Why AI, Ordinals, and Blast are Heating Up | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

I remember when blast first came out I think probably before he saw it two hours in now company sa it was like what are we doing in this industry I hate it here and it's just like nonstop I also want to add there that I wasn't in that boat I wasn't roasting from the beginning so don't put me in there bro all right yeah don't fade break I think that's the lesson we've learned over the past few months what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerox research March is just around the corner and I want to make sure to give you a quick reminder to not top tick your prices of your D London tickets if you use codes 0x10 at checkout you can lock in a 10% discount on your ticket don't miss out on your chance to get ahead of the curve

I'll see you in London before we get into today's episode just a quick disclaimer the views Express on this podcast by either myself or any guests are their personal views and do not represent the views of any Associated organization nothing in this episode should be construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice all right let's jump into the episode what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerox research today is Monday February 26 so this episode will be airing on the 28th Wednesday and we are joined today by wesy and brick from the blockworks research team to discuss the latest Market happenings ren do you want to get us started with little news and governance updates yeah for sure it's been a busy week I mean for starters I can L raise a pretty insane round at 100 million dollar U sorry not at $100

million they raised $100 million from one single VC a60 I feel like that's pretty rare in the crypto space normally you get like 30 different VCS on the cap T and then maybe like 20 different other Angels where I just decided to go full Chad mode and B 100 million from a6z I mean on one hand a6z probably has like three billion dollars left to deploy and so they just wrote this massive check on the other hand part of me thinks like what does Ian layer needs so much money for given that like 80% of the ecosystem growth is going to be at utable to you know like points and the eventual ioner token no one's going to see that1 million and think that it's going to be used as incentives but I mean all in all

a pretty Chad move I think just based off that base alone this thing's just going to launch at a Incredible or incredibly stupid valuation anyone have any thoughts on the race yeah I'm wondering where the money is going like are they going to build something extra on top of this still like probably start hiring more people and like start building up some new stuff on top of that is my guess yeah I think they're just going to be the top service provider like creating different abss like someone needs to facilitate the creation of these things I've heard some cool like things being built on the cryptography side but not necessarily on the like

what's going to generate cash flow and they're really like driving this thing if it doesn't get adoption that's on them so I think that's probably what a lot of the money is going for for but yeah my first reaction to this was like igen token that's going to be the biggest air drop we've ever seen by a large margin and yeah I'm excited for it I was trying to think through what the valuation they raised at because I don't believe it was disclosed was it but you got to think it was at least five billion considering a $100 million was raised I mean that'd be what 2% ownership I'm doing that math on the fly but then on top of that we've got um aail which we don't have this written down in our notes but it just came to me they just raised 27 million and you see

that they're doing things like kind of similar to like polygon's aggregation lay it sounds like as well as reaking I I don't know I didn't look into it too deeply but nonetheless I think it's an interesting Trend that some of these infrastructure plays like Ian Lair is starting to vertically integrate and offer other services to Pro provide more value to their services yeah I'm excited for all of the events that they're going to throw over $100 million um next on the news and the governance updates we have ordos and Bitcoin so I think ordos have been on the ter lately no monkeys are trading at I don't know 0.3 probably on the higher end of that and it feels like people are finally picking up on ordinal um they've been like sort of quiet uh but I think

people are finally realizing that there's so much capital in Bitcoin and either people a want that Capital to become productive or B they want to flex that capital and Bitcoin has never really had nfts until now case in point is for example there's a Bitcoin L2 called murin which I don't think anybody has any clue what they do but they've hit I think it's two billion in TVO which is like pretty crazy it's like blast levels of crazy so I think there's probably more of that to come uh to be honest Bitcoin L2 season's probably just getting started as far as another season it's air drop season and parel announced their token details um they're going to air drop roughly 7 to 8% of the token

Supply that air drop's going to happen in April and ail launch a pre-launch Futures market with the token currently trading at roughly a 1.7 billion FTV so for those who are unaware parcel sort of review the state leverage per trading platform you get a leverage trade real estate markets whether that's like London Dallas New York La whatever um but they also have built this really Innovative price feed to sort of bring in rwa or real estate prices on chain I'm going to take a pause there does anyone ever thoughts on either of those I think um this is one of those projects that could do well because it's like unique we haven't seen anything like this before and then it could be

easy to like spin up a narrative here the only thing that I'm thinking about this I haven't used the platform myself but I'm hearing that the funding rates can get pretty crazy so like if you're trying to hold a position for a long time then your gain just get uh eaten Away by the funding rates so that's like one concern I have with the project over the longer term but in the short term like I wouldn't be surprised if it does really well because it also plays into the kind of the rwa narrative which well now it has kind of died down but wouldn't be surprised if that makes a big comeback at some point this year Salon was at like 10 bucks this was like a year plus ago and I hopped on a

call with the parcel team actually and they they pivoted to this per platform based on real estate prices actually and they were building something different prior so I'm really glad to see that they made it out alive because it's safe to say morale was kind of low on that call when I chatted with them but nonetheless like this is a very hype project on salana and I'm excited to see that they they made it and survived throughout the baron kept building I think one of the interesting tidbits uh with this product is the data feed I think there's real use cases for a real-time price feed of home prices and real estate prices in major cities so I'm excited to see if that provides the token extra utility that maybe entities that wouldn't normally be interested in crypto would be like okay now I need to buy this

token because I want access to this data all right thanks Sam yeah um in other news we have Merchant Moe which is sort of Trader Joe's other decks on mantle Network um they're proposing to give me back as most staking rewards is kind of on the back of the uni proposal that we'll talk a little bit a little bit about later um in other news Athena is currently 5. 6% of per oi on ethereum and they also say that they would send the yield from sde to 15% from 44% in order to build out the Insurance Fund and maybe they'll give out these rewards later maybe it won't but only time will tell but then a day after that they just um basically went back on that right

because you kind of rugged your stakers of 66% of the yield super rough mathematics there so I think really bad communication uh I think boosting up the Insurance Fund is definitely the right move because at some point this trade unwinds like pretty badly um but yeah just H this communication I know some of you guys have thoughts there so we love to hear them I just think there's a lot of people who are currently kind of farming the shards on there and then they might not be planning on like staying at the protocol for the long term and then if they hear that okay now my yield is going down uh there's some push back on that front other than that yeah I agree with you

the main priority right now should be just like creating a good Insurance Fund if something bad happens like it might feel pointless right now but it's there for those situations that you can't kind of predict yeah I took a deep dive down this Rabbit Hole last week and I actually pushed a flash note out for blockworks research subscribers which by the way you can use code0x research 10 for 10% off your sub but uh I looked through chaos labs's and Athena's internal research and basically most of the scenarios assumed a $20 million starting Insurance Fund size and used historical funding data and basis based and like

kind of saw where the fund would acrew and this includes events like 3ac Tera block five Celsius like everything terrible that happened over the last year as well as the eth proof of stake to proof of or sorry proof of work to proof of stake trade when everyone was shorting per and the the funding rate got super super um positive um so basically though kind of rambling here at this point but basically the research doesn't include any of the other risks outside of funding in basis so I have a big problem with that just because of the fact that there's smart contract risk there's exchange risk there's liquidation risk like some of these blacks want events that you can't foresee need to be baked into the insurance F funds required sizing in my opinion and these studies

just didn't do that and on on top of that we're sitting at like a $2 million Insurance Fund right now they did just raise $14 million so I think that's going to get up to 10 million but either way all of the studies that they conducted assumed a $20 million starting point instead of a $10 million starting point so all of this to say I think that they need to be extremely aggressive right now in uh building up the Insurance Fund and unfortunately the communication or lack thereof I should say is kind of what caused this backlash and made them backstep on going aggressive into building up the insurance funds hopefully they'll get that figured out or at least give the Dow like control or some governance here early on so that way uh these changes can be made and they won't receive backlash for being

responsible I also think it's wild that they already have 5.6% of all per oi on eth and I'm not sure if this is the case but I don't believe they're back testing included the fact that they're going to have a material impact on these funding rates as especially as they continue to scale up up and so as a result as they become 10% 20% of pers oi and eth I think it's going to have an incredible impact on what rates look like across different exchanges Etc and so yeah I'm curious to see how that impacts specifically the protocol and the need for that Insurance Fund do you guys think that because you know like a lot of people normally look

at funding rate and how hot they are as a sign of like Market FR do you think those Dynamics change with Athena I mean like probably not so much at 5% but say like 20% you know everything else may be at like a 50% funding rate and if maybe at a 10% funding rate um do you guys think that there's like a material impact there and like how should you view the market or at least like E's funding rate Market from here on out with atina I feel like the the funding rate should in theory in in a perfectly efficient market like reflect the inherent yields of that specific asset so for most Lans it' be their their staking reward rate um and over

time as we see sort of strategies like what Athena is doing where you have delta neutral strategies where you're long uh the asset itself and gaining staking yield and shorting on a per like eventually markets are going to get efficient enough where those are pretty well dampened over time and so I think you're just going to look at those rates and know that they're taking into account um some sort of strategy like this yeah if you want to much deeper dive on Athena go check out our latest Empire episode where our resident research Anon this Matt gave a fantastic Deep dive into sort of everything intha especially the risk next on the news and governance updates we have apoin voting for arum orbit as sort of their own app

chain I think there were a few contenders there optimism ZK sync I think polygon cdk But ultimately arum orbit won the vote and they're doing it in partnership with an entity known as Horizon Labs I'm not sure what the connection is there but I think this was a pretty big vote just in terms of like ape coin's like name maybe not so big in like the app chain will actually become big but he's like just a brand name you know um and I don't think it means much uh I feel like we just got to wait until it's actually built I wouldn't be too surprised if this thing takes like way way way too long to be like built and actually launched so next on the news and governance updates we have gaet dropping a this is kind of like a weird

one um basically gunet has been the risk provider for a for a pretty long time they help manage protocol risk interest rates L values for different markets and on G um last week basically G said all right guys we're done here we're having some problems working with the Dow sure you can probably speculate as to why they caught up that engagement I think they've had a relatively like problematic relationship with a few specific individuals in the da and as Matt on the research team say right like it's a hard job you're interfacing with like God knows like 20 30 100 different stakeholders all of them are super whiny all of them want a lot while we not

wanting to pay a lot and it's just a hard job right it's a lot of politics involved and probably l so much like actual quantitative analysis and probably the best example of this is the Cur Fiasco on a um where Mitch alone just got like blown out of the water but the whole time gaunet was saying like guys like you should like reduce the risk you should like Capt the LTV you should stop new BS and then everyone just vot a gauntlet down and then in retrospect it was like a pretty stupid thing to do and so yeah that was that was a pretty hard thing to interface with and at block research I think we've seen firsthand um how hard Dows can be to work with but also I think there's a lot that we can improve in that process

and as also blockers research is here for that anyone have anything to add for those I think you hit it on the head I think Dows are just tough customers and you kind of get crucified like no matter what you do as a service provider it's like everything you do is forward- facing and if you step up or misstep just just once that's the only thing you're remembered for like all the other work that you did unfortunately is just goes by the wayside and everyone only recognizes your brand with that one mistake that you made so I get why Gauntlet setting stepping down it's a 247 365 job so I think they did fantastic work and I wish them nothing but the best and hopefully a can find a solid

replacement yeah strong agre there all right next we have a quick word from osmosis thanks to our fantastic sponsor dydx all right guys now moving on to our dydx segment this week we have Sunny from osmosis thank you so much for coming on so I'm going to dive straight into it how has osmosis worked with dydx since the dydx chain launch in October last year yeah we've been uh you know having dydx join the cosmos ecosystem has been great uh they definitely helped you know bring in a lot of capital into the ecosystem you know getting uh Cosmos native usdc I think like half of the cosmos native usdc is on dydx at this point and then like 40% of it is on

osmosis so you know I think the two of us together are like making up quite a bit of that usage right now um and yeah the team has just been really good doing you know we we've been helping them a lot from like the technical standpoint with like just technical support you know we've been using the ca of SDK for you know four or five years now at this point from osmosis and before uh and so yeah just they lean on us for technical support and but then they've you know really over the course of the last year or two just like massive Improvement on their like technical side and they're like some some of the best SDK devs out there on the product side you know I think the biggest source of interaction today is uh that we're they use osmosis uh stable swaps as the like for swapping

between ethereum native usdc and cosos Native usdc so if you're on ethereum and you want to send usdc to uh dydx chain it sends it to uh to osmosis swaps it to the Kos sta of one and then uh passes it on to dydx so that's using a project called squid uh that sort of enables a lot of that but with osmosis in the back end um but yeah we're exploring you know other things that we might be able to do in the future whether it's like you know it's probably not gonna be for like probably not this year but you know dydx will prob eventually support uh multic collateral uh systems and so for liquidations uh you know hoping we'll be able to work together to use osmosis as

the back end for a lot of those liquidations osmosis in particular ended 2023 on a very high note with Q4 volume up like 250% or something crazy quarter over quarter and 2024 has actually started off pretty well as well with $1 billion dollar or more volume for three months in a row so what can you attribute to the rising attention and volume to osmosis yeah I think it's a combination of you know new capital entering the ecosystem and a number of new assets uh that have been you know much to much hyped up asset so you know I think the beginning was probably probably with

celesia so Tia osmosis is the main Dex for Tia which is obviously a very popular asset these days and so I think Tia on a lot of days even has flipped atom in volume on osmosis so historically atom has always been like the number one token by volume on osmosis but um so yeah with Tia but then now we uh then last month we had dimension and in the coming months there's just a lot more projects in that especially in that whole like modular ecosystem many of which will uh probably have their like decks go to market be on osmosis gotcha I know osmosis has a lot of stuff on the road map for 2024 so we

would love to hear a little bit about what you have in mind a lot of the focus is on just increasing access to these uh assets right so both within the cosos ecosystem and Beyond so you know lot of new assets coming in Cosmos you have bar chain asria anishia like all all these projects that people are very excited about but then you know we're working with a lot of projects like you know uh there's a top 10 market cap asset that is activating IBC within the coming coming month and so we're working very closely with them to be like their interchain uh go to market um but then working with like different Bitcoin Bridges to you know I think Bitcoin is

uh a massively under tapped Market in the deck on the spot deck side so how do we bring in you know Bitcoin and have that enter the defi ecosystem um and then finally we're working on a lot of account abstraction stuff so you know I know account a lot of people are working on account exraction stuff these days but I think most people are taking it from a very like infrastructure standpoint where they're building like infrastructure or like and expecting apps to integrate with it um because we have actually a user pH product we are starting from a very like okay what are the specific product features that we want to enable and then building the account abstraction uh pieces to enable those specific features so the first one

is this thing we have called oneclick trading which basically means you can s do trades without having to sign every single time there are other apps that actually have this including dydx uh so they were actually one of probably the first to do that uh but what we're doing is adding a lot more security functionality to it because the way that a lot of people implement this it's it's a little bit dangerous uh we're begging it so like we're working with a company called blockade and building all these security functionality to make it so that these um this oneclick trading is is much safer um and then we're working on a lot of like onboarding stuff you know our goal is how do we get to the point that people can onboard into osmosis without needing a to install any sort of Chrome extension or anything

like that or you know we're working on a mobile app as well but how do you start using the mobile app without needing to copy your private key from like one device to another we're building out a lot of this account of stack and I I hope it'll be used by more Cosmos chains as well so you know uh Zion is one Cosmos chain that's planning on using our stack and I hope dydx will eventually adopt it as well nice I love to focus on the user experience unfortunately that's all the time we have for today but thank you so much for coming on Sunny now moving on to Hot Seat Kone segment thanks guys now moving on into the hot seat K drone segment this week I'm going to pass it off to wesy First wesy who do you have in a hot seat or k drone yeah absolutely

definitely want to start us off here with a cool Throne which is unis swap which finally I guess enacted where there's a proposal to enact the fee switch so specifically uniswap Foundation hit the forums to what they call activate Unis swap protocol governance by basically allowing uni token holders with of delegated and now stti their tokens to receive a portion of protocol fees uh they site the reason for doing this uh to facilitate better governance participation in the protocol because right now I think less than 10% of all circulating uni tokens vote on any given proposal which is really low participation and they're hoping this kind of mechanism encourages stale uni

to be delegated and have that uni actually be active in voting on proposals um I think this is is a pretty Obviously good idea uh it's been in the works for a while Gauntlet has actually done some research in the past simulating the Unis swap fee switch what that would look like in terms of the impact it would have on liquidity tvl swap volume because including an additional fee will obviously change uh the calculations when it comes to uh Traders when it comes to people providing liquidity and whether it's worth it uh for them compared to alternatives um and they also looked at which pools would be most affected by the Fe switch

and interestingly those pools were particularly ones with high competition so for example stable swaps were one of those because you have things like the three pool on curve uh with a lot of competition for liquidi so any amount of additional fees will uh help competitors uh inch out when it comes to arbitragers or uh people going through aggregators Etc uh I did some math myself on what the protocol Revenue could look like um so if we assume that governance decides to add the protocol Fe switch to the same pools that Unis swap Labs chose which is just like we and eth swaps between

Stables as well as stable swaps between unlike Stables so like Euro Stables to usdc Etc um and if they choose pools like that um if we look at you know 5% 10% or 15% fee switch it would be 9.4 million 18.8 million or 28.2 million uh annual revenue contributed by the fee switch um and if we assume the the highest the 15% there then state in a 50% stake rate then the stake staking returns would only be 0.75 uh% APR for stakers which is on the lower side for sure compared to other defi apps that allows staking but I also

did some calculations looking at like moon maath what The Highest Potential Revenue under uh the fee switch could be so I looked at all pairs that have a fee and could be included in the fee switch and looked at unisoft highest monthly volume which was December 2021 and a 15% fee switch there would mean 221 million in annual revenue uh which would contribute to a 5.3% APR at a 50% stake rate so it looks much better and sort of bull market territory and as you add more pools obviously um but yeah it looks like based on the proposal as it's currently written it looks like the fee switch will be be between 10 to 25% because they're going to be using whole

number fractions uh extracting from the the the fee in its current state so this means they're going to start at 1110th but you can go 1 nth 1/8th 17th Etc to to 1/4 of the fee that they're currently collecting and that would go to the protocol instead of LPS um but yeah I'm just excited to see how this plays out um with what governance decides to do with respect to which pools are used how large the fee switch is going to be itself but yeah this is just a long time coming and I'm glad to see them try it out yeah I think like mty it's kind of interesting sort of dynamic here right like previously uni from Financial

Financial perspective has zero value Ur So like it should be valued as zero kind of um but you could also argue that like before this Fe proposal came out people were basically pricing in the probability of a fe s proposal and also pricing in how much uh Revenue that Fe s would come in so I guess with this proposal basically from like a mathematics perspective the probab the probability became much higher and this time I think it's like a lot higher chance of passing through because it was proposed by the unisoft foundation themselves rather than like some random other entity and I don't think they would do so without having gone through like the correct like legal

checks and talking to the big delegates or the big token holders knowing that they had their support but then on the other hand right you could also say like if you're holding like the uni token in a blue Market or like any token to be honest like does 1% 3% or like a 5% PR really move the needle I guess at the end of the day having yield and sort of that Financial value is still a lot more uh valuable than having no Financial value and the uni token kind of just being a governance token I like how that they're sort of intertwining uh staking and delegation with this sort of like fee switch I think that makes sense it shouldn't just be a fee switch for every single uni token holder that you can claim as long

as you have like the uni uh token in your wallet I think having an engage like delegate system an active one that's incentivized in the right way is really really important especially for an ecosystem as largest uni who nowadays I think are thinking a lot more like uh granularly about the strategy or sort of a lot more intentionally right you're seeing them talking about like Crossing token incentives with unisoft V4 and unisoft X growing I think those strategy discussions become a lot more important and unisoft realizes that it's kind of been lacking a little you know it's kind of just been sitting enjoying its market share on Mana but not really thinking about like its overall strategy on other chains sure they have their like product

strategy super like toned down sorry not toned down but like um they've honed honed in on their product strategy but not so much like Crossing strategy and I think all in all a good move obviously a lot of these other D5 tokens experience the V rate higher too but to be honest like a lot of other tokens have a fee switch on already or for example there's another subset that really don't have that much in fees to distribute so yeah but a good move for the industry as a whole for either of you guys who actually follow Unis swap more closely than I do what is the the bull case on Unis swap growing fee Revenue Beyond just simple spot uh fee take rates like

it I I guess like is there per coming down the line is there like what what is supposed to ultimately increase revenue for UNIS swap like through V4 and other things if I had to guess it would be two things the first is V4 and hooks finding some way to internalize me into the protocol rather than sort of leaking that value to Searchers and Builders I think a whole host of like me related hooks come online once V4 comes on in Q3 and at some point unisoft may see like a good one and say hey this one one is really good for our protocol it's

good for our LPS too and we want internalizes and that would result in God knows how much in potential free Revenue I think the other sort of uh X Factor is unisoft X no fun intended um at some point I think unisoft X becomes like a pretty liquid like cross Chain Bridge and I'm not sure if they charge a fee on it today but it wouldn't be too crazy for them to charge a fee on it especially given the sort of like brand stickiness that unisoft has so I think those are the two main excess like methods of value ACR Beyond just like the spot product today yeah they're definitely you know

trying to release new products it seems like like Ren said with Unis swap V4 coming up and Unis swap X as well as the Unis swap wallet it seems like they're just continuously building new products that at some point in time will ACR value to the protocol or to the labs or Foundation Etc um but yeah I mean what going back to what Ren said I agree that this kind of design where they're sort of marrying both delegation and the the staking rewards is like a really good one because it does facilitate that governance participation and also while I gave uh some of the numbers for staking rate like even though they'll it'll be pretty

small I think just having staking in General is enough for people to lock up their Capital because there's something psychological about the fact that you have an asset and now you have a place to lock it and put it somewhere like that is definitely um something people are going to uh look at and participate in um and I just think this is a a good design as is um but yeah I'm the things I'm particularly interested in is what percentage take rate they choose because it can have meaningful impact on the protocol itself and whether you know arbitragers M Bots aggregators swap through Unis swap because if you go too

high then they'll go to competitors and again I I definitely recommend reading The Gauntlet report uh because they go through a few different scenarios and how that'll impact total volume tvl and so yeah I'm just interested to see how this changes not only Unis swap but the Dynamics between amm in order flow in general all right next we have brick brick who do you have on the hot seat of couton this week yeah I have um blast in the cool drone just because of their kind of growth strategy that they're they've been implementing or actually I don't know if they should be half and half in both cool throne and hot seed but um yeah they just tweeted that main main n

this launching on February 29th um and yet what I was like referring to when saying that they might or maybe should be in the hot seat is because like when they first open deposits there were um quite a lot of debate about like how it was done with some kind of shady marketing speech of like um people becoming pre-ich and things like that and then also a lot of people were bashing the fact that they didn't have a functioning chain yet um but especially the lad part I don't really or I didn't have a problem with it back then and don't have a problem with it right now like I think that they

just executed really well on their kind of BD strategy with gamifying the whole project and like yeah it helped that they had a like really um big name backers and then of course already approv and like founder but um the way that like yeah you could earn points you could invite your friends and earned more points they kind of created this fly wheel for like gaining capital and then by getting like or you get points by um like doing these spins and that also makes it more gamified so it's like giving current crypto users what they

want to use um and now they've got over two billion in tvl so with that much locked capit it becomes easier to then you know attract Builders and they also ran this um big bang competition which got over 3,000 submissions from projects um probably a lot of uh Farmers on that point as well but I think they chose around 50 projects that they're like gonna help out with or like um you know advertise or whatever it's called um and yeah like okay um coming back to the hot seit part like I think from time to time

they're maybe a bit too aggressive um on the like advertisement side so again they had like I guess posted about the project called r on blast through their Twitter page which a lot of people read as okay this has to like be a super well dded project and there's no way this is going to rug and then I think the rumor around the street is right now that around 400 or 500 eat got collected by the project and now like all the socials are deleted and uh the founders aren't known so yeah that's like one way or easy way to shoot yourself in the foo if um like you do

these advertisement things uh too aggressively um and yeah a final part that I want to mention is um I've been looking at blast the NFD exchange quite a lot recently and um there season 3 is ending in May uh of this year and like all of the rewards for this season are coming from blast so a lot of people think it's going to be the native token um and 50% of like all the rewards are going to um oh did I said blast The Exchange I meant blur we knew what you meant we knew what you uh please do some editing work there

but yeah blur the NFD exchange um and yeah 50% of the like all of the rewards are going to like blur depositors um but once this season like ends um blur probably has to come up with like a new either like Implement some kind of a value acral mechanism for the the blur token or then continue like funneling some kind of rewards for blur stakers because otherwise there's like from season two uh they released like 200 or three 300 million blur tokens to the market um and a lot of people back then thought that there would be like

huge sell pressure coming from that but with this like deposit SL taking strategy um they managed to curve that but yeah going forward there like nothing exceptional happens or um like blur doesn't Implement a new exchange mechanism or something like that then I think that token could be in some trouble going forward but yeah that's all I had any thoughts I think as a space has progressed like obviously gamification has become more and more rampant and I don't think that's even something that's limited to crypto I think that's just like a general societal Trend right like

anything that can be gamified will be gamified especially for example these like online live streaming shopping like online like shopping live streams like those are probably like the most dopamine hitting like experiences one can have or just like walking into like a digital casino and I think blast did that right to be honest like both from a builder and a sort of um depositor perspective right uh I think you see a lot of I think you will see a lot of l2s or like whatever like app chains copy this Playbook because it's a chicken and Nick problem you know like you want Capital but the capital wants something to do so you lock up this capital for a certain period of time uh and then you have in last case two billion in TBL and

then Dev get super excited because you know like there's two billion of TBL which obviously are in it for like a air job they want to go completely DJ and go hand for the aird drops and now you incentivize all of these Builders to come to your chain and build I mean 3,000 projects is pretty insane sure some of them are like probably just scammed so like GitHub commits um but still it's a pretty uh it's a pretty crazy number and I think they just played it right so much um and it's just going to be a Playbook that's going to be copied more and more did the yield sort of did the yield bearing component help that much probably not that much but I think just mentality is good knowing that like your asset is being productive and has yield similar to like the uni Fe switch it's just a good like

mental unblock for you to actually have a reason to deposit rather than just like thinking oh sure I'm getting points but my capital is just sitting there and not doing anything and yeah I don't know whether blast projects are going to urge up to for example everyone that holds e for stable coins in the bridge but I wouldn't be too surprised to be honest I also think as a part of that big bang competition it's like the airdrop is half to users and depositors and then half to protocols so if you were on that list of winning projects and you receive a like basically a ton of the blast token and you can use that to attract users and get people to try out your products like this just the

execution plan here is so perfect and as much as like we all hated it the day it was announced and we figured out all right everyone's just depositing billions of dollars into this multisig like yes that was terrible Optics but it worked and I think we're in the early Innings of blast and I personally didn't deposit over there but but I'm excited to bridge over there and and try some apps out because I do think there's some interesting use cases with Native yield bearing stuff yeah I definitely agree with all you what you guys have said I was definitely a blast hater when it first came out just with the the marketing and the fact that the chain wouldn't exist for multiple months but looking back I agree with everything that this was

actually the correct strategy by like you said having native yields itself isn't the biggest game changer but it definitely attracted enough people to lock2 billion dollar worth of capital like the fact that it wasn't launched for three months allowed for these deposits and then for them to actually attract good developers to build good products and so at this point it's really impossible to fade um with2 billion doll of automatic deposits as it's going live with many projects that are going to be on the Chain as main net hits like I can't imagine how this doesn't do extremely well but at the same time like you definitely need to be careful with a lot

of the new projects because just as much as the $2 billion doll in tvl attracts good developers it also attracts a lot of bad developers and people looking to rug just to like the risk on blast team Etc so I'd be pretty careful with which projects you you invest in or buy their token Etc but I do think it's definitely a place to pay attention to especially if you're a DJ like us and in the weeds yeah I do have to say that I feel like we fumbled this one a little I remember when blast first came out I think probably before he saw that two hours and now company sack it was like what are we doing in this industry I hate it here and it's just like nonstop

everyone could not get over like the square Point systems like the pre-ich marketing and we just like I hate it here so much but I mean yeah in hindsight and now I think it was like a really good move but at that moment I was like dude what are we doing here but I mean at the end of the day where crypto is today the users are like 99.9% just here to speculate and gamble so you might as well give the users what they want I also want to add there that I wasn't in that boat I wasn't roasting from the beginning so don't put me in there bro all right yeah don't fade break I think that's the lesson we've learned over the past few months what's up everyone March is approaching fast

and I want to give you another reminder not to miss out on Das London it is coming it's right around the corner and it's in March from the 18th through 20th we have three full days of content this is your chance to bump shoulders with some of the world's top Executives and have open dialogue with both attendees and speakers we're going to be focusing on a range of topics that I'll let Ren discuss for you first on the list we have Bitcoin Catalyst the Haring and spot ETF next we have a view from the buy side from investors on things like strategy portfolio allocation and more we also have have a topic on Ras tokenization and stable coins which I think we can all agree are going to pay a large roow in crypto future we'll also talk about global regulatory Frameworks like compliance best practices and the

evolution of global standards that are shaping the global investment landscape we also have someone from the institutional front to talk about infrastructure such as Banking and payments with financial giants like visa and JP Morgan and last on the list the macro case for digital assets so don't miss out on this Monumental event seats are limited so be sure to register today by hitting the link Link in the description and using the promo code 0x10 to save 10% on tickets see you in London Nick Sam do you want to give us your hoty cool Throne yeah absolutely you actually alluded to it in the uh news and governance updates a little bit ago but I've got ordinals in the cool Throne today no one seems to really realize it because it's hard to like find a good data source on ordinals volume globally as well as it's

difficult to um just basically get any data on bitcoin ordinals as well as like holistic views of of NF volumes uh generally speaking but some numbers just to like put it into perspective node monks did 2.75 million of volume over the last 24 hours Bitcoin puppets did 2.4 million and R6 did 1.25 million and madlads and tzoran on the other hand did 600k and 2 million respectively and then the two largest by volume collections on ethereum were DG gods and isuki and each of them did 1.8 million roughly so ordinals are dominating the volum wars and no one seems to really notice I was looking at magic Eden's numbers earlier today and I saw that 43,000 unique ordinals buyers were active on the

platform in February versus 73,000 for salana so there's still more users in interacting with salana based nfts on Magic Eden but despite this fact they brought in $1.5 million of fees on ordinal purchases versus just one million for salana so in my opinion all of the signs are pointing to ordinal season continuing if not heating up even more from here um and I think think uh it's just the early Innings like if you go into some of the discords and some of these projects that are well connected with good founders with good intentions who are early in ordinals there is random airdrops Whit list giveaways for minting things for free and like you can pretty much earn your money back just

paying attention in these discords and participating in some of these things that are popping up and it reminds me so much of ethereum nfts before last cycle when they really took off and it's not really fair to compare them because obviously they've already gotten a lot of hype so far but I just think the market size for this thing is is really large and it's also super memeable because there's a ton of people who hate the idea of ordinals and then you can just respond to them and be like thanks for storing my ordinal on your Bitcoin node that you're running in your basement as a maxi like it's just it's so perfect and it makes me laugh and I think some people are worried about the longevity as like l2s and like in the Bitcoin ecosystem proliferate but I kind of look at the ethereum landscape and we

never saw that actually happen with l2s like you look at arbitrum optimism Etc nft volumes and it is laughable in comparison to ethereum main net and so I think there's true value in having these like Fine Art collections on the actual Bas layer so this is a space I'm watching really closely especially as run season kicks off around the having in April um yeah ordinals on the cool Throne was a very easy pick for me this week but curious if you guys have any thoughts yeah I strongly agree that you know ordinals are something to look out for I definitely am comparing it to etherum NFS especially last cycle we saw how crazy things got as eth's price Rose people were just looking for places to

park their capital and flex their new found wealth and nfts were the perfect example of that and we're seeing that play out in Bitcoin land which I think will honestly be a much bigger Market given just the size of Bitcoin itself the fact ordinals are popular in many different geographies around the world the fact they've had this most momentum already despite being extremely hard to buy or like you said find data on like I just think this trend is going to continue uh for a pretty long time um definitely watching the orinal space and also am watching magic Eden which huge credit to them because uh tensor has kind of been eating their lunch when it comes to salana nfts and their volume

and trading Etc but this pivot to trading Bitcoin ordinals I think is a huge one they're definitely I believe the primary place in which people are trading these ordinals they have a great user experience um and yeah I'm just just huge credit to them for finding this Niche and in deciding to basically pivot a little bit but they're really finding their footing now yeah and it's it seems that in um like when it comes to nfts and them doing good uh The Playbook is that you need to find a group of people who uh get along well and like create this strong commun communities but then you need to have like an opposite side to

those people who are like yeah yelling at people that no don't inscribe this things on chain or last cycle you had just like overall people saying that why would anybody buy these like jpegs I can just like copy paste this and whatever um and that seems to be like good fuel for uh these things to start growing larger and larger also big shout out Sammy because you talked about this about like two or three months ago already and like I think you got it back then but I have to give your your credits I love it thanks brick um I'm curious though out of you4 who here H or out of you3 God I'm counting myself who

here is actually bought an ordinal has everyone or because I'm willing to bet at least one of the four of us has not I have not but I've gone to Magic Eden and and thought about buying one I I have I thought if you already know brick have you brick yeah I played around played around with it and I'm still so mad about or for to myself because the node monkeys mint was on Christmas Day I think or something like that where I was thinking like N I don't have time to look at this right now and now I'm really beating myself for it I think everyone is but I just think

that's a testament to the fact that it's still pretty early like it's totally new infrastructure you need to download a new wallet you need to like get used to the denominations like there's just friction there and the migration is happening very slowly but I find it interesting that even in like this group of us for there's not 100% of us who are super Crypt native always on chain doing different stuff trying things that haven't bought an ordinal yet like if we haven't done it there's so many other people who are going to do it and I guess I should say that this is not Financial advice and I wouldn't go too crazy here but I just find the dichotomy of this and the slow migration over to ordinals like very interesting cool just give me more fomo no it's

fine I think like maybe from like a slightly midt take like Bitcoin is the largest asset or like crypto asset I know crypto asset is not an actual term it's one that Gary genser made up but uh Bitcoin is the largest asset by market cap right and that Capital has been sitting there for God knows how long and has always been unproductive there's probably like God knows how many people sitting on like tens of millions of Bitcoin and they've been looking for something to do some way to like flex your status instead of just holding like 20 million in Bitcoin in like a cold wallet and ordinal like ordinal is your solution right there has to be like an insane amount of Chinese wheels and then add to that the Bitcoin ecosystem in general and sort of productive uses of

your Capital whether that's like reaking with like Babylon and like generating yield uh on your Bitcoin like I I feel like people are not ready for like Bitcoin City season and the metric I like to use is how much Bitcoin stuff there is on my WeChat feed and just every single month there's more and more Bitcoin like all of these Chinese vs are investing into like completely pointless like Bitcoin l2s but the money is Flowing there for sure and then on top of that it's like if you've got $20 million of Bitcoin you're probably going to be pretty hesitant to deposit into one of these l2s because like let's face it they're not real l2s like you can't actually use Bitcoin the

asset on a layer 2 in a completely secure and trustless manner so I think you're going to forgo those trust assumptions and maybe dabble in the ordinals market instead because it is self custodial it's all on chain like you're completely secured by the Bitcoin Network like this is a completely safe thing to partake in so if you're going to speculate you're probably going to do it at the ordinal lir and you're probably like because there's nothing else like with ethereum you have nfts which is a niche but you also have defi you have gamei you have all of this other stuff that you're competing with M share for but on bitcoin's Bas layer it's ordinals and that's it so I guess now I'm really giving Westy fomo so maybe this is a good time to pass it over to Ren for the uh his hot seater

cool Throne yeah thanks Sam uh this week I have World coin in the hot seat I wouldn't say it's like entirely in the hot seat but a little in the hot seat just cuz price went up a bit too fast worldcoin is currently sitting at a 1 billion market cap but it's sitting at a 81 billion fdv so this is like low float High fdv to the max um it's ripped up Forex in the past month and to be honest like the supply Dynamics are relatively interesting 75% of the supply is your marked for the community and unlocked over 15 years 6 billion out of the total 10 billion in Supply is allocated for users and the token is only given up when people sign up right

um so technically the higher the liquid Supply the more adoption it should have in terms of people that have scanned the eyeball but I also know that they've recently started out giving sort of world coin token rewards to just people that have a wed slash account already I think sure on one hand you can be like cynical and saying like dude this is disgusting like World coin shouldn't be at 81 billion FTV but I think open AI Sora was kind of the cataly right people went like holy crap like some of the videos you saw come out of an A S were shockingly realistic and I'm not sure how World coin and like proof of personhood will be the solution for that but just sort of like the narrative Instinct you need

some way to prove I like a human is a human or like some content was human generated plays really really well into World coins vision sure they only have like 3 million wallet addresses today I don't think a proof of preson hood solution might solve like AI generated content in its current state but the narrative is definitely there and then on the other hand you have sort of tangential Catalyst right I think conference season is just getting started you have Eve Denver starting this week and the amount of AI events at Eve Denver both by sort of large VCS or large AI projects is so numerous like there's an event every day and it's packed and I think as conference season

happens like that Circle joke becomes really strong people go like oh my God oh my God ai ai is goingon to change everything and from a study more like left C perspective right like Falin reached like 400 billion FTV and that thing probably makes like six digits in revenue or probably less a year maybe more I'm not really sure I haven't checked don't HTE me if I get it wrong um but if fcoin can reach 400 billion FTV last cycle What could worldcoin reach you know and then Sam out you're saying like oh yeah I want to raise like7 trillion for my chip company like and worldcoin is kind of like Sam outman starting so yeah I think it's going to be like a hated a hated token like it's up so much already but I think there's

still so much upside of course not Financial advice um but I feel like the Cal is are there however there are definitely like Supply unlocks and like um more Supply coming online so that's something to all always be wary of this kind of remind or yeah this isn't financial advice either but like uh seeing this like World coin rally uh has kind of changed my mindset of how I think about allocating in my own portfolio like um before this kind of bull market started I was thinking that okay if if the FDB is really too high I'm not going to touch that thing because everybody knows that it's not sustainable um but but now I understand

that that's not true in crypto land right now so like what I'm trying to do is find this like low float High fdv projects or like things that could uh become like high fdv and then looking for narratives or like drivers that are hard to quantify um like the potential of as in is with like this world coin stuff like nobody really knows what's going to happen with AI or how fast AI will go forward and like how this world coin stuff even like ties into it so it becomes a narrative that's kind of easier to sell um and yeah I yeah I I don't really have a problem with like

low float High fdv stuff but I just think that it's funny that at some point it has to come down um and people are still willing to like bet on it and Gumble on it um which is an interesting phenomena because I don't think we see that in try markets right now or ever pretty much guys the number is7 trillion do like people are definitely pricing this based on how much money Sam Alman is Raising or like that is a quarter of the US's GDP last year like that is an incredible number and so as a result like obviously these things get repriced and yeah there's some factors of the ftvs pushed out over 15 years Etc

but people are definitely pricing in that worldcoin I guess achieves its vision of becoming Ubi I know Sam mman right now is conducting studies on Ubi and its impact on the world and if those studies come back positive he's obviously going to point to hey I've World coin this this private sector decentralized open Ubi is probably the better solution Etc um and I think you know the higher this thing goes the more valuable it becomes Etc but on sort of the flip side with such a high FTV and constant unlocks and the fact that if you this does achieve quote unquote Ubi people will be selling

the world coin for dollars or the currency of their choice so there's constant sell pressure and there needs to be buyers on the other side in order to sustain the price level so the question is I guess who is the buyer on the other side there needs to be stuff built on world coins chain uh that potentially uses their proof of humanity system Etc um maybe who was on the bid side is Sam Alman or similar figures just trying to prop up the the value of this thing in order to create a sustainable flywheel Etc but yeah I just don't see how at some point this doesn't slowly unwind as people as a cell pressure builds up and there's not

enough bids but that could take many years but and especially as the AI progress continues at the rate it has like this thing could continue to pump and pump higher than we could even imagine yeah regretfully I have faded the the AI narrative for the most part I've got like a small bag of towel but nothing significant and it's just something that I've kind of come to terms with I'm like okay like this is not something I understand at all the ftvs are going to get ludicrous this is going to be a game of hot potato for maybe one week or maybe two years throughout the cycle I really don't know but what it comes down to for me is I don't actually believe that today or in

the next few years that there's a genuine crypto use case with AI that's going to make a material worldwide impact I do think that will come eventually but like most things in crypto I just think it's a little bit too early and I'd much rather wait until uh prices are super super low in the middle of a bare market after the bubble pops and start looking at things then so that's kind of my plan of attack for this I think the universal basic income point that Wesley mentioned was really interesting uh I saw a tweet this morning I don't know if this is true I need to verify it but someone wrote that starting this week 10 million worldcoin tokens which is worth roughly 80 million as of current prices will stream a week to retail wallets over the following two

weeks and will continue doing so every two weeks after at higher rates so if we take their three million wallet address wallet addresses today that's roughly 25 like $25 um for wallet like sure that isn't a lot but it's a good flywheel you know and I would guess the majority of world coin like orb scans are in developing countries and in those countries $25 goes a super long way and if you're making $25 a week from just scanning your eyeball you are definitely scanning your eyeball to like all of your neighbors yo dude just go sign eyballs you can like buy like God knows what for like two weeks with this $25 of payout and there was this interesting point that worldcoin had in

their white paper so the full paragraph reads wild Network effects will ultimately come from useful applications being built on top of the financial and identity infrastructure the token is issued to all Network participants to align their incentives around the growth of the network this is especially important early on to bootstrap the network and bypass the code start problem but the last sentence is this could lead the world coin token to become the wildest uh sorry the whest distributed digital asset maybe the loudest too um but I think that's a very possible scenario you know say five years later worldcoin or scans have gone absolutely ballistic there's more people that own worldcoin the token than

Bitcoin or ethereum around the world and sure like maybe there aren't that many use cases for it but I think at some point this is like a personal thesis of mine I think at some point like big Tech has a reckoning moment where marketers say that okay I'm I don't want to spend my ad Budget on your social media platform because 90% of the views and interactions and clicks are completely fake in organic or different B activity and a worldcoin appears on your doorstep and say hey we're the only proof of personhood solution in the world with 50 million signups use us or U 50% of your Revenue because people and marketers have been paying for like nothing in the past like

five years and I think that moment will come I don't know when it will come but I think the AI problem of sort of like generated content fake fake activity will only go exponential From Here For Better or For Worse is wld D AI money it could be I'll tell you what it's definitely not e though just don't let strride get a hold of it I guess just one last point that um this is super random thoughts too but Sam Sam was saying like he doesn't see a very valuable use case for AI but if you read like Brick's AI ex crypto report like you know that I think brick is like

relatively bullish like AI agents and I think AI agents like right now they may not make a lot of sense you know it's just like AI agents like transacting on change that like helping you like bet they're helping you like trade in the per markets they're helping like to do like super rudimentary transactions but I think at some point AI replaces like a large amount of like white collar or even like maybe not blue collar but white colwick um and all of those could be AI agents built on some decentralized open source protocol right and then the community sort of like submits the owni agents who has the best like I don't know the data entry AI agent Excel like DCF AI agent and that has like an

incredible amount of value capture because if you're a company and paying some like Investment Bank or like 150k a year and you can pay an AI agent like 60k a year and he does like a relatively okay job too you probably take that five years down the road and having all of that built on like an open source decentralized network is a pretty damn cool idea that I think has like actual value in the world of course it's probably a bit too early and there's like a lot more AI ideas that I'm personally excited about but I think that's just like a random idea ahead I just think people get like too caught up and ahead of themselves with all this stuff like yes chat GPT is awesome don't get me wrong but do you guys actually like I use it in Niche use cases and it's also takes me three or

four tries to get the prompt to spit out exactly what it is that I'm looking for like these things are not tools that are ready for Mass adoption on their own in my opinion and now we're just sprinkling crypto on top and saying like different buzzwords like that's honestly what I see it feels like a forc narrative on crypto Twitter to be completely honest I know that's going to be a hated take and once again I'm going to double down on the fact I do think AI agents will be huge I just think it's going to take five to 10 years to actually play out and we're going to see a lot of booms and busts in between I actually think that's a pretty good take like especially comparing at the valuations some of this stuff is going at um I was just recently thinking

about this like now it's probably easier than ever to just like create some documents um throw some bsws in create your Twitter page for some AI related project and then just release a token and say that okay we're GNA build this at some point now we're doing this and this stuff and then let's say in two years we have a good product and like your token valuation will go through the sky because everybody is just like trying to front run each other in this vertical and as you said earlier some like not a lot of people understand what's happening so it's like I see AI I bu and that's the thesis yeah to respond to Sam I don't I

don't think people are overhyping the progression with which AI like is continuing at its rate like a year ago we were barely using chat gbt and it's gotten so much better in the past year and we have products like last week that were announced Sora from open AI you have text to video Etc and I think just the progression of how good AI is is just going to increase exponentially over the next few years and so I don't think people are overhyping how important and quick AI is developing however I definitely agree that a lot of these air related projects within crypto are getting overhyped and overvalued but as brick said like people just they don't know what's going on

they just see this progression and they just spray and prey at what they think could be a potential big solution because they know the market for the stuff will be huge but no one really knows what kind of solutions will actually work which ones will win Etc people are just saying I need to get exposure to this thing immediately and just like throwing money at it but yeah eventually this thing will will unwind there'll be a top of a bubble and then as Sam said maybe that's the time to bid to bid when things sort of calm down for a bit to drr AI to Infinity longterm everything is over value today I think that's probably a good point to close it

out but thanks freaking wussy for coming on and see you guys next week thanks for Hing us hey everyone thanks for watching today's zero X research episode I wanted to take a second and remind you about an upcoming 2024 digital asset Summit in London this March seats are limited so hit the link in the description and use the promo code 0x10 to save 10% on tickets see you in London [Music] oh