Magic Eden: The Everything Platform for Crypto

0:28Meet Magic Eden, the home of Web3. If you've used any of their protocols, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super dap in the home of Web3 in real time. Go to realvision.com forward slash magic for more information. Hi, everyone. I'm Ralph Powell, the CEO and co-founder of Real Vision. Here at Real Vision, we're committed to give you the best knowledge, tools, and network to help you succeed in your financial future. If you're enjoying this podcast, please take a moment to give it a five-star rating. It truly helps us continue to bring top-tier content. Thank you so much.

1:02Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman, where I take that journey to the nexus of exploration of macro, crypto, and the exponential age of technology. I look at many of the big themes, and my job is to figure out how they all come together in the end. One of these is NFTs. NFTs are kind of misunderstood. People think of the last cycle and the insanity of the NFTs and the profile picture craze that happened. Now, a lot of that crashed and burned. And we're seeing a similar kind of craze in Mean Coins now. But NFTs are something much, much bigger. You see, NFTs are really contracts, individual contracts that exist online.

1:52And they can be used for many things. You see, in a digital world, everything goes to zero in value because you can create infinite amounts of stuff. But once you use something like an NFT, a non-fungible token, what you can do is create digital scarcity for a particular object. Now, the breakout use case has been high-end art. And I've been a big buyer of that in the down cycle in things like XCopy, who I think is the culturally most relevant artist in the entire history of the space. along with Beeple. And I've collected many more artists too. You can see my collection on OpenSea under the Culture Vault.

2:33You can see what I've collected. And those are long-term savings for me, things that I won't sell, I want to hold on to because they're going to remind us of the culture. They're a time capsule of this cultural moment in time when we all started to realize that we could make our fortunes and unfuck our futures in crypto. It's a special moment in time. So that's what I've got is these time capsules of the culture of the time. But NFT is a lot more than just art too. So it was really important for me to reach out to somebody to talk about the bigger picture. And I've always been a fan of the guys at Magic Eden.

3:11I'm a big fan of Super Rare, Magic Eden, even OpenSea, because I want to know where this space is going and how they're seeing the space. So, with Magic Eden, just as a side, they're actually sponsors of some Real Vision content. But just to be clear, nobody I have on The Journeyman ever pays to appear. These are people I want to speak to for my reasons, and you can't pay to appear on The Journeyman. The show can be sponsored, sure. So, let's not conflate the two here, but I really want to hear from Jack what is going on at Magic Eden, and where this is all going. 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.

4:00In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

4:10Jack, welcome to Real Vision. Yeah, absolutely. God, thanks for having me. I have to say, I'm a Real Vision listener, actually long time listener exponential age don't this up like so i'm actually really excited to be here it's actually kind of surreal for me on its own t-shirt on today let's go let's go that's awesome um i wish you listen to a lot of your like macro stuff and macro and crypto are so intertwined together so whenever you guys drop stuff about like what's up with inflation what's up with rates i'm like listening at least until on the gym right on the day so i love it yeah i mean that's the point is look they're all the same thing people didn't realize crypto is actually a macro thing um you know i even found you know i ran a lot of analysis on even nfts and found that particularly the art ones are actually a macro asset uh they just need the business cycle and alt season and various other things to come together and and then it all happens so yeah everything is macro and macro is kind of everything i guess so listen let's get your story first so jack tell us your your crypto journey because that's always i love hearing how people got into this ridiculous industry why you would suffer such pain to do this that's a good question i think that that hits at the nail that that hits at the nail man like a lot of uh i'm a lover of pain and a lot of pain tolerance but uh yeah i haven't so so um it's somewhat intertwined with the magic Eden story but uh one of my co-founders Sid uh he's our CTO we've been like high school friends actually so I've known him for like 15 16 years grew up in Australia together went to high school together went to like math tutoring on the weekend together um and he got me into crypto 2014 uh we graduated from college he started a bitcoin company so that was like one of the early bitcoin bull cycles and he uh he started like like an indexing company like a really really he would describe as like an early version of alchemy and uh he raised some money moved from australia to the us set up shop and he said hey jack you should come visit me man like and maybe we should do some stuff together and he tried to convince me to join and at that time that's actually when i got fascinated with bitcoin and crypto because he was you know shilling it to me all the time uh but i took a look at what he was doing.

6:28I said, dude, I just graduated. I don't know much about business. I don't know much about tech. I'm not very good at coding, but I definitely know your thing's not going to work. So like all respect, I'm going to have to bow out, which was, you know, at that time, I actually had some dissonance. I felt like, oh, you know, felt a little shameful, like not joining my friend in his startup, but it was a good choice because his thing went down in flames. Meet Magic Eden, the home of Web3. They are getting into the token trading space in addition to NFTs to become a super dap where you can do everything cross-chain all in one place.

7:01They're solving UX issues by building products across every chain ecosystem, swaps, borrowing, and lending, NFT, perps, and more, all seamlessly cross-chain. Instead of hopping between countless sites and handling multiple wallets, just use Magic Eden. Plus, the ME token is coming out this quarter from the ME Foundation. If you've used any of their protocols, you can claim some. So check out Magic Eden today and watch them become a super dap in the home of Web3 in real time. Go to realvision.com forward slash magic for more information.

7:54And for many big shifts in the crypto industry of the last 10 years, it all made me want to jump in and do something full time. But something held me back. And the thing that held me back was I felt like in those early days of crypto, it felt like a lot of things in crypto was about infrastructure, like making the tech faster, consensus algorithms, or it was about trading, right? building exchange, DeFi, building a trading shop. And I didn't come from any of those backgrounds. I didn't have like a CS PhD and I didn't work on Wall Street. I was more like a consumer product manager. That was my trade.

8:34So long story short, I just mainly dabbled in tokens. Then what happened was in 2021, I saw like the Ethereum NFT boom happen. And this is like front page New York times people were talking about art like people were selling these up for 69 million dollars and that's when it gave me this feeling like actually this new thing nft is this is about like art culture games partying people talking crap to each other on the internet this is things i understand this is like consumer stuff this is the thing that every man that every woman on the street can understand without being really about consensus algorithms how high the tps is that there made me feel like hey actually maybe this is an area i can contribute because i came from this consumer internet background and that's when i basically called sid again he you know he also dropped out of quick line and said hey i'm actually seeing a lot of really interesting things in the nft space maybe we should actually start a company together do some side projects we kind of started magic you didn't build the first version out in two weeks and then uh we were lucky enough to catch like obviously the nft ball cycle in 21 and then started magic you didn't got a lot of traction and raised like$130 million in like nine months.

9:43And then, yeah, now like we're three years on in that journey. And you started on Solana, right? That's right. Yeah, I started on Sol. Why that decision? And, you know, talk us about the first iteration of what Magic Eden is. We'll talk about where it's going along with where the market and everything else is going. But talk us through that first bit. Why did you make those decisions? And what was in your head at the time? Because startups is always a journey of you think you're going here, you end up going there. but let's where where did you think you were going so started on soul and definitely resonate with you like um we took a bet we worked hard but there was also a healthy dose of luck involved you know it's like can't come pretend otherwise we started on soul because in 21 that was a bit like the contrarian bet because people thought soul was this like centralized chain people didn't really believe in this like old chain thesis that much uh but for me because i was uh i came from consumer internet i was like a big tech pm in the bay area i thought hey like the history of the internet has been you know it over long uh long enough uh time horizon it trends towards the best technology the fastest technology and so i actually built this new chain that was really fast really crisp and we can build some really nice user experiences on top of it and then secondly like eth at that time was more the cultural center for nfts and that was where the pioneers were but really soul was where the white space was so we wanted to take this contrarian bet over time we expanded to like 10 chains got traction on eth as well and as well as on bitcoin but that was the bet um and then at the same time of course a healthy dose of luck right so what happened was when we when i called sid and i said hey we should do a we should maybe do something nfts we didn't think we were going to start a company we said why don't we just do this as a side project see what happens and it was actually around this time it was like labor day weekend like you know september october 21 and we said you know what we're just going to take two weeks off work all of us and let's just crank something out and we bought like a wordpress theme because we didn't want to code the front end we just wanted to figure out the back end and all this small country stuff and we like sticky taped it together, toss it out into the market.

12:02But yeah, in two, I said, I said, you know what, in two weeks, if we get$50 ,000 of transactions, that would be a success. And then we started doing like$200 ,000 per day within two weeks. And that's when, you know, we looked at each other and said, hey, this is like, sometimes the universe hits you with this opportunity and you'd be, you'd be stupid, right? We'd regret it for the rest of our lives if we didn't jump in. So then we just like quit our jobs and just did it full time. Yeah. Hey, I hope you're enjoying the episode. If you want to dive deeper and really dig into what's going on and how to understand it, then grab my everything code PDF for free.

12:38Just hit the link in the description below. You're going to love it. I'm sure it's going to really help you. Was your vision to create an open C on Solana? Was that the original idea? Is here's a new chain, they're going to have NFTs, there's going to be activity, there's no way for it right now for people to buy and sell the stuff we'll just solve that was that it was you know at the at the early days that that's probably as far as we thought about it um and um openc even tried to like acquire us you know like in in the really really early days and that was basically it i think we had a few differences in maybe the way that we thought about nfts that was different to openc and some other players but that's probably the more like the simple v1 of the vision i think what we wanted the the two things that was pretty different about us was number one we said um there is some aspect of nft that looks like the trading markets like equities markets or fungible token markets in the sense it has like a secondary market and a primary market and what we learned what we observed was in those markets it's like ipo right like if you also own a lot of the primary market there is this overflow of demand that flows into the secondary market and it creates some network effects.

13:54So we built our product with like a primary market and a second year market very early. And that was pretty different to like other players like we can see. And then the second thing that we always wanted to do was we actually followed more like this Amazon Netflix analogy, which is we want to have maximum range. And crypto goes up and down. We don't really know what would take off. But as long as we have maximum range, then the range will help us acquire users. and that convenience will help us appeal to users over time. And I think most players are generally single ecosystem players. They either play on EVM ecosystem or Sol ecosystem or Move ecosystem or something like that.

14:34So from the very early on, we said we should be very horizontal. At the peak of the insanity, you raised a lot of money, which is great. And now it's like, oh shit, what have we got to build? So then your vision has to change because you've now got money, you've got backing of investors and you've got an ability to go and do something. What do you guys say to each other and what do you decide to build?

15:19that 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 Plus500. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.plus500.com to learn more. Trading in 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. Yeah.

15:57Yeah, that's a good question. And like, yeah, in the middle, also like FTX collapse happened, sold from like$250 to$8. Our revenue dropped like 99%. And you're thinking, oh my God, Frank DeGoldt changed his chain right at the bottom. Yeah. I was like, Frank, man, come on, bro, just pick one. I'm building technology just for you. No, it's a really good question. There was a period of fog of what? No lie. During that very bearish times, we were also thinking, it's very hard to see what's working. Then we did make a couple of things work, and there were a few big theses or directions. One is really hard on going multi-chain.

16:47And that was in this bear market where everyone was being fairly conservative and they were not doing aggressive expansion. And we said, let's aggressively expand. And what we did probably like 18 months ago, one of our best examples of that was expanded Bitcoin. So now we have like 90 % of the Bitcoin collectibles market. Yeah, you pioneered that. You saw it really early. People didn't quite understand it and you guys jumped on it. Yeah, that's right. And then off the back of that, there was another thesis, which is category expansion. So expanding beyond just NFTs into other use cases. So we become more diversified and more resilient.

17:24And it also started with Bitcoin because we started with Bitcoin like collectibles, which is called ordinals. And then we expanded to effectively like fungible token trading on Bitcoin, which is called ruins. And now we also are the dominant player in that market. So we have like the biggest Bitcoin decks. But the whole thesis was, you know what, what we should do is do horizontal chain expansion so we have the biggest range. So it doesn't matter what creators pop off, we can always give some exposure. And then we should do category expansion because these use cases in crypto are so volatile that it's much better to be resilient.

17:58And then the last thing we did was, this is one of the things that in some ways I wish we did earlier, but better late than never, is we went upwards, like we went vertically. So we built our own wallet and we released our mobile app a couple of months ago. We got like 300 ,000 downloads. And the reason for that was, as you said, we raised a ton of money. Like, what do we do with it? We wanted to grow. Obviously, our investors wanted to grow. The people behind us also want us to grow. But one of the biggest problems I realized was as an app, we were like sitting behind the wallets and then we also sat behind the centralized exchanges, which meant it was very which meant it was very hard for us to grow so to give an example if we spent a hundred million dollars on a super bowl ad then the first the users will go to coinbase and then the users will go to like metamask and then like a very small trickle will come to magic eater and we cannot grow we were just like uh we're just praying for rain right praying that a bullmark will come and users will come so the only way for us to put that resource investment into something that actually helps us solve our vision is build our own wallet which then has our own fiat rm so we can bypass other wallets bypass the centralized exchanges so that we have our own way of growing with our own product vision and and so yeah that's how the things that we did in the last couple years i want to go into the bigger vision in a sec but i just want to go back to one thing is you'd come into nfts but then nft volumes went to essentially zero which must have been a scary moment for you guys because you've raised all the money you've kind of raised it for generally nsts as a thesis and then you look around you and they're like there is nothing happening that was is that what is that what you saw that forced you to adapt and look for new opportunities the corva is actually a bit like this um so i think number one um in definitely like looking now nfts is way softer as a category than 22 right when we raised that much raise the money uh but even in 24 i think even though the category is soft magic either i think we're still doing pretty well like we're over 70 of the revenue within the nft market and even off that we're like profitable as a 130 % company.

20:23So to me, it's almost like, man, this category is pretty soft. It can only go up from here. And even at the softness, our strategy works and we're doing really well. That's like one take. The second take for us is I still fundamentally, the way I see the NFT thing is probably how I perceive the crypto industry, you know, as I was waiting on the sidelines of, you know, of the last, since 2014 is that I think it always starts out looking like a toy. and I always think that there will be a long-term trend towards utility. So what I mean by that is this. Initially, when DeFi started in 2017 or 2018, I also thought there was no way this was going to work.

21:02This looks super illegal. This looks super speculative. And my co-founder was employee number two at DYDX. It was like a decentralized futures exchange. And he first showed it to me 2018. I said, dude, you have like 100 users. This is not going to work. and lo and behold they're doing like hundreds of millions millions of dollars of trades per day divide the real thing and the second thing is that likewise like for tokens 2017 everything started as very speculative like vaporware icos but eventually the best tokens with utility and teams building behind them rose to the top and like solana like you know uh will be a really a good example of that that is our view for nfts and my view for nfts which is 20 21 22 there was this like hyper speculative phase and it was uh it was a bit like tulip mania if you will and a lot of teams got washed out because they were very empty but now we are seeing the spark of like you have games uh actually using this technology there was this game called off the grid that had like 5 million users uh launched a few weeks ago this is to me is like the burgeoning of chapter too of nfts and what is probably the following the same trends of other crypto paradigms before which is that fundamentally this technology is sound but now we have the creators and the teams who actually have the vision to bring something to life so all that yeah i think to summarize 24 things are pretty quiet i think we're still doing well relative to the quietness and then over the long term we're still really bullish and i think you'll follow the same trends as other trends in crypto you know i always find that you know when you're trying to solve problems like quiet market you come into other things.

22:40Firstly, your expansion to the Bitcoin ecosystem very early meant that you could take a dominant share. Okay. So that was a fantastic move. The other thing is putting on other things onto the platform, the ability to transact, the wallet. It just builds something closer to a super app in the space, which I think is a really good vision. I want to dig into a bit more than that in a sec. It feels that the multi-chain thing is actually a very hard thing to solve, but it's actually the biggest need of all. Right now, if I want to go and buy an NFT on Tezos, Bitcoin, ETH, SWE, whatever, it's a total fucking pain in the ass.

23:26I got all of these wallets. I have different places. I mean, I bought some Rupert Renisto smiles on Magic Eden that are stuck in my Phantom wallet because they don't go into my Ledger device very easily. And it's like, really? And then I've got stuck with stuff on base. I've stuck with stuff on the new other layer 2 that just came out for NFT artists. I've got some on ETH. It's like, guys, make this easy for me somehow. Yeah, well said, man. Kindred spirits. But how difficult is that? It's easy to say, you know, I can waft my hands around and go, yeah, everything should be interoperable in a multi-chain world.

24:05But you've got to build the tech to do it. How difficult is that to do? It is really hard. I think technically it's quite challenging. It's very expensive. And I think operationally, even from go to market inside the company, how you organize is also pretty challenging. um so i think so two things one i what you mentioned about the problem we definitely resonate with and i think that's like the core hard string problem that we want to solve and the second is that we always have the same magic even which is like what is hard is what is valuable so let's just go to the hard thing and um to tie all those things together like building across why is it why is it challenging in the first place it's like if you want to build on multiple chains it's effectively like building on multiple technical stacks it's like building on a windows stack uh apple stack uh linux stack and then like some really weird cobalt stack that would probably be bitcoin and then trying to have a very seamless front-end user experience across the top across all of them and i think that's fine if we're like 10 000 company like microsoft but we're not right we're like 130 percent startup so it is technically very challenging and because the encryptor the underlying stack like the chains they are also changing the they have teams that's updating all the time you also have have a lot of chasing and keeping up to do so i think that is technically very challenging then operationally it's challenging because as folks in crypto know, like there's all this chain maximalism.

25:43It's a little bit like, it's a little bit like we're like this American, or, you know, we're like this international company and then we go into a local country and we don't understand the culture and we're like doing some really weird thing. Like we're like using email in China where everyone uses WeChat, right? Or we're like trying to use a credit card in Latin where everyone uses cash. It's basically like that. So what we, and initially when we tried to do the multi-chain thing, we didn't understand this and we screwed it up multiple times but over time as we landed each chain and each ecosystem we developed our own playbook for how to enter the chain and actually have success and the way we actually think about it now is we hire like very dedicated talent from the chain and ecosystem who understand the tech and then we we also it's like respecting the local culture we also hire operations and community teams to understand what this local culture really is and what this local chain ecosystem is about to then actually run the operations and go to market.

26:41So to us, it was pretty difficult technically, operationally, and then I think it was kind of expensive to run all of these different teams. But at the same time, to your point, like what would we do in the bear market? I actually think that was a really valuable thing we did because ultimately, I think we're one of the only crypto companies to be able to solve this problem. and it actually made us very resilient. It's exactly the reason why we have 70 % share in NFTs while we're profitable. And despite everything going down, and we're still able to like stay focused, stay long-term without, you know, a lot of competitors attacking us and distracting us in different directions.

27:19Is the true north for you, the non-fungible and the fungible side is like the infrastructure layer to move money on and around? Or is that becoming a bigger deal and you find out the execution transaction and maybe staking and other stuff that can all come from the space, the DeFi thing. Do you just think of it as the kind of support layer for the NFTs or just all part of a kind of larger super app idea? Our vision is, we call it like trade all assets on all chains in one app. And what I think the vision, this next chapter of Magic Eden, what it's going to look like is like an on-chain version, coin based on-chain version of finance that can trade multiple categories of assets with an extremely wide amount of range so on all chains so then to your point like we have nfts as one category of tradable assets we have tokens fungible tokens as one category of tradable assets and it basically allows us to serve users in those use cases and there's a high degree of synergy between the two like gaming companies want to launch tokens they want to launch nfts that's like vc backed institutional teams and then like meme coins grassroots teams they also want to launch nfts and they also obviously want to launch tokens so there's a high degree of synergy i think for us today um the fungible token trading side is probably like 25 of our revenue already and that's coming from ruins and that's coming from a mobile mobile app and i think in 2025 that number is only going to grow as well how do you get liquidity onto the platform because we've seen different models of liquidity and some have been an utter disaster and kind of sort of ruined the market and others are illiquid so it's the opposite pain you know particularly in the nft side which is you know because they're specific non-fungible goods or you know assets they're they're more difficult to provide liquidity for how do you think about liquidity in this do you think the liquidity should be provided by the market or should it be provided by liquidity makers i think our view on this has changed over time and i can tell you a little bit about our current view and um and then like uh uh and back into like some some previous views so i think that i think in this new like in the product that the vision that we're shooting towards this like on-chain version of coinbase on-chain version of binance multi-category trading app it's not necessary for us to own the liquidity and what is much more important for us is to acquire the user so it's like count of users is more important than like the volume of liquidity and and i actually think that's a really valuable problem to solve because i think the in crypto there is this over gravitation towards volume and liquidity because the space does not grow right it's full market bear market in the bear market there are no new users, the only thing that we can see is we have a flat user pool.

30:21We can only measure how much volume is going through to each user. However, what we want to build is once we have NFTs, Fungible Tokens, our own wallet vertically integrated, we can acquire users from the Web2 non-crypto space. And what is much more important for me is then just do the really simple experience and onboard those users. And as long as we have the right value propositions to onboard those users, it's okay if we churn some users to other apps or competitors. That is less important to us. What's much more important to us is have this funnel where we can grow our users. So then why do I say volume is less important than users?

31:01I think one of the very special and unique properties of us being this Web3 decentralized centralized app, you know, relative to centralized apps is we can compose on other people's apps. That's the beauty of Web3. So what I can do is we can build a nice trading UI layer on top of Uniswap, on top of Radium, on top of these like decentralized exchanges, and we can tap into their liquidity, but the user comes to our interface, they use our wallet to do the trade. And that's how we can probably with 130 people build these use cases that will take like 500, 1000 people to build because we don't have to build every part of the stack we just have to pick the stack that we think is most valuable to our mission and then go from there so what we are really focused on back to i guess it's all founders have their own like found the dna and that's why they pick the strategy that suits them we are like consumer internet uh application builders we like building large-scale apps that feel really simple and delightful to use what i think is much more important is that we build the delightful ux for this trading platform we build our own wallet so that we can have sticky relationships with our users but we don't have to own the liquidity and instead what we should then focus on is growth and onboarding users into the space and yeah there are certain chains like on bitcoin where it's so hard to build that i have to build the liquidity i have to build the decks i have to find the market makers it's just part of the necessity but there are other ecosystems like solana east where all all that part of the stack or the market structure is very developed it's fine like we can just sit on someone else's liquidity and someone knows a stack but we just have to find the user yeah let me let me know if that if that makes sense yeah that makes total sense to me i want to step a little bit into the future now as well because this is where it gets really interesting to me i i kind of believe in punk 6529's view of NFTs, which is they are much bigger than people understand.

33:03You know, my general thesis is here that all of human society is run by contracts. Even you turning up today was an, you know, not a signed contract that was witnessed, but essentially a contract between you and I that we were going to get together and talk. And everything we do is a contract. I mean, literally everything in human society is organized by contracts. and in a digital world those contracts are nfts and because they're cheap and easy to do we can get these trusted verified uh distributed contracts at scale so when i think of what you're building i just think it's a lot bigger than people yet understand because the technology is the same you're just changing what the bloody nft has so here's where i'm at one is obviously there's a huge marketplace in steam the gaming assets right so you talked about that there's a gaming asset marketplace okay that makes sense we can see where that's headed i just think ticketing is going this way all sport tickets all concert tickets all of that there needs to be a marketplace a secondary marketplace liquidity for tickets and tickets after the event because they They are now assets because I've got my Live Aid ticket here from when I went to Live Aid back in whenever it was 85.

34:29I've kept that because it's valuable to me and to other people. And so, and then if you can do that, well, you can do derivative contracts in finance because they are NFTs. And it's the same technology stack that you've built as a consumer app that can actually do a lot more than people yet understand. Is that directionally right in your mind? oh yeah yeah they're getting kindred spirits for sure that's why um that's why i had my own uh take around like nfts are soft today but long term i think they're going to be huge we have exactly the same thesis you know uh like magic eden we're we're like expanding into token trading but that doesn't mean that we're divesting away from nfts in fact what we want to do is keep investing remain number one it's just that uh we have the like we have these new product lines to make our business in general more resilient but to your point of like do we believe in that future for sure like there are way more non-fungible things sitting around us than there are fungible things and we can already see the trend towards tokenization like assets and concepts moving on chain and leveraging the you know the provenance and uh and benefits of uh of blockchain technology i think that's an inevitable trend and when we one of the things that we talk about is like think long term and bet on the right side of history we're hoping you know we want to be in this industry for 10 years 20 years 30 years and be one of those companies can really like push this industry forward that i think all of those things that you say would uh would actually take place the way that we think about it is i think the core like there is this use case in nfts that was really prevalent in uh 22 like profile photos it was fairly speculative but there is this identity flexing element to it i think that market has gone a lot a lot softer so that speculative fervor has deteriorated but it's still there and it's still like a profitable a market to be in but we think that hey like we have a state we know how that game works Let's do that.

36:36There is this use case around gaming assets, as you say, with, you know, affecting like games who want to have like their native experiences and assets. There's a use case around that. Then ticketing, music, all of those are also other categories that we're interested in. The way that we see it is, I think for us, the mobile app and this mobile wallet will be the core foundation for us to tap into those use cases. What my goal is, is for 2025, five we get to millions of downloads on our mobile app today it's like 300 000 in three months i want to get that to like 5 million 10 million and we have like some strategies to do that how do you do that because you you're going to need something killer that changes the zeitgeist right it's not it's not general market flow is going to do it because you'll end up with a lot of competitors you need to have the killer thing this is pretty public but we're announcing we're adopting the ME token.

37:29So I think it will be like this drastic cannon to supercharge our growth. The second is that I think there is some really interesting use cases within the Bitcoin ecosystem that would appeal to more like crypto curious audiences to do that. So I'll give you an example like in Bitcoin, there is now this talk of adding like effective like smart contract properties called opcat and if we can do that then you can imagine people taking out loans on bitcoin people trading more than just collectible assets staking of bitcoin can can be available so like you stake bitcoin to earn yield and if i think about those use cases those use cases of huge markets right because bitcoin is really the crypto asset that has really gone mainstream It's got this ETF.

38:21It's now recognized all over the world. It's like, you know, BlackRock is talking about. Yeah, it's the collateral for the whole system, but it had no other uses. And now everyone's building the new uses for this. Exactly. Exactly. And I actually think yield on Bitcoin is also very underappreciated use case because yield exists in every other crypto asset. Ethereum has yield, Solana has yield, like a bunch of these L2s, their assets have yield. And yield is a much easier to understand use case than trading. Trading is generally more for advanced people who are more locked in. But a lot of people are very casual.

39:05I want to hold Bitcoin like my dad. My dad wants to hold Bitcoin. If you tell him you can earn 5 % a year in it, he would definitely do it. But these use cases, I think, are pretty close to being unlocked by some new technologies that's being discussed in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And given the brand power of Bitcoin, they have really big markets. And given our positioning as the biggest DAB on Bitcoin, I think we're in a unique position to tap into that as well. So adopting the ME token as a supercharged incentive, some really interesting things happening on the Bitcoin ecosystem. And then the last thing I would say is this is what I learned from the last bull market.

39:39it, when the market starts getting really hot, then we can start doing much more mainstream partnerships. You know, we used to do ones with Bugatti, like Shaquille O 'Neal, Coachella, Tomorrowland. But back then, we did not have the building blocks to really get all of the ROI from doing those big partnerships or marketing opportunities. But now we have the wallet. We have our own use cases. The app looks way better. we can actually acquire these users and actually grow. So when you look out five years into the future, assuming you'll be rolling 50 % of it, because that's what it's like when you're trying to predict, but what does crypto look like?

40:26What does the world to you look like outside of Magic Eden? I'm just asking for your big picture. Where's the next five years going here? No financial advice. give me the indulgence of being 50 % wrong or more. I think crypto as a total category is going to be like bigger than gold, right? Because today we're like already 1.5 trillion, right? And gold is like, I don't know, 10, something like that. It's not that far off, like similar. I think crypto is 2.5 trillion. Bitcoin is whatever, 1.5 trillion. So yeah, I mean, we've got, and gold's, I don't know, it's probably because it's had a rally maybe it's 15 trillion now something like 18 trillion so a long way to go so maybe not five years but like five to ten years that kind of scale and then when once you're in that size then if you think about decentralized finance as a category it's going to be massive like i'm not going to put a number on it but like that would that would no longer be seen as this niche uh thing for technologists or early adopters i think that category is going to be it's going to be huge it's going to be like a really dominant player and then if you think about then there are very dominant use cases that in there which is like stable coins for remittances uh borrowed land all of that i think all of those will be very very refined i will also say that um i think that within then and then of course then you have like culture like so non-financial use cases like culture gaming once you have that much the market size is that big and there's that much commercial opportunities in it i think those categories which today look a little bit like toys and look a little fairly small there's going to be enough commercial opportunity for very large companies and very large products to be built in there gaming marketplaces fully crypto native games with millions of users um uh yeah like uh art culture being becoming much more vibrant than it is uh for now the thing i actually wanted to say is if we actually imagine like that kind of world then i actually think that there is a new class of internet companies that will also be massive i think that in today's world in crypto like the centralized exchanges that is the best business model and they are effectively the kings right because they control the flow of capital from traditional capital markets into traditional traditional pools of capital into crypto and they capture that flow it's like it's like being searched for the internet right but i actually think once you have that much of a massive on-chain market it is going to be the native on-chain companies like us magic eden spoiler spoiler that is actually going to be the true players to understand how to play in this and how to follow the track yeah because if you think about it the broadband companies captured the first part of the internet because that was the entry, right?

43:21Same as the exchanges. They were the toll booths. They would take the tolls as people came in. But then once the people came in, the infrastructure was there, and then they built on top of it. Out of that comes Facebook. Exactly. They're the native companies. Yes. That's right. And they capture the actual value because they're actually closer to the dollar. Yes, the exchanges capture a lot because they are close to the dollar because the dollar goes through them. But the dollar gets spent in this new economy. So I always think of crypto as an economy. It's a new frontier economy. The exchanges are your capital flows.