Will Agent Swarms Price the Future on Prediction Markets? with Zack Pokorny

12:17Beimnet Abebe:20 % of oil goes through there.

12:19Alex Thorn:That's enough to stabilize the entire market.

12:21Beimnet Abebe:The price forecasts I've seen are, like, over$100 a barrel. Where are we now?

12:26Alex Thorn:Like, 70s or, like, high 60s. Depends on Brent crude. Yeah, yeah. So that's a major increase, a 30 % increase, potentially. if a bad conflict. So further uncertainty in the market. I mean, there's just a lot. All right, real quick on Bitcoin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go to Bitcoin. So we got about as low just a day or two ago as in like the 62. Yeah, 63. I think I'd say 62s. Didn't quite retest the Feb 5. 60K low. 60K, which was really the flat. I think on Coinbase it was 60 ,000.00 was the 50 Feb 5 low. We're now drifted higher today. we were up about five percent almost to 70k um that's on a day where stocks were green crypto

13:11Beimnet Abebe:stocks were all up as well pretty much yeah um is that just drift is that that's just in the range that noise i think it's just noise i mean a lot of like the alt charts for example it's like oh you know something goes from like you know 16 to like two dollars and goes from two dollars back to 230 or 240 yeah like 40 percent like 20 and this from a very low yeah right and so you have base effects at play you know because stuff is sold off so much and same thing on the crypto equities right like oh my god like yeah like coinbase is up a lot today well did you see where it was to start the year yeah like it was down a lot it's down a lot right so these moves look like huge moves percentage wise and that's totally reasonable but like for people that were long this stuff like it's not really like you're not feeling if you were long at 100 for bitcoin

14:03Alex Thorn:you're not feeling that much comfort that it went from 62 to 68 yeah like it's like nothing where

14:08Beimnet Abebe:was solano to start the year yeah like you're back to 88 bucks yippee i think you probably started the year like 130 yeah 120 no material change in your mind from what we're seeing right now i think right now right now it's it's a range and historically in uh bear markets and in crypto So you've had periods where you've rallied 20 % to 40 % at times off the lows before ultimately making lower lows. And so I do think that if you're trading from the short side, these are not great levels. Even if you're of the view that you're going to 50 % or lower eventually, you just have to know where max pain is at any point in time.

14:51Beimnet Abebe:And so I think it's feasible to get a rally as high as 80%, 85 % even. It's totally possible. And what you'll see happen is narrative will follow price, right? And so the moment, you know, you start getting back in the 70s, people will be like, oh, it's back. I risk on 75K. Like, oh, my God, it's digital gold. The DATS flywheel starts again. And then Max Payne would be lower. And then, yeah.

15:17Alex Thorn:Yeah, and so you think it's more of a, to the extent it goes lower, it's more of a drift and a chop. It's not a, you know, we don't see it. I mean, I guess the main one being if all of a sudden equity is correct, like significantly lower than you could get it.

15:32Beimnet Abebe:But ultimately, like the way this market works is like you need to have like people start to get long again.

15:39Alex Thorn:Yeah.

15:40Beimnet Abebe:Right.

15:41Alex Thorn:That's right.

15:41Beimnet Abebe:In order for you to actually. And there probably have been people playing this volatility, buying a 62, thinking that's too cheap and then selling the 69 to clip some money.

15:52Alex Thorn:That's a good trade. Right. But that's not the type of activity that carries us higher in the long term. You need structural long.

15:59Beimnet Abebe:Structural long. And to be honest with you right now, there's so much volatility in the equity complex and so much dispersion. That being a stock picker right now, it's a phenomenal time if you're good. Yeah.

16:14Alex Thorn:Obviously.

16:15Beimnet Abebe:And if you're in the sectors that do well. But there's so much to do that crypto, for a lot of Main Street folks.

16:22Alex Thorn:Not the most interesting thing right now, still. It's what happened the last year to AI, quantum, gold, these other things took Mindshare. Now stocks. You're right. Plenty of interesting stuff.

16:31Beimnet Abebe:You have days where IBM moves 10%.

16:34Alex Thorn:IBM. Yeah, it's crazy. Like. And Microsoft. Tons of them, by the way. Tons of them have done this.

16:40Beimnet Abebe:The vol has been insane. Yeah. So it's like, why do people like alts and tokens?

16:45Alex Thorn:It's usually because of the vol. The vol.

16:46Beimnet Abebe:And so like this.

16:47Alex Thorn:All right. Well, that's very interesting. This is a great one with you, PymNet. I hope you have a great week. and we will see you next time. Thank you, BimNet. Amazing. Thank you. Let's go now to our guest, Zach Bicorni from Galaxy Research. Zach, welcome back to Galaxy Brains.

16:59Zack Pokorny:Yeah, as always, happy to be here.

17:00Alex Thorn:Yeah, you've been working on a bunch of interesting stuff, so I thought it'd be cool to give our audience some discussion and insight into what those things are. I wanted to ask you about lending. In general, you're the author of our excellent and widely read quarterly lending report. And the new Q4 update from 25 comes out within the next week. And I also want to talk about prediction markets. You're an avid user and follower and author about prediction markets. A bunch of interesting stuff's been happening. And then also wanted to talk to you about base, Coinbase's optimistic roll-up that they are now removing from the op stack, the OP stack, and the super chain.

17:39Alex Thorn:They want to own it themselves, the code base, and whether or not more things that portends more change is coming for that. So let's start with lending. What is the update here on the numbers? I mean, I think last quarter was the biggest ever, right? It eclipsed all prior in terms of the amount of loans outstanding to both centralized and decentralized lenders. What happened this quarter?

18:02Zack Pokorny:Yeah, I mean, last quarter, we hit an all-time high, upwards of like$80 billion. This quarter, we obviously came down a bit just with...

18:10Alex Thorn:So that was Q3.

18:11Zack Pokorny:That was, yes, Q3 2025 was the biggest quarter for outstanding loans we've ever had, primarily driven by on-chain lending.

18:18Alex Thorn:Yeah.

18:19Zack Pokorny:We kind of had a positive reflexivity loop with trading activity being so high, prices appreciating, people doing these like yield based looping strategies. It created a big, not bubble, just a lot of demand and economic possibility for these types of loans. But in Q4, you know, we had 1010 negative price action. So it was really a story of negative reflexivity on chain and off chain resiliency. brilliancy. We actually saw CeFi loans continue to climb, which is actually something we mentioned the last time I was on here. Like in a bear market or bearish conditions, we thought it was likely to see CeFi lending continue to grow while on-chain kind of falters.

19:02Zack Pokorny:That's just the reflexivity loop of on-chain lending and the nature of it. But yeah, we only came down about $8 billion, so like 10%, and then CeFi lending kind of filled the gap. um so what mostly flat quarter over quarter uh down like 10 we lost like eight billion dollars worth of open loans but still nothing crazy i mean we obviously saw the defy share fall a little bit

19:23Alex Thorn:um but that's just yeah i mean the value of collateral goes down people use people close loans people get liquidated yeah one of the biggest stories we've talked about now for a while in the lending space has been the ascendancy and resiliency of defy as a prime is defy still the bigger than cefi i know it has been for a quarter or two at least right like is it is it still leading in terms of share versus the centralized lenders yeah it still has about a 57 percent

19:52Zack Pokorny:market share give or take so like the majority of loans are still really incredible yeah i mean it it makes sense it's there there's no gates to entry the the applications can be way more nimble than centralized lenders like the whole like pendle pt looping phenomenon can only really originate on chain right i mean maybe some cefi lenders are starting to do that stuff or or thinking about it but it can't just become a thing and then get implemented off chain like on chain is where the experimentation happens and all of these assets for the most part are native to blockchains like we're starting to see some rwa looping stuff but these are primarily crypto native synthetic assets

20:30Alex Thorn:that people are using here yeah i think um and but the resiliency too like when you look at the like in 22 and 21 when we had all-time highs in spot prices and in lending um that was mostly cefi right that was the block by celsius genesis galaxy right etc um and now you know first of all very few of those are still around it's a different cohort of centralized lenders obviously galaxy's still around but um defy wasn't that big then what like what has changed like why what has supported its rise the composability you're describing makes sense but it's trust right it's trust and

21:11Zack Pokorny:like you mentioned all the major cefi lenders got wiped out yeah so it was like anybody who wanted to borrow against their bitcoin or their ether whatever where were you gonna go for a big period yeah like the the largest applications made it through the bear market no issue yeah for the most part um whereas all the cefi lenders got crushed and that was kind of the interesting thing I was looking at when I was putting all the data together. It was like, it really was like one quarter, C-Fi lending just evaporated. Right. And even in the wake of super negative price action, the biggest liquidation event in perps market history, we're seeing it continue to climb.

21:50Zack Pokorny:Like, I think that's a testament to the practices of a lot of these C-Fi lenders, the industry's ability to self-regulate in the absence of actual rules and even maybe hostile rule makers. But yeah, the resiliency of off-chain lending has been huge. And I mean, maybe there'll be some decay in Q1, but I anticipate it to be more steps down, not taking the elevator. Smart. Interesting.

22:14Alex Thorn:I want to ask this a little bit of adjacent, but you also put out a report a couple of weeks ago now talking about the correlation or connection between staking and lending on a network. Would you just give the high level of what the thesis is there and the conclusion you came to?

22:32Zack Pokorny:Yeah, I mean, it's really a story of collateral asset access. Like, all the lending on chain is collateralized or over collateralized. So without quality collateral assets, you really don't have lending markets. And every user on chain who holds like ETH, SOL, whatever, which are the bedrock of each of their respective chains, they can stake for yield, they can deposit into DeFi, whether that's just directly lending through uh like a pooled lending app or whatever um or through some kind of like synthetic yield bearing product like athena to create new collateral um so when they choose staking you essentially just cut down on the pool of available collateral and

23:12Alex Thorn:lending markets struggle to kind of grow in that setting oh so the it's like um you can get a i don't know make this up if the chain is paying five percent in inflation and rewards for staking but the borrow market for your asset is only paying three, you wouldn't lend. Yeah, you just have less incentive.

23:33Zack Pokorny:Staking is relatively less risky. The yield is much more stable. It's programmatic and known. And you're just not taking the application risk.

23:43Alex Thorn:Yeah, it seems to make the argument, though, that if you want more robust lending markets on your chain, you should have lower inflation right lower staking rewards basically yeah it certainly

23:58Zack Pokorny:helps i mean there's ways to get around it you can try to import assets from other chains like

24:03Alex Thorn:bitcoin obviously no but then those i was thinking that but your collateral point like that like a bitcoin on solana is much less much worse collateral than a bitcoin on bitcoin right you think you have other wrapper issues and whatnot yeah i mean or have those been solved

24:17Zack Pokorny:Yeah, people are working on getting loans on like Ethereum and Solana against native Bitcoin. But I think the issue is mostly like there's only so much Bitcoin circulating that wants to be deposited into a lending application. It's not very available. Yeah, and just the nature of lending activity, it's very sticky. Like if I have a USDC loan out against my Bitcoin on my application, it's going to be very hard for you to dislodge it. especially if I have a lot of trust in that application, which we have with Aave and some of the Ethereum-based applications. They're not actually incentivized, even if it were cheaper to move elsewhere.

24:54Alex Thorn:You mentioned Aave. I continue to get diverted here, but what is going on with Aave governance? Can you explain what's happening?

25:02Zack Pokorny:Yeah, I mean, we've kind of been seeing this revolution in the way people look at DAO structure and what the tokens actually are. It took a few years of super negative price action to come to this conclusion. but essentially people are asking like, hey, like, what do I actually own? Is it the underlying application? Is it the treasury? Like, are the people who I trust to run the application build out the protocol? Do I have like legal recourse against them? Like, does my voice even matter? And I think what people found for the most part was that the token isn't really connected to anything and you don't have much of a voice.

25:38Zack Pokorny:Like, there's no legal contract that says like, oh, me as a token holder wants this implemented. we pass the vote like they have to go do it um and it's also an asset control thing we kind of seen this bifurcation where you have these legal entities that hold like ip intangible assets and other things which we're learning are very valuable like in all of these acquisitions we've seen from tradfize and otherwise they're buying the equity and the ip and the marketing type assets they're not actually buying the tokens and the tokens don't have any connection to those things but now what we're starting to see is token holders and DAOs say like wait we actually built this entire thing we have like maybe some legal wrapper that helped us build like front-end product but they didn't actually build the protocol which is like the big money-making thing like especially in the case of Aave the the protocol is making like 120 million dollars a year labs is doing much less than that and the DAO is starting to ask like hey why don't we own the IP and and all these other things I'm so like super healthy conversation to be having i think this is going to be significant in terms of like getting us out of the bear market and like making tokens investable um but it's very disruptive um and we're just gonna have to work through those growing pains but healthy otherwise very interesting

26:55Alex Thorn:to have a the most important lending defy app the biggest yeah most important lending application yeah so like having a major covering but where is that landing now in the sort of ins and outs of that debate like right so the labs uh what owns the ip and like the they control the treasury but the token holders are the dow and technically they want to own the ip and the treasury yeah i mean the dow already owns the treasury and like ave tokens allow you to vote on like allocation

27:23Zack Pokorny:and protocol direction and stuff like that but they want the ip yeah and like that's the part that people who would go acquire like ave equity like that's what they're going for yeah um are

27:34Alex Thorn:Are they going to give it over? Like, is there any sense of a compromise emerging?

27:38Zack Pokorny:I mean, the two sides seem to be talking to each other. There's, like, maybe a stroke of hostility. But I think that's just the nature of this game. But, yeah, with Aave, it's interesting because they have V4 coming out, which, for, like, any application migrating from a previous version to a new one is already challenging. Like, Uniswap, I think, is a testament to that. They launched V4. they couldn't get really any activity or liquidity to migrate to v4 from v3. So they're also going to be going through that at some point in the not so distant future. Adding the governance debate complicates it.

28:13Zack Pokorny:But I mean, I think Aave as a protocol is so trusted and so widely used that like most people who use the application probably don't even hold the token. So like as long as the application works i think um you may not see too much disturbance in that regard but yeah nonetheless it's uh i mean the the main dev shop that develops the ave protocol announced that they weren't going to renew their contract and they're walking away so like that does bring some kind of uncertainty into maybe not v4 but beyond that like who's going to fill that role um because they've literally

28:48Alex Thorn:built the biggest and then is it like labs the labs organization paying devs or grants for devs or is it the dow that's the dow yeah but i mean like right i mean that's the is some of that bifurcation i think it's regulatory in origin i said oh the token it can't be too good or might be an illegal security and separately we'll decentralize like control of the token or whatever but the labs is the equity entity that venture investors probably invested in right and they're trying to keep the tokens separate from the venture-backed equity which is a security private security and maybe like the regulatory reforms that have been happening in crypto make it much more palatable and less risky to have your token actually have the equity like features yeah i mean i don't think it's a coincidence that this

29:41Zack Pokorny:is happening right now yeah like bad regulation or just the complete absence of any regulation is what landed us on the current design and the more like forgiving regulatory environment is definitely giving people some runway runway to experiment and i mean at the end of the day this is like a legal regulatory thing like most of the innovation happening around this whole deal is a legal thing yeah and like novel legal structures for dows and giving them like legal recognition and letting token holders actually have binding binding rights to the treasury and um the people who are who are

30:15Alex Thorn:running the protocol it's very interesting how um you know people wonder you know how bad really was it say under gary gensler at the sec right i mean you bitcoin made a new all-time high actually right after he became chairman in 21 um okay but um you know you're in your business survived not all of them did but one of the counters is you have to understand the downstream effects to regulatory decisions and like how it warps people's behavior people follow incentives and one great example that's been talked about a lot that i've talked about is that like ftx setting up offshore it's kind of directly the result of it being effectively illegal to run a very useful exchange in the u.s at the time and that de facto um unenforceable prohibition it just they literally moved 90 miles offshore and set it up there americans used it right whereas if they had made like workable um rules that a business could genuinely come in and get and and could and and follow then you would have had better investor protections here here too is another one like because of fears of ICO and enforcements against 2017 ICOs.

31:30Alex Thorn:Later, token launches formed in Switzerland or other jurisdictions or offshore bifurcated their tokens or only sold the tokens to inside investors, elite VCs. So you had much more centralized networks and weird structures where the token's not connected to the application's revenue, like in the case of Aave. You hate to see it. This is a good example of just bad regulation that, by the way, didn't stop Aave from launching a coin and didn't stop FTX from launching offshore. So also didn't work. Yeah, I mean, Aave launched like nine years ago.

32:05Zack Pokorny:No, it was a long time ago.

32:06Alex Thorn:But again, you know, like those structures, it didn't stop like, you know, the L1s from being launched and the tokens trickling from the professional investors ultimately into the retail. Like it doesn't even work if you're trying to ban it or not allow it. You failed at that also.

32:23Zack Pokorny:yeah i mean we had probably tens of millions of tokens built over the last five years yeah um but yeah the ico component of it i think is like under discussed a big issue with like token price and what kind of brought us to the mindset we have now is like the down only price action which partially is a result of divergence in value that the private market assigns these things versus the public market yep um so like applications or protocols can go to the private market and raise 500 million dollars for this crazy idea that they have but maybe if they had a token and it was an ico the public market would effectively say like actually you probably only need like 50 million

33:02Alex Thorn:dollars yeah and and the uh discrepancy too like with the lockups and stuff and the um opacity of the private sales create all these overhangs whereas like you can just like take ethereum right like there's like you just bought you pre-bought the ethereum tokens in bitcoin by the way um and there's not a giant pile of like who's holding what like technically all those people can sell ether over the years if it goes up like there's overhang but it's not the like monthly online you wouldn't need a website like you know token on tokenomist tokenonomist or whatever it's called right the tracks unlocks and you know the whole meta of vcs dumping on us quote unquote quote, is like a direct result of the water on pavement pathways that token launchers had to find.

33:46Because if there had been a regulated way to sell safely to retail, both safe for the issuer

33:53Alex Thorn:and the retail, that's a much more decentralized and egalitarian structure that widely disperses the coins much better than selling two-thirds of your network tokens to three VCs.

34:05Zack Pokorny:yeah or i mean even worse projects sell their equity and then they also give the same investors tokens yeah so the token is like the effectively like the exit liquidity on the equity in the event that like you can't sell it or it doesn't get acquired yeah so you also have the dual structure where like you actually might have been more incentivized to push the value to the equity and the token was just kind of like my quasi liquid representation of my stake there yeah um But yeah, I mean, VCs, I think, get kind of demonized and unlocks do as well. Like, I think inherently you need both of them.

34:39Zack Pokorny:Like, without people to fund crazy ideas, you don't get any of what we have.

34:42Alex Thorn:Yeah.

34:43Zack Pokorny:And at the end of the day, you need to incentivize the people to build the stuff. So, like, teams should get token allocations. They should unlock on some cadence. But maybe there should be, like, a KPI-based unlock where it's like, hey, maybe you get 10 tokens, five of them unlock over the next x number of years but then the other five the other 50 percent the you need to actually create value maybe it's like a market cap threshold or a user threshold or a revenue threshold like whatever it might be um which we're actually starting to see with a lot of these projects that are raising under these new frameworks now it's like the team may get like a little bit of linear unlock but at the end of the day if the token price doesn't go up you don't actually get paid so it's like a yeah it's like an incentive

35:25Alex Thorn:alignment it's pretty straightforward because you don't want giant amounts of supply hitting while like in a bear market basically when coins are going down like we have right now yeah it'll just reflexively cause more dumping um is that ownership coins the new frameworks you're referencing or metadao or other similar yeah exactly um i mean metadao kind of trailblazed

35:47Zack Pokorny:the idea um and have like at least the first working implementation of it uh but we're starting to see forks and clones and people experimenting with the idea across all the ecosystems now um and there's just so many cool moving parts of this like futarkian decision markets are so important so we're seeing a lot of innovation around that stuff like we used to just have these binary like yes no decision markets and now it's like we can actually have 10 outcomes and we can like price things more effectively and find like the most optimal decision um so like purely using markets to decide outcomes not just words in like a written proposal and then yeah people are also getting creative with the legal structures themselves like internet capital markets are i think proving to be a valuable thing and they're leaning on them but they also acknowledge that like we're not purely living in the world where all value exists on the internet just yet so building novel legal structures that let people launch on chain as like an ownership coin or whatever we want to call them um and then go launch into the real world and be like a regular LLC or whatever it might be.

36:51Zack Pokorny:So it's kind of getting interesting in that regard. It's like legal innovation.

36:55Alex Thorn:Yeah, I don't know if we'll get to the other topics because it's very interesting too, but we've talked about that. That's been a question, particularly in the context of DAOs, how they might be recognized in the real world as an entity or a legal entity if they solely exist on chain, right? And like, I think Wyoming had an interesting DAO law. Gabe Shapiro and Metal X have an interesting way of doing this. I think even Delaware Law, where many companies are incorporated, actually does also recognize DAOs as an entity type. But this brings me to the second question. And there's, I think, tons of innovation still happening there.

37:35Alex Thorn:Don't AI agents face the same problem? Because they aren't, like, don't we need a structure for AIs to have legal personhood, theoretically?

37:46Zack Pokorny:yeah this is something we've been talking about on the desk it's like a world where companies are just purely run by agents i don't think is like that crazy right like somebody just prompts an agent tells it to go build an app a company like do the whole thing um who's legally responsible for that like am i like an agent of the agent and like whatever it goes and does like i'm responsible for i'm not yeah or can i just disperse like thousands of agents and they're all legally liable for something and you sue the

38:16Alex Thorn:agent like does the agent have money can he have to forfeit it like i i mean i i have no idea if you think about it even just like viscerally like for people who aren't deep in the like the you know virtual ai agents like rabbit hole which is an amazing one by the way you should be learning about and using um but think about like a humanoid robot like let's say i was to get like one of the first tesla robots or something and it's mostly inside my house the first one let's be real i'm fold laundry most of the time right but like then i send it out to get the mail now it's walking out there neighbors see it could they become scared okay but it's still on my property can i send it around the you know down the street to target to pick up some batteries and some paper towels is it allowed to walk into the building at all can it go in the self-checkout and pay are they going to call the cops is it going to be arrested like what is the framework for like agents operating or robots in the physical sense, like just in the real world.

39:09Alex Thorn:Like, are they allowed to do that? I don't know. Maybe Waymo and those guys and SF with those cars have figured this out a little bit, at least in the context of those cars. But like, not even just like, can it be legally responsible, which is obviously very important as well. What is it? Is it a person like, can it steal? Let's say it decides to steal from Target. Will it be arrested? Are they going to put it in the car and drive it to the police station? like what is that society has not actually made a lot of progress at all in figuring out let alone the legal questions but also the societal questions on this yeah i mean i think the

39:43Zack Pokorny:capabilities of ai like especially over the last couple weeks has i mean we just never thought about these things like up until this point like maybe we have been like in our own not much little you consider us pretty early in thinking about it but it has been recent yeah like i don't think we've had much of a reason to actually think about these things but now like claude and chat gpt are just one-shotting everything and it's like well actually like this thing could build like a real product um and if it does that like and it starts its own company because even on like the legal innovation side like they're making it so that you could just go spin up like a boilerplate legal document or like an operating agreement for a company with like stable coins on a blockchain no human intervention at all right like technically these things can go start launching like real companies they can and then yeah then like in that case like what is the i mean you literally

40:33Alex Thorn:just handed an llc and give it control over the documents like but then yeah and the product that it builds you have a personal llc like you can just assign it to the agent to work on like then you still own the llc so it's actually your company the agent just does all the work and and that you think that you can do today like that's that you could easily do the question i I guess, yeah, if the agent itself wants to own it itself, is that even possible? Would a court even recognize that? I don't know. Yeah, I don't think anybody knows. It seems like we're going to have to figure that out. Anyway, it's interesting with the ownership coin.

41:07Alex Thorn:It's actually quite a similar, trying to take something that's virtual, such like a DAO or a virtual AI agent, and give it legal standing. Do we need laws for that? And the other thing I was thinking is if I vibe code an agent or a bot that steals Bitcoin as a business model, which is one thing people have talked a lot about, because the AI is pretty good at like smart contract vulnerabilities and stuff like that. Surely if I create it and send the bot out to do it for the purpose of getting me Bitcoin or Ether, then I would be responsible if it does. That's just from a first principle standpoint seems to make sense.

41:49Alex Thorn:however we're largely not saying that like in the rest of society at the moment right like if you upload code to get up but you don't do it it's not usually you're protected if you make an encrypted messaging app that a terrorist happens to use like it's not your job you're not capable of intercepting or prohibiting their access it's open source right and there's the blockchain regulatory certainty act which is the protections for developers presumably like with how if an agent is doing it on your behalf and you programmed it like you can't be protected in the same sense i don't either way we need some clarity yeah i mean i think eventually it's going

42:30Zack Pokorny:to become like a real question and it's also like what if your agent makes another piece of software that does something yeah negative like your agent makes an agent and then that one yeah what if you didn't know two hops away from you is going and doing some crazy stuff um yeah like what if you

42:45Alex Thorn:didn't know at all and and because you didn't know you couldn't have had intent either your agent farms out work that it came up with that you didn't observe and that work is illegal um or breaks the law it's i mean one i don't think you should be held accountable if you didn't knowingly do it with the intent to do bad how can you be guilty but two society doesn't want to have now these semi-guiltless bad actors, if AI agents do start creating them, we still want to prevent that from happening. The best way we typically prevent bad things from happening is by creating consequences for the people who would do the bad thing that disincentivize them from doing it.

43:27Alex Thorn:But if you don't even know if it's happening and you passively, even by mistake, enabled it, right, like that is, you can see where the backlash to AI is going to one of the many areas that's going to come is going to be it's almost like the three laws and like minority report or um i robot right like thou shall not hurt a human or whatever like is that even something we can encode i'm pretty sure that's straight fiction and we can't uniformly

43:53Zack Pokorny:encode these types of rules i mean maybe you can but again like it's still software and things can go wrong and all that stuff but yeah i think these questions that might sound crazy today are likely to become relevant in the future especially as the technology progresses and uh it gets implemented more widely like i don't think we've seen like massive

44:18Alex Thorn:ai penetration into companies and businesses just yet there was that graphic going around you probably saw it was like oh it was like a chat gbd like 0.06 percent of the world so almost nobody is using it like yeah and that was just like i think individuals personally that

44:34Zack Pokorny:wasn't like organizations and companies that were doing things for commercial purposes where like

44:39Alex Thorn:right now i feel like it's especially in terms of like the societal understanding of these issues and possible desire to get into a policy conversation whether it's backlash or promotion or whatever is is not really happening because it's not you're not seeing it in your everyday life you might be seeing it at work it's mostly like enterprises and startups and professionals that are seeing how much can be done like we use ai a lot here already making bots scraping data right analyzing documents but that's why i kind of feel like i like to use the humanoid robot example because like surely when you start seeing robots walk around if if it hasn't already that will be a catalyst for holy we need to have a big giant policy discussion about ai right i mean you're seeing some backlash to like data centers among the you know de-growthers and anti you know energy people but like no big conversation yet on like what should ai and robots be allowed to do

45:36Zack Pokorny:yeah you know i think it's only a matter of time honestly yeah um let's talk about another gray

45:42Alex Thorn:area we were talking we love to talk about and cover prediction markets and over the last several weeks alone there have been some interesting questions about market manipulation or insider trading probably most famously at the super bowl i think the market was whether or not was it cardi b or someone which is like who's going to be like the first celebrities would appear on stage during the halftime show and because there usually are many who appear but aren't listed as being and And I guess what somebody who was a dancer like had knowledge and voted. They use that knowledge and voted for someone.

46:19Alex Thorn:I can't remember who it was. They appeared. There's also the guy that ran on the field and many people. But he had previously apparently done event markets like through Vegas about running on a field. It's not actually clear if you bet on this one. But had he bet whether someone would run on the field and then he did it himself to cause the market to resolve his favor. That's an interesting one. obviously have mentioned markets you know brian armstrong listing out all those words the end of his q3 earnings call which just happened to be the words that people were betting on whether or not he would say right and then they had the idf soldiers who knew presumably knew inside information about when israel would attack iran and profited off of it all of these slightly different but like but maybe before we debate some of the like which ones are bad and which ones aren't oh and the last one i'll mention is there was the guy who sat outside the super bowl uh the where was that santa cruz santa clara santa clara santa clara and heard them practicing the halftime show and the other parts of it and there was a market for exactly how long would the national anthem be well he like sat outside and could hear it while they were practicing days before and was able to bet correctly all of these different but before that maybe you've written about how surfacing information that might otherwise not be available to the public is a huge benefit of prediction markets can you explain what you mean by that

47:52Zack Pokorny:yeah i mean that's kind of their purpose is to incentivize people to bring forth information that would otherwise just or yeah i mean like the purpose of the markets is to provide incentive for people to service information that you just can't otherwise do through like mainstream news outlets or otherwise. Like, I think the guy sitting outside the Super Bowl stadium is the perfect example of that. Like, if he couldn't have made any, like, economic gain on knowing, like, how long the national anthem would be, he wouldn't have gone and sat outside. And then no one would know. And then nobody would know.

48:26Alex Thorn:Except for insiders, yeah.

48:27Zack Pokorny:Yeah, exactly. Like, it's kind of a silly example, but...

48:29Alex Thorn:Well, it's only silly because, like, there's not necessarily a huge societal need for us to know the exact number of seconds that the national anthem would be. But you could imagine this in much more interesting and also not nefarious ways. Like you could say like, you know, what would the price of oil be? And people could look at open source satellite imagery and see where the oil tankers are, which they do, right? Like and find information. Smart people could actually learn that, again, for an open global commodity, they may – smart people might have a view and express it, which could move the market.

49:04Alex Thorn:and thereby tell the market that there's something happening with oil, right? And that's useful information for the average person. Your gas might go up, you know? I could probably think of other more societally beneficial ones. But, yeah, so that obviously has a conflict with this concept of insider trading because oftentimes the people that are in a position to know, then betting, right, like that's for the most part restricted in other markets like securities markets but that's the people you want to come out and do the bet so that the market will learn right yeah i mean these markets are also just so different like mentioned

49:42Zack Pokorny:markets is like not something that like is trump going to say the word bitcoin during the state of

49:46Alex Thorn:the union yeah and then when he was like a 30 chance at one point last night yeah people were

49:50Zack Pokorny:making funny jokes like oh if he says like jester maxing like i'll be able to retire my family yeah

49:54Alex Thorn:yeah bringing that information forth you're saying there were there are new types of ones where there's probably no societal benefit like a mention market i mean i don't maybe it's there

50:04Zack Pokorny:could be some actually well i mean with the mention markets it's interesting because there is like the first amendment that protects you from saying those things so there's like actually other like maybe superior laws that protect you from let's talk about that brian armstrong one where he said

50:18Alex Thorn:all these words they happen to be um you know i don't know if he was aware i i don't have that knowledge i think many people assume he was aware that these were words in the poly market of there was a market that said what words will brian armstrong say during the earnings call and at the end of the earnings call he said something like i just before i want to wrap i want to say

50:38Beimnet Abebe:the following words bitcoin staking web3 ethereum etc right and it caused a bunch of those to resolve

50:43Alex Thorn:a certain way now i i assume he didn't have a position in that market i'm assuming also it's hard to get historical polymarket data. So I can't pull it up on my phone now because this market has long expired. But there probably wasn't a lot of volume on that market either. But if we assume he was aware of the market, we know that he explicitly caused it to resolve in certain ways. He was absolute. As the market was about whether he would say something, he was uniquely in a position to manipulate the market. I put in that air quotes because I don't really think it can be. But on the other hand, if he didn't profit on it and it's imposed upon him, he didn't make the, like, create the market.

51:31Alex Thorn:Can you really say, oh, well, because saying the words intentionally would cause it to resolve, now he can't say the words? Now you can say, I could open a market right now that says Zach Pokorny will answer this question as soon as I stop talking. And because you're aware of yes, you're not allowed to answer. I just have to sit here silently like it's right like it imposes to prevent to make it illegal to do what brian did would impose serious first amendment restrictions on him right yeah and i mean in some cases these

52:03Zack Pokorny:markets can also be produced permissionlessly like calci and polymarket regulate what markets go up but there can be like any number of other platforms that spin up and then what if like every single application covers every single like word that ever exists like he literally just can't say anything yeah um i mean it's a very like nuanced and interesting thing but i think like the biggest takeaway from all this is that prediction markets are so unique that they just push the definition of yeah insider trading and market manipulation to its limit like maybe it requires new regulation maybe it doesn't right um but we are certainly pushing the the limit of the

52:43Alex Thorn:definition yeah you have to assume part of the reason we've been thinking a lot about this is mike selig the cftc chairman has come out and said they will do rulemaking on prediction markets and of course he's also claiming that the cftc has sole and exclusive jurisdiction over regulating prediction markets um you know where prediction markets are in a dispute with the states over sports gambling or sports event contracts and who controls those and he joined a suit so like he will have to rule make and you have to imagine intent is going to have to come into here because it's like you know if brian just did it for fun to be funny maybe he knew about it he didn't profit so he knew about it and he did it anyway but he didn't do it to manipulate like his intent was to promote prediction markets by you know what i mean like but intent is like hard to prove very hard to prove but i think it matters like because like let's say he didn't know and didn't have intent, but he did cause it to, I mean, you'd have to prove that he knew.

53:42Alex Thorn:I mean, like, you know, again, you can't, if there's a market I'm not even aware of and I don't have the intent, you can't restrict my speech. I think that's obvious. Some have intent standard, but very hard to prove. One last one I think is worth talking about is the IDF soldiers. So they, they bet on a date that Israel would strike Iran by. So they, they used classified information, clearly a misuse of that information.

54:05Zack Pokorny:But they didn't actually have the ability to dictate.

54:07Alex Thorn:Yeah, they weren't the general pushing the button, though, right? So while they profited from insider information, they didn't really manipulate the market the way, like, a person resolving their own mentioned market did or the man running on the field causing the market to, right? So more of a question, more of, like, an equivalent to, like, MNPI, like, if you're at a company and you happen to know the financials but you're not in a position to affect them but you trade on it, which is illegal in securities markets. um so yet a different like situation with nuance and a standard they're gonna have to figure out like how they want to handle that to me that's not a problem for the market and if anything it's the exact thing you're saying the market's good for the world has an interest in knowing if and when

54:53Zack Pokorny:an attack on a country will occur yeah it allows people to like actually express an opinion in a meaningful way right like i go back to like election polls on this one because it's just

55:02Beimnet Abebe:such a clean easy example yeah like no poll wants to be wrong like elections are essentially always

55:08Zack Pokorny:called 50 50 until states start being called as it's happening and then at that point the information is useless like i want to know like an opinionated stance yeah three months six months a year out and putting your money where your mouth is which is what prediction markets require

55:21Alex Thorn:i mean that's what it lets you be right let's you be opinionated because you can make money you can profit, but also as an observer of the market, you know that that market is people who cared enough to actually put money where their mouth is, right? And so you assume that it's incentivizing better information, right? So you have an interest, but if you can't, so that's why, like, for the IDF guys, I don't think they can, that isn't really a question of market integrity that the CFTC should look at, I don't think. It certainly may be one that the government of Israel wants to punish them for misusing the classified information.

55:57Alex Thorn:It's like loyalty to your country. Yeah, that's fine. Or if I was at a company and I don't move the market on a prediction and I do use inside information, well, the company can be mad at me and I might be in violation of my employment contract or confidentiality, but it's not quite a question for the market regulator, I don't think, if they're not disrupting the market. In fact, they're kind of doing exactly what the market wants.

56:20Zack Pokorny:Yeah, and I mean... It's tricky questions, though. Even making the assumption that the regulator will view it is disrupting the market then it's like like how much do i need to move the market in order for it

56:29Alex Thorn:to be meaningful like do the odds going from like yeah five to ten percent constitute like meaningful

56:34Zack Pokorny:disruption or is it just like a one percent yeah and if the idf soldiers obviously if they you know

56:38Alex Thorn:mail email the information directly to iran's leadership that's literally leaking the information that's treason leaking it directly to the enemy but if they merely bet on it and let's say the price didn't even move after they bet have they even given the information away and they gave away no signal and just right he made money if it was that you're quite yeah but let's say they did move it significantly is that giving away is that is it now a leak because they move the market 20

57:05Zack Pokorny:30 whatever it is yeah and then the definition of substantially is right like very arbitrary like finger in the air like oh it's two percent today yeah like you effectively told the world because

57:15Alex Thorn:you move the market so much okay like where's that that's why i think like you know when we were talking about having this discussion like you were saying like you know you're not an expert in securities mnpi laws nor am i and i was like i think we really just have to think of this from first principles like the regulator and by we i also think mike selig in the cfdc they really just have to try to game out what they think the market should look like and write the rules from there i mean maybe where they land on certain aspects of it will take info and comps from other commodity or securities laws in our country or others.

57:52Alex Thorn:But there's a bunch of weird nuance here if you want to promote the good growth of prediction and information markets, which are very good for hedging. We were even talking about this. Even sport, they say, well, sports, gambling, sports markets are surely not a good example because that's just pure speculation. That's not true. You know who has a huge interest in whether the Patriots or the Rams win the Super Bowl or the Seahawks win the Super Bowl? like t-shirt vendors in boston people that sell jerseys sports equipment anyone that sells hot

58:24Zack Pokorny:dogs near a game right yeah they're very unique hedging instruments that yeah apply to literally

58:28Alex Thorn:any event um like no there's a lot of people the patriots organization itself theoretically might want to hedge its future income based on by shorting its own self theoretically and i think even some people already make or lose billions of dollars yeah and i think people already do that

58:45Zack Pokorny:through like Vegas. Like I think there was like the mattress guy in Houston. Yeah. Who like did the, like if the Astros win the world series, like I give away like mattresses for free or something like that. So,

58:56Beimnet Abebe:yeah.

58:57Alex Thorn:So to, what's it called? Mattress Mac. Let's go. Yeah.

59:02Zack Pokorny:Good. Good shout out.

59:05Alex Thorn:Yeah. But like if they win though, like a lot of people might go out and buy more mattresses or something. Yeah. It's the same thing too. Whereas like, you know, the guy, there was, there's a guy and I forget what business it is in Boston. remember it was like if you hit the logo on the green monster um you know you get give away a ton of stuff and it's like but it would have to be during like a playoff game or something but the thing is it's like kind of right way risk because like the red sox win then like everyone's going to go out and celebrate and buy stuff too or something you know interesting markets there

59:34Zack Pokorny:um yeah yeah i mean people are also starting to build even more sophisticated more information rich products on top of prediction markets. What are they building?

59:43Alex Thorn:What are you seeing out there?

59:44Zack Pokorny:The most fascinating one I've come across is impact markets, which is essentially just using the same sort of structure. Like if this event happens, like what does it mean for asset prices? So instead of looking at, oh, this event has a 50 % probability of happening, it says this event has this impact on the price of Bitcoin. But what will be interesting is you will need prediction market probabilities to feed into the models to price these things.

1:00:13Alex Thorn:So it's actually a secondary market built on top, not a replacement for the binary outcome.

1:00:18Zack Pokorny:Yeah, I mean, they're just going to be sources of information for models of more sophisticated, more direct asset information, rich instruments. And if you put in some regulation that degrades the signal of the prediction markets, you actually kind of kill a decent amount of innovation for all the things that are being built on top of it. um, mostly markets related stuff. But I think at the end of the day, like if people watching the election can have like a super opinionated stance beforehand, like I think that's important. Um, and it kind of highlights the flaws with like traditional sources of, of the market was very accurate in the 24 presidential.

1:00:59Alex Thorn:Very. Yeah.

1:01:00Zack Pokorny:I think it was like 60, 40 or like 65, 35 for a while, but that's still infinitely more signal rich and opinionated than right 52 48 like 52 48 doesn't it doesn't mean anything to me yeah yeah um so yeah and then when when you have opinionated signal underneath you can kind of let it flow up to the top and like now we can actually price assets better we can hedge our risks better um and i i tend to think that's where this is going just given the success of obviously like polymarketing calci and all that um but also decision markets and people's willingness to use these things in an alternative use cases guide their actions and yeah um you've

1:01:43Alex Thorn:written a lot about that so go check out zach's stuff on futarki and prediction markets on galaxy.com slash research before we wrap i know we said we were talking about this although we this has been plenty fascinating already um let's talk about one last topic base it's the biggest ethereum l2 by volume and users i think um potentially by a lot right i mean i think i I think by like almost every metric. It was like 80 % of all transaction value on roll-ups, or sorry, on Ethereum L2s is on base. They put out an announcement at Coinbase saying they were leaving the Optimism tech stack and what they call the super chain, which is the federation collection of people, of roll-ups that use the same tech stack together.

1:02:21Alex Thorn:Makes a lot of sense, by the way, because part of the idea is anyone can spin up a roll-up and we'll give you the full tech and you get upgrades from us when we upgrade them all. They all stay safe together. blah blah blah sort of abstract out the technology aspect of the actual l2 but coinbase says they're going to bring the code base in-house they're going to develop it themselves is what they're saying and um like but they haven't i don't seem like they haven't said they said they want to own the code ship upgrades on their own cadence perhaps faster but they haven't actually said if they plan to materially change the design have they i mean their blog post said that they were going to remain in an Ethereum rollup.

1:03:00Zack Pokorny:Yeah, and just migrate away from the OP stack to the base stack for the exact reasons you said. They want to control shipping cadence. They want to control feature implementation and all of that stuff. But I think what's most important here is like in what they didn't say, like one, what was the reason? Like, was it Vitalik's blog post about the future of rollups for scalability? I think that's probably the least likely one. but then we also have Clarity coming down the gauntlet in Congress and other exchange-backed roll-ups moving to decentralized. Like Kraken, I think, is the most notable one in that regard, moving to the most decentralized structure you could have as a roll-up, which is base sequencing.

1:03:42Zack Pokorny:So in that event, you're as decentralized as the Ethereum L1 Validator set in effect.

1:03:47Alex Thorn:So there's a number of reasons why they might have done it.

1:03:51Zack Pokorny:But they didn't say any of those. But they didn't say any of those.

1:03:54Alex Thorn:If it's true that they're going to stay in a, quote, Ethereum roll-up, then maybe the base sequencing is the way they'll go. I think the reason you and I have been following this, and we were, I would say, mogging them pretty hard over the last summer on Twitter, it's not decentralized base, single-sequence optimistic roll-ups. They're not decentralized. Yeah, it's not a base-specific issue. No, it's not. It's not. But that doesn't mean they're not necessarily safe. People always get mad at me. they're like somebody was complaining comparing it to a wi-fi router like first of all that's a terrible comparison but i get that like there is the forced inclusion unilateral exit capability from this so like it can't steal your money in that sense but like they can if they could be sandwiching for all they know i mean we know they're not but like they control ordering they can set fees on the on the roll-up right um they could censor you could get around it but with some effort, but take the context of securities.

1:04:54Alex Thorn:Entities that charge fees and transaction ordering and can censor your transaction are like brokers and dealers and exchanges, and all of them are heavily regulated, right? And so that's why I wonder if they intend to become more decentralized just to further, I don't want to say avoid regulation. Obviously, Coinbase is out here calling for regulation, as are we, but they don't want that protocol to have to be regulated, the actual like layer two in this case but like you know the blockchain quote unquote they don't want i think rightly so but they risk i think this you mentioned clarity there's a section 302 in the clarity act which defines a non-decentralized finance trading protocol i think is the thing which is basically saying well if and it's i think it's pretty reasonable overall they're like it's got all these exemptions until registering with either the sec or the cftc or whatever if you're truly decentralized.

1:05:46Alex Thorn:But they're saying if you're not truly decentralized, then you're centralized. I think a lot of, some commentators have wondered, among other types of apps, and, you know, centrally controlled DeFi or whatever, perhaps centrally sequenced optimistic roll-ups might actually be considered a non-decentralized and they'll subject them to regulation. But no indication or anything about whether seeking more decentralization was the cause here?

1:06:12Zack Pokorny:No, I mean, the entire thing was essentially around like developer control being able to use like what seemed to be like ai more effectively with like reducing the the developer surface area and all that stuff um yeah not much in that regard also no indication of what's going to happen with the fees they pay

1:06:29Alex Thorn:to the super chain how much was those fees like over like we looked at this once yeah i think it

1:06:35Zack Pokorny:was at one point like a few million dollars over the course of like a quarter a half year like

1:06:39Alex Thorn:nothing like it was like 200k a day at one point we saw yeah that's how much like they make and

1:06:43Zack Pokorny:And then I think the super change fee is like 12 % or whatever it might be, which, I mean, percentage-wise.

1:06:49Alex Thorn:So they don't pay that now to Optimism once they leave. They wouldn't be paying. Yeah.

1:06:54Zack Pokorny:I mean, if they're not using the tech anymore.

1:06:57Alex Thorn:Is that also like what does that do to Optimism? Like how big of – clearly the biggest roll-up, they had the most volume, so they were surely paying the most fee and the biggest share of fees that they're receiving. you know i don't know the state of their of optimisms you know treasury or whatever but like from a revenue standpoint of licensing their tech that's got to be a massive loss for optimism right

1:07:17Zack Pokorny:yeah and they were actually just working on a buyback proposal so using some of the revenue to buy back the op token um but it seems like now the revenue is going to be pretty small

1:07:28Alex Thorn:what are the big optimist optimism super chain members obviously op or whatever they call it

1:07:33Zack Pokorny:op chain or yeah op base um i think maybe zora and and a few others but like there is so many

1:07:40Alex Thorn:roll-ups and nobody really wasn't it other related to base i mean base has a lot of apps on it by the way a lot of the ai stuff ai agent a lot of the stuff is built on base um but zora is moving to solana right oh yeah they announced that yeah i totally forgot about that me too i did too they

1:07:58Zack Pokorny:um remember yeah i'm not like super blogged into like all the social five stuff no me neither i

1:08:02Alex Thorn:I think Will on our team is probably the guy for that. Yeah, that's more his lane. But then wasn't also, what's the Dex, is it Aerodrome? Aerodrome is an application on base,

1:08:11Zack Pokorny:but they also, I think, announced that they were going to launch an instance on the L1.

1:08:14Alex Thorn:That's right. I guess they're not leaving base maybe, but I don't know. Just put these things together. Yeah, like the two of the biggest apps on base are either leaving or going elsewhere as well. And then base announced this potential big change. The first step is just we're taking control of the code, but to me the second step is like, okay, what are you going to do with it now? You wouldn't need to take control of it just to ship little tweaks more quickly. I wouldn't think.

1:08:41Zack Pokorny:Presumably that lays the foundation for a much more substantial change. Even in the weeks leading up to it, there was a lot of posts from people on Twitter like, oh, I'm leaving base to go do this other thing. There were, right? Yeah, and then there was the Aerodrome thing. I also actually kind of forgot about that. Yeah.

1:08:55Alex Thorn:That's like the main DEX application powering swaps on base.

1:09:00Zack Pokorny:Yeah, and they announced that.

1:09:01Alex Thorn:i mean they're not like leaving base but right replicating well and jesse pollock who runs base had a whole post about how like kind of like i was wrong more than i was he's still early but remember he had been big in promoting social trading um there was a jesse token or something right that was made that type of stuff that base is for creators and he had a post in the last few weeks also being like actually we probably were early on that it's probably basis for trading like all blockchains mostly are today right so if you just put all this together it's like seems like a bunch of like you know spinning um uncertainty possible changes in the base world which is quite interesting for the largest ethereum l2 um none of it necessarily like you know existential or like catastrophic or even bad or base just all seems like a lot of things yeah

1:09:59Zack Pokorny:there's a lot of things going on and i mean you could even make the argument that it's that it's good like if they do move to decentralize right just have one less centralized chain i mean we've

1:10:08Alex Thorn:been calling for it basically we praised ink krakens for doing based roll-ups and i mean i directly accused it of being too centralized to avoid securities laws in the case that they launched tokenized securities on it so i think they absolutely should decentralize i don't but again that's what's so interesting like really it's tricky you know they i i think if they could solve decentralization in a way it would grow base you know yeah absolutely and like the products that it's this catch-22 i think that centralized businesses feel which is like if we give away control like don't we lose money control power over it whatever and it's like but you could make more money like it could become that more widely adopted like would ethereum have been as big if it wasn't as decentralized with proof of work on its launch almost certainly not right stellar existed made safe coin existed like there were other you know i don't know it's coinbase surely knows that decentralization is good yeah i mean in the blog they also mentioned

1:11:10Zack Pokorny:that like the use of the optimism stack was like maybe like always kind of like a temporary thing they were like expediency yeah like this let us get to market way faster than if we were to build

1:11:21Alex Thorn:this from the ground up ourselves and like now we're migrating yeah so there there's also that element yep to the whole thing maybe it was always the plan yeah totally fair i don't want to accuse them of doing it for one reason or another just hard with very little information about what appear to be pretty big moves happening yeah you're just kind of left to speculate is there a prediction market on what will base like switch to an l1 well because also people have been waiting for like a coinbase coin or like base coin and there isn't one and like presumably it's a lot at least based on our past historical regulatory setups like the more decentralized blockchain tends to you know not have its l1 asset be considered a security whereas if it's just like oh what's the blockchain oh it's just one computer in our basement like pretty hard to argue in my mind that that's its token if it had one wouldn't be a security so like maybe that would also be a reason um they should decentralize if that's something they're considering which they've never confirmed nor denied or denied i don't think there should be a prediction market about whether or not they're going to launch a coin there must be a base coin in prediction market is there yeah there's got to be yeah yeah yeah um well we could go on and on but this is great sack we talked about lending We talked about Aave and governance for DAOs and AI agents.

1:12:39Alex Thorn:We talked about prediction markets and impact markets. And now, of course, base and Ethereum and Coinbase. A lot in there. I think, you know, Finn, I think we're going to have to chop this. We've got to put the markers, you know. It's kind of like three separate conversations with Zach. This was great, Zach. Thank you so much. Zach Bacorny from Galaxy Research.

1:12:56Zack Pokorny:Yeah, thanks for having me.

1:12:57Alex Thorn:That's it for this week's episode of Galaxy Brains. Thank you to my guest, Zach Bacorny from Galaxy Research, and my friend, Bimnet Abibi from Galaxy Trading. Everyone have a safe, happy weekend. We will see you next week.

1:13:34Alex Thorn:Apple podcasts and more. We'll see you next time.