Avalanche: Gaming & the Next Crypto Revolution ft. John Wu

0:00Hi, it's Raoul. Guess what? I can't believe we're turning 10 at Real Vision this September. I can't believe it's a whole decade of democratizing the very best financial intelligence and building this kind of super community of finance, including the super platform of finance. And to celebrate, we're throwing a virtual party on September 27th at 12 p.m. and you are on the guest list. It's free to join, so don't miss out. If you're not a member, you can sign up at realvision.com forward slash free. we've also got a trade ideas competition where you can flex your market smarts plus some exclusive limited birthday merch and much more planned for september it's gonna be a lot of fun so sign up realvision.com forward slash free and we'll see you at the party september 27th at 12 p.m that's realvision.com forward slash free

1:01Hi, I'm Raoul Pal and welcome to my show, The Journeyman. And The Journeyman is all about that exploration of the nexus of macro crypto and the exponential age of technology. I strongly believe in a multi-chain world. People get confused. They hear me talking about one token versus another. You know, I like Solana and I'm very strong on Sui because I'm on the board, stuff like that. And people mistake the fact that that's what I think the future of crypto is. I'm not. I'm a mercenary for price action as well. I'm trying to make money like all of us are. You know, we need to make money out of the space because this is one of the biggest opportunities we've ever been given as we go from a$2 trillion asset class to$100 trillion asset class.

1:45But I'm actually more broadly interested in the overall space in a multi-chain world where people are pushing boundaries and frontiers of using this technology as the new infrastructure layer of the internet. You see, the ownership of goods, whether it's real world assets or digital assets, requires blockchain technology. It's a prerequisite for where the internet is going. Also, the powers of decentralization, as society starts rebelling against concentration of power, we're looking towards decentralization. That's a classic thing that happens in societies over time. It's an ongoing process from one to the other.

2:30What is really interesting within blockchain is where we see new use cases coming. There's often a criticism of the space, which is it's bad UX, it's bad UI, there's no real use cases outside of stable coins and other stuff. But it takes time to get people to start building on this. And I'm not talking about small startups for crypto natives. I'm talking about the big web two companies. I'm talking about the finance and I'm talking about gaming and culture. These big things, they are coming to blockchain. And I think it's really important to explore this. Now, I'm not much of a gamer myself. I didn't really grow up with gaming culture.

3:12But my go-to person for that is Pierce Kicks, who many of you know, who helped us understand what the metaverse is going to be all about. I was with Pierce in Portugal recently chatting with him over a beer and he said listen there's a huge game coming called off the grid that may be the big breakout and I'm like okay and he said look this is the strongest conviction I've ever had and I said well what chains it on because you know you want to know who's doing this he said Avalanche I'm like okay well I'm going to get my friend John Wu to come and talk to us about it because you know John is somebody I really really respect and like in the space.

3:48He's always got something intelligent to say. He helps me broaden my perspectives. And they're doing great work over Avalanche. So that got me to talk to John Wu. And then I was on the platform recently. I'm going to share this with you because we've got these great trade ideas on the Real Vision platform. And one of our members put up a trade idea for avalanche so i thought okay that's interesting now he's up seven percent so far who's the member can't see the name of who it is right now but it was submitted for the trade idea competition we've got running on real vision where members all around the world are competing by putting up trade ideas now he's talking about avalanche's 2024 upgrade and how big that is so i think it's a great idea to take this trade idea, to take what Piers told me, and then to go and speak to John and find out, okay, what is going on here?

4:46So this is why I love Real Vision. There's so many points of connection and interest that we all make, whether it's from the trade ideas or whether it's the notes that members are giving where they're writing up their thesis on things, and you get to drop by and see this as part of your membership or connecting with members is another great way so you can connect via the comments section on that trade idea and chat to other members about avalanche and the opportunities that arise and just having people within our network like pierce kicks keep us up to date and that's why i wanted to get you guys up to date and what's happening with avalanche and what's happening in the broader crypto space by talking to John Woo.

5:29And John should help us really understand what's going on. So I hope you enjoy it. Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto, and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

5:54John Woo, how the devil are you? Raul, I'm great and I love being here with you. I'm glad we can make this work. I've been on a couple of times. It's been a while, so this is great that we're back on. Yeah, exactly. I'm always looking forward to this because, you know, your perspective, because like me, you've got financial market background, hedge fund background, but also deeply crypto native, technology native. So it's always a good conversation. So for those of you who don't know you and your background, Just give us the quick bio. So similar to you, I started my career in traditional hedge funds and VC.

6:29I was a tech investor. You were a macro investor. Similar to you, I also started my own fund ultimately, like you did. And then I got into this space and so did you. Now I got into this space, though, first as an investor in Bitcoin in the, call it 2014 era. uh basically i just did the math and realized the incremental supply of the minted new uh tokens on bitcoin was on a regular schedule and fixed and i was counting addresses on the demand side and made assumptions as to what could be in these addresses and the most weakest assumptions it was far outstripping the demand so incremental sorry outstripping the supply incremental demand was four or five x that of supply you have to own it um but i still wasn't a hundred percent all it it was really 2017 ish eth um the ico boom and you remember that ral and um i looked at that and i realized whoa there is this is a utility there's a real use case i'd see my shirt ipos i know how expensive they were for goldman sachs to take you around as a hedge fund guy there and i know what it costs the companies.

7:38And suddenly you're seeing this done in a global crowdfunding manner in a very quick way for companies to raise money. And the best part was individuals, regular people were getting it early as opposed to late. So that's when I really became all in as an operator. I wanted to create a security token market of private securities and alternatives to make it easier for every person to get access. Back then, that was Airbnb, Uber, and private funds. And then in 2000, so that was CEO of Digital Assets Group, a private security platform. Then in 2019 and early 2020, I did my undergrad at Cornell, a very well-known professor in the space and distributed systems at the computer science department at Cornell, asked me to come lead the business efforts for Alva Labs, the team behind Alva Lanch.

8:32And the rest is kind of history. So we were 10 people in a room in early 2020. Today, we're 250 plus all over the world, at least according to CoinMarketCap or Coinbase's rankings were one of the top ones, a layer one. And things have been just fantastic. And I think the space and Alva Labs, Alva Lanch have a lot of upside going forward. So we'll come on to Avalanche and Avalabs in a bit, but let's just talk about the market and the backdrop. How are you seeing things right now? What are you getting your sense on the ground with your technology perspective, your investor perspective? How are you seeing the state of the world?

9:15So I am now an operator, not a hedge fund person anymore. But that would be the question I would ask if I were still a hedge fund. In fact, I would be trying to find people like me all day long to ask them about the fundamental operating trend. So you still have your instincts with you, Raul. So I think if you take this from – you have to look at the one-year-plus trend. If you look at it from about a year ago to where we are today, today is the day just so people know that Fed may cut rates. I think the macro backdrop is actually fantastic. And no one's better at talking about that than you. So I'll leave it to you to talk about that.

9:51The liquidity situation, as you talked about, is also improving. I'll talk about the fundamentals of individual assets in the space. I think in general, what we're seeing is a little bit of dispersion now. Not everything is all treated as the same anymore with just different betas. Now, the market is actually a little discerning and trying to figure out giving the quality assets more respect. And that is based on fundamental trends. And I can tell you from where I sit, there's been a lot of potential partnerships crossover from traditional Web2, as well as TradFi, who want to use the blockchain to enable some application, to enable some sort of feature, or to have a better backbone for their B2B infrastructure.

10:38And that is all happening. on the native side, the P4P and in the crypto native side, you know, I think things have been, frankly, a little bit quieter. I think the adoption curve for natives has gotten to a point where we really need to see more people crossing over and taking the belief and diving in like you and I did way back when. And that's only going to happen when you see better applications and real use cases. So you think that we're at the point where it's difficult to onboard the kind of investor type who's curious and really the next phase has to be this applications layer that we've all been talking about, working on and thinking about.

11:24That's correct. I think this is now a few cycles. I've been involved now for three cycles. You've been involved for at least three cycles and it's grown. I mean, I know you regularly talk about there's 500 million users in the space. I'll differ a little bit. I think there are 500 million investors and speculators, actual developers and actual users of on-chain stuff is actually relatively small. So there's still a long way in terms of penetration for actual usage. And that's what I'm talking about. What I am seeing is developers, both in crypto native and in web two are experimenting and ready to launch things but there's a short term and a medium term issue i think in the short term um frankly they want some certainty in the regulation and after november for better or for worse i think people are going to start moving it's kind of like the gun just went off and you're at the starting line whether it's good weather or bad weather you're going to start running so but while you're still waiting no you don't need to figure out if you need to put on a pair of sweatpants or not you can at least hold off a little bit there's no like urgency to go do something since we're so close to november so i think that's one thing and another thing is frankly i think these new entrees into the space unlike in the past where they would buy it on coinbase and then somehow easily figure out way to get into ecosystems and try things out if you own an etf you're actually sitting it parking it somewhere and you're not really getting what this whole space is about which is utility and usage so there are probably more people involved but they're not involved the way an operator will love it to be involved frankly now you've seen this kind of development in the past and that's why your perspective is always useful because technology almost always scales the same way right we're seeing it with ai now as well that yes there's the the pioneers the people who experiment and try stuff but there's actually quite a long time before the applications layer got built so give us your perspective on that because i think it's really important because this is just a technology adoption curve people forget that it's just one that's investable by everybody which makes it different that's right and i think you've also highlighted these good points is you know forget about the asset class look about look at internet like if you just look at the stocks the magnificent seven you've kind of missed the big picture of what how it's changed people's lives period full stop it's so obvious now in hindsight um that's going to happen ai and that's kind of happening in blockchain as well you know what you've seen frankly is adoption and usage more on the b2b side than the b2b2c or b2c side so the average user hasn't gotten their ai chat gbt moment necessarily yet unless you want to deal with the clunky stuff on chain so what i'm seeing in terms of working with developers and partners i think there are again i already talked about one thing which is a little bit more clarity going forward in the environment in regulation but also a lot of blockchain engineers are very good at creating platforms but they're not great at creating ui ux so that's gonna need to happen and we are in the stage right now where developers if they're going to come into this space, they're going to need better tools.

14:44They're going to need scalable lockchains. That's kind of why I'm very excited about what Avalanche is doing in the Vox 9000. We can talk about that later. Part of it is creating the tools so developers can create new, better creative applications that will create the demand from the usage side. Have you ever wanted to trade Bitcoin but haven't dared try? With Plus500 Futures, you can trade crypto without the hassle of opening a wallet. With just a few clicks, you can register and start practicing with their free and unlimited demo. See a trading opportunity? You'll be able to trade it in just two clicks.

15:19Feel ready? You can move to real money with as little as$100 once your account is approved. And the great thing is that in addition to crypto, Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments. S &P 500, NASDAQ, gas, and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals forex and beyond with a simple and intuitive platform you could trade anytime anywhere experience the fast accessible futures trading you've been waiting for with plus 500 with over 20 years of experience plus 500 is your gateway to the markets visit us.plus500.com to learn more trading and futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone not all applicants will qualify plus 500 it's trading with a plus when you look at demand again not just from avalanche as i said we'll get into that more detail but just overall where are you seeing movement you know we hear a lot about gaming we hear a lot about real world assets but it's still kind of you know very behind closed doors you know tokenizing u.s treasuries i mean it's not the biggest deal in the world yet you know where are the web 2 company you know what what is the state of the union when it comes to the bigger players building on this i'm so glad you're asking that because you know we're open source platform so we see who's developing and some of them are private chains so that others can't see but we get to see and frankly there are a couple of verticals that are really growing and one is gaming on avalanche yeah you guys have done a good job with that so far you got that what was the huge game you've just got that's just oh there's a couple but um Godzilla grid grid yes off the grid okay so we'll take a side hand and talk about off the grid yeah I want to hear about this because triple a publisher type people my one of my favorite people in the entire space guy called Pierce Kicks at Delphi and I was with Pierce at his house in Portugal and he was like wild-eyed he goes this is the biggest thing I've ever seen so I said I need to get John on to talk about this so what to talk us through this it's legit it's gonna be on the playstation it's gonna be on the xbox and the in-game asset solution will be on a wallet and minted on avalanche so the users can have sovereignty of their assets ultimately be able to trade it and feel like they can do things a lot easier and have the back-end benefits but what's really exciting here is this This is not your classic crypto game, which is basically thinly veiled DeFi product.

17:53This is actually great gameplay, great graphics. This is what Godzilla people are known for. And they raised like$75 million plus in order to create this game. So it's not a cheap game and they have a history of a large following, great graphics, and they're going to be launching this in the very near future so that all their users can have an even better experience than they have traditionally. So I'm super excited about it. I can't wait till everyone is able to see this in about a month or so. And it's going to be minting those assets on the Avalanche blockchain. Yeah, I mean, Piers said, you know, he's a gamer, a true gamer.

18:31He grew up gaming. And he's like, this is a really good game. Forget the fact that it's on chain it's a really really good game and you know nobody yet has got gaming right now the lead times are long right it takes a long time from the idea to doing it but this feels like this one has a chance of actually showing people how this is going to work that's correct there are other good ones as well but i think gaming is where you can get a lot of users they're very similar in age and and and other characteristics as crypto native people so i can easily see someone doing gaming in gunzillas off the grid and then figure out how they get off of that into the greater ecosystem of avalanche avalanche is also ethereum evm compatible so they can move all over the interoperability to other chains as well in fact there's even a move vm on avalanche so they go to other places like suey or something that can all happen i think that's the ultimate dream for anyone in this space is to create that true interoperability so that people can move anywhere they want that's the real power of you know the blockchain the permissionless open blockchain yeah because in the end we can't have walled gardens everybody's going to have to work with each other to allow some sort of interoperability because if the internet didn't have interoperability you and i wouldn't be able to talk right now i'd have to have the same software system as you the same you know isp all sorts of things but you know this bit needs to get done and it's still not done very well yet this kind of interoperability layer correct i think what you need again is good tech at the blockchain level but you need in at least gaming you need great content or great triple a publishers at the application level and you combine those two frankly i think Godzilla some of these other games chose the avalanche network and networks because they wanted their own execution environment.

20:27When you roll up a L1 or what we used to call a subnet, it is your own self-sovereign blockchain. You choose GAS, you choose the token economics, you choose what you want to validate, how many validators, and most importantly, it is customizable so that, and it's your call is sandbox. So you're not subject to congestion based on some surge somewhere else. If you're a AAA publisher game, Last thing you want is your users having a bad experience because some NFT drop or something goes crazy or some meme coin goes crazy and you have congestion in the system. You have your own execution environment.

21:06I don't know how off the grid is going to go, but when somebody gets traction in one of these games, what kind of number of users do you think it onboards and active users? So people who are actually collecting collectibles in games, stuff like that. what are we thinking this is going to do to the space? Because gaming is so vast, right? So I have two examples. One is another game that's launching on Avalanche. It's a public company called Nexon. It's publicly traded in Japan. It's an Asian company. They have a game called Marble Story. There's about 200 million. It's been around for 10 years.

21:43It's a more casual game. So it's not like the graphics of off the grid, but it is a well-used and has a lot of longevity, almost 200 million registered users. They have like 500 ,000 to a million in terms of monthly active users, depending on what's happening. They are going to launch a blockchain-enabled version of it in parallel with their existing game. So that will be the first test case of how many people start migrating to do... They're doing it for two purposes, not just for user better self-sovereign data and feeling like you own your assets on the user perspective. But some of the highest margins for a lot of these games is UGC, user-generated content.

22:28So the composability of tools on an open permission network allows their users, their players, to actually become developers and create new modules or new assets. And that's actually free content. So some of the best gaming companies out there with the highest margins, it's because they have users who create content. and that will be an example of a large existing base of web 2 gaming that will be migrating and that'll be a specific example now i have some numbers of other things that are actually happening it's not as big as that but and they're slightly in a different space like in royalty royalty we can talk about now or later before we go on to loyalty royalty and um real world assets and stuff just want a side question i'm seeing a lot of interest from japanese corporates we've just seen sony announcing its own layer 2 you're obviously doing stuff with japanese corporates i'm seeing everywhere what what is happening in japan that suddenly kind of switched on the light bulb for the japanese corporate players i understand a lot of gaming comes out of japan as well but what is going on there are you seeing the same and rest of asia too korea as Korea as well.

23:42So I think what's going on is we always have the perspective of a US person and the regulatory environment here has gotten harder, whereas the clarity has happened elsewhere in the world. So I think what you're seeing is Japanese corporates, Korean corporates and other places in the world don't have as much uncertainty of what they think a stable coin will be or not be going forward and what's considered a security or not a security going forward. And they're willing to now take the steps in terms of developing technology for that when that clarity becomes imminent. In the US, frankly, I think it's still more uncertain and the rules are still more vague.

24:27So it's coming. It's almost like looking at it reverse. It's like they're doing it on schedule. Unfortunately, we in the US are off schedule a little bit. So, okay, let's move on to loyalty, royalty. There's another thing that I've been very interested in, you know, whether it's the creative economy, the fan economy, there's so many areas of this. What are you seeing happening there? So I love the space because, again, it's real world use cases. So we're working with SK. SK is a large conglomerate in Korea. Keep on the Asian theme here. They have a pooled royalty system. there's 24 million south koreans in this system 40 of the country and over a hundred thousand merchants that share points so it's pooled in the sense that um if you buy effectively 10 cups of starbucks you can get one room at a marion so everything is working so it's kind of an interoperable loyalty interoperable already but when you have that many participants and you need value to be transferred in a call it a token version especially that's a point or a reward point there's no better back-end solution than a blockchain and what they found already is again they have 24 million so far i think it's like you know a few hundred thousand that have migrated to the blockchain enable solution but because of the gamification of it because of the feeling of ownership of the actual coins and because of the trading potential capability of the coins the engagement and the frequency of use of the call it couple hundred thousand that are using the blockchain enabled solution is 30 to 40 percent better than the average um loyalty rewards program in the web 2 version so early early signs are very positive for a blockchain enabled solution in the u.s there's actually one that we just announced with a company called tyb try your best now what try your best is is a u.s version the founders have great relationships with certain brands like Glossier, Rare Beauty, Urban Outfitters.

26:31So they have those relationships on one end. On the other end, they're plugged into Shopify. So they've abstracted away the blockchain component of it to the end user. But basically what they're doing is they're using promotions that would exist anyway at the merchant level and then tokenizing them. But the user doesn't know it. User thinks it's just a promotion code for a challenge. So if you buy a lipstick from glossier or something you are given a challenge and if you tweet or do something with it and and become effectively an influencer for them or you do something else that they set up as a challenge showing up at event or something you get these promotional points and then at checkout you actually can um it can redeem it but so the you and they have also in the last month and i think last day i have i saw was july they've also increased both the dollar amount used by the blockchain person as opposed to the web 2 version and they've also increased the frequency by a lot as well i think their numbers are more like 10 to 15 percent increase in in dollar amount and like 30 more frequency do you think just out of interest do you think the asian market is quicker to adopt technology i mean it's very stark when you go to asia how far advanced their cities and technological infrastructure is versus the US.

27:52I mean, the US thinks it's a technological, technology-based culture, but it is at building companies, but it's not at using it. That's exactly right. I think US, we have great developers and coming up with great vision and building things. But in terms of the individual user adopting a digital solution, that has historically been far higher in all the um north the asian countries whether it's japan or korea um china and i think there's a couple reasons though especially japan is obvious it's the density of things so people are used to doing things online and in a small place um but i also think that they have a very mobile first type culture and that also helps out a lot but yes they are far more from a user perspective willing to adopt these things and um i can tell you that they are willing to try new things that perhaps the average US person wouldn't.

28:49And it also leads me to think that the UX, UI breakthroughs might actually come out of Asia, you know, as a lot of these apps have in other spheres, because they're so consumer focused with their technology, while the US is kind of builds businesses. And as you talked about, the terrible UX UI that is the blockchain space right now, it feels that Asia is going to solve it first. Looking at products from our partners in Asia versus that of the US, that is factual. The UI UX and some of these things with SK, potential ones with Nexon and other companies are working with in Asia, the user and the UI UX is very smooth.

29:31And also, it's also fitted for local taste, if you will. And I saw this as an investor, like, you know, especially if you go to places like Asia and China, meaning Asia, you saw that their search engines were cluttered like Yahoo in the old days. Whereas here, our tastes are Google, plain, simple and nothing on it and simplify the whole thing. But yet they like that scrolling digital things moving like you're at a 1990 stock trading, you know, place where digital lights or it's like, you know, living in Times square or something so they know their users and they are better at the call it um user interface level how long before we get one of the larger hotel chains or or airlines because obviously that is the holy grail of the point system or american express you know there's a few of these big ones out there that feel like it's so obvious that they go on chain but it takes time it will not be in the U.S.

30:29first it will be elsewhere and there's a couple of reasons first I think in the U.S. most of these loyalty systems are siloed so the monetary system is controlled by Delta and United Airlines alone they do have point-to-point partnerships you know JVs or whatever once in a while but it's not like in Korea where it's a shared pool by everyone and unfortunately what the koreans have learned for the u.s unfortunately for the u.s is that it's like business clustering like this is why we had malls in the u.s there's a north strength brings in the foot traffic still appreciates the taco bell that's at the end of the mall because people do need to eat and it does increase overall foot traffic for everyone and they appreciate even though they sell footwear that a foot locker is in there as well business clustering actually works for everyone.

31:22I think in Asia, they're far more comfortable with sharing these loyalty points with everyone else. In the U.S., they're focused more on the monetary system and effectively devaluing. And in fact, I think there was recent news about Delta getting some heat from the agencies in the U.S. for basically defending the value of their promotional points for Delta flyers. I mean, I know I've had this problem with not necessarily Delta, but with other airlines hotels and places where all of a sudden you think you've earned it but you didn't earn it and you show up and it's like no you still owe x amount of dollars yeah i mean debasement is real and if you have your own private money supply which is what they really are you're always incentivized to base away your reward system that's right so i to answer your question i think it's going to be overseas and i can't name names because we're working with some of these but there will be hotels and foreign adopters of this for loyalty far faster than US airlines or hotels.

32:27So let's talk about real world assets, which is something you focused on as well. What are you seeing there? Okay, so in the US, we're seeing a little pause. And I would too. And we're seeing a lot of experimentation, proof of concepts, but they are kind of in wait and see mode. what we are seeing a lot of is obviously stablecoin. I was just at the launching of the New York office with Jeremy Allaire and the growth of stablecoins there. But even every one of that launch party is still waiting for a specific clarity as to what determines a stablecoin. We're seeing a lot of tokenization in the money market funds, BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, to name a few.

33:10That's all happening. But in terms of tokenizing funds, like we, Avalabs, helped KKR a while back. It's really the crypto native funds. Recently, Parify decided they wanted to eat their own cooking, so to speak, and they just launched a new fund and they tokenized a sliver of it through our progress to securitize to have the right licenses on the Avalanche blockchain so that individual LPs can go and buy and ultimately trade those LP units and have more price discovery and liquidity. So the bigger funds are in pause, but the crypto native guys who are now starting to eat their own cooking, if you will, to show the rest of the world.

33:51How bean up are you all feeling in the US? You know, because it is, I mean, every conversation I have is like everyone's hanging their head. It's like when regulation, you know, everybody's been sued. You know, it's just been it's been a terrible environment. I mean, everyone's moving forwards, but it's been bloody hard. I mean, what we've done is really moved our energy to different areas. You talked about Asia. So, you know, my team has spent a lot of time in Asia this past three or four months talking to different companies. We've gone to the Middle East, Latin America. So Avalanche's Big Summit now is going to be in Argentina in October, in a month from now, because 30 % of the Argentinians actually use cryptocurrency as a way to daily transact.

34:39So I think looking at everything from a US perspective, yes, it could be kind of frustrating. But what we've done is channel energies, the rest of the world that are adopting much faster. You started the beginning of conversation talking about the ICO boom in 2017. And ICOs were such an obvious way of coalescing capital really fast, very suitable for a space like this that innovates, dives, thrives very fast. The time cycles are super fast. Do you ever think we get back to that? Because it feels like everything in this space, you see the experimentation, it grows, it flames out, and then from the ashes rises the phoenix and the next iteration of this.

35:23It feels like that ICO stuff is still under, business is not finished. Business is not finished in terms of that. You're absolutely right. I think the technology has improved a lot. user interface is not perfect yet, but it's also better. But we also learned from that, that in the US, at least, they were considered unregistered private security. So you have to have an ATS to be able to match trades. You need to have the right broker dealer licenses, et cetera, et cetera. So I think the dream of that is still there and it will happen, but it's going to take more time. I think really what's happening is the technology's improved so that don't forget right after the ICO boom on Ethereum, you have crypto kitties that inflated fees because the technology wasn't there.

36:13Now it's probably there in at least more than one of these chains. Okay. But the regulation is not there yet so that people will adopt it from the issuer perspective. And then at some point you actually need individuals to have some sort of discovery and research and understanding and get comfortable with the private security asset class. So I can't wait till we get to the point where it's just about education and research and discovery as opposed to waiting for clarity in rules. Is regulation still not ready for it anyway? Well, it is happening elsewhere in different forms. I mean, for example, before the ETPs in the U.S.

36:55got launched, there were ETPs in Europe. So other places in the world, there are definitely versions of this. But let's be honest, also the largest capital pool in the world is still in the U.S. And the US, if you use current rules, has the largest accredited and qualified individuals. So that's where the asset value is. And they are the first ones to actually buy this before we get into a retail, true retail situation. Switching topics, one of the things that, you know, everybody overcomplicates the space or overfinancializes the space often. And I step back and think, basically, blockchains are in this business of selling block space.

37:34you know that's all we really do in the space and you know yes unlike other systems like this whether it's cloud or whether it's the internet you can actually participate in owning it so it's very different but how do you think that this how do we start to differentiate block space in the end when everybody's kind of fast and cheap and everything else how does that work great Great question. Because I think there are... How much room can there be for 50 block space providers? Yes, there's going to be some niche, some broad. But yeah, how do you think of block space per se? So I'll answer that in two ways.