Unbelievable Zero to $13B Story of Mantra's OM

Transcript

People believe in what we're doing. They believe in the vision. They believe in our community. We've had, you know, we're a we're a layer one chain that just launched mainet. What's the story of this rise? Who's buying? What's going on here? How do we actually get the government to come consider working with something like what we're building? Welcome back to the rollup, your home for technical talks and open conversations that shape the modular future. Nothing on today's show is to be construed as financial advice. You can see our full disclosures list at the rollup.co/ventures. All right, we're live. Consensus 2025 Hong Kong. JP, how's it going, man? How are you? It's our first time first time on on on the rollup. So, maybe just uh who's JP? Why do you care about crypto?

Where you're from? Yeah, absolutely. So, um thanks for having me. Appreciate it. We're glad that we're able to to do this finally. Um I'm from the US originally. Um Hong Kong is home turf. I've been here for almost eight years now. Um got in very early into crypto when I was in university in Spain, actually. Um, so bought my first Bitcoin back in 2013. Had a friend, shout out Trey Tomlinson, uh, who was doing [ __ ] on the dark web. Yeah. And told me a computer science major and like said, "You should go check this stuff out." And, um, back then it was like 500 bucks or something.

For me, that was a lot of money back then. Um, so it was either like, "Are you buying beer or are you buying Bitcoin?" And normally it was beer. Yeah. But a little bit of Bitcoin. And um, ended up uh, graduating. Then uh, wanted to follow like a traditional finance path. So, I'm dressed like a [ __ ] traditional finance guy right now. Um, I don't normally dress this this up, but um ended up going to B school in Germany and then uh did a masters in uh Shanghai, China. So, that's how I got out to Asia. So, I was um you know, again trying to work in traditional finance or consulting or something, you know, much more stodgy and boring, but actually ended up getting a job at a local stateowned investment bank called Guai Junan Securities. I was effectively like the token la or foreigner. Um I was like

literally the second foreign hireer ever that these guys have done. I was like the Morgan Stanley of China that no one's ever heard of. Yeah. If they're not in this part of the world. Um and I was the second foreigner ever to work for this company and they didn't have any clue what to do with me. Um half the time in the beginning I was just like on magazines and you know doing presentations on like literally that's like that was the thing. But I want to do something real. So fortunately there's an opportunity that um they started this like research team that was focused on emerging technologies and you know China has these five-year plans that they put out and they have all these different emerging technologies that they wanted to research into and blockchain was one of those. So I just kind of like kept my interest and kept

looking into it more deeply and then ended up like building a bit of a platform and community for you like taking all these different fintech companies and blockchain things that I was looking into and I would like basically go into wei works and stuff um host meetups and bring in these founders of these companies that I was researching and we'd have beers and we talk about fintech and crypto and stuff. This is like 2016, 2015. And um then that turned into like an ICO promotion thing because everyone wanted to raise money in China back in the day. So I did a little bit of that. Um obviously China banned crypto exchanges September 21.

And then that was kind of like the the emphasis to move down to Hong Kong. So I moved down at the end of 2017 down here. Worked across exchange business brokerage. Did like very early tokenization work in the US. Cool. We tokenized Spencer Denwy's contract um with the broker dealer Tritorian Capital um that was like one of the first STOs that was like actually legitimately done um and then like was legitimately going broke before COVID happened and started Mantra and launched it as a D5 protocol on Polka Dot. Um yeah, so we flipped Polka Dot today in market cap which is you know kind of validating um and uh because they didn't give us a whole lot of support when we were initially building out. Yeah. And but we had some good success. We like got listed on Binance in March of 2021 and then like

instantly after crypto D5 bubble popped and everyone was in like metaverse and you know GameFi play to earn you know everything else. Um it wasn't the end of the cycle obviously um but it was like the end of D5 1.0 at least for sure. Um and it was like okay how do we actually build something? and we kept building. Um 2022 we started looking at like okay how do we actually take all this onchain you know smart contract stuff that we built. We had staking products, lending, launchpad, a number of different things and use that in a regulated like context and we're initially looking at the US market. Um because we had that connection with the broker dealer. So we're trying to build something there that just slowed way down after you know FTX and Luna and all that [ __ ] Um you know obviously that's changing now with

the US market a little bit but 2022 and 2023 were not good years for doing regulated activities in the United States with crypto. Um so that was a slow you like painful like two plus years. I mean like pretty yeah it was it was tough. I mean we had to you know restructure the team a couple times. We had to I went without I didn't pay myself for years. Um and it was again a challenge but um we fortunately met one of our investors called Sheruk at the end of 2023 and we'd been building a number of different things. We've been working on licensing with Vara. Um we've been working on this chain that we like initially had two different models for and we're just like waiting for someone to finally back us um or me I guess. And um you know it's funny cuz like I was

raising money for years trying to raise money here in Hong Kong. No one was no one was like backing I think probably because I didn't go to like you know Stanford or you know Harvard or something. I didn't work at Goldman Sachs. Yeah. And then the US guys didn't want to because I was a new founder who was in Asia. So I was like what the [ __ ] is this guy doing? Um but the Middle East ended up you know being really big for us. We spent a lot of time trying to build relationships and network and that was really a big catalyst for us. And you know now I think we've become kind of like known as like the you know Middle East project or Middle East chain of sorts. Um which has been good because I think that's been you know the area

where RWAs are taking off the most and obviously the US has come in but um there's still asset classes I think which will be dominated by the the Middle East and the UAE particularly. Yeah. I mean, I think RWAs as a general trend have really picked up steam due to the pro I mean, Trump, pro- crypto in the states and also just I think there's this flight to people wanting uh to to bring uh stocks and bonds on chain. Larry Frink's been pushing that hard on CNBC and also just I think crypto people in crypto are ready for real product, real usage, like real yield if you will.

Yep. I think that's that's a big trend. But I'd love to get into RWA and stable coins, but I'd hate to bury the weed here and just ask you, dude, what's going on? Like, the OM token has outperformed everything this year is up like 7,000%. Um, people are wondering like when is this going to blow up in your face? Like why is this like this is completely unsustainable? And um people are are there's mutters that that there's that there's things happening. So what what what's the story of this rise? Who's buying? What's going on here? So it's pretty funny. I mean like I think the big joke on CT now is like who's the market maker for Montreal is getting yelled at sometime. I know.

Yeah. We don't actually work with Wintermute yet officially. Yeah. Um so they can be absolved of anything. Um we have a couple different market makers. We're going to be onboarding a couple new ones. It's not like anyone particularly and honestly if it was a market maker doing it like everyone would be able to do that. Right. Right. But who is does black pressure coming from the Middle East? Is it from is it uh I would say significantly. Um you know I think there's this in like there's this thing where people are kind of salty that they missed it and they're like how the you know how the hell did we have a a top 25 coin now that like no one knows about and I think it is the positioning a little bit like up until recently um particularly this year we did the billion dollar announcement with

DMach which is obviously huge. You know they're obviously quite associated with Trump as well. Um, so that really spurred a lot of the growth, but last year was crazy, too, right? We rode it from, I think, the all-time low of 1.7 cents. Um, last year, I mean, I think last year's alltime high was like around four bucks or something. Yeah. Um, and you know, I think a part of that was just like that culmination of having honestly relatively unique tokconomics as I said like we had an ERC token that was almost fully diluted um, and fully in circulation and then we had this like B merging together of a new chain. So we had this like repricing of being a like basically dead DeFi application to this like layer one for this new hot

narrative. So that was like good positioning, good timing. Um we did have obviously a lot of kind of credible backers. Um you know Sherukq is a not a cryp and actually the other thing is a lot of these people buying are not cryptonative people. Yeah. Um I think that's what people like they're like okay it's not talked about on Twitter but well that's the thing is like everyone missed it like I missed it. That's the thing like people Well, I'd say a couple things. One, like the people there's there's people who literally don't even know how to buy it, which also means they don't know how to sell it, but they want to be along for the ride. That's definitely a really it is a thing. Um, you know, I was literally at every freaking conference last year speaking and getting the word out and like, you know, we weren't the

shiny new thing because we've been around for four years. So I think that's another reason why people were like well you know we're looking at nothing against like Barra or Monad or Story or you know Abstract or any of these guys like obviously they're building really cool stuff but they were the new shiny object and we're just kind of like the dark horse that no one was really paying attention to um to be honest like we're the only major art coin on Binance and like that's where retail bids right like um so that was that's obviously super important. Um, we still have, you know, major listings that haven't happened in markets like the US. We're like, we are literally just getting listed on Kraken today. Um, so we didn't have a US, you know, USD pair. We're not on any of the Korean major Koreans yet. Um, we're

working on it obviously, um, hard. Um, so there's still like those type of catalysts behind which are or sorry, in front which are which are excited about. Um, and to be honest, like, you know, some of these violent actions are just because we just don't have spot sellers, right? A lot of it is not financial advice. A lot of it is, you know, we're seeing like short squeezes happen regularly, and that's why you have these like big violent, you know, god candles happening. Um, and part of that is, you know, we do really have long-term aligned investors who again are not necessarily cryptonative. Um, many of them are very traditional investors. You know, we're fortunate that Sheruk is is one of our investors. They're backed by nine sovereign wealth funds, Mubadia,

ADQ, Saudi Pif, like basically all the big boys. Um, so very patient institutional capital. Laser Digital, which is Neora. Um, Brevin Howard is one of our biggest backers, um, that no one actually knows about. We never announced it. Um, now I can. Um, but so we have these big institutional guys which are like longterm minded and, you know, and they've obviously been super supportive and giving us a lot of credibility. um in the Middle East particularly, you know, we've been very lucky that like there's a lot of people who just know about us and and and have been bidding and and interested in the project. Um we've come to become this like hometown story a little bit. What what what are they interested in specifically? Like I guess better ask like why is this like

why are why is Manry Dow worth Well, is it what's the market cap now? Uh I think 13 billion. 13 billion. 13 billion. What war is that respectfully? No, it's a good I mean I mean to be honest it is the I think it is like who's going to win the RBA play and we are specifically focused on that and right now we were the first real L1 to market that had like legitimate crypto anything. Okay. Um what I mean by that is like provenance is another like real world asset L1 also in the Cosmos ecosystem but they don't you know no hate against them. have crazy like onchain onchain TVL they don't have any onchain activity and they don't have any cryptonative anything in my opinion um and now you're seeing other projects

which want to be rubb but when I go on defy llama and look at monstrous TVL it's like it's like 10k or something so that's mantra dow that's the old that's the old like old old staking platform okay um mantra on defi llama and this is one of the challenges of honestly running any layer one is you have to work to integrate with like every single data provider, every single custodian like we're still working with RWXYZ to get integrated. We're still working with token terminal. I think they should be up and running in the next month or two and that'll show like real numbers. Um, you know, a lot of the stuff that we've put on chain from an art debate perspective hasn't been announced or hasn't been discussed yet or and actually D5 lama is an interesting one like the way that they calculate TVL from a chain perspective

is very different than like for our debase at least is very different than than like DeFi native platform, right? And you know, fully transparently, we don't really have an active DeFi ecosystem yet. We're building that out. Yeah, that's another opportunity and we have a lot of interesting primitives that are going to be coming along soon. Um, you know, from the TVL side, like you know, we've done big deals that that are just not recognized yet. So, what type of deals? Um, like for example, we're putting on like 200 plus properties and villas from DMach like this week. Oh, so you're just tokenizing them and putting them on chain. people are buying them tighting buying these assets in tokenized form right so I I can buy a property a real world property on mantra's chain mantra chain mantra

chain so mantra is the old chain mantra montrada was product that's the old D5 product we dropped the that was like the name of the ERC token correct but Mantra is the is the is the new thing tendermit cosmos based uh cosmos SDK chain yes where you can purchase these properties start purching these properties these assets so But what can I do there today? Not a whole lot. Okay. Honestly, you can't. There's like from a DeFi perspective, there's not a whole lot. And you know the the I think the interesting thing about Real World Assets is like you kind of have two sides of the equation here. You have the RWA like permission side and that's what we've developed. We've built a permissionless chain that's meant to have all this permissionless activity on it. And that's what we're building ground up like DeFi native, you know,

permissionless stuff, right? Perexes, you know, uh synthetics, like all those kind of things, right? Um then you have the art of bas which is not necessarily like something that honestly retailers attracted to at the moment right um but it's an institutional game and that's where we're distributing products to investors high net worth individuals offices is that on the same chain on the same was there like a permission chain or on the same chain so we've built a permissionless blockchain I mean we were like I will say this we were the first to do it um we built the we always felt it needed to be permissionless but you needed to have guard rails and like compliance features in place uh that allowed you to actually speak the language of people who need KYC, they need AML, you know, concerns and they need like, okay, is this going to go to

Hamas or, you know, some of that. But that's what I'm saying. Like, I'm not trying to midcurve this right now, but like why should I buy OM? Like what's the like why are people buying like just for like is there just speculative long-term idea like belief in you guys? Like I think so. Like I'm not trying to say that that we're like we're buying things and there's there's not much happening but like there's clearly stuff happening but like what like like people are buying this in now at extreme at at top 25 crypto token level. Yep. Which is like a very prominent level of of size and and seriousness. Yeah. And and I I just don't want people to to get burned here.

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All of this secured by Mantle's treasury of billions in stables and ETH capital pools. This entire ecosystem is coordinated by a vast network of seasoned VCs that are aiming to create the next generation of banking and financial technology. This is mantle understand. I mean I would say if you look at the the thing that we're building right overall art is a multicycle thing mantra has been a multicycle thing. This is our third cycle now right? So like if you just look at that like frankly I just didn't [ __ ] give up. Um you got to give a little bit of credit. I don't know if that's a 13 billion worth of credit but it is something that's something to say

that honestly I'm just not going to stop until it works. And now we're finally catching a bid because people believe in what we're doing. They believe in the vision. They believe in our community. We've had, you know, we're a we're a layer one chain that just launched mainet in October, end of October, really. Y and we're already 60% in circulation in terms of token supply. Y that's very different than all these new launches, right? So there's tokconomic considerations, there's listing considerations. One thing that I will, you know, talk about today is we're actually announcing that we just got our VAR license approved in Dubai. Okay. So, we got issued our uh brokerage, exchange, and asset management license, which is actually world's first ever onchain native DeFi license issued by Vara, which is [ __ ] huge. Y um so we have like real [ __ ] coming. We're

working with big institutional partners like Damach, um who are legitimate, credible people who are bringing high quality product on chain. And we're in this like I see it as like an Uber moment, right? Like we're trying to take activity that is not normal, like in Uber's case, getting in random strangers cars. Yes. and getting them to, you know, invest into things in a tokenized form. Yeah, that's not what people do today. So, like we're doing it bit by bit, piece by piece. And we've fortunately been able to bring just together a really, really strong group of investors, partners, um, supporters, team members to, you know, help us on that vision. And we just are [ __ ] executing. I mean, work like a dog. I live for this [ __ ] So, um, you know, I I can't like I don't want to speculate

on price or anything like that. Yeah. you know, I I can't do that. But obviously, I mean, I do see that we want to be a top whatever chain protocol, whatever. I mean, that's I won't stop until we Yeah. So, so what do you guys So, okay. So, so still help me figure out. So, you're putting 200 properties on chain as one example. As one example, but you're also doing a ton of other deals, right? Yeah. Where you're doing, is it mostly real estate oriented? So, we have we have like two main asset classes that we're looking at the most. um which is real estate primarily in the UAE. We've done that, you know, $500 million uh deal with MAG, a billion dollars with DMach. Yeah. Um DMach is a minimum a billion that that means like that amount of real estate valued assets

are being tokenized and then put on tokenized, put on chain or distributed natively on chain. Um so one of the things that we've been focusing on is like not really doing um like SPV. Frankly, tokenizing an SPV for real estate ownership is [ __ ] Um, I call it even faux tokenization. Like you need to go direct to title and tokenize the actual underlying because then you can start doing real cool [ __ ] like so you have 200 titles tokenized. We're we're basically that's the goal. We I mean that's like the start, not the goal. That's the beginning, right? Okay. Um, DMach's the largest private property owner in the Middle East. Um, I think they have like 40,000 units that they sell and and and that's just the tip of the iceberg, honestly. And they want to put this on chain for sure. I mean, we

work with the like the kids are running the show. I mean obviously Hussein the father is the figurehead. He started the business. He built it up into a mon a monster conglomerate. I mean they have businesses and everything but we work directly with the kids who are running the show now like Amamira Abbas Ali. I mean we know all of them and we're direct like they're friends. Um so we're just working with these people who are legitimate movers and shakers and they bring credibility when you're talking about like okay how do we actually get the government to come consider working with something like what we're building. Yeah. And if it was just us approaching to be like who the hell are these guys?

But if you come with a partner like that, it just changes the game, right? Um so I've been really fortunate to to have a lot of partners like you know the Damach team um and Sajuani family and you know all these other guys who just they really do move for us. Yeah. And I think that's what people unless you're like familiar with that environment or understand how that stuff works like it really matters. Those relationships matter. But we've been building those relationships for three years. I mean, this bar license, I literally have been working on it for three [ __ ] years. Yeah. Um, and we just got it issued last Friday. So, um, you know, that's just kind of how we view things. It's a long-term builder mindset, long-term grind. And like the juice is worth the squeeze to put in the effort to like not

cut corners because with our base stuff, again, it's multicycle. So, I see that eventually if we focus on one building up like really high quality product on chain, whether it's real estate or, you know, different types of financial products. We're doing a lot of stuff with private credit funds. We've tokenized a Black Rockck fund already. Um we're doing an aviation financing fund. We're tokenizing like legitimate airplanes like 7 seven trip 7s, A350s, a few other things. Um we're doing like we did a a private credit fund that has LP interested Blackstone, Oak Tree, HBS, like really cool products that are now becoming onchain. That's like the first start. Yeah. On the other side, you have to build up this like DeFi native cryptonative, you know, ecosystem of permissionless activity. We're working

on that and eventually there'll be a convergence and I think in the bare RBA assets become a lot more attractive than in a bull because everyone's not really looking for 5% treasury bills, right? And I think the important thing as well is like unlocking real use cases like arts as collateral. So we're working with I was going to get to so what's the business model for you guys here like like how are you guys making money through this? Uh at the foundation level or I'm not sure where to begin to be honest. Yeah. Okay. So like I mean the the fairly transparently like the way that um I think most crypto companies operate particularly blockchain labs and op code. Yeah. So we have effectively the same same situation. The OPCO, you know, in labs helps support technology development, software development,

marketing services, whatever for the foundation. Technically a Swiss association. I think it's a bit more flexible legal structure. Um, based in Switzerland in Zuk. Um, and uh, you know, it does pretty well. Um, it's not a profitable, the Optico is not a profitable business. We've raised some equity capital, but not a lot. I mean, we've raised like less than 15 bucks. Yeah. Um, which I take a lot of pride in the fact that we flipped projects that have raised hundreds of millions of equity capital. Um, and again, I think that's a little bit of this like, you know, we didn't have the background and the pedigree and support and so we had one like literally it's like one group of people took a chance and but again, so so how do you guys make money? What's your business model here to sustain this idea? So yeah so so effectively we have

you know this opco which you know charges services to the foundation um or the association and it also has a large portion of you know team and advisor allocation tokens that are long vested aligned with the team allocations which I think our we we initially launched it at no I had team and advisor tokens from the ERC right four years ago right um which are fully vested and I actually gave all back to the company I didn't take a single one um and then revested myself technically we initially had it a 242 24. So 24 months club, 24 months linear, and we just made it to 3030. So like I'll be basically at like seven, eight years before I even touch a team token and just I don't care. It's like not really why I'm doing this. Okay. Um but the the group company actually has like

a basically hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tokens now um because the run um that are sitting on his balance sheet that it'll eventually have, you know, vest over time. And then we have other models that we're building up like you know the reason that we get this license is because now we're going to operate an art exchange right um when onchain exchange built on built on mantra that we'll actually be able to sell distribute and you know uh trade these products right and you'll earn some fees or earn some fees or some transaction fees eventually we do see like I I mentioned the Uber moment because we're in this growth mode right now where it's like you know billions of dollars of TVL and assets on chain is honestly like still peanuts compared to where art should be should be like hundreds of billions like trillions

So we need to get to that point where you've incentivized growth and in the right forms in the right ways and with the right partners. You know, one of the challenges of being in the Cosmos chain is like every integration is more expensive. True. We're launching EVM that will help. Um but still everything is, you know, you just don't have that many uh cosmos devs out there. No. Um it's a challenge. So um you know, we are on launching and operating different businesses within that model. Um you could almost think of it as like the group business is effectively like a tokenization ccentric DCG or consensus okay and everything's around the mantra ecosystem right so one one product was the chain software one product is the RW exchange it'll have its own token you

know I don't know what the third fourth fifth thing look like in the future but they will all have tokens it'll all be tokenized it'll all be part of the ecosystem every token that's issued will have some sort of airdrop to M community and M stakers okay um so it's just it starts doing this reflexive thing and you know I I would like you know literally we were big in Luna ecosystem. I was particularly like significantly we got into Luna at like 20 cents or something and ran a node from under Mant for Dow days like we ran a Luna node. We're one of the bigger nodes and we ran that from like you know 20 cents up to 116. Yeah. And obviously you know ran it all down.

Yeah. Um, but there was a lot of learnings that you could get from from Luna and the way that they built and incubated like some core protocols that, you know, had product market fit instead of like this spray and tray mentality of like, oh, we need a 100 DAPs. Like, dude, there's literally only like five DAPs in crypto people actually [ __ ] use. Like, yeah, but they just built a Ponzi. Well, they had a stable coin that was a Ponzi. Yes. And they Yeah, for sure. That's the issue. We're not going to do a stable coin. Like, that's not our No stable coin planned. We would work with other stable coins, right? Hey, we get USDC via tether or sorry, via Noble. We're good friends with Elena and the team. They're doing a great job.

We're talking, you know, working on USCT and some of these other, you know, interesting yield bearing stable coins. He's done some stuff with Ono with USDY. Yeah. So, you know, we're agnostic with that with that respect, but we don't want to we don't want to also we're not tying anything into consensus like that's not that's not how we want to do this. Yeah. Yeah. Do do you have any uh issue with the amount of reliance and concentration you have in the Middle East when that's perceived by the western world as like oil money or negative or you know dirty money like like does that connotation affect you your mentality? No. Okay. I don't care.

I mean they were the ones who believed in me. Okay. You know and you know at the end of the day I know those people like very very well. They've done significant due diligence. I mean like not crypto investment due diligence like rigorous like institutional due diligence on us. Um but is there some ulterior motive here that like they're they're like you are just a part of a bigger game that that that that you know they're trying to corner the crypto market or or extract a ton of value or something. We're we're expanding in the US. I mean we're like hiring people in the US right now. Um we're we're looking to go into the US. I'm American, right?

Yeah. Well, my goal is to be on Coinbase. I want to do things right. Like yeah, we're I'm even literally thinking about Redoma Island company to the United States, right? Like we're a global by nature firm. I think one of our advantages is I'm a American citizen who has been international for the last, you know, basically my entire adult life. So I know Asia like the back of my hand. I've been in Asia for a decade now. I know the Middle East really well. We have all these strong partners there. But that's something that other people are going to have to learn and build themselves and build. And I also know how to be American, right? like right it's it's my heritage right um and it's my culture so I think now we're actually starting to get a lot of interest and you know I was even in New York for the

summit like whatever two weeks ago and we'd go into meetings with like big big big asset managers and a few of them you know the big guys they they know us but a couple of them were like how the hell did I not hear about you guys and all this interesting stuff that you're doing out there but it's not precluded to why you know we can operate and do stuff in the US too we'd work with you know different tokenization platforms and exchanges and you know partners and things like that. It's not like we're going to go out there and operate in exchange. Yeah. Um because you know, there's still regulatory issues and whatnot, but you know, I think we're naturally global and you know, we've been around for long enough like I remember when we did the ICO back in 2020, like I literally with my partners

at the time, like we hand didid manually like thousands of SFS. Yeah. And hand distributed everything manually KYC to everyone because there wasn't anything available. You just had to [ __ ] out do it, right? So, you know, I think that's, you know, people are starting to recognize it and, you know, I I, you know, I appreciate that it's been crazy and No. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm I'm not trying to pick a bone here. I'm just show what's going on here. It's all good. Um, I mean, I have maybe one other point that I think is is relevant. Like, I think it's really important that we have put and aligned people so that they feel like they're part of a story. And like, you know, we also do we're very anal about like where tokens are going, where they're moving, how they get moved

on exchanges, like not just with us, but like with everyone. So, it kind of keeps everyone accountable a little bit and everyone winning together. Um, and you know, we'll get pings all the time from people like, you know, who's trying to sell the SA or like what's this token movement or all this stuff and like and then we have a conversation and we have an adult conversation with people like, dude, what like what are you doing? Like we're supposed to be in this together. Like if you need something, are you not allowing them to sell? No, it just depends on like if you say you're not if you say you're not going to do something, then don't do it. But if you say you're not going to do something and then you go and do exactly the thing you say you're not going to do, like isn't

there some concern here that there's some uh uh retaliation assumably non nonviolently from the people that have a lot of power in the Middle East to anybody who would want to exit this process. Oh no, no, no, no. That is scary. It's a scary sitting here. Oh, it's definitely not sitting here questioning in this matter. Dude, we are [ __ ] chill, man. We're like, but you were saying, right, like there's like existential Honestly, I've never thought about it like that. There's depth to your uh situation here. I'm honestly I've never thought about it like that. No, I'm I'm not suggesting that we should, but um prohibiting others from selling is is it's not prohibiting. It's just it's just it's

not prohibiting to selling. It's just if we're aligned and this is what you say you're going to do and this is what the contract states, then don't do what the contract states does. You know, don't Right. Just do the right thing. We are in it so that everyone wins together, right? That's the whole point. Yeah. This is crazy. Yeah. And it has been crazy. Insane. Um, you know, it's been like one of the best performing assets of anything the last 17 months. It's been the best probably. Yeah. One of the best in the entire world outside of like meme coins that haven't lasted. Yeah. And you know, again, I think we're trying to continue to show there's legit like legitimate sustainable activities here and there's real partners. There's real [ __ ] There's real licensing. Like we're doing things right. But you got to understand that that chart is not

sustainable. I understand. Well, that chart is going to it's going to you can't go up only. I understand. Yeah. You can't go up only forever. Like there's going to be a phase where it goes down, but every chart goes through that. Every project does. And it doesn't take much, you know, just a couple like larger sells. But but that's just the reality of crypto. That's cyclical and 100%. And I I just don't want things to go up in flames as as soon as there's a little bit of like a little bit of red candles. No. No. I mean, listen, like everything's good, right? And then like it turns it turns poor. We we've been we've been building for a very long time, right? Like literally like if you look at the chart, everyone looks at it from 2014, sorry, 2024 to now, correct?

But if you look at it from before, Yeah. like you see it was like down like this forever. one of those charts that just is like just kind of Yes. And we just kept building and kept trying to figure it out and kept iterating and kept trying to get someone to take the bet. Um, and even during the course of last year, it hasn't been like all up and down, right? Like no derivatives when we got them launched on Binance, like I guess it was March or April last year, like that was a big [ __ ] deal because now people can short and it's like a whole new um thing of the game now, right? Yeah. because like you get a you know day one listing but then you're getting a derivative on on top on top of it. Yeah. And it changes the game.

Changes the game completely. So you know that's also changed the dynamic of how things operate because it's not just a spot game now for us. It's like really you know it's a per game. Um and you know we're super careful with how we disseminate information and who's trading off of what like because you know we're getting screened by people all the time like what's this onchain activity like you know like what are you actually saying? Are you doing fundraising events? like is there a short is there ability to short here there whatever and a lot of it is probably not necessarily like you know antagonistic shorting it's just a trading opportunity that's fine like it it's it's actually healthy to have corrections correct you know and I know recently it hasn't looked like there's been like too crazy it looks inorganic it looks like people are just pumping

and then people are shorting and then getting blown out well that's definitely happening yeah so Jeffy thank you for your time uh I know that you have a dinner ticket to I I really appreciate you coming Bye. Thank you, man. Great first podcast. Appreciate you putting up with my questions. No, it is cool. I didn't want to let uh hold off on on this one. I think the entire market appreciate it. No, I agree. I mean, listen, we don't want to pull punches on anything. Like, I'm a very approachable guy. I think my Twitter account probably shows that and it's kind of how I've always been from the day we launched the project like active and I mean, I still answer questions in Telegram all the time. I I enjoy it. So, if there's ever anything that you guys want to know, like, hit us up and we're always happy

to try to work. And I and you know I always I I don't ever forget when people fade but I will always leave the door open right and and and I think that's important because you know again like over the years we've had a lot of people who counted us out and we eventually bounced back and that doesn't mean that's mean that we're not going to have tough times in the future. I am assured that we will, right? But I know we'll be prepared and I know that we'll continue to grow and focus on how we can develop this thing cuz like we have a very long-term vision about what we're building and and what we're working on. Um, and we're going to see it through.

Lost JB, thank you so much. Appreciate you, man. Thank you.