taken place with chain link. Um one thing that we were talking about earlier is this Trump lunch that's going to be had with kind of the top holders of of his meme coin. This is sort of bridging the gap between the two worlds. I recall seeing Sergey in the room at the White House crypto summit and and actually getting some facetime and having a little bit of a back and forth. And so when when you see the founder of this project, Chainlink, going up with the greats of the industry, how do you think

he has been able to achieve such status in the space and and has gotten to a place where he is today? I think Sergey has always been focused on a few things, but one is just providing the most secure reliable infrastructure and providing the infrastructure that really bridges these two universes. Like what the path that chain link's been down is like in the early days, you know, this Oracle infrastructure was created and the first product market fit for that was price feeds and now and those price feeds is what enabled DeFi. So like for example a which is the biggest DeFi application they're able to provide secure lending and borrowing in DeFi markets because they have chainlink feeds. So chainlink's really been able to prove like okay this infrastructure actually works within this context and then that serves as effectively a case study to go

to institutions and say like hey look this infrastructure already works within the DeFi context. We can just hot swap in tokenized assets and all your assets into the same infrastructure and you get the same level of security and reliability that we've already been doing. So I think that level of just pure infrastructure utility that chain link applies both to the DeFi world but also to the institutional world as well as I think Sergey comes across just as like a professional entity like just a pure professional. I think in crypto things get a little weird to say the least with some founders or there's like a bunch of drama but like you're never going to see Sergey engage in drama on crypto Twitter like he's too busy on a call with Swift or JP Morgan or something to be dealing with the the the rambles of crypto Twitter. So I think

his ability to prove that this infrastructure is actually useful and the ability to act professional along the whole way over the past you know 10 years I think just speaks to his ability to actually deliver real value producing infrastructure for the space. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned some of the work that you guys are doing with world and themselate as there what is chain link doing with J with JP Morgan with what these institutions and these larger scale uh payments and kind of just like like me banks and financials that make

the world. What are they looking for? What what Yeah, it's a good question. I think what confuses people sometimes is when they think of chain link, they think price feeds and they think DeFi and then they don't quite understand like how does that map onto Swift or how does that map on to JP Morgan? But I think a better explanation of chain link is that it's really this unified developer platform that orchestrates activity across blockchains and existing systems. So that that's like the core utility that chain provides. It's not competitive with blockchains. Doesn't compete with Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these blockchains. It's purely the supplemental infrastructure that provides data inputs, data outputs, and the connectivity between chains and

between chains and existing systems. So for example, with Swift, what Chainlink's doing with Swift is effectively allowing Swift member banks, which are about 11,000 institutions to reuse their existing Swift infrastructure to transact on public blockchain networks. So that's a much more streamlined approach where banks are not going to like rip and replace their backend system. They they've never done that. They're going to continue layering on what they have and they have, you know, spent millions on their backend infrastructure and have trained, you know, tens of thousands of employees and they want to reuse that in the context of blockchains. And it's actually very reusable because the same Swift messaging standards, the same Swift private keys that they use for the Swift network can be applied to the blockchain ecosystem one for one. So in

that context, Chanlink basically provides this middleware infrastructure between the Swift network and all those banks and all the public and private blockchain networks that they want to connect to today and into the future. And so that that one's a very powerful use case. What was recently announced um I think it was just last week with JP Morgan and Ono Finance was specific was a specific crosschain delivery versus payment use case. And what that means is that a institutional investor who was onboarded to JP Morgan's permissioned blockchain, it's called Kexus. They were able to purchase a tokenized money market fund on chain using cash that they were holding on the Kexus permission chain. And Chainlink basically served as this coordination layer coordinating settlement uh

instructions between these two different blockchain infrastructures. So that model basically allows institutional investors to use their existing bank account balances or permission bank account balances to purchase tokenized assets on public chains and not just onochain. This could be replicated across any blockchain, any tokenized asset and with any payment system. So in this situation, what chainlink is basically doing is growing the pool of potential buyers who could purchase these tokenized assets. And this is just one example with JP Morgan and Ono tokenized assets as being one example which I think is really cool and I hope to see it uh uh get applied to more institutions.

Yeah, this is extremely cool. A as we talk a lot about stable coins these days saw a graphic just today that said stable coins are now 1.1% of the US dollar that is in circulation across the world. 1.1% of that is in stable coins. And so question here is that you know you're you're you're extending this credit supply to more ultimately people around the world want to own dollars and even more they want to own interestbearing dollars. So you you mentioned something that is extremely important and it was one particular word and that word was public when you were talking in in the case of of uh blockchains and how swift could operate on a public blockchain. You've

been around the space a long time. I think you you know that has been a sticking point for crypton native users. Could you describe why it's so important for the swift member banks to be operating with tokenized assets on public blockchains? Yeah, so fundamentally just context chain link is blockchain agnostic. So that means any public or private chain it supports and ultimately swift member banks want to be able to connect to any blockchain that their counterparty exists on. So let's say I'm a bank. I issue my asset on my private ledger. That's great. But if I want people to actually buy my thing, they need to come to my ledger. And that's like that's basically the walled garden approach.

And that doesn't scale. So if I am an issue of an asset and I actually want people to purchase it, I need to get my asset out into the market where there's actually buyers. And where we see buyers in the blockchain industry are public chains. And that's purely because of their network effects. Like Ethereum has millions of unique private keys. So that's like millions of potential investors of that tokenized asset. So if I'm Black Rockck, I issue build on Ethereum in public chains because I know there's already buyers there. Versus if I issued it on my Black Rockck chain, okay, that's great for issuance, but if I actually want, you know, distribution and trading, you know, you basically just reinvented the traditional system with all the silos and all the, you know, walled gardens, that obviously doesn't work. With blockchains, the

whole advantage is that these systems are interoperable and value can flow between these different systems. The challenge historically has always been regulatory clarity, which ideally with, you know, the genius bill passing that could help with stable coins and things like privacy and like regulatory compliance with KYC AML. None of those are like insurmountable problems. Those are, you know, I wouldn't say they're easy to solve, but they are solvable problems that allow institutions to get access to all the buyers on the public chains while still complying with the various forms of regulation and identity verification that they need to. So the main thing is just public blockchains are where all the that's where all the money is. That's where all your buyers are coming from and the institutions are the ones who have the assets who want to sell those to where everyone has the money. So it's like a natural, you know,

it's a natural relationship between the two. Like the the goals that DeFi is trying to achieve are basically the same as Trafi. They're just doing it in different environments. And what we're seeing is that actually that could just be one environment, one unified, you know, connected blockchain ecosystem. So that must be like the the big um current use case for TCIP then right where it while there's a lot of infighting going on about who can kind of own and operate the interconnectivity of um you know these public chains where it seems like CCIP would have a a large kind of step in the right direction a large edge here would be around this example that you gave with regards to being able to buy tokenized funds on

chain while you have your capital on the JP Morgan chain. What else is particularly exciting about CCIP um from your perspective and who are some of your partners that uh you guys are rolling this out with that you've seen success from um and you know that are really enjoying using the product. Yeah. So, so what a lot of crosschain providers there's two things. One is that a lot of crosschain providers, like you said, they they kind of focus on just chain connectivity and not necessarily like legacy system financial institution connectivity. And that's that's a huge differentiating factor like connecting to a 100 longtail chains that may not exist in a year. Okay, you got to do that, but like that's not that valuable compared to like I can connect to Swift

or I can connect to DTCC and I could provide you settlement rails so you could purchase these tokenized assets. That's one thing. The other is that a lot of crosschain providers are what I would call like single single service vendors where that's the one thing they do. They do crosschain and if you want data or you want connectivity to Swift or you want some kind of computation you got to go somewhere else and that means more vendors more trust assumptions more security risks it's it's a huge fragmented mess whereas what chainlink offers is effectively a unified platform. So you get crosschain with CCIP, you get the legacy system connectivity, you get the data feeds, you get the proof reserve, you get the NAV data feeds, you get the identity verification, you get this full complete platform of all these different service

offerings that you need for your tokenized asset to exist and be tradable and be regulatory compliant all within one infrastructure layer. And what what is really going to accelerate this is something that Chainlink announced uh that they were working on last year is something called the chainlink runtime environment which is effectively this off-chain computing infrastructure that can coordinate activity between any chain and any existing system where developers can just come in write the programmatic workflow code deploy into this off-chain infrastructure and it coordinates okay need an asset from this chain need to move it to that chain need to connect to a swift payment I need this data API I need this identity verification and it coordinates all these different activities together into one unified application. So really at the end of the day CCIP is a really key

important key important part of the chain platform but it is like one part of the chain platform. It's the crosschain part but there's also the data part the offchain compute part and then the uh connectivity to legacy systems part. So it's really all of these different Lego pieces that you know it's like prevent providing developers like this bucket of Lego pieces and say like here here's everything you need build the infrastructure require. you don't actually have to go mold your own Lego pieces, which is the equivalent to spinning up your own infrastructure, which is not practical for developers. So that that's what really excites me is just the the the infrastructure that unlocks new types of applications like for example DeFi was one example that chain enabled back in the day. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. A I mean a just hit I think 40 billion in TVL. Um and obviously that is secured through and through via chain link. Now, I I appreciate the in-depth kind of product suite layout. I was curious as to the focus of CCIP as well as just how much kind of time and um you know effort and energy is going to that and kind of how it all ties together there. So, um looking outside of chain link and kind of zooming out into the more uh kind of chainling god persona since you are, you know, chainling god, Zach here, um I'm curious if you think there's this kind of neverending connection between crypto and religion.

uh if you think there's any similarities or differences and um kind of what this like what tribalism and in crypto has similarities with you know God and religion and Christianity or or Hinduism etc. What's your take there? I think it's a really interesting comparison. I I wrote a tweet about this a few months ago but I think there are like uncanny levels of resemblance between religions and crypto. Like you have like the holy scriptures which are like the white papers. You have like these divine figures like Satoshi. You have like different interpretations of what the scripture says and what what the white paper says. You have like these different forks and splits. So, you know, where religions disagree and they fork into Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.

Like you have like these false prophets, which I'm I'm not going to name, but certain projects in the top 10 that may not necessarily deserve to be there. and like just like the this active like evangelism of like I have to engage in this holy war to convince you why my crypto religion is the correct one and why yours is wrong. And I think that concept has it applies really well to things that are trying to be like a commodity money or like a store of value money like Bitcoin because like fundamentally Bitcoin, you know, has a very good properties of sound money properties to it. But at the end of the day, it only has value because a lot of people hold it and a lot of people believe that it has these strong properties and that it has value over time. And so that only works if you can

actually convince people, which means engaging in this like uh it's like lobbyism for the public mind share effectively. But that's just like a form of religion. So I think it's useful in that way of creating commodity money. But I think a lot of specifically like L1 chains will look more like tech companies. And like there's tech company fanboys, but like I don't know, you don't really necessarily see it in the same way you did like 10 years ago. Like nobody's really debating Microsoft versus Amazon. Like yeah, okay, there's a platform you choose and there's a differences as end user, but nobody's like, you know, Apple stock is the best stock ever. or if you hold any other stock like you're a scammer and like that like type of mentality doesn't really exist. So I think the crypto industry will again it'll it'll bifrocate like there'll be the

technology platforms and that'll be more traditional you know assets valued more on their fundamentals and revenue and then you have the casino. The casino is kind of everything else that everyone debating about why they're you know memecoin A is better than memecoin B for whatever XYZ reasons like it's it's not going to go away. It's just not going to be the main theme of crypto and the main theme of crypto will just be its useful infrastructure with tokens that generate revenue and monetize network effects and there's kind of less need for tribalism when you can just look at the asset and see okay this one's generating you know a ton of revenue and that one's obviously losing. So I think there's a lot of parallels. It was very helpful for growing crypto into becoming what what it is today. I think Bitcoin will always have that. anything trying to be

like Bitcoin will have that, but a lot of projects will be more professional and more I I don't want to say companies but like I don't think that tribalism is necessarily needed once you've already won market share at that point. Yeah. Yeah. Following up on that, you know, marketing is a necessary uh condition of all of these successful companies and uh you know, just quickly before we uh before we let you go, do you have any any advice that you would give to you know, someone who's trying to compete or lobby for mind share and and you know, especially on Twitter, how have you been able to to maintain sanity amongst the crypto Twitter noise for so

long and and sift through all that noise to ultimately achieve some significant mind share. Yeah, part of it like obviously if you're going to be a figure on the internet, you have to have thick skin. Like social media kind of pulls the worst out of people. It just, you know, it is what it is. But I think for the best thing that people can do really is find a good niche that they can focus in on and like specifically a niche that not only they can own, like it's not something that anyone really dominates yet, but also like a niche that's going to be around for a while. Like if you're going to do a niche about some passing trend, it's, you know, it's like the people who went all in on NFTs in 21 and, you know, now they're just not that relevant unless they pivoted or became

more of a general, you know, influential person. But like you need to find that niche that you can find an audience of people who actually care about that topic and it's not so broad. You basically are a jack of all trades, master of none because it's not particularly interesting. And really, you just got to be like a reply guy. Like you have to go find the conversations. If you're just tweet out to the void, like that works if you're a bigger platform, but if you're just trying to like grow your platform, you got to go where the conversation is and provide actual value. Like it's a bit more difficult these days because you have a million chatbt, you know, spam slot bots that you kind of have to deal with these days. But if you can provide genuine value and you provide more value than you extract and you just give give

information and you find that niche, people will naturally come to you and follow you and, you know, come to respect you. But you have to like find the niche and actually like find something that not only that you're passionate about, but you actually, you know, have good takes or interesting takes at the very least. They don't necessarily have to be good. But that would be my recommendation. And it's it's going to be more competitive than it's ever been before just because crypto is, you know, bigger and more complicated than it's ever been before. Yeah, appreciate that. I I I I like, you know, your your sentiment there about adding more value than you extract. Um we talk a lot about this this principle of economic karma which is similar. It's you know about providing more value than you extract. And similarly I think that goes for information and knowledge

anywhere social media and and beyond. This is our opportunity to to share knowledge and spread knowledge and hopefully that's that's more than we're extracting. So Zach, thank you so much for joining man. It was an absolute pleasure and uh you're welcome back anytime. Yeah. Thanks Zach. Thanks for having me on guys. See you next time. See you soon. pretty bullish on chain link to be honest. I just don't know like how how uh all the the the product releases and updates across a lot of these different tokens relate to the token price. It's just there's such a disconnect there.

You know, there's not in projects like Hyperlid, but I agree with you for all all the other ones that aren't tying together their token with their protocol. For chain link, they they do so more than most, right? My understanding is that you know in order to to to use the feed to use the price feeds you need you need a utility token basically. Right. Right. And so in that case you know the more adoption of their price feeds the more adoption of their token. Yeah. So pretty good episode today. Uh wish we had Tom on uh to join but uh some interesting topics. Good to hear from Anisha. I think that they're they're going to do pretty well. They're they're hanging in there. Um, holding on. Cedto had some good thoughts and

then Zach obviously with Chandling God. So yeah, I mean another episode in the books. How are you feeling, man? Feeling good, man. I mean, we're just continuing to pave the way, I think, for projects to cross the chasm. And you you look at how this is being perceived on the timeline. I think there's tons of support. And ultimately, I think we continue to hear from mammoth founders about mammoth ideas. And these are ideas that transcend crypto. Right? Founders that transcend crypto. These are people and ideas that go bigger. They go beyond the crypto native echo chamber and they reach real people, real industries with real customers.

That's your That's your line, isn't it? Real people, real customers. Look, I I want to I'd like to find a better because real is kind of like ambiguous, but I I I think that's what it's all about is like crypto, you know, breaking beyond the echo chamber. Yeah. What you know what I think you understand the sentiment where where do you think crypto needs to reach in order to find call it product market fit, right? Or a broader audience. Probably Bitcoin above 108K. That that would help. That's all the space really needs to be honest. That happened about 10 minutes ago now. I don't know. I wasn't looking. But good stream today, Rob. We'll see you soon.

Thanks, guys. Thank you everybody. Thanks everyone. See you next time.