Will Farcaster Retain Crypto Natives and Reach Mainstream Adoption? | Analyst Round Table

Transcript

I think the reason why you have a lot of a Crypton native audience currently is because they feel like they're early to something which is like so native to these crypto audiences who are farming air drops or you know trying to be early to a certain token or meme token like that's really what's being monetized right now is being early and as obviously we go months from now I guess the question is how does farcaster retain the audience what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerx research March is just around the corner and I want to make sure to give you a quick reminder to not top ticket 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 what's up everyone welcome back to another episode of zerx research the blockworks research team is back to bring you another episode of an analyst round table today is Monday February 5th so this will be airing on Wednesday February 8th or February 7th actually and uh we're joined by Brick and Westy to jam on the latest Market happenings also just a little update Dan has actually moved over to light speed for the time being so he will only be uh hopping on in the capacity that he's able to but hopefully we'll get them back over the coming weeks here um but ren do you want to kick us off with some uh news and governance updates yeah uh for sure it's been a relatively buy week

as usual um first of all we have the Jupiter airdrop which happened on Wednesday I think in general from the network perspective that went pretty fine I think we saw some like degraded Network performance it obviously took you a while to claim your fair job and maybe sell it but overall I think the network sort of like remained resilient I do know that Jupiter got a bit of community push back I don't think a lot of people understood their launch Pro Dynamics and how the drup the team was basically putting up 2.5% of the total drup supply for sale through the launch F between the prices of 0.4 and 0.7 which equates to a fdv of 4 to 7 billion and so I think the community pushed back

because they basically thought all right we're going to do an aird drop but meanwhile the Jupiter team's also going to cash out at the same time but I think like they got a bit of flack or a bit too much Flack granted there was some communication missteps or maybe perhaps too much communication from the founder but overall I think it was a relatively successful aw from the Network's perspective anyone have any thoughts there I have a question so why exactly were transactions failing to go through is that more of a scheduler problem or more of the lack of like a like a really well- defined fee mechanism I would say it's probably a combination of everything one thing is like definitely like the scheduler and

how it's like stly nondeterministic that should be partially fixed in 1.18 or at least like improved so that's probably one thing I think another thing was was just like the RPC you use I think we saw tweets where like if you use the default RPC probably your transaction didn't go through but as soon as you switch to for example like helios's RPC your transactions went through and just overall like Network congestion I would say but yeah next on the list sticking with salana we have the salana mobile I think they just announced that they reached 60,000 uh sorry 60,000 units in sales which far eclipses their previous round one which I think they limited to 20,000 it'll be interesting to see

whether they can keep up with sort of the manufacturing capacity but I have no clue about global supply chain so I'll let the salana foundation figure that one out but I mean it's interesting to see that like that's a pretty good amount of money for the salana foundation assuming they're the ones to sort of like build and launch this product and I think other than like Hardware wallets aside it's interesting to see a company make their first big like hard Hardware push will salana one they become the apple of web 3 I'm not sure but I think internally within the block Works researching we've always had out got feeling that you know one of these like large like either like protocols or companies probably more so coinbase was going to launch a hardware

product sooner rather than later yeah I think this is just a good move on both sides both from the salana foundation themselves it's a good Revenue driver as well as a way to start sort of the mobile movement within salana um and then on the other side of things it makes sense why there's a lot of pre-orders I think it's pretty obvious it's going to be plus EV with the amount of air drops you're going to get potentially Bonk coming to these addresses as well um so yeah I just think it's a no-brainer overall and I mean we're going to have to wait a year until these things are actually in people's hands um but at the same time yeah I definitely

understand the move here toy actually talked about this in a recent light uh speed podcast and if I understood him correctly uh the foundation is producing these phones at a loss uh and it's more about like trying to penetrate the market because I guess the problem here is that uh it's going to be or maybe better to let him explain it so it's a good idea to uh go and listen to that podcast but I think the main problem is that it's kind of hard to rent seek if you want to call it that um for the phone like it's going to be hard to basically take a cut out of the

uh fees generated through the like app store um because of a certain like relationship between the app and then the end user um or if you compare against like a a app builder that doesn't really once the app is built um it doesn't cost anything to like you know produce some more units you you can decrease your margin uh without becoming unprofitable as long as you're yeah basically that but then with these phones like even if you increase the supply but uh there's always going to be this certain cost of like increasing the

supply sorry I explained this really badly but that's basically the short no worries but yeah I think to totally has the end goal of like at least I think he memes about it but I don't know how serious he is about it about disrupting the Google and apple Dooly for context they both charge I think 30% on any revenue generated through your mobile app so for example if you're cash of clans someone pays $10 for an like expansion pack or like additional gems I don't know what they call it these days um Google and apple basically take $3 off that but yeah if you're too poor to buy a salana phone just get a salana sticker and stick it on your phone it works a little differently but same brand um next up we have LRT protocols

expanding I think LRT protocols have seen an incredible amount of growth like puffer so their TVO has gone like pretty vertical really really fast um and now some of these L Protocols are expanding that to L2 so for example Renzo is expanding their Stak to l2s I think starting off with arbitrum through Conex Network I feel like there are some potential risks there with allowing like sort of like users to St through an L2 but I would love to like hear your thoughts on like do you think these L protocols I hear to stay is it too fast too quick does anyone really understand the risk involved I think they're here to stay

and I think we're at like literally like inning two or three of this to be honest I think it's going to get pretty crazy uh I'm not personally partaking in like the the reaking protocol or the the liquid reaking protocols right now mainly because I'm a little bit worried just about how like the points allocation with igen Lair ends up going like I don't know if you know if you have 200 points on Renzo of Ian Lair points and 200 Igan lir points in like an eoa that you deposited directly into IG lir I just don't know if you'll ultimately get the same igen allocation once that air drop actually happens and in my opinion it's like Igan is definitely want launching at like a 20 billion fdv or something like that and I don't know about the LRT protocols as

much so I just kind of think it's a little bit risky to to gamble on that I mean I'm sure it'll be fine because I mean obviously Ian Lair is incentivized to to make sure that all the people who deposited in these LRT Protocols are are happy because ultimately they're customers of of igir as well but it's just a little bit dicey when you have such a layup on the Igan lar drop in my opinion yeah I definitely agree with everything Sam said I also think the end state of these LRT protocols is that they just can keep competing with one another to get more users yield Etc in this move of Renzo expanding to l2s is just one step and what Sam said is like the first

inning of what these LT Protocols are going to do but I think eventually you know as we start to see riskier and riskier protocols pop up the fact that L lrts themselves already stack risk uh smart contract risk on top of smart contract risk I just think the end state of these things after a couple years when they're all competing for the most yield with all the users that some of these are going to end up uh blowing up and contributing to um yeah pretty big uh blow ups within the ethereum space so I'm definitely cautious about using the LRT protocols uh and it's hard to to tell who is really winning the race at the

moment since I keep seeing another one pop up every day uh that increases their tvl so yeah that's that's how I'm thinking about the LRT space at the moment what I don't understand there is like how many of these protocols do we need number just keeps going up and up and what are really the competitive advantages there like you being seen as the safest project I would reckon and you having like the most liquid underlying um that you're issuing so like based on those two factors it's yeah most likely going to be similar to the LSD market and you're just going to

have like a few winners and then all of these other projects drop off also I at least I hope that at some point crypto Market becomes more efficient at pricing risk so like if a one project pays out let's say 10 basis points more than another but it's mechanism is much more riskier like at least I'd hope that people still choose the project that pays less yield but on a risk adjusted basis is better yeah definitely agree with all your point I mean it'll be interesting to see the market dynamics play out but I think like L it's should be uh like winner takes off or like a few winners will dominate the

Market but I think there's a Nuance there in that different Alles have different ABS exposure so it's not exactly like pain vanilla like a the I'm staking where like everyone has the exact same risk exposure different outties will have different risk exposures so maybe maybe we'll see a world in which there like multiple like dominant aots what's up everyone March is approaching fast and I want to give you another reminder not to miss out on D London it is coming it's right around the corner and it's in March from the 18th to the 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 a topic on Aras tokenization and stable coins which I think we can all agre are going to pay a large vote in crypto future we'll also talk about global regulatory Frameworks that comply best practices and the evolution of global standards that are shaping the global investment landscape we'll 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 in the description and using the promo code 0x10 to save 10% on tickets see you in London moving

on to our next news we have apoin L2 um they're basically there's an ongoing vote in the Dow as to which L2 that they want to launch on there's a few options I think one of them is polygon one of them is optimism one of them is arbitrum and one of them is ZK sync there's a few like there's a slight controversy there because polygon bought a significant amount of ape and they are using that to vote within this proposal as to like which R up stack that they should use I think it got a bit of push back personally I don't think it's that bad you're buying like quote unquote equity in a company you're using that to like

basically partially decide the direction of like a governance vote not that much different from like a shareholders vote and obviously you would do so in a Direction that's beneficial to your own company you know like I'm not going to like be a Manufacturing Company buy stock in Apple and then use it to like uh choose another like manufacturing supplier that makes zero sense so I don't think like it's one of if anything like I think it's better than trafi at least like you get the transparency that you know like polygon bought x amount of a if they're using it to vote on this proposal rather than like all of this happening behind closed doors you have no idea who's like voting um but other than ape there's also been a lot of l2s that are trying to quote unquote

incentivize treasure da to build a L2 under stack for example ZK sync optimism and Scot so I mean like it kind of just seems like good oldfashioned BD Wars is happening again but this time it's for protocols to build an L2 on your roll up stack rather than just building on your L1 for example I'll be interested in hearing how you guys think this plays out like is there a winner or is it just who has the most money I don't know one would hope that it's the best deck that wins but I'm not quite sure about the fact that you can just or I'm not sure I agree with the fact that it's a transpar ENT way for companies to operate uh that be be being being able like just buying

tokens of the market and immediately go and vote with those because yeah actually I don't know how it works with companies but at least when a fund buys a large allocation of shares they have to like uh make an announcement about it and then the market has time to react and blah blah blah meanwhile here yes you can see if somebody's buying the tokens but you can just do it immediately and I guess there are really no restrictions so in the worst case scenario let's say a few projects are like neck to neck and then somebody just decides to acquire some tokens on the market and like push over the vote which would not be ideal in my opinion yeah that's definitely a fa

take as far as thinks on the new segment we have Elixir Elixir is like a decentralized market making protocol and they are setting up PO for rabbit X on February 6 so it could be a potential play if you want the Stark air drop while also sort of farming the elixir farm at the same time Sam was there anything you wanted to add there no I just think it's a pretty good play honestly like people are looking for things to do on Stark net that token is coming that token is coming soon and uh it's a good per platform from what I've been told I haven't actually used it myself but if you look at the daily volume leaderboards it's pretty much every day rabidex hyper liquid dydx V4 V3 and vertex at the top five so

definitely like a a promising protocol and worth using if you want to trade yeah lastly for the new segment we have clusters which is sort of like a multi-chain ens or domain name using layer zero uh as an underlying technology I think youve seen a relatively large amount of activity within like these like onchain names recently especially with forecaster which will dive into a lot more later seeing strong growth but also I think ens recently announced a partnership just this morning with god daddy so I haven't read into what the partnership entails but I would guess you can use your ens as a domain name which is like pretty cool if you buy like an ens then

you like own the domain name and you know you can set up a website under your ens so I think that's really interesting to see yeah I like this idea too like I don't know exactly how clusters Works underneath the hood but I do know like it's a pain in the ass when I'm like dealing between a phantom wallet and a metamask a rabby wallet and I have to like remember the names from or the addresses from chain to chain it'd be really nice if I just had you know Sam and I could just send I'm sure I wouldn't actually get the one Sam that's only three letters and I'm sure someone would grab it before I did but nonetheless it would be nice to have like one domain name that I could send across chains to um just identify my addresses MH yeah well all right next we

have a quick word from chaos Labs thanks to our fantastic sponsor dydx this week we have om CEO of chaos Labs on for our dydx segment quick starters what is chaos lab's 20 million launch incentives for dydx and do you mind giving us a quick rundown on how it's done so far yeah the $20 million liquidity incentive um or launch incentive program for dydx is a program meant to bootstrap liquidity and encourage migration uh to the new dydx chain from previous versions like V3 uh the idea here is to incentivize early adopters who are driving volume on the platform and driving organic flow um that's high level the program is structured across

seasons and should run around six months um and the incentives are distributed in dydx tokens uh through governance at the end of each season you really can't argue with the fact that the incentives of worked pretty well uh so far but I'm curious on the market maker side because a lot of the critiques and worries heading into V4 was that market makers wouldn't want to set up the new infra has has this actually been what you've seen or do you think most market makers have successfully Market migrated over by now so the volume is has been really really impressive like if you compare um around the current time frame the the volume that ID xchain is doing versus other prevalent uh Perpetual protocol it's been number one for a lot of the

time uh since the launch of the program so I think those concerns have been put to rest um and the incentive programs is actually performing and serving its purpose in incentivizing people to migrate over and giving them sufficient motivation so there's still room to grow um and we're seeing that happen week over week but the the start has been very very strong and promising so focusing on the statistics right um what type of numbers have you seen so far are there any any outlier statistics that perhaps you weren't expecting we would love to get us sort of like a rundown so the last right now we're on season two uh we've seen on the dydx Chain over almost 22 billion in trading volume across 34 different markets uh over 2,000 uh Traders and

1,100 market makers have been earning points through the program that we're administrating um and then there's some a lot more interesting data on like the performance of trading traders in the market like liquidations and so on I think what's really also nice to see here is amount of deposits so we spoke about new infrastructure and having to migrate and all of these things well in the early weeks we've already seen over 40 million usdc deposits on the dyd exchange and then I do want to ask a little bit about wash trading what is you guys' methodology or how are you guys going to try and combat that because obviously in crypto whenever there's incentives there's people who want to try and extract those incentives in the most efficient by let's talk about what was trading is or or at least how we're defining it so basically when

you're administrating a program like this everybody knows that in crypto farming is a really big U part trying to get the points trying to get the airdrop allocation um and really it's hard to differentiate between users who are organic and supporting the the platform and there because they find Value and just folks that are either sting a Bots or there to kind of maximize on that airdrop allocation um with the wash training module of chaos Labs we make that distinction and differentiation uh so we run several different algorithms that are rooted in the latest acad a research and how to detect watch trading with sophisticated metrics and conditions uh we do an analysis on on basically graphs uh in the trading venues so basically takers and makers um

and then towards the end we're able to see if there are any Cycles so so a really really naive example and I'll show this now when I pull up my screen is two traders who are trading back and forth their p&l will stay net neutral um throughout the the trading season or throughout different positions but they're doing incredible amount of volume and this is typically something uh that we Define as wash trading and we don't want to incentivize it or encourage it so there's a blog post about it on the chos blog we also go into detail about it on the dydx Forum and we kind of give some intuition for how the algorithm work how all the different algorithms work and how we're detecting cycles and graphs yeah that makes a lot of sense and I'm sure there's you know can't really fit it

into a five minute segment and how extensive this uh this wash trading detection actually goes but I'm glad to see that you guys are actually taking a thoughtful approach breaking this up into Seasons kind of doing retroactive rewards based on activity and doing your best to reward the behavior that you want to see but I do believe that's all the time we have for today so Omar thank you so much for coming on if you want to leave the audience with uh where they can learn more about chaos Labs dydx we can link to that stuff in the show notes after after uh after we're done recording here for sure first of all thank you for having me I really enjoyed it if you want to learn more about chaos Labs the easiest is Twitter chaos laabs or on our website chaos laabs XYZ we're

always happy to talk to builders uh thanks for having me today yeah of course let's get on over to hot seat and cool Throne all right back to the hot seat cool Throne segment this week I think we'll let wesy go first I know Wes's got some cool data that he wants to show so Wesley please go ahead I'll share my screen for you yeah appreciate it uh in the cool Throne this week I have spark protocol which I've been seeing a lot on my timeline recently so forther a little clarification spark is a subd under maker Dow uh it's essentially a money market similar to a I believe it's a fork of a V3 but they actually have a direct deposit module

from maker uh into the money market so users can borrow die against it um but yeah spark has had an immense rise over the past nine months I believe it it launched in May of last year and now has over were I think $3.4 billion in supplied value and $2.2 billion in borrowed value which you can see on our blockworks research analytics page that Ren pulled up um for those watching on YouTube um but yeah this this rise has been obviously attributed to plugging directly into maker but they're also in the process of what they call pre- farming for their token or users that are uh supplying volatile assets and

borrowing d are able to earn up to 30 like a a pool of 30 million spark tokens which represents 2% of the total Supply after four years of farming um and from there we can expect subow farming to commence in May of this year so coming up in a couple months and the way that works is the first two years 500 million of the subd tokens will be given to Farmers um with 350 million of those going to uh the stable coin Farmers so not die but there their rebranding die to new stable uh which is yet to be named and then 150 million of that 500 million is

going to the new government's token that's replacing mkr um and then from there the following two years after that you have 250 million split up the same way evenly across the stable coin in the new governance token and then the remaining four years 125 million are split up and so I think obviously with Sparks immense growth over the past nine months we can expect there'll be a lot of eyeballs on subd farming when it goes live um people are obviously farming as much as they can right now for even such a small amount of the spark Supply that once you know sub farming starts I think there's going to be a lot of eyeballs I

think you know maker is obviously going to benefit on the back of this given that there's portion of the subd farming going to those that want to use maker and yeah I just think you know spark protocol is killing it their top eight in D tvl overall and didn't exist a year ago so yeah I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on spark I think the narrative is definitely there after the January 1 especially after the January 31st FC meeting where I think jvon pow was a little more hawkish than expected and I think maybe the market is realizing that we may not get as many Cuts as they thought we would so obviously with higher interest rates for

longer that benefits make it out just from off like increase interest revenues especially from all of their rwas and I think that natur really carries over to spark but on top of that you also see leverage or stable coin Supply starting to come back right if I'm not wrong like December and January was one of the first months where us saw a growth in the stable coin Supply whereas like in the previous one year it's like straight up being a down only chart and so that bols well for maker Dow in addition usct I think hit a absur market cap like 97 billion and I think the statistic was that usct made or like tedra specifically made more money than the

entire like Goldman sack like usct made 2.2 billion Gman Sachs made two billion in Q4 and usct is probably run by like one 100 with the Manpower and resources of Gman sex so it's really interesting to see all of that play out especially like onchain in the form of Makow yeah one one thing maybe worth noting is that if you think about for example holding usdc or borrowing Dy or like creating a vault and then taking up D like those are two different things so kind of for D to grow um big time or a lot uh the markets like demand for leverage has to go up

because otherwise the like circulating Supply kind of doesn't increase um but it will be interesting to see now that if that kind of Paradigm starts again where I guess we some are already saying that we are in a bull market and it's going to get much better from here than I think D could see huge growth when like people want more leverage and now there's an even easier it's much easier to borrow to spark for the Cal than it is to set up your own Vault or whatever yeah I think Spark's going to be a home run I remember we had Sam mcferson on one of the co-founders of spark or contributor I'm not really sure what his title is at the exact moment but he definitely had some cool things

to say and I recommend going back and listening to that one for sure but I mean like you said Ren just to recap rates are higher for longer um the demand for leverage is returning and you have subow tokens as well as almost like a split for the maker token so it'll look cheaper on paper to to retail and you get a fresh chart so as stupid as that sounds we've seen it worked like way too many times in the past to to fade it to be honest but unfortunately us people can't farm that airdrop unfortunately yeah there's definitely a reason why like even in the world of equities they do stock bids all the time but Sam who do you have in the hoto couton this week yeah I definitely picked the easiest one of the week I've

got foraster it's a social media protocol SLB backend built on uh optimism mainnet so forecaster is like the back end of the protocol and it's essentially just the account management so you sign up by calling the contract on op mainnet and in return your wallet gets assigned a forecaster ID or an FID as they call them for short and this process unfortunately requires like multiple steps and transactions and you need to like rent storage add a key um and a couple other things which is kind of cumbersome so like you can use a uh ens domain which they support as Ren alluded to earlier if you want an onchain solution but the fids are actually offchain and stored between the peer-to-peer network of nodes but regardless the clients make it a lot easier to sign up warcast is the most

popular client right now and it's a a blend between like Twitter and Reddit and I'm not going to lie I tried it last week and it is very smooth like I find the channels super super compelling much better than Twitter lists I feel like that was like their failed attempt at at Channel honestly um and uh it basically just streamlines the account creation process and you give that uh client a key to tr transmit transaction data on your behalf which is basically propagated to other Hub operators um so basically you have apps which are like the clients that you're interacting with at the top of the stack and then you have actual forecaster for account management at the bottom of the stack and then you have the hubs in between them basically propagating information that's sent from users of the different clients to each

other uh and that stuff's technically off chain but it it's still pretty damn decentralized like they call it a sufficiently decentralized social network and I would actually agree with that Testament we saw warp cast go down because it's experienced such explosive growth but you know your data was always there and propagated between the network of hubs um and you could have interacted with any other client that's built on farcaster despite warcast being down so that actually is a huge improvement over the current things we see I will say I'm a little bit apprehensive just because we saw the friend Tech height we saw threads for like a minute everyone was like ah like let's switch over to to threads from Twitter and it you know didn't actually pan out so I I don't

know if it's here to stay but it definitely feels a little bit more special than any of the things I just mentioned or lens no shade to lens but the ux over there just isn't that good in my opinion like with too much onchain stuff I think this model is a lot more solid I guess um the question just comes down to for me is how are the Hub operators going to be incentivized to store and propagate all this data as you know it actually grows that was like kind of my main tip with noer back in the day and this seems a little bit better because people are paying to rent when they set up an account with h warp cast so maybe you know if you have a successful client it could be pretty cool to see the competition between the different clients um nevertheless I

think it's going to like I guess spur Innovation at the app lir uh for for different social media channels all built on foraster which is super interesting another thing that I've got to mention when talking about warcast is frames which is basically an extension of Facebook's open graph protocol so basically in short they allow creators to embed applications directly into an iframe within the warcast UI um so instead like normally on Twitter you know you see a link it gets butchered by the algo uh you click on it takes you somewhere else you got to maybe buy something log in create an account check out it's this whole process this kind of alleviates all that you can just click on uh the frame and then since you have a wallet associated with it you can just

check out right there which is pretty neat I could see a ton of use cases coming from this like purchasing items like I mentioned or using an application like a game without actually leaving the warp cast UI so that's pretty promising I guess my take on this is it's got a long way to go like personally for me the the frames don't work half the time to be honest and I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong maybe I'm just an idiot but definitely isn't super smooth yet um but I can see like how they'd be really good for gaming or nft mins or community building so still wrapping my head around warcast but I think it's going to be a pretty big deal um on top of that like meme coins over there have gone you know 10 to 100x over the last month or

so since people started using it uh a lot of people are tipping people in this token called dgen which is pretty funny um and I also think uh a good way to play the adoption of it is probably just longing op not Financial advice but metrics on optimism are going to look good right as we head into 4844 and we have a e spot ETF narrative narrative hit uh heating up so that is my cool Throne do you guys have any takes on warp cast foraster Etc yeah I think as far from like a business model perspective I think it's fairly interesting they charge $7 a year for basically storing all of that data and with that $7 you get 5,000 cast which is basically their version of

tweets you get 2,500 reactions 2,500 links 50 profile data and 50 verifications and anything that exceeds the thresholds that I just mentioned basically gets pruned um kind of similar to like blob pruning I guess um and you can pay more for more storage so in the sense like forcaster is probably a social network with I want to say 20,000 followers I haven't checked the Dune dashboards yet and it's turning on it's like Fe switch from day one you know if you people are willing to pay $8 a month for Twitter premium but still have to deal with like millions and millions of like Bots spam scams like surely you'll be willing to pay $7 to get access to

foraster on the other hand I don't know what their da costs are how much they're paying to like post all this data but I feel like this is kind of like the other use case of sort of Da layers right there's like so such an abundance of Da and on one hand like it's going to take us a long time for us to reach a world where we have like thousands of rollups or maybe not that long um but decentralized social media or like even decentralized identity seems like one of the solutions that's going to fill up that da layer and it'll be interesting to see whether faster basically fills up that Da Gap and how much data they really produce and how much they able to

monetize you know if they're able to get 10 million users on F that's like 70 million a year not even including I don't know maybe like some ad model where they turn on and perhaps like the ad model could be an ad model that social media or like web to social media hasn't really explored before you know like you can put ads but then the ad money goes back to for example like users through some research or whatever and it's uniquely enabled by crypto and yeah I'm just very interested to see all of these like experiments play out and the different like market dynamics of a slightly more crypto native like social media Network yeah I think the thing that I first start thinking about is like

comparing this with frch and how sustainable is this but I think this this time it might be different uh because I remember with frch it was more about the underlying token me or the key mechanism that got people hooked on it and then because the product itself um wasn't that good it was hard to like you know just open the app and like continue using it but here I feel that there might be like tangible developments compared to for example Twitter or at least their potential for those and I guess as long as the teams continue developing and like smoothing out the experience and introducing all of this like new cool

features then yeah I think that this uh platform could be super sticky uh but also comes down with it's so hard to bootstrap a social media site so I think it comes down to like continuing with this momentum that the platform has had during the like recent week or so yeah I personally see a lot of comparisons between forecaster and threads when it came out and that you know everyone is piling in everyone's starting from scratch and needing to build their follow is up so most of your timeline is just engagement baiting like not really quality content just whatever hits people's dopamine centers gets a

bunch of likes a bunch of follows um and I also see some comparisons with frch although obviously you're not like buying and selling keys of these people but I think the reason why you have a lot of a Crypton native audience currently is because they feel like they're early to something which is like so native to these crypto audiences who are farming air drops or you know trying to be early to a certain token or meme token like that's really what's being monetized right now is being early and as obviously we go months from now I guess the question is how does foraster retain the audience like obviously this is a good bootstrapping mechanism to get

a number of crypto natives on board which they've done a really good job already but how do you get people that aren't Crypt native and how do you get the crypto native people to stay and make this their home base and even if that's successful one thing I'm also thinking about is let's say crypto Twitter does migrate to something like forecaster does that sort of Silo the conversation to a new social media platform that maybe normies who are trying to learn about the space don't have access to or don't know about and so all the conversations that are happening on Twitter that they see are super low quality because all the high quality people have left so we need to make sure that we're you know controlling the narrative and getting quality information out there at the

same time so yeah that those are like all my thoughts on forecaster at the moment I think I'm really excited about frames because if you think towards like web to social media right every big app that took off introduced a new like exciting media form that caught on and eventually stuck around until they reach just like viral app status right for example example Snapchat posting pictures and videos that like automatically deleted Tik Tok short form like reals be you know like the front and back camera I feel like I'm too old for all of that stuff um but foraster has the potential to do the same with frames right for example I know our big

bosses Mike and Yano are really excited about the intersection of uh foraster and prediction markets so as a news and media organization maybe there's something we can do there like every time we put out like a news article you can bet on a prediction Market within a frame right we put out a prediction Mark uh we put out an article about say IP 4844 and you can predict and beted on whether you think 4844 will happen by before March or after March you know and you can extend that to like quite literally anything given the extensibility of frames for example like micro payments to read like one of to's latest articles or buying something like integrating shopping experience within a frame I feel like at some point like people are going to build Innovative

enough frames that attracts an audience outside of the core crypto audience and I think it's very possible that they replicate like a cleaner less spamer like more fun version of Twitter even outside of crypto circles yeah I agree with that but then that kind of comes back to the point of like having to maintain momentum when building because I feel that you mentioned B which kind of reach some popularity but then at some point it just like plateaued I guess it really didn't um like introduce anything that new at the end of the day and okay maybe

the business model was kind of broken because you had to post a picture every day of your life and like most people's lives or everyday lives probably aren't like that's super super interesting so I guess that's also a reason why the platform kind of died down but let's say forecaster comes up with something really Innovative in let maybe a year and a half but in between that time like nothing has really changed then it's going to be hard to again like um bring on new people and gain this new like hyper on the platform I think something that could be sticky for forecaster is if uh people or sorry protocols use it as a filtering

mechanism for for airdrops because obviously we don't really have a a proof of human yet but I think this would at least improve an airdrop allocation you know if you're active on forecaster then you know and you can prove that and you already paid your rent storage for that year then maybe if you're on that list of users you can get an airdrop for some protocol like I'm sure we'll see some of that because we're already seeing a ton of like bounties being posted for unique ideas with frames and if you can just tap into a network of users and use a frame to provide them an experience it's like that that's very strong for community building and something that could keep people coming back well into the future in my opinion yeah as a as a closing point I

think what I'm excited about is the ecosystem and the fact that like any developer can come in and build on Fame and I think just within like 24 hours of frames launching right uh this is probably organized beforehand but you saw like hacker houses in New York you saw hacker houses in SF led by for example Varian fun and Bally from base and you know like it's really like whatever you can dream of just go build it and I feel like we see a camrin explosion of like just fun Innovative frames within the next like two or three months obviously like there will be probably risk involved I wouldn't be too surprised I know this was a a point you made Sam in our warning C that like one of these frames is goingon to have like an exploited in it and no one have will

have any clue on how to audit that and that'll definitely be a risk so try carefully maybe moving on to my or this week's cool TR for me uh which is tried airdropping their native token sdd to stake Thea holders um and yeah basically stride is a liquid staking cocen um IBC enabled chain which already dominates most of the like markets within the ad ecosystem um and they will drop 5 million s

strd which is worth around 20 mil as we speak over the next 150 days or so uh and it's cool to see because uh in the past few weeks we've just seen more and more projects like mess around with points and like yeah we might do an airdrop at some point but here's a point program first let's see what happens uh meanwhile here the rules are like well defined and you know in advance that like the airdrop will be proportional to the holders like percentage of the total eligible stts Supply um and yeah basically St holders on stride blockchain and then those who

LP on Osmos and asort neutron will be eligible with three million tokens being dropped in the first 60 days and then 2 million in the next 90 days and the drop happens on a daily basis but it takes six months after the location for the tokens to West um and yeah I think like since the LSD Market is mostly a winner takes all this is a really well thought out kind of scheme to attract Ste sticky users over a certain time period and then also yeah once people get used to

or people are probably already used to using stride because of it's like large markets in this other other um Adam ecosystem projects like stri will probably do really well in the in the longer run by yeah do you guys have any opinions on this yeah I think obviously like I really like the no BS like we're just going to give out 5% of the supply to S TI uh stakers and that's like a pretty hefty amount you know but obviously with the whole like modular money narrative I would guess they're making a b that that 5% of the supply that that they're

giving out is well worth it not just in terms of like any potential fee revenue from like stake Tia but also being the def fact though I'm not going to use the word canonical but maybe like preferred liquid staking issuer within like any like Cosmos or like IBC enable chain right and I think like overall the design of stride is relatively interesting from an architecture perspective right how they use like interchain accounts so that anyone can issue lsds from other external chains on stride and that's something that it it kind of feels like ethereum is struggling with these days for example like rap stake de you're seeing snapshot vote after snapshot vote people have to

rely on like external bridges in order to bridge like rap stake de to say BNB chain or Avalanche whereas Cosmos like doesn't really have that problem today you know like obviously interoperability is still a big concern for ethereum and it's like rollups and there isn't a good solution there yet and Cosmos does genuinely have very interesting Tech that we'll probably get copied by ethereum at some point or later and I think stride is a great like index bet on the cosmos ecosystem like overall or like the IBC ecosystem or like the first bet that you're probably going to make is like Celestia but I think the Second Great bet would just be like whoever is going

to issue all of these liquid staking tokens for all of these proof of Stak chains and it seems like stri is a clear winner right now yeah it's not even stride for all proof of stake chains like to me this announcement specifically in terms of like their raise plus the STA uh incentives to me show how much they want to penetrate the Celestia Market not just Celestia in terms of Tia but Celestia in terms of the rups built on Celestia because if you noticed in the Rays it included Neil Sani of eclipse who's building rollup on Celestia as well as s oir was building Sovereign Labs which would be a role as a service

provider on Celestia and so to me stride clearly sees Celestia rollups as another place where they can sort of plant their flag um as these rollup tokens come out but also specifically with Tia obviously this is a bet on TIA becoming quote unquote modular money or Tia is used throughout rups on top of Celestia in some way shape or form and they're hoping to obviously be the number one liquid staking provider of Tia and with that comes um some pretty big advantages I think we're probably going to see some of these Celestia rollups copy the blast Playbook of having sort of native yield to their rollup uh but have that be

actually an LST underlying within the bridge and obviously T is a perfect candidate for this given it'll be on many rollups it has a pretty high staking rate um and so yeah I just see this as a really great move to establish themselves within the Celestia ecosystem I do think they'll become the biggest at the very least Tia LST if not you know the LST for all these rollup tokens as well so yeah just great move overall by stride I would also just add I do strongly believe that we're going to start seeing sta get the air drops if you will you know in the past we've seen

people trying Cula staking uh via staking obviously to get aird drops and I think that it makes a lot more sense to aird drop to St holders because those people are actually liquid and they can come partake in your ecosystem so I think that'll be a pretty big push moving forward as well and also helps contribute to the modular money narrative so it's just kind of in everyone's best interest to do so yeah one last point on stride is State dydx um with strides Products St dydx is basically Auto compounds the the rewards into more dydx and dydx has been doing like a pretty hefty amount of volume on V4 I think the metrics have shown Sean gr and that could be another

clear winner uh in addition to St Tia but all right viick go ahead I was going to close this off by saying I realized I kept saying Adam ecosystem instead of the cosmos ecosystem so please all the cosmos homies don't come after me all right thanks Rick um last on the hot seat Kone this week on uh maybe a bit of the hot seed I would call it a crypto the game I think it's a game incubated by Deli it's basically an onchain crypto Survival game so it's basically replicating Survivor but like with a mix of like onchain elements on it um right now I think the price should be well

above 100K $100,000 in E and you basically have to pay zero 0.1 e to play after you get started in a game you get assigned to a tribe and then every day your tribe stash team faces an immunity challenge ranging from competing in arcade games to going on a digital scavenger hunt and then whichever tribe wins a daily challenge gets quote unquote immunity and the other tribes have to vote some of their own players out of the game until ultimately the game is left with one player who wins the entire prize F that's not the interesting part for me I think the hot seat part was Anish um one of the founders at richro he basically added

200 contestants to the game and paid around $50,000 in doing so he instantly became the largest voter base comprising I think 40% of the player base and he said like on Twitter that he was open to alliances and he blasted all of this on Twitter through a tweet however the game developers basically commented on the street saying like did read our terms of service and then a bit later they basically revoked all of those participants or they removed all of those participants from the game and they got a lot of heat um for keeping the $50,000 that andish basically deposited in order to play that game so that was like definitely

questionable but then I think Anish made a really good point right like I think onchain agents have a place to play in an onchain future obviously the first like iteration of that is probably like more so transactions based having an onchain agent control like your wallet or like a multisig stopping like malicious actions but it's not that hard to see a world in which like AI agents participate in these type of like online games or protocols um so I thought that was a really interesting like experiment so to say and I wouldn't be too surprised to see onchain AI agents get deployed more and more you're already seeing like AI agents being deployed maybe not on chain but for like air drop from protocols where they try to randomize your activities um and I think

the other super interesting thing about this was that he created a prediction or not he created he took part in a prediction Market on poly market and he put up $15,000 against him winning on poy Market I think when he first tweeted about it there was a 10% odds of him winning now there's a 25% odds of him winning and like you could say that one may vote on yes initial win for crypto the game and then you use that to influence like within the game who they vote to kick out and if you bought like the yes shares then you probably wouldn't want to kick out a nich so I just thought like it's very interesting like bri mechanism so to say and I wouldn't be too surprised to see like

more types of these like really interesting Vibes or like Hedges come to fruition on poy Market just given how much poy Market is taking off in overall volume especially boosted by the presidential election this year yeah I mean this is like a perfect case of where proof of personhood or maybe what Sam was talking about where linking forecaster accounts where there's probably some pratic way programmatic way to make sure there's no AI agents in this game and you don't have to rely on a terms of service it's just automatic um within the game itself that's first and foremost but second I think it's awesome what Anish is doing

here I know Anish is pretty big in the mbv space as well and obviously he looked at this particular mechanism as a way to Arbitrage basically the MV between you know the winnings and uh prediction markets being able to basically create a way to have positive expected value both for himself and the rest of the players playing um I thought it was really really cool um I'm excited to see how this plays out in the end if he does win I mean it it's in every individual's best interest to basically bet for him in the prediction market and vote for him to win and they even though they lost the game they still win uh on the prediction market so I think it's pretty

cool overall my thing is the game just doesn't sound very fun to me it sounds like like a Discord grind to get on a white list except you have to pay 0. one e to partake so I'm going to pass on playing but that was a very very clever use of prediction markets I agree wesy I will say I know some people that I've been playing and they said they've been saying it's super fun um but I haven't been playing myself so I can't can't say anything about that but yeah I just wanted to say that fair take I'm glad you added that color honestly because I also haven't even seen any of the games that are being played here but brick did you have something to add

there yeah I was going to say that the whole prediction Market point opens up another kind of worms where like uh you might have these situations where it becomes or your EV is 100% better um in a situation where like you lose uh on the thing you're or like you win the bet but you lose on the kind of underlying thing so then suddenly you become like incentivized to kind of destroy your own action sorry that was bad explanation but let say I don't know you're a football player and then you're suddenly able to like um bet on your own game and nobody can kind of uh scream

for that then you're of course like okay that's legal but you know it's kind of the same thing here in a way yeah I definitely agree on that point and I think especially in Asia you see a decent amount of like five for teams to lose already whether that's like traditional sports or like Esports so definitely something that I could see having very important implications like I don't know maybe one day a Dev who hates his job creates a prediction Market saying like will this protocol be hacked before like this state and then like I don't know maybe he buys no um maybe he buys yes and then like Hedges against himself like actually hacking

the protocol or so something ridiculous like that um but on the point of like the game being for I haven't played the game myself too so I don't want to comment on that but I definitely could see that one day there's this like super viral game I don't know like maybe like Pokemon go but with like pudy penguin IP you know and then like everyone gets like permission this access to play this game and it becomes just like super crazy like viral movement you know I think like when Pokemon go first came out like no one was ready for how much it would take over the world I remember like just like do like 1 million people fting like Central Park in New York cuz there was like a Snorlax and there was just like crazy videos on their net I think it'll

be really really cool to see like a movement like that happen once again but with like either Crypton native IP or facilitated by crypto rails someday you just made me think of an idea too Ren like what if you back to forast or made a client that's literally a game like there's so many different things you could build in the context of gaming and crypto and like we just haven't quite yet seen it come to fruition but I agree with you super exciting prospects yeah all right I think that's a good point to close it out if no one else has anything else to add um thank you wesy and brick for coming on this weekend see you guys next week hey everyone thanks for watching today's zerox 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 [Music] London