Crypto Day | Brian Armstrong, Balaji, Chris Dixon, Katie Haun & More

27:19But to start with myself, I'm Alon. I'm one of the co-founders of PumpFun. Cool. PumpFun is a launchpad where anyone can create their own coin. And it's based on the Solana blockchain. And my PFP is Remilio. So it is an NFT based on Ethereum. Very cool. A little crossover. Yeah, crossover. Pulling over some Ethereum lore. Not pure Solana Max. Why don't we start with, we have a primarily sort of traditional tech audience. Why don't we start with the origin story of Pump? I know you have had a crazy time, even fundraising, went through a couple pivots to get to the launch pad that is today. So I think it'd be great to hear the backstory.

28:02Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I mean, I've been in crypto for a while. Before we built Pump Fund and myself and my two co-founders were building a bunch of different ideas in crypto, consumer crypto, you know, in NFTs and social fi and a bunch of different random corners of the space. Nothing really stuck. I mean, I think we built for around a year or so before we got any semblance of traction. Ultimately, we weren't really building for ourselves. And I think once people started trading meme coins on Solana is when we first saw that there's a problem or a few problems that we can solve that would actually be addressing some of our issues.

28:40Because we were trading on the side. We've always been trading meme coins and NFTs and all that different stuff on chain. And we noticed that there's a whole bunch of different problems that we could solve by building a launchpad where anyone could create their own coin, standardizing the way people launch these things in a more secure and safe manner, as well as in a way that is more user friendly for people. So anyone can get involved and you don't need to be highly technical to launch your own asset. So PumpFun, I would say, was the first product that really allowed for mass tokenization. And it's something that we're going to continue doing.

29:18So I want to give a little bit of backstory. I'm sure you can't talk about numbers, but Pump is one of the fastest growing companies in history. It's one of the reasons we were interested in having you on the show. I believe we'll have to make some type of chart at some point, but I believe we'll probably be one of the fastest companies ever to a billion dollars in revenue. How quickly when you guys started the launchpad, did you feel like you were, did you kind of realize that you were onto something? Was it kind of immediate PMF or did you even have to iterate from that initial launch of the launchpad?

29:55Yeah, when we first came up with the idea, we were pretty confident that it was going to work, especially compared to some of the other stuff that we were building. On our launch day, we got quite a bit of buzz around it. I mean, the MVP that we shipped was so incredibly shitty that everyone came and then they had to leave because it just wasn't working. But that initial buzz and the feedback that we got, you know, made us realize that we were onto something for sure. It was only a matter of iteration. It was a matter of finding distribution because ultimately what we offer is a marketplace. It's a launchpad where you're connecting people that are creating these assets and people that are potentially interested in buying and selling them and trading them.

30:34so it was a matter of distribution as a matter of iteration and polishing the products it took us around two months after launch to actually get it off the ground there's a lot of you know

30:49make it work but eventually it played out and obviously you know we were confident that it was going to work but we had no idea that it could blow up and then actually generate so much revenue and become this great business. How do you actually make money? Yeah, so two main, well, it's all really the same model. It's a small fee in each trade. So whenever a coin launches, the platform takes a 1 % trading fee and each time the coin is traded, once it graduates, I mean, a graduation is basically when a coin gets to a certain market cap, it grows in size and so on. once it graduates, it's the same fee basically, but just a smaller one that the platform charges.

31:33And is that like by design so that you don't get disinermediated or you don't get out-competed by other platforms? Like, are you thinking about that? Because I feel like there's this narrative in crypto where like somebody builds something amazing, has a great business, and then there's like an open source fork of it or something like that. Is that a risk that you're thinking of and like planning against? I mean, of course, you know, when you build something successful, I think in any industry, you're going to expect some copycats. I mean, something that we've been expecting is something that we saw historically.

32:01We saw that a year ago. We saw it six months ago, and we're continuing to see it. I mean, obviously, we continue to monitor the markets and kind of see what user feedback is on different approaches and models. But ultimately, we have our own solutions. We speak to our own users. And, you know, we kind of stay in our own lane in that regard. Yeah. Talk about the branding. It's extremely chaotic. It feels extremely internet native. uh and but but i'm curious what your kind of like framework to making decisions around everything kind of design brand yeah absolutely i mean i think when we first started we pump actually wasn't the name that we came up for this product specifically it existed for like a few different products that we launched because we honestly thought it was like all the products we were building were for for people in the trenches so to speak so people that were trading on chain and so And we felt like that whole ethos, that whole branding just kind of aligned with, I guess, with what, with the culture, like, of people trading on chain and really this deeply internet native crowd that we were addressing.

33:08I think definitely contributes to how we think about it today. The way we think about it is we don't necessarily want to, I guess, we want to pay respects to kind of where we came from. And we want to grow our community rather than removing and making our brand like, I mean, there's a big difference between making your brand more accessible or your product more accessible and kind of moving away from the brand that you've built. right um so i think a big part of why pump has succeeded is that it has really built a community of people that are you know that are trading and hopping on every single day and and so on and a part of that is being in touch with them and and continuing to to to to interact and that also reflects in the design like if we changed everything all of a sudden and it was extremely i guess you know looked like your average product and ai or something like that then i think there would be a lot of eyebrows that would be raised by our user base.

34:11Yeah. Can you talk to us about VC? I mean, have you raised any? I'm sure people are growing fast, they're beating down your door. I think the story is you raised from Six Man, right? Is that correct? Dudas' fund? That's correct. I can't give too many details on the whole, I guess, life cycle. Yeah, but I have a question that that would be fun to answer. What's the craziest thing a VC has ever done to try to win allocation? Because I know you guys, revenue has just rocketed to such an extreme degree. You guys, for every dollar venture capital, I'm sure you've generated at this point an obscene amount of profit.

34:54But do you have any funny stories there? I'm not sure if there's anything in particular there, but definitely there are so many stories where not just for VCs, but like, you know, I guess influencers in the space and stuff as well, where we DM them multiple times and got received introductions and didn't get any responses, only for the exact opposite to take place once the platform has gained traction. And yeah, this has happened many times. Can you talk to us about the live streaming product that you guys have? I mean, we're live streamers ourselves and so super interested in what's going on there.

35:29Yeah, you recently brought it back and made a number of changes to it. So I'm curious, you know, how it's evolving. Yeah, absolutely. So the live streaming feature is pretty simple. When you launch your own coin, you can also launch a live stream alongside it to, you know, engage with your community, talk to them, do a whole bunch of different things. Obviously, I think a lot of your viewers are going to be familiar with the previous live stream product that we had, which kind of, you know, I mean, it gained a lot of mind share late last year and ultimately needed to shut that down for a variety of reasons.

35:58but we decided to bring it back with much, much better moderation as well as just an improved product overall. And the reason why we think that our live streaming product can genuinely change the whole creator landscape and actually compete with some of the biggest live streaming platforms out there is that it completely flips the incentives that creators are currently facing. As a creator, I mean, I'm already seeing this with relatively few users compared to the biggest platforms. As a creator, when you're starting out, Now, it's pumped fun. Live streaming is the easiest place in the world to get your first 50 to 100 viewers.

36:32Why is that? The reason is because users are directly incentivized to find people early. Because if they find your live stream early, they see that you're interesting, you're entertaining, you're funny, et cetera, and they buy into your coin. If your coin gets more attention, then that presumably can yield profits. Obviously, not financial advice, et cetera, et cetera. But that's oftentimes what ends up happening. And because of that incentive structure, it makes it so much easier for creators to get traction. And that's the biggest problem that creators usually face when they start out. That's the first thing.

37:07The second thing is that with a few recent changes that we've made, creators don't necessarily even have to sell their tokens to make money. They can monetize instantly with no middleman through creator revenue sharing. So whenever someone makes a trade, a small percentage of that goes directly to the creator. So they monetize immediately. There's no approvals that they have to go through. They don't need to reach any milestones. They interact directly with their audience, and they don't necessarily need to appeal to any advertisers and so on. As long as their content respects the terms of service of the site, they're going to be able to monetize.

37:46Talk about why you chose Solana early on and why you're continuing to double down there. And if you're looking at opportunities on other chains at all. Yeah, so we love Solana. I mean, I mentioned Ethereum early on with my PFP. So that's, I guess, kind of where our background is. We built on Ethereum for many years in that ecosystem. Eventually, because we were building products and we're getting, I guess, increasingly desperate to get users um we saw that especially for this for for for meme coins people were starting to trade them on other uh on other blockchains specifically solana and that was gaining a lot of traction back then um so we um we start you know we wanted to go to where all the users were right because that would maximize our uh our chances of succeeding um so we went to solana um obviously after we we gained success we got a ton of inbound from other blockchains and so on.

38:42And people were asking to get their favorite blockchain added. But ultimately, our goal is to bring tokenization to the masses. Our goal is to kind of expand this universe and really break into the mainstream. And I don't necessarily believe that going onto any other chain would contribute to that. Solana as infrastructure has improved so significantly over the past year, year, year and a half, since PumpFun has been live, that we're very confident that, you know, once I guess that critical mass is reached, the infrastructure will be able to support, you know, to support the activity on the platform.

39:23And more than just that, there's so many ecosystem applications that utilizes Pump's, you know, marketplace infrastructure and so on that actually contributes to the, you know, not just to the bottom line, but contributes to the overall user experience. Like people can use whatever interfaces they like to get the best experience possible. So all in all, couldn't be happier being on Solana and we're not considering leaving anytime soon. Very cool. Fantastic. Thank you for jumping on. I know you don't do a lot of interviews, do a lot of media in general. So I appreciate you coming and telling the story.

39:58I legitimately think there will eventually be a Harvard, you know, business school case study on what you're building because it's completely unprecedented, the growth. I think we'll probably just start to see this year people realizing how big a business, you know, pump has become in such an incredibly short period of time. So thank you for jumping on and sharing and we'll talk to you soon. Absolutely. Appreciate it, guys. Cheers. and that harvard business case study will be tokenized on chain i'm sure it will have a i'm sure it will i'm sure we'll get it'll have 20 meme coins per case study maybe a meme coin for every paragraph class should just be live streamed on pump fund they could fractionalize the case study every every word you can just get a word um yeah uh well anyways it's interesting that But I think meme coins were working on Ethereum, but the gas fees on Ethereum were so high.

41:00100 bucks or something. You know, you couldn't make a trade for$100 because, you know, somebody would be like, are they going to pay$50 in gas to make a trade like that? Speed and price, you drop, you increase the speed, you drop the price, like you always just see more activity. And so, yeah, yeah, fascinating. That$1 billion revenue number, is that something that you can just inspect on the blockchain? If you just add up a lot of transactions, is that possible? Yeah, it's visible. I'd seen a post as of maybe last week that they had passed$750 million in revenue. And when did they actually launch?

41:39It seems like it was like a year ago. Is it like roughly a year ago? Wow, impressive. So one year to$750 million. in like real and it's not marketplace like that's like their that's not gmv that's actually their their take net revenue revenue anyway uh next up we have katie han from han ventures in the studio welcome to the show katie thanks so much for hopping on um we're excited to talk to her welcome welcome hey hey guys good morning good morning how are you wherever you may be i think here at the conference? No, we are not. We're in Los Angeles. We're in Hollywood, the future of media. Yeah, we're bringing media back to Hollywood.

42:21But thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with just a little bit of an introduction? And how are you spending your day to day these days? Oh, my gosh, a little bit of an introduction. Well, my name is Katie Hahn. I founded Hahn Ventures, which is we're investing in blockchain technology through an early stage fund and a later stage fund. And we're about three and a half years old as a company and as a fund. Do you do liquids? How many decades has the last three and a half years felt like? Oh, my God. Well, you know what, guys? I've actually been in this space over a decade.

42:51Yeah, wow. Over a decade. So how many years has that felt like? But the last three years have been wild. But I'm really excited. You asked about how I'm spending my days. I'm really excited about this particular moment in crypto. Sure. Because we have a lot of the fundamentals coming together. And as I said, I've been in this space a long time. And we've had different fundamentals working at different points. But it finally feels like all these fundamentals are working all at once. Break down those fundamentals. I imagine it's regulatory, it's community, it's collective belief. It's like scale of the actual chains, maturity of the code.

43:25How do you think about it? What are you thinking about it? Here, you guys do it. I can question you. Great job. So the first thing is institutions, like you said. Okay. Institutions. The institutional story has been around before in crypto in different cycles. And we had some early adopters for institutions, right? We had Fidelity. If you think about folks like Abby Johnson, she's been in the space for as long as I have, maybe even longer. We had folks like Meta. I mean, I was on Zuck's original DM project, Ford. He saw stablecoins coming years ago. So we had Meta leaned in as an institution kind of early.

43:58And then we had other institutions, folks like BlackRock. I think Larry Fink is actually a great exhibit A for someone who really changed their mind on crypto. Totally. Larry was against crypto, not against, but he was certainly not a fan of blockchain technology. And a few years ago, he said he had really changed his mind. And now you have BlackRock running a tokenized money market fund called Biddle. So that's some of the earlier institutional adopters. But now we have some of the later institutional adopters, folks like JP Morgan, Charles Schwab and others. And you'll see other announcements coming out soon from other institutions.

44:31So the institutional story is one fundamental, but I want to talk about three others. You mentioned one, regulatory, but before I get to regulatory, because it's not the most exciting, is the technological progress. We've had different kinds of levels of technological progress over the cycles that make up the crypto industry. You have cycles, we always talk about the bear and the bull cycles. and really kind of the last bear market when folks were really declaring the space dead as they do by the way every single cycle it really felt i i remember when ethereum was touching 800 after the ftx crisis and i was like i don't know where the bottom is here this feels like the most toxic asset and that was like i basically time to start a fund right yeah well yeah yeah no i had just started our fund no and in hindsight and in hindsight i was like the moment that i thought this it was over it was completely over was like a perfect bottom tip guys another time another story for another day remind me to tell you my solana buying story in new years and when i thought it couldn't go any lower it even went lower although we got in we got in when it was pretty pretty darn low and a lot of assets you asked if we do liquids absolutely we do we believe hugely in tokens we believe hugely in equity but let me get back to the fundamentals first because this is where we're spending our day, thinking about stuff like the technological progress.

45:54If you think about post FTX, that era you're talking about, ETH is at or thereabouts. Solana got down to like, what,$9? Bitcoin's hitting like$17 ,000,$16 ,000,$18 ,000 levels. People were declaring the space dead. Pundits. Sorry, I know you're not pundits. But everyone was saying, God, Terrible idea. You started a crypto fund. And here we were, 10 of us like, no, this is a great time in the space. And I think one of the things we saw is there's a market story to crypto and there's a technology story to crypto. And what we saw on the technical progress. And by the way, Fred Wilson and I authored a blog post probably about a week after FTX saying, hey, the technical story here has not changed, folks.

46:39And instead, it's only changing for the better. We had things like the Ethereum merge, the largest software upgrade in history. You know, Tully, the founder of Solana, recently said that we're no longer talking about block space for one of the first times in this industry. Stuff is scalable. Stuff is cheaper. Instead of paying, you know, multiple dollars for a stablecoin transfer or an NFT transaction, it's sub one cent. And that's due in large part to the builders that we're building through these bear cycles, including the last painful bear cycle. So that's the second fundamental. And I think the third fundamental, as I think about it, is product market fit.

47:16You know, you talk about things like product market fit, Bitcoin. Hello, product market fit exhibit. I debated Paul Krugman in, was it 2018 or 2017? And he told me Bitcoin has zero use. I debated him and I said it will find product market fit. At that time, I think Bitcoin was trading around three, four or five thousand dollars. and lo and behold, fast forward these years later, I think it's clear it has found product market fit as a digital store of value. But also we have things like stable coins have found clear product market fit. And I hope we can talk about stables. We'll dive deeper later in today's session because stable coins are the story of the day that folks in the mainstream are now talking about.

47:58So we have product market fit and others, other product market fit kind of, I say we're on the precipice of, we can talk about that. But then you mentioned the fourth fundamental, which is regulatory. And I think the thing I heard for the last decade from builders, by the way, from enterprises, from institutions, from LPs when I was at my prior fund, is regulators aren't going to allow this, though. Right? Like, this is all going to get shut down. What was your answer then? The obvious rebuttal is regulators are going to make code illegal. It's pretty hard to ban code, right? Anybody can create it and put it out on the internet.

48:36I'm sure you were always confident that it wouldn't be made illegal, but at the same time, the sort of U.S. regulatory regime was making it pretty difficult to exist as a crypto founder in the U.S., which had the same sort of effect in some ways. Yeah, you know, fun fact, since there's the conference going on today, I don't know if you guys are aware of this. I was asked probably around 2012, 2013 to help shut down Bitcoin for the U.S. government when I was a federal prosecutor. So it's just crazy to think about. Hey, Katie, little project. I don't know if you have time this weekend to look into it.

49:15Can you shut down? Open the case, Fanu Lanou, first name unknown, last name unknown. Somewhere in the Tenderloin, San Francisco 450 Golden Gate said file of Fanu Lanou. But look, I realized early on that this was a really powerful technology. And regulators, by the way, and we've been saying this for the last decade, regulators should love this technology. I mean, for its kind of permanence, right? All of the things that make a blockchain great for a lot of things. Also, by the way, make it look, as I always said, when I was a criminal, I hoped that criminals would use this instead of cash or wires, which I don't know how many banks anyone has ever subpoenaed.

49:54I've subpoenaed a lot of them. Good luck getting compliance with a subpoena. But at the same time, I really do worry about the erosion of financial privacy. And not just now that I'm in the crypto industry 10 years later. I talked about this when I was a prosecutor and the kind of reach of the Bank Secrecy Act. And we can go really deep on that. I think there are parts now under the third party doctrine that if it went back to the Supreme Court today, I think you might have a very different result than the last time the Bank Secrecy Act was challenged within the 1970s. And, of course, the velocity of payments has just skyrocketed since then.

50:27And now, unlike in 1970, where I couldn't glean too much information about you from your maybe couple payments or people writing out checks back in those days. Now, if you think about if I have all access to all of your payment information, I could probably like predict where you're going to go every day. Just about. Right. I mean, it's a really great almost in that way. And this is not crypto. This is just all financial data. Right. Every time you use your Apple Pay, you're doing a credit card, you're using stable coins. I mean, this is something that we should talk about at another time. Talk about your kind of early stage investment framework philosophy.

51:06What are you, I imagine there's investments that you get the opportunity to make that you believe will be successful, but maybe aren't the best use of your capital if you have this sort of broader vision of where the asset class and the technology can go. but I'm curious how you think about opportunities and even kind of your moral framework for investments. I've never heard it described as a moral framework, but that's an interesting framing. I mean, I think, first of all, we start with the founders. Like any other venture investor, it's all about the founders and the market opportunity, right?

51:43And if you think about founders that I've previously kind of known in my gut, this is an amazing founder, an exceptional person who's going to build an amazing business. I mean, the first instance of that, as far as I was concerned, coming into crypto was Brian Armstrong and Coinbase, right? And I think one of the things that makes Brian so remarkable is he had a huge business going just spot trading Bitcoin and then Ethereum and adding all of these other assets. But he was never content to just rest on those laurels as an exchange. It was always about diversifying the business and the Web3 economy.

52:17And he was thinking about things like stable coins many, many years ago. Obviously, USDC was a partnership between Coinbase and 2018. Yeah, we had Balaji on earlier, and he showed a video of the launch, the web page for the launch video. And he's like in the first five seconds. He's seven years younger in that video. I remember that. I remember that. Did he have a bowl of cereal with cream or something in that? I think so. I remember those days with Balaji well, you know, with the USDC launch happening. And I think, again, I remember being in the Coinbase office, by the way, the day that Bitcoin first hit$10 ,000 for the first time.

52:56Imagine, by the way, if we were having this conversation, you know, now we would be like, oh, my God,$10 ,000 market correction. Well, just a few short years ago, that was like cause for celebration. People couldn't believe it was$10 ,000. I was in the office. The euphoria was kind of everywhere, except Brian had his eyes on what's happening next. We're not going to get comfortable with this. We're building an open global financial system for the world. Where are we taking our revenue lines next? And he's been thinking about that day the S1, you know, day the direct listing happened in April of 2021 at Coinbase.

53:30So I was so excited to be a director of that company for almost eight years and see that company through a remarkable series of events. And I still am so excited watching from the sidelines about what they're doing. So I think the first thing we look for is we look for an amazing, exceptional founder. And that, you know, Brian's a great example, right? So we're just trying to find the next Brian's. But also the market opportunities and the space, as I said, the asset class is so broad. So it really, we're talking about, what are we talking about? We're talking about prediction markets. One thing, that's an area we're very excited about.

54:06But we kind of think about it as where will this evolve? Not the current state of innovation, but more the end state of innovation. or the midpoint state of innovation. And in the case of prediction markets, I'll tell you one of the things we think about is, think about like Netflix. Netflix was very centralized. It curated content. And then all of a sudden YouTube came along and then unleashed even more content globally at scale. I mean, exceptionally so. So for prediction markets, when are we going to get that user generated equivalent or the YouTube moment? I think that's really interesting.

54:43And I think what makes crypto special in that story is the programmability that people around the world 24-7, you know, the Internet operates 24-7 and anyone with a smartphone can access that. So we think that's exciting. Yeah. So we're looking for, you know, we're looking for exceptional founders. It sounds like an easy job. Just find 10 more Brian Armstrongs. And you're great. 10 more. Sounds like an easy job. I believe in you. Yeah. Thank you, guys. do it thank you for doing the work to service the bryans yeah the world yeah we're talking later today we're very great well i i'll tune in for that also i think though you mentioned moral i think one of the things we just i like the context the context there is like certain vcs will have a you know traditional vcs will have a vice clause right where they say we don't do defense we don't do uh recreational cannabis we don't do this and i could imagine crypto funds bifurcating to some degree where some of them say, we're going to do these types of deals, and we're not going to do those types of deals.

55:48But maybe that happens already. Right? Like you saw this during the last run up the last full run. In 2021, we had many folks, traditional VCs, many of whom are friends of mine, decided they were going to get into crypto, but they weren't going to touch tokens, they were only going to do equity businesses. And although we love crypto equity businesses, they missed out on a lot of tremendous opportunities. Like, imagine if you had said, we're not touching Solana. I mean, Solana is a huge market opportunity. Ethereum, huge market opportunity. I mean, Bitcoin, huge market opportunity, right? These are just some blue chips I'm naming.

56:22Of course, there are plenty of others. We said, we are crypto maxis. We're not, you know, we're not going to be religious zealots about any particular token, but nor are we going to write off entire segments. Rather, we're going to focus on the founder uh the bona fides of the project the metrics of the project and we really want to know here um by the way do they have a plan for regulatory compliance realizing uh the times were uncertain um in those moments but do they have a plan for it or is there a plan to launch a token and then uh we say leave the us that's got to be the most that's going to be the most nervous meeting a founder has in in their round is pitching you on their regulatory plan because like a lot of other vcs are like yeah great he's got a regulatory plan you're like well here's like the 10 reasons why that is not going to work yeah but you know what i think that actually we like to think that we can be helpful in that way even with clarity i was talking to probably one of the most legendary biotech investors in the world um a couple months ago and he told a group of our founders he said you know i'm in a regulated space we've got plenty of regulatory clarity And believe me, we still need to kind of navigate like this doesn't it doesn't just go away just because we have legislation passed, which we think is really important and clarity.

57:39You still got to comply with it. And we always said I always said, look, you got to have a kind of a plan for it. You don't have to have it all figured out when you're raising a seed round, when you're raising your Series A. Coinbase was great in this regard. But look, they did not. They've obviously made a lot of progress as a company on that front across the different iterations of their company. like one would expect, like is reasonable. So my touchstone is what's reasonable. And you got to build a business too, right? And I think we realize that and we're pragmatic partners and we like to work with founders.

58:10Tell me a founder who says, I have no idea what to do here. I don't want to break the law. I don't know what the law is, but like, we'd love your help. We'd love your thought partnership and we love those kinds of founders. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was a fantastic conversation. Thank you guys. Thank you for having me. We'd love to go way deeper. I'm sure we're going to learn a lot today. This is good. Talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on. Up next, we have Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz. But first, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

58:41Go to ramp.com to get started. Ramp. And very excited to talk to Chris. Obviously, extremely storied investor. Top of the Midas list. Early Coinbase investor. Continual Coinbase investor. We got Brian Armstrong coming on later to tell his side, the founder journey of Coinbase. But Chris has been all over the place in crypto for a decade, 15 years, 20 years. I think he invested in Bitcoin back in 1994. It was early and right. Yeah. A lot of the people that we're having on today were early and right. Yep, yep, yep. Which is a good thing to be. So Chris, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm great, John.

59:15Good to see you. Good to see you. I'm also an early Soylent investor. Yes. Yes. Good to see you guys. Congratulations on all the success with the show. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. Where should we start? Can you give us a temperature on the crypto markets? It's been up and down. Come on, let them take a victory lap. Take a victory lap. Let them take a victory lap. I feel like you get - I mean, I know the job's not finished, but - They always twist your arm into doing podcasts when the market's down and saying, oh, you got to hold you accountable. And then where is Kara Swisher calling you when the market's up?

59:49That's a good point. That's a good point. By the way, can you guys hear me okay? Yeah, yeah, you sound great. Okay, great. Yeah, good. I mean, it's been a long journey, as you guys pointed out. I think that we had a lot of challenges the last four years, regulatory challenges with the last administration, and that looks like it's trending much better now. With the new administration, it's more pro-tech, and I think we have a lot of momentum in Congress. And that's a big deal, because that created a lot of headwinds. So that's great. And. And then also like the kind of core infrastructure, and we can, if you guys want to talk more about it, but like, you know, the like, so for example, one of the things happening right now are stable coins are really taking off.

1:00:28So like last month, it was something like$2 trillion in stablecoin volume, which is more than Visa. And so, you know, quite a lot of volume. And a lot of that's due to the fact that the infrastructure, so Solana, Ethereum, and so forth, has gotten really good. So you can now send an arbitrary amount of money anywhere in the world for under one penny in one second. But that took years and years of work, investment, you know, founders, technical folks doing a lot of work. So that's great. And so there's a lot of good things. I think that, you know, there's a lot of challenges too, but overall it's been fun.

1:01:06Do you think that the narrative around stable coins is still going to morph into micropayments for the internet? Ben Thompson was talking about this with MCP. It's not in the standard, but you can easily imagine that getting worked into the second version of the standard. At the same time, obviously just global remittances has always been a huge category. It is the one category that I used stablecoins for years ago. And it felt very real in that moment, even while people were saying, oh, this is useless. It felt like, OK, this is the value. But I'm interested in like kind of the next application of stablecoins and then the one after that.

1:01:38Yeah, great. So I think just maybe briefly, the way to think about stablecoins is today we don't really have a global payment system or global financial system. We have, you know, 195 countries. Each one has many different banking systems. When you send money to another country, like I say, you wire money. Like, actually, we've had this experience at the firm where we wire investment. And it ends up going through, like, a bunch of humans and paperwork. It's really just a mishmash of systems. And so the way to think about stablecoins is similar to how, for those who are old enough to remember, text messaging was like this, like in the 2000s.

1:02:09You would send a text message and it would say you don't have a plan to send to Canada. You've got to sign up. And it was all these different systems. And then WhatsApp and FaceTime came along and they built this sort of what they call over-the-top global network, right? So think of sort of stable coins and blockchains as an over the top network. It's from day one, global, low fee, credibly neutral, programmable payment system that just sort of works everywhere. That's kind of the simple way to think of it. And so, as you mentioned, one of the obvious benefits is just cross border. And that's where a lot of the uses are right now.

1:02:39And so, for example, like SpaceX has a program where they move, you know, they'll sell a Starlink in I think it's like some south of like Brazil or something. And then they'll immediately use stable coins for so-called treasury management. This is one of the kind of growing use cases that folks like Stripe will talk about. Remittances, you're sending money back home from the U.S. to whatever, some developing country. Countries where the currency is volatile and they want access to dollars or euros. And then, as you mentioned, John, the idea that because, and actually, I encourage those who are interested to go listen to the Collison's.

1:03:11They were an all-in podcast a few weeks ago talking about this. What they're actually, as they say, they're really excited about is less the low fees and more the programmability, as you just described. And so you can do, so this is like one obvious thing is, you know, invoice fraud. So people will send, you know, these faxes type things. It's really old fashioned where they'll say, like, here's my wiring instruction. And if you guys, if you've done this, you'll say, like, please make sure you call first. But of course, calling doesn't work in an age of AI because it could be a fake voice. And so, you know, what Stripe was excited about is because blockchains are programmable, they can have a full kind of reputation system on top.

1:03:44So they know, like, this is a valid place to send money to for your invoicing system. Right. So you can program it. As you mentioned, micropayments. Now that you can send money for one penny, that unlocks a whole bunch of use cases. So machine-to-machine payments, every time you're doing an AI API request, as you mentioned MCP. MCP, I would expect, would have down the road a payment standard. And AI agents. So you imagine a world, which I think we're headed to pretty soon, in a couple of years, where you have all these different AI agents running around. I'm, hey, I'm advertising, I can program, I can, I can write your essay for you, I can, you know, do your homework, whatever, and they're all sort of advertising their services.

1:04:20And then you sort of imagine other agents coming along and negotiating and, and, you know, pennies getting transferred back and forth and this big kind of, you know, economic, you know, kind of mishmat, like kind of collection, you know, on top. So the web moves from like these kind of sign up forms to agents sending money automatically. And we think that would be powered by most naturally powered by a global, you know, low fee programmable system like blockchains. Yeah. Yeah. How has I'm super curious to understand how your guys is lobbying efforts have evolved over the past six to 12 months.

1:04:57We went from, you know, a sort of a large coalition of people trying to basically, you know, block crypto from getting real adoption and traction in the U.S. to suddenly ETFs being approved and things like that. And I imagine that's kind of changed your guys' strategy on the Hill. So I'm interested to hear how that's evolved. Yeah. So that's so I've been doing, you know, we sort of I saw Mark Andreessen on you guys. I think it was a week or two ago. I watched that and he was talking about a little bit. Mark and I have been very involved in this and by necessity, originally, like four or five years ago.

1:05:33And then over time, realized just how important it is to engage. They say in Washington, they like to say, if you are not at the table, you're on the menu. So you don't want to be on the menu. So I've been going sort of like once a month and Mark has two and really just kind of trying to explain our perspective because we feel like the interest of startup, like so most startups don't have the resources to go to DC, right? And of course, big tech companies do, and big banks do, and all sorts of other big entities do. And so our kind of logic was that we're one of the few entity, you know, kind of organizations that has enough scale to have a government affairs team who represents the interest of startups.

1:06:14And so we go and we say, look, we represent small companies, and here's what they're interested in. So for example, they want to have clear guardrails and rules around blockchains. They want to have open source AI, That's another really important issue to us. Clear rules on like AI and copyright. There's a series of things, you know, having a single federal framework and not a 50 state laws on a lot of these things and so forth. Right. And so we go and we kind of advocate for that. We've taken a bipartisan approach from the beginning. We think that's very important. I mean, look, just one is to get we think the way you really build industries is legislation.

1:06:46If you think back to the Internet, that was built on really on the 96 Telecom Act. and had things like Section 230, which you may know is now a contentious issue. I like to say if Section 230 had been administrative guidance instead of legislation, it would have been a political football every four years. It was built into legislation. And so you could, Section 230 is what enabled marketplaces, social networks, and so forth to build reliably on the internet. So we've always felt that both for AI and for crypto, we want legislation that provides clear rules, pass for innovation, and really eliminates or mitigates or eliminates, you know, all the kind of bad use cases and bad actors.

1:07:23And so that's always been our approach in bipartisan. That's the legislation you need bipartisan, first of all. And secondly, you know, like the Democratic Party has, like most people will sort of think, you know, Republicans are pro-crypto, Democrats are anti. That's not really true. Like we just had a last week, a Senate sort of, it was a procedural vote on the stablecoin bill. And I believe there were 17 Democrats who voted for it, you know, which is significant. And I think, you know, our view has been we want to kind of, you know, shift the Democratic Party back to the values of Obama and Bill Clinton when they were pro-tech and not sort of the kind of blue sky thing, Democrat thing that happened in the last years.

1:07:55Yeah, I mean, the interesting thing about the lobbying is that I looked at the I looked at the donation dollars that were coming from crypto aligned people and crypto funds, and it was split almost exactly 50 50. Like the entire crypto community really did go super bipartisan with the spend. And obviously, the Republicans won. So it feels like a Republican issue like right now. But it doesn't feel like it's going to remain that way. On the issue of government, I'm interested to know, maybe stable coins are a good example, but just general crypto adoption. How do you bucket? How do you think about the adoption across government, B2B, or just direct to consumer?

1:08:32Because when I think about stable coins, for example, there's people that want to pay people individually, but there's so many ways that you can just tuck stable coins under some business. Like with the AI thing, if you get Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft using stable coins in an agentic application, the user might never know that I'm paying a fraction of a cent to access a Wall Street Journal article. It just happens and I'm not even aware. So what are the key drivers for the different constituencies and then the different applications and how do they fit together? No, that's a great question.

1:09:04And I have a broader kind of framework I like to talk about, which is sort of, I sort of like to distinguish technologies between what I call inside out and outside in. And so inside out of things that sort of start with established institutions, like AI to some extent is like that, you know, the iPhone was like this, it came out of Apple, a very established institution, AI came out of, you know, Stanford and so forth. Whereas crypto very much, you know, Bitcoin started at the fringes, right? And sort of like open source software, and there's, you know, other kind of tech movements have started the fringes, and it sort of worked its way in, right?

1:09:30So stablecoin started for the main use case was settling crypto trades seven years ago or something. And then over time, you start to see more and more like payment providers in Argentina, for example, and that sort of more kind of moving to the center. Now Stripe, I think Stripe is very much probably, I think, the smartest. A lot of people think the smartest, if not the smartest fintech company is all in on it. They did a billion-dollar acquisition bridge to ramp up their efforts. I think the main gating factor, like I speak to a lot of like, what I would love to see is a world where you have banks and, you know, asset management firms and every payment provider, as you described, John, like behind the scenes, it's just sort of, it's the substrate, it's the infrastructure, right?

1:10:09It's like HDP or SMTP. It's just this thing that exists. A lot of them say, we just want like that final, you know, regulatory clarity piece, right? Because they want that assurance because they're like, they're risk averse. We just had four years of kind of law fair against the industry. So that's why I think that's really like, honestly, like I probably spend more than half my time on that now. That's just kind of the key. There's two, and just to say, there's two big kind of bills that we're advocating for. There's stable coins, there's one called market structure that's just coming forward in the house now, which is also to kind of clarify more broadly on tokens.

1:10:41But I think that's the main thing right now. I think, and to your point, exactly, I don't think most people ultimately will think of even the word stable coin. I think there'll be like digital dollars, you know, like for the average person. It'll be an industry term like ERP. People interface with that, but they don't know. And like, actually, but we'll see, like like we have a fintech group at the firm that's not crypto i don't know if you know folks like i think you interviewed anish and yeah yeah all those folks um and then you know they like crypto but they're not like crypto and they'll tell me now like it's become pretty standard in the stable in the fintech stack that people will use stable yeah so let's yeah you're sorry one you're like a three-person startup and like boom you push a button and you got 190 countries that's very different in the old days yeah i want to get your point of view on the competitive forces and dynamics right now because we have startups, which there's entire subcategories.

1:11:28You have hyper decentralized crypto companies. You have sort of hybrid companies like maybe Bridge that are kind of sitting in between fintech and crypto rails. And then you now have big institutional players that are coming in. Maybe they brought ETFs to market to start. And then now they're thinking about stablecoin applications as well. How do you look at the market and what kind of advice do you give to portfolio companies that are trying to figure out who they are, whether that's fully decentralized or some type of hybrid or so on? Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think that, I mean, the point is not for like decentralization and kind of this new architecture of blockchains for its own sake.

1:12:12The point is they have specific benefits. So like why would one build on a blockchain like Ethereum or Solana as opposed to a traditional, you know, AWS, like a traditional architecture. And the answer is by built, you know, when you build the way I like to describe it most simply is blockchains allow you to build digital services that remove the intermediaries. So you remove, so for example, stable coins, you have no intermediaries that are taking fees, you don't have the banks and the payment providers and the payment networks, right, that take the all the different layers of fees. So that's an important benefit is you're building these, you know, you could build social networks without fees, you can build games without fees.

1:12:45You can build AI systems without fees, right? Without fees, it's like very low, like sub, like a couple of basis points. I actually have it for those interested. I wrote a book, read right on, and I have a chapter on take rates where I go through this in detail, but it's essentially you're going from like 30 % in the app store, you know, 100 % in Facebook and 50 % on YouTube to like five basis points or something, right? So, or, you know, two and a half percent for payments and so forth. So, so, so the first question is why would you want to build on them? The other one we mentioned before is programmability.

1:13:13You know, you can do all sorts of cool stuff on top um and so i think it's your question i think it depends like like ultimately i think of startups as you want to work backwards you want to say what do you want to do for the world what kind of service you want to provide and then you work backwards and you say how do you want to build that right in some cases that means you want to build something on a blockchain like a pure service like a protocol we call it with a token and so forth in other cases you want to build more traditional software that may be like for example like you mentioned that that bridges between a bank and an asset manager and a blockchain system right so i think it ultimately we think of it through that lens is kind of now as an investor, I skew towards things.

1:13:46I like things with, for example, network effects, because they can be very my career. I found that network effects can be very powerful, right? You invest in something, it grows, it kind of has a natural kind of defensibility and kind of gets better as more people use it. So there's a kind of different lenses you can look at it. The last thing I would say is to your to your listeners, I know you have a broad audience. I think that the crypto space right now, the real shortage we have is startup talent in that there's a lot of obvious good ideas where there just aren't many people pursuing it. So I think it's actually the opposite problem than you might have an AI right now, where I imagine AI, it's an amazing technology and deservingly people are excited as they should be excited about it.

1:14:24But you probably for every idea have, I don't know, 50 good startups pursuing it. In crypto, I think we're under competed. We have too little competition, honestly. So I would say to your listeners, if you're a smart person thinking about doing a startup, I think there's a lot of white space right now. If you're in AI, pivot to crypto. We heard it here first. Or we do both. We love AI. It is my worst. Yeah, how are you, I'm sure you're perpetually going to be unsatisfied with the technological progress because you understand the full potential, right? Where are you at right now? You know, we had Balaji on earlier.

1:14:58He's, you know, was very bullish on ZK proofs and what's coming down the pipeline there. Prediction markets a little bit. Yeah, prediction markets feel like. During the election, it was like, wow, this is a completely, no one was talking about this during the Bitcoin white paper. And yet crypto has created something that everyone gets value out of in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah, I think we are still, you know, I think these technology things always go in S-curves. We're clearly still at the, you know, somewhere in the bottom of the S-curve. Like, I think there's just a lot more growth. And just like user base, there's something on the order.

1:15:30Most of these applications I'm describing have up to 50, at the highest end, probably 50 million users, which is 1 % of the internet. So it's still very early. And Polymarket is doing incredibly well, but I assume it's still in that kind of sub 1 % of the internet. The internet has 5 billion people now, right? So we have a long way to go. I think a lot of the kind of core infrastructure is now, as of a year and a half ago, kind of good enough. You know, I think a lot of these technologies have that characteristic where you have kind of, you know, whether like neural networks only got good enough.

1:16:00I don't know, whatever, circa, let's call it something in the 2010s because of the, you know, the Moore's law on GPUs. Right. And so, you know, iPhones, once you had capacitive screens and semi whatever processors and so forth. I think blockchains, I think we no longer have infrastructure as an excuse anymore. Like now it's about building applications, about getting regulatory clarity. And I think we're pretty far along there. I think we have a long way to go fully exploring kind of the idea maze and all the different cool things you can do. And and, you know, and then bringing it to billions of people is the goal.

1:16:30How have you been advising crypto emerging managers? My one of my favorite I'm going to kind of butcher the stat, but apparently like the sort of median crypto fund massively outperformed like the median venture fund for most of the last decade. And so I thought that that was this beautiful narrative violation because, you know, people, traditional venture would love to poke fun at crypto VCs, yet they were sort of like systemically outperforming the other party. But what kind of general guidance are you giving to somebody that maybe was an active trader and wants to get more into the actual, you know, kind of venture side of the game?

1:17:12I've been investing in venture funds and crypto funds for a long time, just sort of after I sold my first company. In fact, Mark Andreessen and I have done it together for a long time and have been doing crypto funds since, gosh, probably 10 years and just consistently. And I'm still very bullish. And to your point, I think that's probably correct, like on the data, like they've just done. And I think it's just it's just traditional finance in the sense of you have to, you know, non-consensus right. Right. Like as much as we hear about crypto, it's still very non-consensus. A lot of a lot, a lot of venture funds just simply maybe they'll have a little bit of Bitcoin, but they'll otherwise they'll rule it out if there's tokens and things.

1:17:50You talk to fund funds, they a lot of them will say we have a no crypto rule, you know, sovereign wealth funds. So all the kind of giant pools of capital that fund the venture world. And so it's still kind of this considered this kind of weird sideshow. Like, obviously, the past doesn't predict the future and so forth. And we don't know how things will play out. But it's still very non-consensus, I think, from a financial investing point of view, the broader crypto world. So I believe that's where the opportunities are in venture investing. Obviously, you have to also be right. And time will tell.

1:18:23But I think it's still much more, it's surprisingly non-consensus in the investing world, I think, to this day, despite the performance. Can you explain a little bit of the dynamic of how venture fits into the lifecycle of a new crypto company these days? Because there's liquidity available from retail in some cases. There's some companies that are going to be profitable very early because of their insane product. Yeah, we had a lawn from PumpOn earlier, and that's a classic example of a company that was able to be very efficient. And I think we've seen on the other side, you have companies like Hyperliquid that got out and have a token very early.

1:19:05So I'm curious, yeah, how you think of the capital lifecycle. Yeah. Yeah, so we, I mean, let's see if I can answer that. So like one reason we started a separate crypto fund originally, like I guess 2018 was so that we could before that I was doing like crypto investing. Yeah. But it would always get these questions from the LPs and like, what is this? Is it equity? Is it tokens? And so create a separate crypto fund with the basic idea was we have maximum flexibility. And we went to the LPs and we said, look, this is going to be different. And here's the idea. And here's a lot of them opted out.

1:19:33Some of them opted in. But we were very clear up front what it was. And so what we think of it is we can do everything from we can buy Bitcoin or something just directly, which we do. People see our funds and they assume it's all ventures. Not like we do a lot of, you know, just buying like tokens that we think have upside. We also do a lot of we can do equity investments like a Coinbase. It's just a classic equity investment. We have a bunch of those that, you know, the goal would be to someday IPO. They could be cash flow heavy ones that do dividends like the ones you're describing, Jordi. like maybe some of those or maybe I don't know what their plans are pumped up from maybe the IPO maybe they dividend maybe they buybacks right if you have cash flows you have a lot of options and then the third one which is actually you know one of our core ones is you'll you'll do an equity a project will start as a as an equity investment but then over time we'll launch a token and the equity investors get sort of pro rata uh rights to those tokens and that actually that's kind of that was sort of the new thing that we really wanted to lean into back in when we started the crypto fund that was a new idea um that you know we helped kind of pioneer that i think um and that was like the warrant structure yeah yeah well basically yeah it's very simple it's a term sheet with two extra things it has essentially token rights yeah and it can be a warrant and there's different ways to structure it um and what's nice about that is it you know one of the reasons startups works so well is that their max like when they work is that the investors and the founders are fully aligned so before that structure existed i don't know how deep you guys want to go on this, there were these things called SAFs and like these kinds of things where you do token purchases.

1:21:04And the problem is it created all these weird incentives where the founder would try to create a token just to do something. What we believe very strongly is alignment between the investors and the founders. And so there's sort of this equity structure with token rights or token warrants is one where if they decide they can stay an equity company and they can do, you know, just do traditional kind of go for profits and things, or they can create a token or they can create two tokens or whatever is best for that service they're trying to create. And in whatever way that they eventually decide to, you know, whatever business model they pursue, the investor will participate kind of per rata alongside the founders.

1:21:37What happens to the C-Corp in that scenario where they launch a token, the token grows and the community is, and like the asset is now controlled by the token and the C-Corp still exists. Are there roles for foundations and nonprofits and different transitions that could happen? Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of times they'll become, they'll just become like kind of one software provider in the network. Oh, sure. Makes sense. Like, you know, they're so, so for example, you know, think of the Ethereum Foundation. I don't know if you guys know the relationship between Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum.

1:22:07Ethereum is a network. Yeah. Ethereum Foundation, you know, they help make a little bit of software. They give some research guidance, but they don't control the network. They don't, you know, it's just like kind of in the same way, there's just sort of a foundation that has some kind of a bully pulpit. Sometimes they can have a separate business model. you know, so like Uniswap is a decentralized protocol that we're investors in. It's sort of a, think of it as a decentralized New York Stock Exchange or something that's doing very well, multiple trillions and trillions in volume traded. And they separately, so they spun off this protocol and then they separately have a website that they operate, which is what the company does.

1:22:43And the website is now, I believe it's a sub 5 % of the volume on the protocol, all, but it's still 5%, right? And so they're just one front end to it. And so I think that's probably one of the best examples of what you're asking, John. That makes a ton of sense. Jordy? What are you expecting to see out of the kind of real world asset category over the next couple years? It feels like this year, at least to me, it's felt like we're days or weeks away from some pretty high profile assets coming on chain. I'm curious how you think about the category broadly. Yeah. I mean, I think of stable coins as sort of the initial real world asset, right?

1:23:24So you have dollars in the bank account and then the next, and then, and then the great thing about that, the kind of adoption there and hopefully all the regulatory clarity we're getting is that will be a natural stepping stone to, you know, you have Robinhood talking about stocks, you have BlackRock talking about, you know, treasury bills. I think it would be nice if anyone in the world I think it would be good for the US and I think it would be good for the world if anyone in the world could buy 4.5 % interest treasury bill and have it secure and easy and permissionless and low fee I think it's good for the US the popularity of the dollar and I think it would be nice for somebody who has a volatile currency to have access to those so stocks bonds and then you can imagine and all of these sorts of so-called dark pools.

1:24:09So still a large part of finance is people using Bloomberg and calling each other. And a lot of that, like trading bonds and muni bonds and corporate bonds and things like that. There's a lot of interest from the banks to think about ways to use blockchains to create essentially marketplaces there, maybe permissioned marketplaces where only kind of certain participants can participate. For them, the benefit is, why haven't they created a network like a marketplace before? because they don't trust each other. They don't want like, who's going to create it? Is Goldman going to create it? And JP Morgan's going to use it.

1:24:40They don't trust each other. They don't trust startups to do it because then the startup will start taking big fees. They've just sort of kept it informal and by phone. And so in a way, a blockchain kind of solves a political problem of getting these 20 entities or 100 entities who previously wouldn't kind of coordinate together. I think that's one broader way to think of blockchains is like, it's like if AI is solving all the problems in the world that need more intelligence, right? Blockchains try to solve the problems in the world that need more coordination, right? Or more, you know, kind of collective action, getting a bunch of, you know, blockchains are fundamentally social technologies and it's about getting a bunch of, you know, that's what money is ultimately social, right?

1:25:18It's getting a lot of people to agree on a standard and to use the same systems and tools. And so similarly with real world assets like that. And then there's other interesting ones to your question. Like we have one called Story Protocol, a project we're investors in that's putting intellectual property on blockchains and letting people you know do capital formation and licensing and so forth around you know so you create a new you know a superhero theme thing and someone wants to make an ai remix of it and like how do they say ai really important so we think a lot about like in an ai world like how will you know creators get paid how will ip work how will how will how will money flow on the internet in a world with abundant content.

1:25:57Right. And I think we think blockchains have an important role to play in that. How would you like to see the industry and kind of the world collectively try to solve social engineering hacks? Feels like WorldCoin is one potential solution there, but I imagine there's a bunch of other sort of businesses that you could fund and then a whole regulatory piece as well, which is we sort of force these large companies now, Apology described it as like, to basically hold these honeypots of data? And there's probably got to be a better way. Yeah, a great question. So you mentioned WorldCoin, I'll just say briefly.

1:26:36So what WorldCoin does is what we call proof of humanity. So it's a way for you to get a cryptographic key that proves you're human. And the idea is in a world, as we're moving too quickly with AI bots and deep fakes and so forth, it's useful to be able to say, hey, I'm truly a human. And then I can get a, imagine a blue check on Twitter that actually cryptographically means you're human and not just that you paid$10. We think that would be useful. It's sort of a missing, you know, kind of building block, so to speak, for the, you know, for the internet that I think we all want. And so one thing we think about is like, what are those missing building blocks?

1:27:07You mentioned zero knowledge proofs. Zero knowledge proofs are, I think, a really interesting cryptographic breakthrough that I think people underestimate in the broader world how important they are. What they let you do is essentially prove things. So I can prove, you know, like a bank needs to know I'm a US citizen, let's say, or I'm, you know, have a certain income or certain profile, you know, health data or so forth. What zero knowledge proofs let you do is I can prove that to the system without revealing any of that, like my actual, you know, where I can, it can basically send me a cryptographic kind of a game that says prove that you're a US citizen, and I can prove it back without revealing all, you know, my name and all the other kind of stuff that might dox me.

1:27:49I mean, we just saw like, day after day, we see these giant hacks, KYC hacks, so forth. At this point, you should just assume all of your information, sadly, has been hacked many times. And having social security as your unique ID and password is just like a ridiculous system in this era. And meanwhile, we carry around these supercomputers with biometrics and advanced cryptography. Like, why aren't we using it? Right. The problem is not the is not the tech, the core tech. The problem is coordination. Again, like it's how do you get everyone to agree on what the standards are. Right. And that's why I think blockchains can be important because it's really the all the pieces are there.

1:28:30But how do you kind of put them all together in a broad kind of, you know, standard or coordinated system? Amazing. That's great. Thank you so much for coming on. We'd love to continue for another hour. Yeah, we can go way longer. We need to have you back and talk more. guys appreciate it it's great to see somebody a contrarian idea that a tech show that actually likes tech yeah what a concept very bullish on it so thank you thank you so much uh we'll talk to you soon have a good one bye bye uh next up we have kyle coming on yeah i'm playing the sound board you know we're talking to some big people just because he's the number one guy on the midas list doesn't mean you can't hit him with the ashen hall yeah you can't hit him with some sound effects i should have but we have kyle samani coming on let's bring him in the studio How are you doing, Kyle?

1:29:09Welcome to the stream. Welcome. What's up, Joe? What's up, Jordy? Pleasure to be here. Great to see you. What's happening? Dude, I'm doing great, guys. I'm actually in Vegas right now. I'm actually looking at the sphere out my window in my hotel. Bitcoin Vegas is going on. It's a fun time in crypto. Is the crypto company sponsoring the sphere right now? Or maybe TBPN should buy the inventory this very moment. I think y 'all's faces would look really good at 400 feet wide and tall. We should just be live broadcasting this there. That's the real alpha. It's great to have you on. I have a bunch of places to start with.

1:29:44So I don't even have context. What event is happening in Vegas? I think Katie Hahn is there as well. Is that correct? It's a Bitcoin conference. Bitcoin conference. Can you break it down? What are you expecting? What's happening on the ground? Yeah, it's Bitcoin Vegas is going on. Largest crypto conference ever. More than 30 ,000 people at Venetian Palazzo. Vance either just spoke or speaking shortly. David Sachs is here. Bo Hines is here. Ross Ulbricht is here, David Bailey, Michael Saylor. Tons of folks are all here. Senators here, Lummis, Hagerty, a whole bunch of other folks. So politics is here.

1:30:17Wall Street is here. Industry is here. Very, very exciting time in crypto. And what are the key indications or news items that people are looking for? Are there people still hunting for different companies to establish Bitcoin reserves or news from the government? Like, what are the unanswered questions that people are looking for hints as to which way they'll break? I think probably the biggest questions are how is the Bitcoin strategic reserve going to be funded? Senator Lummis has proposed the Bitcoin bill, which proposes open market purchases authorized by Congress. That hasn't made it very far in Congress, but it's at least in the public domain.

1:30:57When the executive order was signed by President Trump a few weeks ago, it said that they can kind of fund the strategic reserve using revenue neutral mechanisms. And so there's a lot of discussion today about what exactly does that mean? Folks like Bo Hines and David Sachs and the administration are certainly working on figuring all that out. They haven't shared anything publicly yet, but there's a lot of discussion about that. There's a lot of discussion around Bitcoin L2s. These are kind of ways to bring DeFi to Bitcoin with like two or three or four asterisks after that end of that statement.

1:31:28But like a lot of people are trying to figure that out. uh and then obviously the kind of hot subject of the moment is these bitcoin treasury companies uh the most recent of which i believe is djt um which i think it just announced a two and a half billion dollar offering yeah is that truth social yeah yeah truth social has and game stop game stop announced today as well a large purchase yeah in some ways all the regulatory stuff happening right now feels like the kid who didn't do his homework until two minutes or two minutes before the exam or something and is just cramming because crypto has been an important industry for a decade.

1:32:02You know, people have been investing in this category for a long time, but now it's like the government's like, okay, let's figure all this out. Is that just because we've really finally gotten to adoption and breach the technical milestones or, or do we, and I guess the question is like, do you expect us to get through this regulatory kind of crunch period and then go back into build mode? And if so, like, what are the technical milestones that we're trying to build? What's coming on the horizon after we get through the political arc that we're in right now? Yeah, so I mean, the reason we're here, the reason we're kind of in this moment is like a lot of stuff building over the last 10 or 15 years, and it's really extenuated by the Biden administration.

1:32:46I don't think our industry would be as politically relevant and as politically active, if it were not for the Biden administration, so strongly trying to press on the scales against industry and industry really mobilized against the Democratic Party in a meaningful way. And my sense is that most political strategists probably will tell you that like on the margin, the thing that moved the election in both Congress and the presidential in 2024 was the crypto industry in terms of dollars, reach, anger, PR, et cetera. That now has swung from very frustrating administration to extremely accommodating and welcoming administration that we have today.

1:33:30The work that Bill Hines and David Sachs are doing in the executive branch is phenomenal. We're seeing awesome stuff out of DOJ, SEC, and CFTC on an almost daily basis now. And then the other big item is Congress. There's the genius act in the Senate today. And then there's market structure that's coming pretty shortly. All that stuff is happening. So I think the reason we are where we are is like the pendulum is like kind of swung from one extreme to the other. I feel pretty good that we're going to kind of basically get – industry is going to get, I think, most of what it wants in the next few months.

1:34:05And that just then provides the foundation for crypto to really permeate all of software. Um, crypto systems are the most basic level, just systems for moving money around. Um, and they're much more better and efficient and global system, uh, systems for doing that. And so my, my hope is that once we get these final things done from Congress and in the executive branch, then you see Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, et cetera, embed crypto into all of their respective operating systems. Um, you have AI agents, you know, trading with crypto, whatever. And now crypto financial rails truly permeate global software.

1:34:38Do you think there'll be a realignment from the left around crypto? Or do you think like because it did feel like it was bipartisan for a little bit, or at least it was just ambiguous on both sides. Then it kind of broke right. But it's such a big industry that it feels like maybe the Democrats might want to say, hey, like we're it's a big tent. We're also pro crypto. Yeah, I mean, there's certainly a handful of prominent Democrats who have been pro crypto. So folks like Richie Torres, Senator Gillibrand, there's some others. I'm sure I'm not remembering their names off the top of my head. And we've been donors, although we're primarily donors to Republicans, we are selectively donors to some of those folks that I just mentioned.

1:35:20The party as a whole, I would say, has not really realigned and embraced crypto. And I'd say I'm fairly surprised by that. It just seems kind of like an own goal here. There's a handful of Democrats who ideologically hate crypto, most notably Senator Warren. But like the vast majority of Democrats in Congress kind of like don't care or are like pro crypto. Sure. And so I've been surprised by the like lack of warm embrace. Makes sense. Jordy? Mutual friend Jared Madfess asked me to ask you, what are you excited about in crypto that no one else is talking about yet or very few people are talking about?

1:36:04um i am really excited for dpin and this is a category that's been around in crypto for a few years now and we were very fortunate to help pioneer some of our early investments like helium um but the deep end things are starting to really work helium i believe yesterday or the day before was their first day ever they had a million customers um on the helium network in one day helium for those who don't know is a decentralized wireless network anyone can stand up a hot spot spot in their house and provide wireless coverage and other people can like user network and pay you for doing so. We just invested recently in a very high profile deep end project called double zero, which basically is bringing private fiber to anyone who wants to pay for private fiber per byte of data.

1:36:49And there's going to go live over the summer. And it's going to trade, it's going to really change low latency trading on public lock chains. There's a handful of other kind of major deep end teams like hive map or pipe network and a number of others that we're involved in and i think these are you know crypto is fundamentally financial in nature but like finance is hard for people to grasp and these what's cool about these deep end use cases is that they are like fairly easy for for people to understand um and the first handful of those things are really starting to achieve escape velocity that's great how'd you meet the solana founders um yeah i met anatoly first i don't actually don't know who introduced me to anatoly but I was in San Francisco in April of 2018.

1:37:32I was at a co-working space and I met Anatoly on a Saturday night. And I was sent, he had sent me the white paper for the proof of history and Solana consensus white paper. I remember I read it and it was absolute trash. And I was like, I have no idea what this does. But someone told me Anatoly was really smart. So I met with him and after meeting with him, the thing that really stood out to me was of all of the L1, All of the L1 founders were like very academic in background and their pursuit and approach. And Anatoly was the opposite. He was like, I hate academia. I don't ever want to write a fucking paper.

1:38:05I don't ever want to solve an unsolved problem in computer science. He's like, my only job is to like let other people solve problems. And then I'm just going to like apply their solutions to making my software go fast. And his whole career at Qualcomm and Dropbox and other places was just doing that. And I was like, I like this guy. This guy does not sound like all of the other L1 founders. And so we started the kind of back salon from very early on. Obviously got to meet Raj shortly thereafter and the rest is history. Yeah. So, I mean, was that investment, did you feel like it was out of your sweet spot?

1:38:38Like were you stretching in terms of what you were pattern matching against or was it like delightfully contrarian in your mind? I mean, look, Multifoin was very young. We were six months old at the time we kind of made that first investment. and I don't think we had even a sense of like what is our strike zone or not we just kind of were like young and running as fast as we could and seeing what happened um in hindsight I would say like multi-coins generally likes to invest in more blue oceans than red oceans um and investing in an L1 was certainly a red ocean investment um and so when we invest in in red oceans uh we just want to be like, have a pretty pointed view on why the player we're betting on is like the standout player.

1:39:24And as I was just saying, like, just at the founder level, Tully's background was completely different than the other L1 founders. There's a number of other things that kind of stood out, but that being the primary one, I would say now with seven or eight years of history looking back, I don't think the Salon investment like stood out as being fundamentally like out of strike zone. We knew we hated Ethereum. We knew that like there was problems and we were looking for alternatives. And lots of people were showing up saying like, look, I have an alternative. And so in that sense, it was like very kind of shot on goal.

1:39:58What's been your success rate of identifying new metas like, you know, before other people? It feels like in crypto, if people that are trading are trying to trade, you know, specific metas and then identify new ones. But as a VC, you really need to identify things two, three years, sometimes even more than that. Otherwise, you're just going to be too late, right? Once the thing is already big, you don't necessarily want to invest in the fourth or fifth player in a category. Yeah, I feel very fortunate. We've been involved early in a number of metas, for lack of a better word. First, probably being like high performance blockchains, being Solana.

1:40:40Second, probably being D-Pin, starting with Helium and HiveMapper. More recently, we've been very focused on on-chain privacy. Most people in crypto have been talking about zero-knowledge proofs for, God, five, seven, eight years now. We've scrapped all that, and we've made big bets in fully homomorphic encryption, which is a totally different cryptographic approach. So those are probably the three, I think, really big ideas where we were pretty early. And there's a number of other areas that are smaller where I think we've been early. um in terms of where you know the meadows were like focused on today um i'd say it's like it's pretty obvious stuff but like getting stable coins in the hands of people who want stable coins we've invested in a number of p2p exchanges that make it possible for people in emerging markets in which have capital controls to get stable coins despite their local governments um and so that's a lot of a lot of focus area and then we've been thinking about what are as more stable coins come on chain what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of that?

1:41:42And then we've been going along a lot of those things in both public and private markets. Helping people with capital controls get on chain is interesting. It's kind of like crypto's outlaw roots in a little bit, but very mission-oriented is saying, we believe in economic freedom. They're willing to go into certain markets and deliver that. So very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, this is great. I hope the conference is great. Come back on the show anytime. Enjoy. Jordan, John. Thanks for having me. Awesome to be here. You're the man. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.

1:42:16Bye. Next up, we have Ben Pasternak, founder I met years ago because we were both building in consumer packaged goods. He's gone on to crypto. I've gone on to media, but excited to get the update from him. This probably has to be the most viral new crypto app in at least a year, at least six months. At least six months. I'm excited to chat with him. So Ben, welcome to the stream. How are you doing? What up? Believe in something. How are you guys doing? Believe in Ben. What's going on? Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to see you guys. How are you guys doing? It's good. We haven't talked in a few years.

1:42:54I'd love to just get the update. I had no idea what a tear you've been on. Friend of ours, Dylan, is here at the studio. He's going to do a live interview later. And he brought you up. And John was like, Ben, pass for that? Yeah, we talked a bunch. And then had no idea. He's so locked in on traditional tech that he had no idea what you're up to. And then we explained, of course. So yeah, why don't you actually just catch me up to speed on what you're building? Yeah, well, Believe is a platform for belief and people empowerment. So if you want to contribute something to the world, if you want to build something, if you're going to create art, if you're going to create a song, whatever it is, you can come to Believe and raise the capital you need.

1:43:36okay break the the how how is this different than uh nfts what what technologies are we leveraging it's obviously somewhat crypto related but then uh comp it to a patreon for me well so i'll give you some context luke metro front of the show i believe he used believe this is okay okay got it cool john's familiar yeah i have yeah cool yeah yeah it's basically um we enable people to launch a coin on solana super easily uh you know the tokenomics itself are pretty straightforward uh what we kind of introduced to the space is like a fee uh that's collected uh yeah basically a trading fee and creators are able to raise money through that trading fee um and yeah the the product went like super viral this past month it's only four weeks old because you can launch a coin directly from twitter so we're kind of tapping into uh the existing trend of builders like building something, screen recording it, posting it on X, and they can just tag LaunchCoin to LaunchCoin.

1:44:35Yeah. Yeah. So you're even removing even more barriers. You don't even have to go to the different website, no wallet or anything. But I assume at some point you can interact with the blockchain at like a lower level through the actual app. But the initial kickoff and instantiation happens all on X. Is that correct? Exactly. Yeah. So you launch on X and assuming you're coined as well you can download our app link your x and claim your fees edit your project details and we're also building kind of like an ecosystem for people to like integrate their coin into that product you know engage with different mechanisms and that's all through the app so what sorry what what is kind of like the optimistic use case here for someone actually using this to fund kind of a new idea or new concept because there are places where you can go and get a grant for something, but increasingly it's harder and harder to get a grant for great art or even raise money for the next movie because of Hollywood and all these other dynamics.

1:45:33So what does a win condition look like for you? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a different depending on the industry you're in. Tech obviously has venture capital, which is a pretty good system. I think it is evolving just because I guess the big trend is you're seeing a lot of ARR, MRR, and people's bios. And I think thanks to AI, you know, engineers are way more efficient. There's like less of a need to raise a huge amount of money up front. So if you can like, I guess bootstrapping is kind of in, and this is just a great way to get started. So for tech, I think that's the use case. For other, you know, other industries, like there isn't really a great way to fundraise for anything.

1:46:10Like you could start a GoFundMe, but those, you know, generally haven't gone too far, I guess in some cases, but pretty mid-outcome. So this can lead to like massive funding, for those types of projects. Yeah. Do you think that there should be a link between the token and the equity in a company that's eventually created? I imagine at four weeks old, you probably haven't figured out that interaction because that's probably the most complex legal menagerie you can imagine. But talk to me about the long-term vision. Yeah. Well, so when we shipped them, we thought they'd be purely like attention coins and speculative, but that quickly changed because the first launches that did really well, started integrating their coins into their product, you know, introduced different like burning mechanisms.

1:46:54So I think that the kind of way I view it right now is, you know, they're essentially like utility coins. And, you know, depending on how, I consider ourselves to be like the stripe for coins. So we give developers the tools to like integrate their coin however they want. But at the end of the day, they're really versatile tools and they're going to come up with all different ways that kind of inspire us. Long-term, you know, yeah, the regulatory environment is rapidly shifting. So I think that, you know, We're planting a lot of seeds today and depending on what happens here and it's looking pretty good so far, you can do a lot more in terms of equity, etc.

1:47:27It's very interesting. What's it been like building in crypto transitioning from it? It feels like to me, watching what you built with Simulate from afar, you know, is always very high profile, always in the news and more so than I think like a traditional CPG company. So in that sense, like just being good at thinking different and capturing attention and leveraging that probably set you up pretty well for building in crypto. What have been some of the challenges? I imagine you're not sleeping a lot because every time you go to sleep, there's something something's breaking or someone's yelling at you or something like that.

1:48:04But what's it been like? Yeah, well, you know, it's not my first rodeo, to your point. And, you know, prior to Simulate, I built a social networking app called Monkey that has tens of millions of users to this day. So I'm familiar with building consumer software. I think to your point, yeah, the crypto stuff is 24-7. So in most spaces, you have kind of room to iterate and make mistakes. In crypto, the market is less forgiving. So it's a tricky balance because you obviously can't be stagnant, but you have to keep evolving and changing things. So yeah, definitely a pressure cooker environment. But the outcomes are really crazy.

1:48:38And the cool thing about Believe is we have dozens, if not hundreds, of creators that have like raised funding people have like quit their jobs and gone all in on whatever they're building um and it's rare you get to ship something and for it to immediately have a positive outcome for these people in a like life-changing way so for me that's like super energizing and i hope we can continue to do that at scale what do you how do you think this evolves uh right now it feels like believe is a product for individual creators entrepreneurs artists like you're talking about is their world but but if you guys become you know stripe for coins, or however you phrased it, is there a world where traditional companies in the future would use Believe to get on chain in some capacity?

1:49:21How do you think about that? For sure, yeah, we're already seeing that. So kind of the biggest case study is Dupe, which is like a venture-backed company. I can't speak to their exact revenue numbers, but very serious company that has strong PMF. And they launched a coin, and their coin has like crushed it. It's brought them like a new revenue stream. It's like really activated like this new community for them. And yet Bobby, the founder of Jeep has just like really leaned into that. So I think that is going to definitely keep happening. And, you know, I guess like some of these individual builders might like launch a project that later evolves into like an actual company.

1:49:56And the coin is like, yeah, could definitely be tied to that. You know, watching things, watching how things unfold. I want to talk about the line between like good and bad projects, essentially. Like there's two narratives. One is, uh, look, it's all a casino, no crying in the casino. The, the, the, the DGNs love to just do whatever. And just like, you know, like, you know what you're getting into. Um, the, the, the, the, the, the flip side of that is like, you know, uh, they're there. I guess the question is like, there are a lot of people that have launched stuff and it's gone super well and they built really cool things.

1:50:33There's other stuff where it's clearly just been like a rug and a mess and a disaster and it chases them around the internet for a couple months or even years. Where is the line? What would you counsel people to kind of rules of the road today for getting involved in this and not just frustrating a bunch of people and actually having like a good experience and kind of not just obeying the letter of the law, but like the spirit of the law? Yeah, and on that, like decision-making around going, you know, doing curation versus just creating a platform and letting people do kind of whatever they want.

1:51:08Totally. Yeah. So, you know, I consider, by the way, I had Alon on earlier. Love Alon. He's great. You know, I'm friendly with him. And, you know, so Pump is a huge innovator in the space. I consider Pump to be kind of like the World Wide Web and what we're doing to be closer to the App Store. Okay. You know, you can't completely curate for reasons that I won't go into. like we can't say hey this is good um because you know if we do that we're going to be wrong some of the time sure but it is quite easy to say hey this is bad and when we identify bad actors as like mechanisms we can uh integrate to kind of like yeah basically disincentivize them from launching uh with us versus like one of these other platforms yeah um the i think like the biggest thing for us is you know founder education so you know i think most silicon valley founders like 99 have like really positive intent uh with you know things they do and uh it's our job to kind of like create harmony between the traders and the founders and we can just do like a way better job at that um similar to like you know if you fundraise with like a safe or even if you do like a price round um your first time doing it you know there's usually a pretty big education curve like a lawyer is explaining to you what these different mechanisms mean um most people completely make a mess of it but by their series a they identify the problems they made so there there is uh education with like existing fundraising mechanisms and i think that uh for this too So there's an education that we need to make like really easy.

1:52:25Yeah. I'm interested. We've talked to some founders who have been kind of like curious about dipping their toes in the water. And well, I remember it was we had some buddies to talk to people off the ledge. Yeah. After the Trump, you know, coin happened. Why not me? We had some buddies that that were thinking about it. And ultimately at the time, I think they made the right decision not to do something. but things are changing week by week. And the trick is like, it feels like the most basic thing would be like, don't rug, don't sell what you own or whatever. But there's this other dynamic that I learned about.

1:53:03And this is probably obvious to everyone who's native to crypto, but I could launch a coin, not sell any. Some traders should come in, pump up the coin and then people buy when it's at the high and then those traders sell and I didn't rug, but like it feels like it rugged and people are like, I lost money on your thing and then they're mad at me. And so I guess in terms of like the messaging and the risk reward, like how do you think the rule, which are the rules of the world? What you're describing is there's like a PVP dynamic. Totally. And so I'm curious for you at a platform level, do you think that, do you think that like, for example, you know, are there things you can do at a product level so that if an artist comes on to believe is like using the mechanism to raise money.

1:53:51You prevent it from turning into this like PVP warfare where people are duking it out. I feel like we're going to reinvent accredited investor laws because the whole idea is like a venture capital firm can lose a hundred million dollars on some crazy biotech startup or some hard tech startup. And it really is no crying in the casino. You know, it's like, you guys did your due diligence. You signed the documents and you gave it a shot and that particular technology didn't work out. And so as long as there's no fraud, like you move on and you make money on the next thing. But for, you know, like random retail people, sometimes they get caught up and bad outcomes happen.

1:54:25I feel like there's some vibes in the ecosystem that can just be enforced loosely. There's also some rules, there's some platform stuff. So I'm interested in kind of how you're dealing with that, because it's obviously going to evolve a ton over the next few years. I mean, you're going to be running this for a long time. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. To me, it's, so, you know, Pump being the World Wide Web, there's like very small mechanisms that you can integrate that i think just make the whole space a lot safer sure um and yeah to your point where the snipers where they like buy a large part of the supply they you know kind of dump uh at the top uh there's like a lot of mechanisms like i'm seeing that i think are really interesting which is basically you know having like uh you know extremely high uh fees for the first you know x amount of seconds at trading so that you know the snipers will still get some ownership but their the ownership is like greatly reduced um there's rate limiting so there's like a max purchase amount, you know, for the first couple of seconds.

1:55:16So yeah, a lot of these anti sniper mechanisms are just like kind of evolving right now. And I think they're going to lead to a much healthier ecosystem. And in addition, like, yeah, I think it's like the kind of fee, it's hard to say what is good, but it's much easier to say what is bad. So if we if we do detect bad actors, it's pretty easy for us to kind of disincentivize future bad actors. Yeah. How much of the viral growth or the growth of the company right now has been, would you attribute just to the specific kind of like viral growth hack of like being able to launch a coin directly on Twitter or X?

1:55:52Yeah, I'd say maybe like 50%. I think the other thing is that within the so-and-so trenches, they've been trading these traditional meme coins forever. And it's a really fun game that everyone enjoys. But there is hunger for a new game. And I think that the vision here has really energized the whole space. So that narrative alone, I think, has done a lot of damage in a good way. The opportunity, right? Yep. Anyway, anything else? Very cool. We're good. This was great. Thank you so much for breaking it down. I'm sure you have a bunch of new things to work on in the 15 minutes that you've been on.

1:56:27Good luck building and excited to follow. Thanks for breaking it down. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. It's been cool to see everything blow up for you guys in a good way. Yeah, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you soon. Great to chat. Cheers. Fantastic. A little round of applause. Good to see him winning. If you're in CPG, private to crypto. Yeah. It works. It works. I guess that's a play. Every once in a while. Next up, we have Tom from Dragonfly Capital coming in the studio. We'll break down some more trends, investments. It is interesting to look at companies like Pump, which was only launched something like a year ago and now is done close to a billion dollars of revenue.

1:57:08Then you have Believe, and both these businesses look pretty obvious in hindsight, right? But just required a specific type of founder to unlock it. Really quickly, if you're designing a crypto app, you've got to be on Vanta. Go to Vanta.com. Think bigger. Build faster. Figma helps design and development teams. You said Vanta instead of Figma. Oh, sorry. Figma. Figma. Go to Figma.com. I was like, it's a big day. Whoa, whoa. Yeah, go to Figma.com. Yeah. It is the background of this show. And if you work at Vanta, use Figma to design Vanta. That's right. We're creating a Koretsu. And if you're at Figma, use Vanta for compliance.

1:57:48For SOC 2 compliance. Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. That's right. Double kill. Two ads in one go. Let's do it. Nice work, John. Let's bring in Tom. Let's bring in Tom. How are you doing, Tom? There he is. Nice to meet you. Technology brothers. Good to see you guys. What's happening? How are you? Hey, not a lot. Doing well. I'm loving the suits.

1:58:19I mean, you guys always bring it, but you look great. Have you watched the stream at all? Are we asking two normie of questions or are we hitting the right topics? No, it's the right blend of norminess. There's a lot of stablecoin conversation, but that's to be expected. You know, people, people have the stables. So no, it's been good. It's been great. I mean, my bear case on stables is I went super long stablecoins and my portfolio is completely flat. And so I'm looking for alpha. Give me some crazy ideas. What are you excited about right now that's not one year out, but 10 years out, 100 years out?

1:58:51What's the future look like? Break it down. 100 years out, I think we're all going to be dead and replaced by a agent. So it's all good. I'm not too concerned about that. You know, on the stablecoin thing, I wouldn't sweat it. I think you're going to get a little circle equity airdrop during the Ikea. They're going to just airdrop some shares to all the USDC holders. We're shilling for the US dollar. We're the US dollar shills. Yeah, anytime a company sells like a traditional crypto asset and buys USDC, they're defending the dollar. They're defending the dollar. Yeah. I agree. I actually, you know, I think you talk about stablecoin and when people talk about stablecoins, they talk a lot about flow, right?

1:59:31They talk about using stablecoins for payments, B2B payments, P2P payments, whatever. I think the stock thing is actually underrated. And there's a few people in D.C. who talk about this. I think Paul Ryan was actually talking about basically stable coins being a way to, you know, mitigate a lot of the U.S. debt, because now you have all these new treasury holders. Tether is like the seventh largest treasury holder at this point. And I'm like, this feels like a very pro U.S. bipartisan topic of, yes, we want people to be buying. We want more marginal treasury buyers. Stable coins provide that route.

2:00:04And it's like a little bit of like a, you know, saying the quiet part out loud, but I don't really care. I'm very pro-US, and I think using, promoting dollars. The irony of the digital assets, which people saw as alternatives to the dollar, are now some of the greatest defenders. Yeah, to dig into it, though, is Tether's the seventh largest holder. Is that because they displace Fidelity by taking all of the treasuries and they just move them over? Can we really think of these as net new treasuries that are being bought? These are incremental, right? Because these are people who are offshore. It's people who are in Argentina or Turkey.

2:00:41That makes sense. Certainly, maybe some of it is cannibalistic. But for the most part, from what we've seen from, and actually, Rob Haddock, who's one of the GPs with me at Dragonfly, just had a great stablecoin research piece come out yesterday talking about who is actually using stablecoins. And it's, yes, some people in the US, and yes, maybe some people who previously would have purchased treasuries through the broker. But actually, it's people who are offshore. And that is actually, I think, kind of the killer app. What is happening in the Asian crypto markets right now? I know you've spent a ton of time over the years kind of focused in that area.

2:01:17How is the regulatory environment kind of evolving? What does crypto activity look like? How do we get them to rotate entirely into USDC? Yeah. That's part two. Well, they're waiting for the airdrop. Asia and the US have always um It's sort of, I would say, specialized when it comes to crypto. Like if you look back the past three, four years, Asia has really been running laps around the US when it comes to anything CeFi. You know, we're early investors in Bybit and BitGet, which are now two of the largest exchanges, incredible businesses. I mean, we're talking billions of dollars in revenue. Some of the features and some of the products that they offered, US exchanges are just now sort of catching up too.

2:02:03So I would cite as one example, a lot of Asian exchanges offered what we now call CDFI of offering a totally normal centralized exchange experience in the front end, but wrapping some sort of DeFi protocol on the back end to be able to offer people trading for new assets or to be offer lending and financing opportunities or yield opportunities or whatever is actually available on chain. But without all the complexity and yuckiness of having to manage your own keys, which is kind of what normies want, Coinbase just launched Bitcoin-backed loans using Morpho, which is an on-chain lending protocol, maybe a few months ago.

2:02:41So this is something where the U.S. is now just kind of playing catch up to what's been happening in Asia for many, many years. I think there's also been this trend of more, I would say, Chinese, previously like O2O founders moving into crypto and frankly also moving offshore because they see, hey, venture in China is like kind of dead. You know, the domestic market is kind of dead, but I'm a really great technologist. I'm a really great builder. Building in crypto is a way to access a global user base and a global capital base, but, you know, with sort of the skills that I already have. So, you know, we're early investors in Kaido, which is sort of this now has been coined InfoFi, which I don't quite love, but I think it's a cool concept of.

2:03:24Sounds cool. Yeah, yeah. Basically scraping Twitter data right now, ingesting that and then sort of spitting that back out into this sort of gamified cloud system. They also do some really cool stuff with like transcribing all these podcasts and just like giving you sort of like an alpha sense for crypto. But again, that's like a lot of Asian talent now sort of moving into crypto. Interesting. How are you thinking about the intersection of AI and crypto? Personally, we've talked with a number of people about the potential of stable coins within agents, but there's a bunch of other potential. How often should you pivot from AI to crypto and back?

2:03:58Is that every three months, every six months, every two years? What are you thinking? No, but in all seriousness, how are you? I mean, I imagine you're a consumer crypto investor. You need to get this bet right. Otherwise, you're going to look like a fool in 10 years. So I imagine. Jordy, this is what I have nightmares about. I am sure you do. No, I think we've been maybe a little bit contrarian when it comes to AI crypto in being more bearish on this category. I think a lot of sort of what AI crypto is broken down into is people trying to do decentralized inference, sort of this GPU marketplace.

2:04:36And this is sort of, again, an old idea in crypto. This was something that Gollum way back in the day was trying to offer for video rendering. Now kind of coming back, there's decentralized training, decentralized data marketplaces. I think for the most part, this is just really tricky to build, right? Like if you think about how you actually train a state-of-the-art model, you don't use a million consumer-grade GPUs all around the world. It's like you want one big co-located A100 cluster. Like that is actually kind of the thing that you want. And so like a decentralized network actually, it's just like, it doesn't really have the right characteristics of something you would like the type of compute that you want.

2:05:13Compute is not a monolith. The areas where I think we've been investing in AI meets crypto in the area that we get really excited about. You mentioned sort of NPC and agent payments. I agree. This just seems like kind of a no brainer where you want deterministic finality. You want your micro payments. It's something that just like existing SaaS company, existing SaaS payment companies just aren't really set up to provide. If you want to be able to say, hey, I want like one simple API call for a fraction of a penny, and they're never going to use the service again. That's something where stablecoin payments are uniquely enabled, are uniquely positioned to be able to do this, but it's just not something that you're normally going to see out of traditional payment companies.

2:05:57So we're investors in a company called GoldSky, which is building in this category. We're also, I mean, kind of on the compute topic, we're investors in EXO, which is sort of borderline crypto. I don't know if you've seen them around Twitter, but basically they allow you to run sort of sharded inference locally on your own network. So let's say you have, you know, a couple of Mac studios, really sort of specializing in Apple Silicon right now. It will automatically discover and execute, let's say something like DeepSeq R1 across those different computers on your local network. So you can run really great models on consumer grade hardware, given sort of the existing shortage of GPUs.

2:06:40And so you can imagine that, hey, if you can sort of distribute and start compute across your local network, maybe at some point in the future, you can actually do that across a global network. They're building towards that. I don't know if that's exactly the direction that they want to go. But in the interim, you have this really, really useful tool that allows you to actually get access to local edge compute models, which I think ultimately is where that whole industry is going to go versus, hey, we're all going to be running our own models on someone else's cloud. Back to the venture side, how do you see crypto funds evolving?

2:07:15It seems like there's a number of funds with massive AUM and maybe not enough places to bet on the equity side. Do these funds end up having, you know, you know, be end up 80 percent sort of liquid, 20 percent equity, you know, sort of early stage focused? Or how do you see that evolving, especially? Especially, I was talking with Ani on your team offline, and he was talking about how with AI being so deflationary, we just have companies now that have massive potential, but just don't really need capital. So you're sitting in the investor seat being like, please take my money versus maybe 10 years ago would have been reversed.

2:07:59Totally. I think that is definitely a trend that we see. I don't think it's even necessarily a crypto venture thing specifically, but you were talking earlier about people throwing ARR in the bio. And it's like, yeah, that is downstream from just operators having so much leverage now that they didn't have before. Crypto amplifies that where now you can sort of go public, you can access a massive user base, you can be way more sort of revenue positive than you were before. And so maybe the history of crypto funds, just to sort of take a step back, if you think of sort of like 2017, 2018, for reference, Dragonfly was started in 2018.

2:08:35crypto was a monolith. You give some capital to a fund manager, and they're going to decide, okay, I'm going to buy some Bitcoin. I'm going to buy some ETH. Am I going to invest in a early stage equity round? Am I going to buy a SAFT? Whatever that sort of blend was, they're going to be managing that for you. And oftentimes that was in a true closed-ended venture structure, but sometimes it would be in a liquid hedge fund structure with some side pocket. And it was like, the whole thing was kind of, no one really knew what this asset class was going to look like. And so you give capital to someone else and they figure it out.

2:09:07There was also obviously a byproduct of the fact that even getting access to something like Bitcoin previously was so difficult, right? Like you couldn't buy it through your brokerage, your bank, no ETFs, most just like you need to use some wacky custodian. But the whole process was very convoluted. And so great. You've managed to do it with a fund. That's something you can underwrite. And they can actually go and determine how much of the Bitcoin exposure that you want. You fast forward several years and now, hey, if you're a reasonably sophisticated LP, you can go and choose how much Bitcoin you want to buy yourself.

2:09:40We actually don't buy major liquids in our fund at all. And it's like, I don't need to charge you$2 in 20 to go buy Bitcoin or ETH or solar, whatever it actually is. You can go do that for yourself. And so there's been more specialization in the crypto fund area where now you have true dedicated venture funds like Dragonfly that are kind of doing, let's say, seed through B in addition to, hey, maybe doing some some treasury purchases for some liquid assets that we think have sort of venture upside. And then you have sort of true dedicated liquid funds. Maybe those are delta neutral funds or credit funds or actually just sort of long only discretionary funds.

2:10:17but there's sort of this true split. And I would say it's a bit like the sharks and the jets. I think the liquid funds always talk shit about the venture funds and the venture funds. I don't really talk shit about the liquid funds. I think they're great. But there's sort of the specialization in the strategy. Maybe to what Ani was mentioning and what you were mentioning earlier. Now the trajectory of fundraising goes, hey, we're gonna raise a pre-seed, though maybe we'll raise a seed. Maybe we'll do an A, TBD, But generally, hey, you'll launch a token, token will go public, and then maybe you'll do a treasury sale after the fact if you need more capital.

2:10:53And so if you've raised, you know, north of a billion dollars, to your point, where do you actually go and deploy that? Maybe there are some equity only companies. And certainly we do a number of those where we think, hey, there's this company is going to IPO. You know, we don't think there's going to be a token. It can be just a pure sort of revenue generating company. And I think that's like actually kind of an underrated area of the space. But it's sort of unclear where the rest of that capital goes, which is why you sometimes see these very wacky rounds where some company raises some insane amount of money and you're like, what is going on here?

2:11:27And I think there's just this lag effect between capital raised by VCs and then capital actually deployed into startups. What keeps you up at night about the industry right now? Potential risks. It feels like the industry broadly, you know, this year has been up and down, but so has every year in crypto to some degree. But generally, the industry is sort of like riding on a high, getting more regulatory clarity. There hasn't been, you know, a$20 billion hack in a while. But like what kind of risk do you see at a high level that actually worry you? Yeah, a million things, honestly. And it's an industry that is always changing and therefore there's always more things to be worried about, but also things to be excited about at the same time.

2:12:19Maybe to your point around regulatory clarity, I'm more worried that we don't get regulatory clarity and we fail to get a stablecoin bill passed. We fail to get a market structure bill passed. Both of those are in the short term, not terribly bad. I mean, I would say it's impressive how well stablecoins have grown in spite of being in this sort of regulatory area. In the long term, the question is, can we get a digital version of cash that is, they can be the kind of privacy for peer to peer transactions? Or do we get true panopticon status centralized control? That's something that is going to be bad on, you know, a 10 to 100 year time horizon, maybe not so short term bad, but we need to sort of lay the foundation for that now so we don't end up in that bad situation.

2:13:10I'm also, frankly, maybe a little bit worried about a lot of these sort of Bitcoin treasury structured companies. I think there's only so much marked demand for these actual assets. And I'm like, it is great when numbers go up. I'm a little bit worried about what's happening when the number goes down.

2:13:31Let's just give it up for when the number goes up. Yeah, yeah. Just stop right there. You don't need to talk about when the number goes down. Yeah, just focus on it. Cut you off right there. That's how everyone happens. So let's not worry about that. But overall, I mean, it is a great time in the industry. It feels like, like you're saying, it just never dies. Every time someone thinks it's over, that's actually the time that we're so back. That is the exact time to be back. And it feels like we're back now in a big way. So yeah, we're really excited about where the future of the industry is going.

2:14:02Well, thank you for hopping on. This is fantastic. Thank you for coming on. Come back on again soon. I think you might be a generational yapper. You're one of us. You know, we lived a post. We died a post. It's all part of the same life cycle. So thanks for having me on. All right. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you, Tom. Cheers. In the meantime, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. I'm just going to clap through this, Ron. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. I would bet that every founder that is coming on the show today already uses Linear.

2:14:35Don't say that. They're all about to convert with our coupon code. We don't have a code. We don't have a code. Linear is going to eventually get to 105 % market penetration because certain companies will have two instances running. That's ideal. Yeah. That's our goal. That's complete and total domination. Yeah, we're trying to capture 110 % of the TAM. Yeah, we'll go into that more later. Next up, we have Constantine from Blocked Even here. How are you doing? Welcome to the stream. Hey, guys. How's it going? Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company, just to get us started?

2:15:10Yeah, yeah. No, listen, it's a great question. BlockDemon, you know, the word daemon means in computer science an operating system that runs silently in the background. And that's really what BlockDemon is. We connect institutions to blockchain networks and we allow for compliant and secure monetization of the underlying fee and earn structure, right? And so translated, it means we run nodes for institutions. And so we're pure B2B play. And so we run core infrastructure. We run around 250 ,000 nodes across 40 different data centers around the world, enabling basically institutions to purchase and hold assets and their respective consumers.

2:15:52that has been the the the large sort of activity over the last five years right now we're sort of pivoting more into the defy area of things where the next few years are really all about allowing people to borrow and blend against the assets that they're now you know able to hold and buy a little more easily and so block demon is an enabler we're really purpose-built to meet enterprise great demand for infrastructure a couple of things that are special i guess is that we are domiciled in the us for better or worse um and uh you know we've been um able to attract uh very institutional capital and so on our board governance we have people like jp morgan and goldman sachs and citibank is another large institution with major shareholder status and so So we've got a really unique investor and partner group, I'd say, out of the top 500 institutions offering crypto, 70 % are customers of our infrastructure.

2:16:52And so, you know, we're very foundational to the space. We've been around for seven and a half years. We, you know, raised a bunch of money from, you know, said institutions in order to really bring institutions to crypto networks and do it in a way that's, as mentioned, secure. I'm from Germany. I've come from the cell network world and I always describe nodes of cell networks. Nokia. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Nokia. Deutsche Telekom actually is my claim to fame. I worked for back then a young man called Niko Sharora who, you know, for a moment was president at SoftBank and now runs Palo Alto Networks and also was chief business officer at Google.

2:17:34And so there's been a lot of people who started in cell networks and figuring out how to make that data work. One network, one type of network to another. Yeah, it's kind of similar. Well, can you give us a temperature check on the enterprise? In the last cycle, a lot of the pitches for the enterprise, there was a lot of exploratory budgets, a lot of, oh, maybe we can put our inventory on a blockchain and we'll store the data, you know. But now are institutions coming around and are they more up to speed on what crypto can do for them? How are they thinking about plugging in? And what is kind of top of mind for crypto amongst like the Fortune 500 from what you've assessed?

2:18:15Yeah, so I think there's different categories, right? And so first off, obviously the core financial institutions, the Robinhoods, the PayPals that enable people to purchase crypto and hold it are now all investigating, you know, how do you earn using these assets, right? And so I think you have existing fintech players that have offered basic crypto services that are now feel a lot more empowered. in what we call staking or DeFi to offer sort of earn adjacent products to their customer base. I think you'll see a big trend there. In the TradFi world, I think you're going to see a lot more interest in wallets specifically.

2:18:58And so they're really at that stage of like figuring out, hey, how do we actually, what technology do we use in order to custody crypto assets in our own infrastructure? And so I think, you know, in the past, basically you didn't really want to touch crypto or if you used a third party that you could point to if anything went wrong and so now i think in the current iteration all these institutions are really figuring out what their own proprietary basic solution setup is in order to custody assets and then also offer adjacent earned potential here and so we see a lot of that and with the sort of more sony-esque type of companies in the world you see a lot of interest in building their own version of a blockchain l2s you know i don't know if you remember the good old days when everybody had a totally permissioned little hyper ledger thing uh going i think uh we've made some progress there it is a funny thing it's like we should we should pay attention to this crypto you know thing and then oh we should just make our own blockchain that's that's the that's the way to get involved it's it's yeah that definitely was a yeah we should start our own visa network competitor yeah yeah why not why not what um go for it yeah and that has changed with like the you know the optimism the zk zinc arbitrams like you know people being able to easily spin up um a sort of permission chain on a public network right and so there's been some progress there um and uh we see quite a bit there and then obviously all the etf stuff and and technology that's that you need in order to basically custody these assets and offer yield over time What legacy, you know, we've had a bunch of interesting conversations today and different perspectives.

2:20:39And it feels like in many, you know, the irony of stable coins is that in many ways they actually sort of expand and support the dollar. Right. So this crypto being this sort of disruptive force is at the same time propping up this sort of legacy system. system, what areas of traditional finance do you feel like are most prone to disruption over the next decade? Yeah, I mean, well, because and the context is like those legacy institutions are coming to you now or they already have and they're saying, help us not get disrupted, right? Like we don't want to be Nokia, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think interestingly enough, everyone is uh and thank you for pointing that out i feel like i joined nokia in 2005 on top of the world i left in 2010 after i ran it into the ground and so uh like hey at least you could joke about it now yeah exactly uh no i mean i was obviously a you know small little figure there but it was an interesting learning right because ultimately you had an entity that was very very good and building really complex technology in thousand different versions but very very bad and streamlining singular software tools across its platform.

2:21:51And so I think you'll find that financial institutions have a similar risk, right? Like the, the IT stack of a large TreadFi is insane. You know, I mean, it's probably akin to what Elon Musk, when he talks about Doge, you'd be surprised about how archaic a lot of these systems actually still are. I mean, if you look at the structure of the Swift network, that obviously is one, sorry guys. and then you also just the ERP systems underneath it are so complex and you know JP Morgan has 100 ,000 engineers and they keep on building and doing stuff and so pivoting away from that infrastructure is really really difficult and you know they're starting to do it I think frankly I think we're all way behind here you know even as institutions because the beauty of AI and blockchain and the opening up of financial systems via Bitcoin is going to accelerate the movability of money.

2:22:50And so remittance specifically are sort of areas where I think time's running out for institutions. It's like either you can innovate really, really quickly, or people are going to find other ways to do it. And let it be a Coinbase issue with Stablecoin or something like that, that can actually take care of a lot of these things. And so it's going to be really, really interesting how financial institutions hold on to also the custody component, right? And crypto has a self-custodial cryptographic sort of component. And if you think about what you pay your bank, first and foremost, you pay them so they hold custody of your assets, right?

2:23:24And so often custody can be fairly accurate, but with that custody, you also obviously lose a lot of control. And, you know, you have technology and solutions today that can replicate basically what an institution offers here for zero cost, right? It's really the consumer that is nervous in touching them. And the infrastructure currently is way, way too complex for anyone to use. But you're going to see a lot of improvements there on the user experience front. Also with AI, I heard you guys mention AI. And obviously, you know, you got to pivot into AI every three months. But I think one use case that I kind of want to point out that we're working on that I think is really interesting on the wallet layer is using AI to issue very simple commands to crypto networks, right?

2:24:09To just say, hey, I just want to send Ethereum to this address, you know, like kind of, and that can be an AI. It'd be nice if you could tell a wallet, you know, an agentic wallet, just make me a 10 % return daily, compounded daily, just forever. Please don't make mistakes. Just get me a 10X this. You know, but basically make the interface that simple, right? Hey, wire securely$100 to France, you know, if they need it. But, you know, we can, those type of things, I think, are going to be real improvements on how this works. Yeah. How, what's happening with emerging markets? We've talked about with other guests today around the risk that certain governments might not want their citizens to be, you know, selling their native currency for something like stables or other assets.

2:25:00So how much attention are you paying to the policy decisions in markets outside of the U.S.? Or is that not a focus for you right now? No, for sure. I mean, the outside of the U.S. is still our largest market because we were in the U.S. and obviously got clobbered by regulators and by basically Operation Chokepoint 2.0. And so we expanded massively into Asia. Asia is a really exciting market for us. you'll see a you know asia's lots of things lots of different technologies and and standards and and you know you have the full spectrum of really really dogmatic and and suppressive systems and very very open ones technically and so yes we follow this very closely I think if I may age myself again you know it reminds me a little bit back in the day we were trying to figure out how to distribute music via digital channels and cell networks, right?

2:25:54And so once you pixelate stuff in ones and zeros, it's just really difficult to contain it, right? And you're going to see that with currencies on a very basic level as well, right? Like it's just like you can try and do the China and ban Bitcoin and things like that. But the reality is it's a temporary solution. People are going to find ways around it. And so I think we've... Yeah, like the piracy, media piracy has not been solved. Right. Like at all. Not even close. Right. It's probably easier than ever to get movies online that that that without paying for them. So the idea that you're going to sort of regulate crypto out of existence is is a bit silly.

2:26:35Last question for me. MCP. People have been talking about potentially integrating stable coins into that standard. Where how do you see it evolving? What are you excited about? Or do you think it'll just live side by side with crypto rails? I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I have a preference, right? Please. What is your preference? Well, my preference is that it's all integrated in one, right? Like, I really want to, ultimately, I'm an old school crypto guy. I want access and inclusion via crypto rails for everyone that no single entity can control, right? And so my job is to bring a substantial amount of volume from hard-coded institutional rails into open source on-chain networks, right?

2:27:19And so that's my preference. I think it's going to take a minute with regulators, even though we have a much better administration that's a lot more open to thinking about how to regulate this and a market structure bill coming that we're working with and trying to ensure that this gets done correctly. I think it's going to take a few iterations, you know, like we're going to get something done, some regulation at first, and some of it is going to be good. Some of it is not going to be so good. And then we got to see how much support the industry can continue to garner across also the aisle. Basically, it has to be a bipartisan issue on the regulatory front as well, if we want to see real progress.

2:28:03And so, but, you know, obviously we're very optimistic here that we can come up with something that is as open as possible and replaces as many of the legacy rails as possible. Fantastic. Thank you so much for stopping by. Hope you have a great rest of your day. We'd love to get the update from you as things progress and we get more clarity on the regulatory side too. But thanks so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. How are you going? All right. Next up, I got to tell you about Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. benchmark series A.

2:28:39Benchmark series A. Yeah, I wonder how sales tax Well, you know who has to pay sales tax? Pudgy Penguins, because they sell real things in the real world. Oh yeah, they do. They do. And we have Luca from Pudgy Penguins coming on the stream next. We should just make the next 20 minutes us pitching new world. Exactly, exactly. How you paying sales tax? Let's get to the really important questions. We don't want to know about the NFT market. The people want to know. We want to know about your sales tax stack and how numerals fitting in. Luca, welcome to the stream. We are, of course, joking. How are you doing?

2:29:12What's going on? Welcome. Hey, guys. Happy to be here. Thanks so much for hopping on. I'd love to start with kind of a little bit of the history of Pudgy Penguins because I know that there's been like a series of eras for the company, and you're obviously taking it in somewhat of a new direction or expansion now. But what's the story that you tell about the genesis of the project, your involvement over time and like where things are going? So the 60 second version is I was a huge collector of Pudgy Penguins when they launched about three and a half years ago. They were kind of one of the three golden projects of the NFT bull run.

2:29:52It was really bored apes, punks and penguins. Unfortunately, penguins kind of got mismanaged. They were founded by a bunch of 18 year olds in their college dorm basement with no operational experience. So at no fault of them, you know, Bored Apes ended up being a four billion dollar business. Punks became a legacy collection with a multi-billion dollar market cap and penguins kind of withered to the wayside. But at that time, while I was collecting the NFTs, I was a CMO and co-founder of a company called Gel Blaster, which was North America's fastest growing toy business. I was really involved in just IP.

2:30:27You got to get those for the studio. Yeah, I see those ads all the time. I didn't realize you were behind this. Ben, order some gel blasters right now. I'll get you guys sent. I'll send some to the office. But I was really immersed there. And so when I just closed my eyes and I thought Pudgy Penguins, I just thought this is a multi-billion dollar business. And so rather than being like a disgruntled holder who was complaining all day, I decided to step up to the plate. and I bought the project for about two and a half million bucks three years ago, April 4th. So we're about three years and three and a half months into this.

2:31:00I think what we want to be today is I think twofold. I think on one side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of crypto. When you think crypto today, I think crypto is intimidating. It's taboo. But I think there's no better way to invade the hearts and minds of everyday consumers and with cute pudgy penguins. And I think there's no better representative from a mascot perspective for the industry than the pudgy penguin, you know, the story all encompassing. And on the other side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of penguins around the world. When you think penguins, I want you to think pudgy penguins.

2:31:27And I just believe that the penguin animal is severely underdeveloped. Do you guys do any charity things for the actual penguins? You know, kind of like a royalty, a little give back for those down? We've done a couple activations. I think Children's Health and penguins, I think, are the two places that we donate and we're charitable. You mentioned that the early Pudgy Penguins community was unhappy with the development of the project. It sounds like that's in contrast to the other NFT projects where people were satisfied. But from my perspective, like a lot of these, the 10K NFTs go out, they mint.

2:32:08And then I don't really engage with these projects deeply enough to know, like, what is the community clamoring for? So what was the community in Pudgy Penguins clamoring for that they weren't receiving? And then what are you building that actually will satisfy the community? What are they asking for and what are you trying to give them? Yeah, I think what every community member in crypto wants is productivity and pushing the boundaries and forward progress within both the internal IP and maybe just for the category in and of itself. But just to be clear, like we bought Pudgy Penguins under the guise that the NFT race and the NFT build out was severely underdeveloped.

2:32:49And there was a bar still yet to be set. And we bought this business to win in this category and ultimately to win in the broader crypto category. And so I think from our perspective, it's not just winning for our community members within our small niche and within our, you know, within within the Pudgy Penguin universe. it was really winning for the entirety of NFTs. Because prior to us, NFTs stayed in this digital universe, in this, you know, vision that Ready Player One was going to come 20 years earlier than it actually was going to come. And I thought, you know, if this was the next generation brand and all of these companies were raising billions of dollars under this guise, then as a brand builder for the last eight years, I felt like they just weren't doing all of the obvious things that all these brands have to do to win.

2:33:33Are we going digital? Is everything going to be digital 20 years from now? Sure. But today, people need physical interactions. And I think that's a huge reason why we've won and we've been so successful the last couple of years is we really blended the two worlds, right? We have toys and 10 ,000 retailers. Every toy is tied in with an NFT and crypto experience. And the whole thing really segues. You would build this thing the same way you know, Hasbro or Mattel or Disney would build it. But it's crypto native. It's internet native. And I think that's the difference. How do you balance developing the IP in the way that you believe will create the most value long term and and kind of the desires or wishes from the community of initial holders?

2:34:20Right. Because as a business, you constantly need to be evolving, reinventing yourself. And I imagine there's a bunch of good parts about having this super loyal, dedicated fan base that's heavily invested in the projects. but then there's also some hard decisions to make at different times. Yeah, I think the community's bought in under this guise that we are creating the Internet's Mickey Mouse and that everything that we do is to support that thesis, and they're aligned in that vision. I think the problem, or not the problem, but I think the hard part about this business, and it's relevant for a lot of crypto founders, but I coined this like three years ago, which is we're basically building a publicly traded startup where I have all of the cons of being publicly traded with none of the pros, and I'm a startup.

2:35:02right if i shit the bed right my price and price and crypto is the best marketing because it's such a hyper financialized asset class um and and and you know i do something great price goes up you know holders are in the money the more in the money they are the more they champion the more they recycle those profits back into the product uh and the different the different product lines that we have within the business uh but then obviously if you shit the bed you know it the the the financialization to me is a hyper form of alignment. And it can be your greatest superpower, which I think we've been able to harness and galvanize over the last couple of years, or it can be your greatest kryptonite.

2:35:40And you've seen situations like this with basically 98 % of founders in crypto is that ends up biting them in the ass. They make one wrong step. They don't have that relationship. They don't have their rapport with the community. And the whole thing just kind of backfires. Yeah. Do you think if you look back at the NFT category holistically is our projects is part of that kryptonite just being over capitalized. How much of a strength have you, you know, I don't know how resource constrained you guys have been exactly, but I imagine it's quite a bit more constrained than many other projects in the space, especially as, you know, certain projects got marked, you know, really, really high, a bunch of capital flooded in, and I don't really have a good lens on how that's worked out.

2:36:31Yeah, I think that's just entrepreneurship 101. I mean, crypto in general makes people more money than they're supposed to make. You know, it's kind of like there's an arbitrage that I talk about a lot where, you know, there's a real opportunity for builders in Web2 to come here because the premium on users and success here is probably 10 to 15 to 20x what it would be in the real world. Meaning like the EBITDA of pudgy penguins, you know, might be, you know, we might be a 300,$350 million business today. You know, we've created, you know, five plus billion dollars in value over the last couple of years.

2:37:11And, you know, our total ecosystem is north $2 billion. So I think from our perspective, it's really just a matter of, you know, being resource constraint has been one of the biggest things for us. And probably the lens that I'm most proud about. I mean, our next 10 competitors that we've outperformed over the last couple of years have, you know, nine figures in funding, whether it's from venture or community. But that's naturally, every entrepreneur gets into that problem at some point, unless you really fight tooth and nail over the course of a long period of time to earn that capital. But in crypto, you can make a lot of capital and raise a lot of capital really quickly.

2:37:52And the NFT cohort of 2020, 2021 is exactly that. I mean, guys made, you know, 50, 100, a billion dollars, you know, within 12 months of being in business. You're not going to be a superstar organization, you know, off of that type of growth unless you're just a one in a million entrepreneur and group. But that wasn't the case here. And so I think us being scrappy has been huge for us. We raised, you know,$9 million in our seed round, and we haven't raised anything else for Pudgy since then. And, you know, this year we'll do$40,$50 million in revenue. So, you know, so far, so good. That's awesome.

2:38:28Can you talk about the decision to surface crypto functionality to the user, to the customer. The Instagram has 1.8 million followers, never really mentions crypto. There's a world where you're communicating to a non-crypto native audience. You have a different group of customers that's very crypto native. How do you balance those things out? Is it all just one on-ramp one direction or the other direction? How do you think about that dichotomy? Yeah. So I'm a consumer product guy and consumer products, conversions and action. In crypto, and I think with building IP and character and love and affinity, I think conversion is a process, right?

2:39:08And so I think the idea that you immediately sell people on something that is still taboo and still intimidating, I think is a mistake. And so my objective is how do I create love and affinity around this character, positive impact around this character, positive association around this character over the course of time? And as they become super fans and participate in fandom, they then go and figure out this is crypto and go down that rabbit hole. And I think that's a really beautiful story. Now, on one side, that's epic. But I think a lot of people always misinterpreted our strategy, which is like, oh, how do you get the non-crypto user to then go buy our assets, whether it's our token or NFTs?

2:39:49And it's actually a misappropriated way of how I think people look at the strategy. It's more impactful if you're a crypto native. Let's say you're a crypto whale and your mom or your cousin or your niece or your nephew or your son or your daughter is then participating in a pudgy penguin, buys a pudgy penguin product at Walmart or shares you with an Instagram piece of Instagram content or a game or something like that. That aha moment for that crypto whale is then like, oh, I've been in crypto for how long? You know, nothing has has transcended into my family the way that this has. This is clearly doing something for the industry that that nobody else is doing.

2:40:26And that's kind of like our edge is like we believe crypto is for everyone. And but right now it's not positioned for that. Right. It's positioned for the finance, bro, for the cool guy. But, you know, if we really want crypto to succeed, it's got to be for the woman. It's got to be for the child. As silly as it sounds, those kids are becoming crypto native. And an anecdotal story that I think your audience will love is, you know, I started to meet some of the top Solana traders over the last couple of months. These kids are 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Guys who made$20,$30 million in cash, right, are 16, 17 years old.

2:40:57Couldn't cook a steak medium rare if they wanted. Those are the crypto native, right? And that next generation will actually be native. Unlike, you know, you or I who maybe saw the world before crypto. You know, we're crypto adjacent and we're crypto familiar, but we're not native. This next cohort that's coming in the next five to ten years will be crypto native. And that's the audience that I really want to speak to. That's pretty awesome. Talk to me about the decision to trade offs between the Ethereum blockchain and Solana. Obviously, the project originally launched on Ethereum, but the Pudgy token is on Solana now.

2:41:29What are the trade offs? How do you think about those? Is there one power law winner that's running away with the game or is there a world for both? Yeah, I think they're functionally trying to achieve two different things, in my opinion. I think Ethereum's goal and objective and mission is to be a decentralized network state, which I think is really important for the sake of humanity. Right. Like if you if you weigh a bunch of different variables, AI and just everything that might come into the future, like having a decentralized network state is really, really important. And I think it plays its role really well doing that.

2:42:02I think Solana is the first blockchain that I've really interfaced with from from an outside org in that I think is really trying to be an organization that's built to win. right and they and they and they want to capture as much you know value in winning and building the biggest and best blockchain in the world and then all the things that come with that right like low latency really fast amazing bd getting all the top advisors in to come and help you know bootstrap and and and help you know ecosystem apps it's really run like a like a silicon valley organization and its function i think is to win right uh but there's two different functions i think i think building a centralized network state and building a blockchain to win, right?

2:42:45And to dominate, you know, tech and to, you know, because blockchains fundamentally are, what are they really, right? A lot of people tell themselves a lot of different stories. To me, they're borderless payments, right? And they're global, and they're global, so global liquidity and global composability, right? Like those are its two functions. And if you actually understand that as like an entrepreneur building in the web, those solve two really big problems, right? Like, like, Like, immense problems, right? Like Stripe used to, you know, Stripe and PayPal would take your money and shut you down and do the whole nine.

2:43:16You know, like blockchain will remove that edge. And so I think they're functionally two different organizations. I think from our perspective, we wanted to launch our token because we wanted everyone to have a piece of our main character, this Internet's Mickey Mouse. We wanted our followers on Instagram and on YouTube and on TikTok to be able to participate, you know, in purchasing that token. And today it's hard to argue that Solana doesn't have the best experience for that person coming from Instagram to then go in and purchase something quickly. Like Ethereum today, even with cheap gas fees, no one wants to spend a couple bucks on some gas fees, even when that's relatively low for the ecosystem.

2:43:55They'll want to spend a couple bucks buying the token, and that's about it. So it seemed like a good fit. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is a fantastic conversation. Yeah, I really appreciated your perspective. We'd love to have you back on again for a longer interview. Yeah. This was great. And I'm excited for our gel blaster nerf battle, basically. Yeah, we need to be able to send me an address. It's going to be pretty obnoxious, the packages I'm going to send. So stay tuned. Okay, great. We'll talk to you soon. Amazing. Thanks for coming on. Cheers. Really quickly before our next guest, Public.

2:44:26Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi-asset investing. Industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Of course, crypto. And next up, we have an in-person guest in the studio. First in-person guest ever. Welcome to the stream. Do you guys need to swap headphones? I'm just going to talk to you about it. Okay. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. I should have worn my suit. I know. You should have worn your suit. I mean, it's... I'm so underdressed. Yeah. Well, fitting that you're the first guest. You've been a close friend and advisor to the show here informally for a long time. Happy Crypto Day.

2:45:00Crypto Day. It's been very fun. It's amazing to get perspectives from so many different parts of the industry, investors, etc. And there's a lot to be optimistic right now. A lot more so than when you started Crypto the Game. Yeah, I feel like we launched season one kind of in the depths of the bear market. It was early 2024. I was trying to think about what to do next. And I know we had spoken. Well, you had had this idea forever. Years, yeah. I can kind of give you the whole backstory, which I know you know, but could probably be helpful context for listeners. But when I first started working on it, for real, everyone was like, you're crazy to build Encrypto right now.

2:45:41But in hindsight, it was kind of the best time to launch. But yeah, I mean, I kind of grew up an obsessive Survivor fan. Watch every single season. They just announced the cast for season 50. I was like off camera reading up on that and apply every year. Never got a callback. but kind of played this like CD-ROM version of Survivor called Survivor Ultimate with my friends growing up. And it was like very, very rudimentary. You picked your tribe mate, you played tic-tac-toe for immunity and you voted each other off against the computer. It was like very, very early, like early 2000s. And I don't know, just kind of like always envisioned this world where I could play a version of Survivor online with my friends.

2:46:25fast forward to my professional life I worked at HQ Trivia for the rise and fall which if you're listening you know you know might remember a live interactive game show and started my career in TV but joined HQ for kind of the grand vision of a live interactive TV network so in the same way that HQ took a game show and made it live and mobile and interactive the same could have and should have been said for a shark tank format or a talent competition or a dating show um and of course in my mind a survivor show so actually first pitched the idea for what is now ctg internally at hq probably six or seven years ago now which is crazy um and then yeah it's just one of those ideas that kept coming up i think i pitched it as an idea for a party around drop uh yep and just kind of like you know was starting to think about what was next a couple years ago and well it's interesting because it was this uh one of the most complex products that you can build right this like social interactive multiplayer constantly evolving game that's happening on chain uh so watching you watching you build it i mean you and and tyler and brian and and the team just uh uh did it very quickly and then got to market and i and i remember uh it very quickly took off and And you very quickly were just, you probably didn't sleep the first week.

2:47:48No, not at all. I mean, it kind of ballooned into this 24-7 game show. I mean, I kind of assumed, you know, the way that it's set up, it's a 10-day season. Every day kind of follows the same format of a daily immunity challenge in the morning. Think like classic arcade games or crypto puzzles or digital scavenger hunts. If you win that challenge, you have immunity and you're safe from the boat that night. everyone else votes people out basically last person standing wins the pot uh and i kind of assumed people would log in in the morning meet their tribe mates make an alliance register a score of a game um go back to work and then kind of come back on that night to vote but uh it it just was so so so time consuming for the players um and and as a result it was just 24 7.

2:48:39no i remember weren't people like basically calling in sick or taking vacation days so that they could My most heavily requested question basically from players between seasons is like, when's the next season so I can request my PTO? What was that early controversy you guys had? I think you navigated it well, obviously, because it turned into a second season and then an acquisition by Uniswap. But I feel like you quickly ran into the nature of crypto is that you're talking. I forget who we were talking about this, but maybe it was Bology. But crypto, because it's so financialized, is effectively incentivizing constant penetration testing and incentivizing the world to basically try to hack your system.

2:49:21And I forget the guy's name. Anish. Anish. I'm sure you guys are buddies now. Yeah, I mean, we made up in the DMs for sure. Yeah. Yeah. So the way that it works is basically you buy your entry for 0.1 ETH. that entry goes towards the prize and the entire prize pot goes towards the winner at the end and I was always kind of concerned that there could be some sort of civil attack someone will try to buy up 51 percent of the entries and basically guarantee themselves a victory you know there were a couple things we did to try to prevent that and we for season one we kind of kept entries uncapped so that people couldn't like necessarily figure out what the 51 % mark would be.

2:50:06But yeah, right before the entries locked and the season began, Anish and his army of bots basically bought up most of the slots and kind of wearing my like Web 2 HQ trivia hat, I was like, oh, bots are bad. Basically like kicked them all out and was like, this is, this was built for real people and real players and uh you immediately got the wrath of crypto twitter which um somehow happens every season to the point where like a few friends joke and think that like i'll intentionally like drum up some ct controversy so more people talk about ctg yeah um but uh i mean i immediately realized that uh you know bots aren't bad in this world and um so part of the game yeah we ended up refunding a niche and making things right.

2:50:57And he was so nice. And we ended on good terms. What was it like bringing Web2 or sort of traditional companies into CTG? Because I remember you had some pretty high-profile partnerships as well. Yeah, Adidas actually sponsored a challenge during Season 2, which was our Season 2 controversy. Wow. No, it's all good. But yeah, I mean, it was so incredibly humbling and refreshing to see that basically after the virality of season one, a brand like Adidas kind of saw this little internet experiment and decided to reach out and ask to be a part of it. So yeah, we had six sponsors for season two, each sponsoring a different challenge, one of which was Adidas.

2:51:39The rest were all kind of like crypto native brands, one of which being Uniswap. Do you expect legacy brands to get more involved with crypto? Every once in a while, we'll see them dip their toes in, whether it's Adidas and CTG or Nike with its artifact, right? Yeah. But it feels like that's died off a little bit. But at the same time, traditional institutions are getting more involved with crypto than ever. Yeah, I think eventually we'll see it. I still think it's kind of a dirty word with like the big Fortune 500, like non-crypto brands. Yeah. the artifact example like didn't go well for Nike.

2:52:15I would say the CTG example probably didn't go well for Adidas which is like a whole nother conversation. But I think we as in crypto builders and pretty much everyone that's been on the show today and that you will speak with has seen some sort of like the wrath of the trenches and the army. And it's not a great feeling. And if you are a large like Fortune 500 brand with like a crisis comms team and you're kind of like seeing all of those replies and you know folks feel like uh basically when the crypto twitter army like goes after brands i think it's really hard to deal with so um having said all that as you know the experience and the ui and the ux gets better and uh you know things like privy like improve the login flow and wallet creation and kind of abstract away all of um basically all of the crypto from these uh experiences i think like big brands won't necessarily know that they're doing quote unquote crypto integrations.

2:53:12It'll all just feel like the internet. That makes sense. How have you seen crypto? I would put CTG in the category of crypto entertainment or crypto gaming. It's one of the few games that it feels like crypto, Twitter, crypto X, like really played and got hyper engaged with, even though it was at a small scale have you seen any other games really capture people's attention I know there was a bunch of like open world games that raised massive amounts of money but then haven't seemingly haven't delivered yeah ironically for a crypto game founder I'm not much of like a gamer myself I think of CTG as much more of a game show than like a video game but in my mind the closest example is Yapster which is is also very heavily inspired by HQ trivia I don't know if you played around with Yapster but But it's an interactive game show where you basically can submit memes.

2:54:08The players can vote on the memes. And, like, the winning meme each show is launched as a token. So it kind of has that. And it's 100 % live. And everyone kind of, like, votes in real time. There's a chat functionality. And because of the speculation of, like, the token that, like, basically wins at the end, it has that feeling of a live show. So I would put the App Store in my mind is like the only other kind of like live interactive game show. That's like really, really exciting me right now. And how big can something like that get in your mind? I think huge. I mean, there's like the secret sauce at HQ was that you could win real money.

2:54:45And like that is the case for like most of these crypto game shows. I think the difference with CTG and App Store is that there's kind of only one winner each time. whereas with something like HQ tons of people could win but at the same time because of that you had folks basically winning like 25 cents or less than that with HQ because it grew so big so yeah I think like I don't necessarily know that like a live interactive meme coin show is going to onboard the masses but there's like tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people on crypto Twitter right now what what are you seeing right now on because I know you'll end up advising or investing in other early stage crypto projects what are you seeing uh as far uh kind of trends in the early stage you clearly made the decision with ctg not to raise money yeah and you had every opportunity to i remember in the early days you would ping me and you'd be like oh this fun you know and i would you know we would have i remember having kind of conversations about why it would probably not be good for ctg if you were to raise and then but many people I think wouldn't have made that same decision yeah no I think uh with regards to raising I think like not every single idea has to be a venture scale idea I mean we've spoken a ton about this you know offline but um I you know I think CTG was uh dreamed up as uh initially a drop like a personal drop uh I think that uh it's not like HQ in the sense that we really embrace seasonality and try to be very close to a TV show and so we technically go off air for like months in between and I think the players need that because it's so intense and we need that because it's so intense yeah yeah I think you know if we had raised we probably would be on that like hamster wheel of like having to build some sort of scalable platform so communities and people can kind of like spin up their own versions of the game and it was just like a very manual process and I felt like it wasn't necessarily the right choice for CTG.

2:56:50But I don't know, I'm excited about Pixie Chess, which I know, you know, our friend Josh has started. And for those listening that aren't familiar, the way that it's been described to me is basically like a noun style auction for different on-chain chess pieces that have magical powers. So you can imagine a queen that goes invisible or a bishop that can go backwards, forward, sideways, et cetera. And every single day, there's a different auction you essentially acquire these pieces add them to your deck and the funds from those auctions go towards different grand slam tournaments that you can like take um basically take your uh deck with you and and play against others um really excited about that uh i've been playing around with um vertigo uh which is a new uh like decentralized exchange on solana that's like anti-sniper so i know um we you know spoke spoke you guys spoke to to ben and alan and And, you know, a lot of these token launchers and tokens kind of have a sniper problem, basically, where someone will buy up most of the supply and instantly dump it.

2:57:54So I think, like, building exchanges with, like, cleaner token protections and anti-sniping mechanisms is something that's just going to be net beneficial to everyone. So, yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind. And then the last is probably Tokenworks, which is, like, the closest thing we have to crypto mischief. they do different like token drops yeah i think i saw you pushing about that yeah really excited so um is brian armstrong next i think so i think we'll see check the calendar well thank you for coming on your first the first official yeah oh my god thank you so much for having me thanks for coming on dylan thanks for all the help on the show we got brian armstrong next the gong is still ringing the studio the gong the gong the real gong rings much longer than the fake gong.

2:58:47Yeah. Well, we're waiting for Brian. Let's tell you about AdQuick. AdQuick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. It's out of home built different, John. It is. It is. And we have Brian Armstrong here. Welcome to the stream, Brian. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me guys. Thanks so much. Welcome. I don't even know where to start. I mean, we were kind of in the same YC batch.

2:59:19My first company was in YC summer 12. It's been Soylent or which one? Yeah, Soylent. It's a weird story because I joined the company shortly after YC and I was in a different YC company. So, but that's a story for another day. I give John problems all the time for not, you know, tapping you on the shoulder and, you know, demanding that you take an angel check in that era. But anyways. Well, 2020 hindsight, I can assure you we were not like the hottest startup in that YC batch at the time. I mean, it was hard to actually raise our seed round, et cetera. But, you know, obviously it worked out. It was not obvious though.

2:59:54Yeah. Was it, was it, what was the incentive for joining Coinbase back during the YC days? Was it a full Bitcoin as a referral fee? Yeah. I mean, I was kind of stealing a page out of the PayPal book where, you know, everybody would get about, I think you could, yeah, if you invited your friends and they onboarded, they got$10 of Bitcoin and you got$10 of Bitcoin. And at the time that was like about one Bitcoin. So crazy to think about. Yeah. And there was a lot of people, I went around to like probably a thousand or more people in the Bay Area at that time. And anybody I could find, I'd be like, hey, do you want some Bitcoin?

3:00:23Like, I'll send it to you on my phone. And I'd try to get them onboarded to the Coinbase app. And yeah, as soon as we started out, it was like five or$6 for a Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you tell the story of Coinbase now? I mean, it's such a huge story do you think about it in particular eras or is is the going public era a different distinct era or or do you do or do you even map it to like the the the bull the bull cycles and the and the bear cycles is that does that have a tangible feel in the coinbase story internal to the company yeah yeah well i i think of it in different so fred wilson had this great thing he told me one time he said like companies have multiple founding moments on the way to being a public company And that was definitely true in our case.

3:01:08So the first era was, it was like Fred Ersam and myself in an apartment, just grinding it out, like, you know, 14 hour days, just doing everything ourselves, like answering customer support tickets, like trying to recruit people, trying to get anybody to join, writing code ourselves, right? And so that was like the pre-product market fit, like, how do we try to get something moving? And then you go through hyper growth, right? And your problems totally changed, which is like, how do we get a real set of leaders into this company? How do we not get hacked? How do we go raise more money, like build a real board?

3:01:43And so you go through this period of hyper growth where we were like, we'd never managed anybody, but we were suddenly we were managing 25, 50, 100, 500 people. And we were hyperscaling, just trying to keep up with all the demand. And then, you know, crypto went through ups and downs. Eventually, Fred decided to go found his own company, which was super successful, like Paradigm. And he's doing another company now. So I had to bring in an executive team that was like its own experience with a bunch of infighting and blowups and drama. And I finally got a exec team that worked. And then we went public and, you know, Emily Choi is like our president and COO now.

3:02:17So she's like, you know, it's multiple foundings along the way to get to these eventual outcomes. It takes like 10 years to be an overnight success, quote unquote. Overnight success. We love overnight. We love 10 year overnight success. We lost the overnight success. We have a soundboard and it plays overnight success. Every time somebody says it took them 10 years to really be successful, we hit that. But what other industries have you looked to for learnings to kind of like build through these boom and bust cycles? Because it feels like, you know, you guys are acclimated to that now. But I know this is, you know, the case, oil and gas is probably a prominent one.

3:02:53Were you able to pick up anything from outside of crypto to help you steer the ship through cycles? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, every company has different challenges. So I actually don't think ours are that bad. But one of the challenges we had when we were getting ready to go public was like our revenue was super unpredictable and volatile, right? Like we'd have a trading quarter where we would just blow it out of the water and we'd be like printing money. And then it'd be down like 70 % the next quarter or something. And, you know, in the public markets, investors really love you to have these predictable revenue streams.

3:03:25I still don't to this day know why they're so fixated on that. It seems like they should be thinking about the growth potential, but they love the predictability of it. And so, yeah, we had to look at oil and gas. There's like some energy brokerage. Like, you know, actually the traditional brokerages like NASDAQ and NYSE, like they have the same issue. They can tell you, one of them told me one time, he's like, if you can tell me what the S &P 500 is going to do next quarter, I'll tell you what our revenue is going to be. But of course, like if you can do that, you've got it made in other ways.

3:03:49So, but, you know, whenever I feel like we're having a bad time, I always look at like the hard tech companies, right? Like the biotech companies in the public markets get beat up way more than we do. They have much less predictable revenue. Their revenue is pushed out way farther. All my friends who are working on hardware companies, I'm like, wow, they're really doing entrepreneurship. You know, I'm like, they're always calling me up. They're like, I've got four weeks of cash. You know, we're trying to raise money. And I'm like, you've been trying to raise money like every month for the last 18 months, just living like one month to the next month.

3:04:25And like, those guys have true grit. So in software, our margins are high and it kind of covers up mistakes that we make. And we actually had revenue relatively early in our journey, whereas in like in biotech, you have to invest in it for 10 years to try to get your first dollar revenue sometimes. Yeah. There were a whole bunch of narratives around crypto back in 2012, even before decentralization, resistance to government control and anonymity, just faster payments, all these different things. What's the state of the union from your perspective? How would you grade the different executions across the original goals?

3:05:02Some of them have just kind of fallen by the wayside as we found different solutions to those problems. But what do you think we've knocked it out of the park on? And what do you think we still have a lot more work to do on? Well, the ultimate vision for crypto was always economic freedom, in my mind. In fact, that's the mission of Coinbase is to increase economic freedom in the world. So that's like how to give people more self-sovereignty more control of their money It enables them to not only like live a freer life and have not be have things taken away from them But it also it's better for society because if we have a society with good property rights and sound money and like Rule of law and these things you could actually try more things If people are rewarded with the upside of their labor, they're gonna go They're gonna go try more ambitious things in the world So you see that there's actually economists who measure across different countries like how high is economic freedom?

3:05:51And you see that in high economic freedom countries, there's like higher GDP per capita, but there's also like less corruption. There's less war. There's lower infant, you know, lower infant mortality, like all these kind of downstream effects. So the ultimate potential of crypto is to get more economic freedom in the world. And we've been trying to push on that through a variety of ways. Like one way we've done it is by getting legislation passed in the U.S. or pushing on that. We had a big influence in this last election. The crypto voters showed up in a massive way. We had like 2 million advocates who raised their hand in the US saying they wanted to elect a pro-crypto congress and candidates.

3:06:25We had like a couple hundred million dollars in the in the Fair Shake super pack. And so we now have the most pro-crypto congress that we've ever seen. And we're on the cusp of getting stablecoin and market structure legislation passed. The other thing is we've been pushing on our products, right? They have to be easier to use for the average person. Like the early crypto products were just it felt like some computer scientists came from on high down the mountain and they tried to make this accessible to mere mortals. and like that was never going to work so the products are slowly getting easier and simpler for average people to use and crypto is growing into these areas like payments and tokenizing securities and it's not just like trading as a as a use case right so we're getting closer and closer but ultimately i think crypto is going to update the entire financial system globally and like the majority of all payments will run on these crypto rails they're just faster cheaper more global and that's how we're going to get more economic freedom in the world do you think the conversation around economic freedom over the next few years will shift away from the U.S.

3:07:23and more towards emerging markets who are adopting digital assets but may face you know push back from from their governments and you know potentially even more aggressive way than we have in the United States over the past four or five years yeah it's a great point because I think the unmet need is higher in some of these other countries emerging markets right where people like in In Turkey, they're getting like 70 % inflation a year or something. It's just like it's devastating to their entire economy. People have very high demand for the dollar and then Bitcoin. Same thing in Nigeria, etc. Now, some of those markets are going to be very resistant to it, like especially if the government is not fully aligned with the people's interests.

3:08:03The government wants to run their fiat currency because then they can kind of print money and abuse it. And it's one of these kind of original sins of fiat currency, right? So or like some of these markets have capital controls, right, like in India. So I think the governments will be somewhat reluctant to embrace crypto in some of these places. But the average person will love it. Like the people are demanding it. They're rushing toward it. The governments are a little hesitant. And so in democratic countries, it'll be allowed because more people will vote for it. But in places like China, they're really cramping down on it.

3:08:38You know, I don't think North Korea is going to add it anytime soon. So it's a little bit like the internet, right? China has the great firewall of China. North Korea has their own private internet. And so some of these like really corrupt regimes, I think will have, they'll try to crush crypto, but in most places in the world, it'll happen. North Korea even has their own Linux distribution, Red Star Linux. Did they? I didn't know that. I gave it a cool name. I mean, you got to admit it's a cool name. It is a cool name. I want to talk about BASE. Obviously, it's powering a lot of consumer crypto use cases right now.

3:09:09like what how did that come about what has it been like incubating something like that inside coinbase yeah a lot of people have asked me about that because they're always surprised that like a relatively big company can still innovate or whatever but i think yeah the way that you know i can't take too much credit for it by the way the big the biggest thing that i did was i we have we have a very entrepreneurial culture different people we've brought in and um jesse paul came to me at one point he was like hey i want to work on a new chain and i was like cool like take a small team, go run at it, you know, like two pizza team or whatever, like five people.

3:09:44And I had no idea if it was going to work. But the biggest thing I didn't, he deserves all the credit, to be honest. The only thing I did was I kind of shielded it from the rest of the organization a little bit and just gave them time to cook. And he went through like five or six iterations. And I saw a couple of these along the way. And I was like, honestly, I have no idea if this is going to work. And it turned out to actually really hit. And so that's, if there is like a secret to this, which I don't, I don't know if it's a secret, but it's like, you have to allocate some percentage of your budget to these venture bets and make them small bets because you know you want to have two two three four people like working on it kind of like a yc company not like don't put a hundred people on it or something it's going to be like a big bureaucratic thing as long as they're small bets you can tolerate like you know 75 of them not working out and once in a while something hits and it pays for all the rest of the bets i mean it's just it's kind of like having a venture capital internal at the company so we actually set up this thing called we call it like next bets.

3:10:39And twice a year, anybody in the company can come pitch. It's like a group of people, we call it like internal venture capital. And they're basically the people who run different product groups. But there's also some really kind of like smart young engineers, et cetera. Basically, if any one of them raised their hands and said, I want to fund that out of their budget, then you're greenlit to go do it. You don't have to get a unanimous yes. You just need one person to say yes. And there's actually some pretty big, like USDC, I will tell you, I actually voted no on USDC, which was a terrible, now it's like almost a billion dollars of revenue or something for us.

3:11:13And I voted no because I was a little skeptical. I didn't think it was decentralized enough or something. But luckily, somebody else on our team voted yes. So it got funded and it turned out to be a massive thing. So it shows you how much I know. That's incredible. I want to talk about putting stocks on chain. And you go back to that original Peter Thiel lecture in the 90s talking about maybe we could have a digital dollar that's not backed by gold or the treasury, but actually backed by stocks. Is there a world where that happens? What needs to happen? Is there a world where Coinbase shares are securitized on chain?

3:11:48And I know you probably can't give like forward guidance around that, but like walk me through the changes that would need to be made. And is that even a good idea in your mind? Yeah. Yeah. Well, just starting first with that PayPal point that you made. I mean, there's a great book, I think it's called PayPal Wars. I believe it's about the founding of PayPal. And, you know, it really, there was a lot of like that libertarian ideology of like economic freedom was in the origin, the founding team. As you can imagine, they went on to do many other things. And I think like in many ways, crypto is fulfilling the vision that the early PayPal team started with around economic freedom.

3:12:25And the main reason I can think of for that. I mean, there's a lot of reasons. They got acquired by eBay, et cetera. The team changed in some of the motivations. But at the end of the day, nobody wanted a US company to run the global financial system. If you were the Indian government or random person in some country, do I really want to put all my money in some US company? But if it was a decentralized protocol that nobody controlled, kind of like the internet, it's like, okay, we'll all kind of integrate with that. And so Bitcoin was the key innovation, I think, that unlocked that opportunity.

3:12:58You also asked about like kind of tokenizing securities. And I do think that's an exciting area. We're pretty interested in that as well. You know, it's like the trading of stocks is just one more area of financial services that could be improved by crypto. I mean, as an example, there's a lot of people around the world who want access to U.S. securities, but they don't have a simple way to open a brokerage account and track that. So it's like the international access would be better. You could get like perpetual futures markets spun up for these stocks, which would give traders more leverage.

3:13:27You could do 24-7 trading. You could do fractional shares. So I actually think like most traditional securities are going to get tokenized on chain in the next five years. We've been working a little bit with like the SEC task force on this and trying to find the right path to do it. So it's something we're interested in. But yeah, obviously nothing to announce today. Where are you getting the most leverage from AI internally? I can think of a bunch of different potential applications but I haven't seen you do online virtue signaling like other certain CEOs have but I'm curious you know what you're excited about yeah okay well so I think we're doing a lot of the current best practices that most people are doing with well run companies and then there's a couple areas on the horizon that we're that are more crypto specific that I'll tell you too so I mean the basic ones you probably know it's like we got onboarded all of our engineers to co-pilot and cursor and everything like that so we got 100 of them on board and that was good um our customer support i think like maybe 60 of inquiries are being answered by ai now which is really good we also for a long time been building ai models around fraud prevention and like detecting risky transactions um so but you can yeah obviously like any process within the company that has a clearly defined input and output you can train a model on and like generating compliance reports.

3:14:46So we're trying to integrate it everywhere. The ones that are a little more on the frontier or like crypto specific for us. So one is that I guess people are calling it agentic commerce, right? Which is like, you know, your agent is increasingly kind of like your assistant and it might need to book you a ticket to go somewhere or it might need to get through a paywall or something. Like if you're like, hey, go read all the research papers from Nature on this topic and give me a report. Like, OK, those cost money to ingest it. And so AI agents are going to need to have a wallet to go pay for stuff.

3:15:22We think that crypto will be the backbone of that. Like USDC on base is starting to be adopted by some. We actually released this open source thing called Agent Kit, which makes it easy for any LLM to have a wallet. And we're working on a couple of checkout type solutions with other players that we'll announce soon where the AI agent can actually get through the checkout flow in many of these e-commerce sites and pay with USDC on base. So I think agentic commerce will be a big one. I think it's also we're going to get like AI agents that can be kind of like your RIA, like your registered investment advisor or almost like your trading bot.

3:15:59So imagine like you you're in the Coinbase app and you kind of tell them, hey, I want to put like a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars something into this account. And you're talking to a trading bot and you're like, just go make me money. You know, I don't know. Don't make mistakes. Don't make tell it. You know, I joked about this before. Ten percent compounded return daily. Don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes. Yeah. And it may have some questions for you or like it may make mistakes. And like there's a lot of details to figure out. But I think having a trading bot like do a lot of that for you.

3:16:31And it's like, hey, make sure like if I if it goes up a lot, lock in some gains, you know, so I don't regret it later. You can give it kind of abstract concepts like that and it'll go. It knows how to make the limit orders for you or whatever. Yeah. How do you think that how do you imagine that type of capability really being dispersed? Because I imagine I mean, obviously, there's people with, you know, trading bots today and they're actually I imagine some of them are so effective that they just say, well, we don't actually want to release this because we should just use it ourselves. But it sort of could potentially tie into this dynamic between closed source AI and open source AI.

3:17:08And is that, do you think part of Coinbase's opportunity is to make sure these types of tools are available to as many people as possible versus just a handful of traders? Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, so we're not doing prop trading on our own balance sheet. So we're not like trying to be a hedge fund or something with a proprietary algorithm. So our goal would be to like make this available to as many consumers as possible. And yeah, I mean, it might, it's kind of adjacent to financial literacy, right? Like many people might come in and be like, yeah, I want to make like crazy returns. And this thing can kind of tell you, well, okay, that's pretty high risk.

3:17:42Like, why don't you like dollar cost average into this, um, diversified portfolio over time. And like that might be more in line with your risk appetite, but if you want to take 10 % of it and try something more high risk. Like, you know, so it can teach people about these concepts. And while also doing what they ultimately want to do, what they would have done anyway in the app, but it's just making it easier for them. Totally. Can you talk about the extortion attack, how you handled it? And I'm particularly interested in going forward. There's a lot of tools in your toolkit. You can throw more money, more people, more technology at the problem.

3:18:18What's the next few years look like in terms of beefing up security? Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, we've had a really good track record on security at Coinbase over the last 12 years. And even in this attack, you know, we didn't see any private keys or funds accessed directly by the attacker. So what they, unfortunately, they were able to do is they were able to bribe some of our customer support agents and to share with them, like, personal information on customers, like name, address, et cetera. And, you know, they want this information, attackers want this information because they want to text people, call people, try to socially engineer them and to get them to send their money.

3:18:51And so unfortunately, they were able to successfully do that with a handful of customers, which we've reimbursed 100 % at this point. And then they sent us this demand once once we were, you know, they realized they'd been found out and customers were kind of getting educated about this. They sent us this demand for$20 million or we're going to release all this information. And it was an interesting moment. We know we came together and thought about it. And, you know, on the one hand, we could have paid them the money. Right. But we were we we talked to a bunch of security researchers and people.

3:19:20And they were like, you know, there's really what typically happens in these cases. If you pay the extortion, they're just going to come back in three months and extort you again. And it's like, do we really want to be in this situation where we're like funding their next attack and like rewarding this kind of behavior? Or do we want to try to create a deterrent to this kind of behavior? So we decided to flip it. And as you probably saw, we put out a$20 million bounty for any information leading to their arrest and conviction. And that's been kind of a crazy experience. I mean, just as one data point for comparison, after 9-11, the US government put out a$25 million bounty on Osama bin Laden.

3:19:56And we put out a$20 million bounty on these guys. So we had like maybe 5 ,000 tips or inquiries come into the email that we put out there. Most of it was junk. And we kind of whittled it down. There's about like 70 or so credible leads, I would say. um we always have to be a little careful because some you know some of these could be like the the uh the threat actor themselves sort of trying to throw us off the trail or run down some wild goose chase um some of the other people sending in uh tips or leads are like other threat actors who kind of have beef with these guys or like they're um it's kind of like no honor amongst thieves right yeah and uh so you know i'm which is fine with me but it's no i i really enjoyed the the you know, I saw the video that you put out and I enjoyed imagining the dynamic of the thieves, you know, sitting around a table, realizing that, you know, the sort of game theory of who's going to turn in who, you know, it was a, it was a nice, it was a nice visual.

3:20:55Yeah. Yeah. So that's exactly what we wanted to create was a real deterrent here. It's like, if you're, if you're going to attack our customers, you know, you need to look over your shoulder and always wonder like, who's going to turn me in or who did I interact with in my entire life who might have known about this who's going to turn me in. So anyway, I can't say too much more. We're working closely with law enforcement, but we're going to run down those leads and hopefully get a good result. I mean, you asked about beefing up security too, I think. Yeah, just kind of going forward, you can imagine let's hire more people, better people.

3:21:28Let's throw technology at this. Let's monitor comms and where data is flowing. Is this more of a technology issue or a talent issue or an oversight issue or policies? How do you see investing in the next round of security? The thing that popped into my mind, the way that you're already leveraging AI is there's a world in the future where a more secure CX function would be entirely code, right? And you wouldn't, it'd be much, you know, you could create an environment. Or at least AI oversight of everything, of every interaction. But yes, I'm interested to hear what your take is yeah well it's a great point i mean the the 60 of inquiries being answered by ai now i mean they're they're not going to get bribed i mean there are other threat act threat threat vectors with ai too right because people are always trying to jailbreak these agents and things so it's not there's not a perfect solution and i don't think we're going to have we're still going to have like human in the loop on a lot of things for a long time um but yeah there you know never let a good crisis go to waste like this was definitely a good moment for us to go implement a bunch of changes and we mobilized a team of about three or four hundred people like right away that just went into overdrive kind of trying to lock down a lot of these systems a lot of it was not just um our own systems there's vendors that we work with that you know we needed to push them to hit a higher bar as well um we did relocate some of our customer support operations um you know the ones that got targeted the most were these overseas um contractors and things like that and you know you can imagine like some of the money being offered as bribes that would have been like pretty impactful even in the united states if people were there and we need to have 24 7 coverage etc so it's not a perfect solution to like just move it all in the u.s and pay people more like it doesn't 100 solve it but we are relocating some of those support operations and then essentially just hardening our systems like luckily we had we had some good controls already which limited the scope of it but we obviously didn't do enough and so we've got to keep investing in that.

3:23:23Do you have any advice for younger builders, maybe the younger version of yourself? You know, we had Chris Dixon on the show earlier today, and he said that crypto, you know, one of crypto's biggest problems now is just a lack of talent. There is talent here, but it's probably, you know, could have 10 times more to create a lot of great outcomes. I'm curious if you feel the same way around kind of talent in the industry today? Yeah, well, I think there's a, we've never been, it's never had it easier actually recruiting great people into Coinbase. I think there's, there is like a great, probably that's due to our scale, right?

3:24:02Startups have to really fight for talent. But I think if you look at like the top five most exciting tech trends in the world right now, like my five would probably be AI, crypto for increasing economic freedom and all that, brain machine interfaces, fusion energy and longevity, I think is also in no particular order, by the way, like long, you know, there's a biotech company I co-founded called new limit, which is working on epigenetic programming, which is really cool. It's an, it's a longevity company. We talked to the founder, we were blown away. We came away extremely excited by that conversation.

3:24:33Nice. Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, so I think to me, it's like, how do we accelerate progress? Sure. And I think the smartest people from a talent point of view, like the smartest kids up and coming, you know, people, whatever, they all want to work in things that are going to change the world. So like, those are those are the top five. And, you know, I think like there's actually a pretty incredible amount of talent in crypto. It's like, you just got to go try. You got to go try ambitious bets and be OK with some of them not working. Like, I think sometimes people think that, well, Coinbase started and now it's big.

3:25:03And so they're just a success. And it's like, no, that's not true. Like we're trying these venture bets all the time. Like I there's others that didn't work, right? Like we launched Coinbase NFT and it was pretty much a flop. Like we launched Coinbase in Japan. We invested all this money and time, like didn't work for a bunch of reasons. I can tell you if you want. And we shut that down. And so we're constantly like, you know, stay hungry, stay foolish. Like we're trying new ideas a lot and you have to be okay with like two out of three or three out of four just not working. What about the Superbowl ad?

3:25:35Was that a similar one person green lights it and who green lit it? and what was the story with the QR code? Yeah, well, as usual, success has many fathers and mothers, but it partially came out of a rushed, like a short time, constrained speed creativity, right? So we actually didn't, I think by the time we bought the ad, we didn't have enough time to go film something for months and months. And so the team just got really creative and I don't even remember who it was in the meeting, like our CMO and there was an agency involved and it was a collaborative effort where someone was like, you know, well, what if we did kind of like a direct, uh, direct marketing type campaign where we want people just install the app, but you can never measure the result of most of these brand ads, right?

3:26:20You're always like, I don't know, did it drive revenue or not? Nobody really knows. So we're like, well, we could actually measure how many people just like scan it and sign up if we, if we just put a QR code on the screen. So I don't remember who said it actually in the room, but it obviously it worked. It was cool. Yeah. And, and, and you You tracked the ROI and it was positive? Okay, so that's actually a very complicated... We looked at this... I'll bore you with the exact details, but long story short, so our site actually crashed because we got about 20 or 30 million visits in 20 seconds.

3:26:57And we knew there was going to be a big surge. And so we had, I think the first page loaded and it was heavily cached. but then like 20 million people started going through the signup flow and like everything shut down so we had to email a bunch of them later to come actually come back and finish it um long story short so we lost like probably about a third of the value in just like overwhelming demand that we unfortunately couldn't scale to but it would have been very proper it's it was still profitable depending how you count it the fact that we're talking about the ad today means something very memorable.

3:27:32Yeah. The brand value alone, maybe, maybe paid for itself, even with none of the direct revenue. I have one last question that we'll let you get out of here. Um, uh, and feel free to just, uh, take it as like meta commentary on the nature of the question, but who is Satoshi Nakamoto? Um, so the official answer is it doesn't really matter because like the idea stands on its own. And so if anybody ever comes out and we find out who it is like in their, their will or, you whatever. But the unofficial answer I think is probably some combination of like Hal Finney and Nick Szabo and maybe one other person.

3:28:10But that's my guess is that it was a collaboration between those people. But ultimately it doesn't matter. Hal Finney is frozen at Alcor but he's no longer living. So we don't want to, you know, but maybe if Alcor actually works, which is a big if in the future we can bring them back to life. We'll find out. Yeah, that'd be amazing. Yeah, we'll have them on the show. We'll have them on the show. Yeah. That'd be fantastic. Jordy, any other questions? No, this was great. This was fantastic. Thank you so much. You're our first public company, Fortune 500 CEO. Yeah, that's right. So thanks for doing this.

3:28:45This is a big milestone for us. We really appreciate it. Well, I love that you guys are championing tech and it's, yeah, the enthusiasm is palpable. So I get to see your clips all over social media. Enthusiasm? What are you talking about?

3:29:01we're gonna need a bigger gong we're gonna need a bigger gong thank you it's great it's great having you on brian uh and uh thank you for the work that you do we'll talk to you soon you guys soon bye cheers great hit john great great hit the the gong is it's working wonders uh next up we have suna from volt capital coming in is it volt i'm gonna take one minute yeah i'll talk to Suna. Let me tell you really quickly about Wander. I got to sing the song alone. Find your happy place. Find your, find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views. $50 million Series B.

3:29:42Oh yeah, today. Congratulations. Hit the gong one more time. You're already on your way out. Size of Wander,$50 million Series B. Congratulations Congratulations to John Andrew, Kyle, the whole team. Fantastic. You guys are crushing it. Book of Wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And John Andrew is coming on the show tomorrow. Fantastic. I'm very excited about that. Fantastic. But amazing milestone. Well, stay locked in. We've got four more guests. Our next guest is Suna. Hopefully, we can bring her in and keep the conversation going.

3:30:22How are you doing? Hey. Sorry. It's been a big stream, been a big day, but glad to have you here. Would you mind kicking us off? I was so happy about it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great puzzling everyone together, getting everyone. It's also hard because I'm not, as it's very clear from this stream, I am not crypto native at all. And so the first time we tried to schedule this, we tried to schedule you, was during that big crypto conference in Dubai. And everyone was like, what are you thinking everyone is going everyone who matters in crypto is going to be busy and they're going to be 12 hours off your time zone and then we wound up scheduling it today and there's this massive bitcoin conference unfortunately some people you know were able to hop on the stream uh but it's but it's a great community and so everyone's been able to break it down and explain it like we're five because we effectively are but would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and yeah, what you're excited about.

3:31:23Yeah, sure thing. So I am at Volt Capital. What we focus on is pre-seed and seed crypto companies. And I mean, the reason we even started Volt Capital is if you look at the landscape of crypto funds, there aren't really that many that have a senior partnership that have all founded companies before or built a team from the ground up. And that really is the DNA of the fund. And so what we do is we focus on founder first philosophy in terms of how we index on investments. And then also we've all been founders ourselves as well. And we're focused in terms of like on a barbell strategy in terms of the thesis.

3:32:02One, there's established markets. And by the way, this isn't live, right? It is. Oh, okay. You're live. So there's established markets like payments, DeFi. Yeah. And I think the camera is OK. There's established markets like DeFi, payments, stable coins that are taking on these tens of trillions of dollars markets. Sure. But then also, I mean, right now the rest of the world is waking up to stable coin potential. Yep. Stable coin started about five to seven years ago. Yeah. So if you look at what the net new narrative is right now, it's largely around real world case applications for crypto. and what we focus on is largely crypto AI intersection.

3:32:48And then that oftentimes look like crypto and robotics or like crypto and strictly crypto and AI or also D-Pen. And Jordi, I know like you and I had collaborated on that essay a while back where we go through the different verticals and potentials. That's cool. Yeah, what is the state of real world assets on chain? I remember during the last cycle, Sam Altman or Sam Lesson was on the Logan Bartlett show talking about maybe your mortgage will be on chain, maybe physical real estate will be on chain at some point. And there was a whole bunch of legal and technical and financial issues to work through to actually make that happen.

3:33:24Are people optimistic about that narrative in real world assets? Or has it moved to a completely different trajectory? Yeah, no, we're absolutely excited about that. I think for a few reasons. One is institutional demand is here. Secondly, a lot of the tech has been figured out. But the tech wasn't really the tough part. The tech was probably an iota of it. If you look at the distribution of teams, it's like, all right, you have an engineering team, like 20 or 30, but then you have like hundreds of people focusing on recourse and the ratio was pretty disproportionate in terms of what they were focused on.

3:33:54And with regulatory language being cleared up and getting more approval from the administration and I guess more legitimacy for the space, it's really paved the way. But what we're focused on when we talk about real-world applications, in addition to that, are like we're seeing companies at the intersection of crypto and robotics that are finding innovative ways to collect and check for quality assurance of data in massive global ways that you aren't able to do with existing rails particularly for robotics because there isn't really a common crawl equivalent for robotics like there is the way we train web2 or like internet lms and then And also like space and crypto.

3:34:36We're seeing companies build at the intersection there, like out of steady research, so like really domain experts in space that are finding really interesting ways to create data marketplaces at the intersection of crypto and space. One thing that we've seen, and great to see you, by the way, one thing that we've seen from, I think, a number of the different conversations today is it feels like consensus that agents will use tokens or that the agentic web will be leveraging tokens. As an investor, what are the kind of different kind of layers of the stack that you're looking at, whether it's, you know, the agent layer, infrastructure, the actual tokens themselves?

3:35:14How are you thinking about investing into that trend broadly? So I'm going to say something contrarian around banking agents. And I don't think from a venture standpoint, it makes sense to invest via private equity, particularly because a lot of that value capture is going to be done through enterprises. We already saw Coinbase rollout X402, which allows agent to agent payments. And they already have massive distribution channels. So you are already starting off at a massive disadvantage as a startup. And instead, what we're looking at in terms of crypto AI, there's a lot to be done on synthetic data generation.

3:35:53There's a ton to be done on the federated learning side in terms of like how do you train models when you're dealing with sensitive data around health or finance. So there are way bigger markets to go after that I think are more appropriate for startups versus companies that can be rolled out. As we've already seen from these larger incumbents. Yeah, we're talking to the founder of Prime Intellect, kind of similar idea of distributed computing, wiring it all together with crypto makes a ton of sense to kind of use those latent resources. But you're saying that the same thing can exist for data markets.

3:36:28Is the goal there? With regard to robotics data, you would think that if this evolves the same way that the LLM, RLHF market evolved, it's like scale AI is just going to go and centralize it all and then sell access to that. Is there some sort of underpinning fundamental difference with robotics training data that would make it more native to an on-chain environment? Yes. So a few things. So one is up until recently, a large way that we would train these robots is through physical sensors and actually having to run physical simulations. And what DeepMind came up with was a paper last year where they show that you can train robots purely on egocentric vision data.

3:37:14And egocentric vision data is point of view data. It's like GoPro video. So they train robots to play soccer using egocentric vision data or this video. and there isn't a common crawl equivalent or just like these massive data sets where you have footage at the right angle or right height to then feed to these robots to be able to train them and the problem is not everyone has like the balance sheet of like a tesla or like the ability to go and then collect that and so the best way to do that is distributed in a distributed way and so there are companies that are working on on one hand compensating users for uploading video data that specific companies need.

3:37:55And then on the other hand, and it's like we're more like the scaly eyepiece comes in, is you can disincentivize or slash users essentially like a built in penalty for uploading poor quality data that's like pixelated or at the wrong height or angle and streamline that all in the protocol level. And so that unlocks a massive amount of potential in terms of the economics of these marketplaces, in terms of the amount of data that you can collect and the diversity of the set of data. Yeah, it's interesting to flip around because we've been talking about VO3 and Google's massive advantage there with the YouTube data set.

3:38:28I've produced, I mean, through the show, we've produced hundreds of hours of video content. It goes on to a few platforms. It doesn't go on to every platform. Like now we're on most of them, so most of the hyperscalers could effectively train on our data. But if you're a YouTuber and you're just releasing on YouTube, vending that data to another training platform is something that's not really accessible. Because obviously YouTube's not just going to go license all that data to another company to train. Very interesting. The problem is for robotics, right? Yeah, similar. Because you have task-specific footage.

3:39:06What is the state of the crypto seed market today? Is it collaborative, sharp elbows? Also, I mean, the dynamic I'm interested in is like, it seems like it's easier than ever to just like spin up a coin in two seconds with one of these new pump coins and then that's your seed round. But it feels like that's still not a perfect substitute for traditional venture capital. But is that competitive with what you do these days? Like there's so many alternative sources for funding in crypto. In many ways, you could also make the argument that companies are going, you know, creating tokens so fast that it's potentially good for seed because maybe you need a seed round, but you don't need the series A or the series B.

3:39:51Sure, sure. And, you know, maybe limit dilution. But maybe don't get squeezed as much. Yeah. Yeah. So every cycle we see this meme or it's like, will crypto kill VC? And every single cycle it doesn't work. And the reason is because the quality of capital matters. And what founders, like what first time founders or founders or people that aren't even founders, what they don't realize is that when you have and you guys, it's like when you have a venture fund on the cap table, it's not just getting the capital. Capital is now a commodity more than ever. it's the support you're getting from that particular fund and the legacy or brand name that they're going to give your company to help de-risk it which helps you recruit better you know be on on news outlets otherwise you know wouldn't wouldn't really listen to you because you don't have a brand name around you and it's just your startup and so those intangibles matter more than the capital you're taking on and that's the lesson that you see these founders learn over and over again when they think they can just like launch a meme coin and then call that their financing for the rest of their lives.

3:40:54Yeah. What are the other value adds that VCs are pushing right now in defense tech? We're seeing VCs effectively set up like lobbying firms in D.C. to help with that go to market with the Department of Defense. I imagine that at least staying ahead of regulatory changes in crypto makes a lot of sense. But what are the other vectors other than, hey, we might refer a couple engineers. years, we might get you a couple of press pieces. What are the outside the box value adds that a VC can bring to the table? Yeah. On the defense note, I've also heard of some funds purchasing the American flags that they all have.

3:41:29Because there's actually like a division of the government that provides them for a flag you're not getting it from any retail store. And that's, I guess, out of the box in defense. But in terms of out of the box, like value add and crypto, there There are the universals, like you said, like recruiting and helping put together the roadmap and helping like next rounds of financing. But one thing that we're doing at Vault that I think is pretty unique is we're actually building a simulation engine for deep end protocols where you can input different parameters for the network that you're building out and see based on average inflows and outflows, how you can expect that network to perform in different environments over time.

3:42:11and you can update number of nodes, number of like what you anticipate and number of end users being. And so getting really sophisticated around technical value adds that help the team move the bottom line in terms of revenue generation, I think is the real thing that crypto venture funds should be focusing on beyond introductions to people that can recruit or market makers and things like that. What do you think the first truly breakout what about D-PIN product will be? Is WorldCoin classified as D-PIN or is that not the right framework? I know there's the cell company, there's hotspots, but what kind of categories broadly are you most excited about?

3:42:57Yeah, there's this joke where if you squint hard enough, almost everything's D-PIN, like even Bitcoin is technically D-PIN because there's a harder component. But WorldCoin absolutely has broken through mainstream. I mean, they were just on the Time magazine cover. The things that we're more broadly interested in regarding D-PIN are, like I said, the crypto robotics angle, but then also the crypto space angle. So there are teams that are building out. I don't know if you've seen that chart from our world in data where you can see the number of objects we've launched into space. And it is just, I mean, it's not even hockey stick growth.

3:43:30It's like a vertical line almost. And these are like CubeSats, probes, landers, like whatever, or crew landers and others. And that's going to be a problem real fast, right? Like we need better anti-collision software. We need to be able to track like silent satellites, which are almost like second strike defense capabilities, but in the sky. And one way to do that is by booking out commercial grade telescopes and being able to have eyes on the sky data that way. But usually they're booked out days in advance. You have stale data when you get access to that. The other way is to just crowdsource it.

3:44:03Like a lot of people have electronic telescopes to use anyway around the world that are hobbyists are taking imaging in the sky 24 seven and you can compensate them. And then on the demand side, charge companies to access that data. And so we're seeing a lot of interesting plays around orchestration data marketplaces that are tackling very unique, dynamic, up to the minute data that we don't have in traditional rails. Very cool. Very cool. I think the broader... I don't want to make too much of a joke, but I do think we should let the aliens access pump, you know, pump fun. For sure. They should be able to...

3:44:40100%. Extraterrestrials should be able to launch. That's the first thing they should do when they arrive. It's kind of a gateway to crypto. It's kind of welcome to America. Yeah, welcome to humanity. No, but I believe we should put crypto in space. I agree. I'm excited. Crypto everywhere. Thank you so much for stopping by. This is a lot of fun. Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you for helping us understand all these different things. Yeah, this is great. Very cool. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Tune in. Bye. Cheers. Next up, we have Mert Mumtaz from Helios coming in the studio.

3:45:08We'll get a little intro from him. We got to talk to you about Bezel first. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. With Bitcoin at 110 SK, you can get a Nautilus. You got to rotate into Nautiluses. Welcome to the stream, Mert. How are you doing? Good, sir. How are you doing? I'm great. Would you mind taking us through a little introduction of yourself and your company just to kick us off? Sure, of course. Yeah. My name is Mert. I work on Helios, which is not Helium. I know Kyle was on. He was talking about his investment in Helium, which we get confused a lot.

3:45:43And Helios does infrastructure, high-performance infrastructure for Solana. And I also shitpost a lot on the Twitter.com. That's great. Let's give it up for all of that. Sounds like you're doing God's work. What does infrastructure mean in this context? Are you building data centers? Are you just managing them? Are you just deploying nodes? Are you writing software? What's the shape of the team look like? Yeah, I mean, the short answer is yes. And what I mean by that is we do some combination of all of those. Probably the least worst way to think about it is like some combination of Cloudflare, AWS, and maybe Stripe.

3:46:24And so in this context, we basically help developers or traders or whoever wants the data to get data from Solana super fast in a structured way and also write data to it super fast. Got it. What are the different tradeoffs? You mentioned Cloudflare. Like, is geolocation important as you build out infrastructure like this? Yeah. So it depends on the blockchain, but Solana has a lot of pretty advanced trading activity. um now the assets that they're trading might are a little funny because you might get like uh not citadel but like let's say similar types of players really co-locating their servers to ape like far coin or something um but like the the co-location and like these latency games do play a pretty big role yeah how how are how advanced are the high frequency trading operations what are they using i know jane street writes everything in o camel are we seeing like low level programming languages being used to trade these meme coins now?

3:47:25Oh yeah, definitely. Like you, you have people, I mean, I don't know if the audience here would consider like C and Rust that low level, but like everything from C and Rust to some people will get extremely degenerate and start going into assembly for certain parts of the stack or like raw networking code. So yeah, it's, it's quite a serious game played with very interesting assets a lot of fun what what kind of players exist that don't like to talk about what they're doing and aren't aren't loud that maybe aren't that maybe aren't doing anything that's that's you know morally wrong or anything like that but are just sort of uh uh under the radar under the radar they just don't want to talk about their alpha because they don't want to bring a bunch of competition so the question is what kinds of people like that exist yeah like are they What's the shape of their operation?

3:48:16What's the scale these days? What are the different types of groups? Are they coming from other – is it a new desk and an existing hedge fund? Or are these completely new operations that have just scaled up from like an individual trader? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's pretty unique in that you have the existing types of like quants from Chicago or New York who will have some sort of operation. not all of them um but like probably the ones that you know of already from trad fi a good amount of them are already kind of playing this game um and then they'll compete with like a set of interesting actors um some of those actors might be like some of the prop trading shops from like tokyo um or or just other parts of asia but then they'll be like competing with like this random 17 year old kid from like estonia in his basement and like that kid uh actually tends to And it's not just like a specific kid here, but like that persona.

3:49:12And so crypto is interesting because you now have all these guys kind of on the same, roughly the same playing field. And it's interesting because it's also kind of why Solana was started by Anatoly, which is he basically wanted, he had this vision that I think he got a front run like once or something on one of these things. And he got so mad. He's like, okay, you know what? I'm just going to build this decentralized NASDAQ where everybody can compete. that's amazing uh what is what uh in your mind what's the most important uh elements of the solana roadmap going forward from here uh it feels like a lot's been built out there's a very healthy ecosystem but job's not finished what's what what what in your mind is like uh the most exciting upcoming improvements yeah so uh we have a very detailed roadmap that i wrote about on solaneroadmap.com.

3:50:05And when you go to that site, basically you'll see four words and it just says increase bandwidth, reduce latency, nothing else to it. And basically everything is centered around making the thing go faster. And like there's, I think Kyle was talking about double zero as well, which is like a new fiber layer where you can do some more advanced like network level filtering. We have like Jump, for example, building a new client in C, which is meant to be much more performance. But everything, roughly speaking, on the tech side is always centered around, how do we just make the thing go from point A to point B faster?

3:50:46And from a, let's say, a cultural or socioeconomic lens, it's very much about what we call the fat thesis, which is founders apps tokens um so really just how do we attract how do we form this association in somebody's mind if they're like a product builder um how do they think about or why would they think about solana first right so that when you have ben pasternak's or lucas of the world or alan um why should they pick solana and that's because um like people like me but also everybody from solana foundation um and and like investors and whatnot um how do we set up like the best friendly friendliest founder infrastructure.

3:51:24So it's kind of like, you know, the Y Combinator of crypto in a sense. Yeah. What is the state of the UAE crypto scene? And how much do you actually feel inclined to travel outside of the UAE versus just waiting for people to come to you? Oh, that's a great Good question. Well, I am in the UAE like 360 days out of the year. But then now I'm in Montana where it's like UAE has no nature and then Montana has all the nature. So it's like this barbell strategy. But like so I'm I moved to the UAE from Canada, Toronto specifically, where like it is illegal to hold over or trade over 30 ,000 CAD, which is really like$8 USD.

3:52:13worth of any coins except for Bitcoin, Ethereum, which fair enough. And then Litecoin and then Bitcoin cash. Okay. So like, and leverage trading is illegal. So just to give you an idea of how these are. Banned leverage? That's so un-American. I'm unsurprised. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. Okay. So yeah. I think it's because like one of the pension funds was like an investor in FTX or something. Oh, yeah, that's right. Which, you know, interesting. But like in the UAE, in terms of crypto specifically, for example, I can pay my phone bill in USDC. And I have, which is pretty crazy. And the government actually is like quite interested in like getting you, you know, on the phone and really trying to work out how do we actually like support the builders here as opposed to some other jurisdictions.

3:53:06But like the UAE, I like referring to it as kind of like the hotel for crypto where like it's kind of just in the middle. So whenever you're flying anywhere, people just stop by. I remember the last time you wanted to host this crypto day, there was like a massive conference there. It really shows you how native I am to crypto. I'm completely out of the loop. In fact, it ties to my next question. The last during the last cycle, I was really captured by the story of Solana. I thought the founders had a fascinating story. Obviously still kind of coming from the outsider perspective but I appreciated the technology they were building.

3:53:43There was that meme of like SQLana. It's not as decentralized as it should be. It's not as pure of a technology as other chains. Talk to me, give me an update on that. Has that, have the problems that people were surfacing, have those problems been solved or were they never problems to begin with? Is it all just memes and it doesn't really matter because it's just about the perception? Obviously, the perception of Bitcoin has changed a ton. It was originally like, oh, it's going to be completely privacy-based and it's very traceable. There's been an evolution of the Bitcoin narrative. Has the Solana narrative evolved and kind of taken me through the last couple of years?

3:54:22Right. So with Twitter, most of the debate or discussions, let's say, happen on crypto. Twitter, which is an amazing place for intellectual sparring, let's say. Definitely nothing gets straw manned or taken out of context. And so like SQLana, for example, was a jab from somebody from Ethereum, who obviously is not a very big fan, but that's okay. And it was basically trying to draw the parallel that Solana is actually like this centralized database. And basically, I made somewhat of a career out of saying that's wrong aggressively on the internet. And it's, of course, wrong because fundamentally, Solana is a blockchain where you have thousands of different nodes.

3:55:10And really what a blockchain does is it's a bunch of different nodes functioning as one node, right, so that you shouldn't be able to actually tell. There was some certainly quite valid criticisms, and there are still today. One of those was that like Solana would go down at like very high activity, right? So in 2022, there was this whole NFT craze where people would like really try to mint pictures of like these stones, pixelated apes on the internet. And it started on Ethereum, but then Ethereum fees obviously went up. And so they came to Solana. But like Solana was not expecting people to be that passionate about certain pictures.

3:55:53And so that exposed a lot of interesting engineering problems in the core architecture. And we basically took those learnings and then we iterated a few better designs for the blockchain. And so what that allowed for is now when the next cycle came, which was with, you know, meme coins and, you know, the president of the united states launching uh trump coin and then his wife following right after that um when that actually happened this time the chain was actually ready to handle it and that's why solana has been um basically like the main uh um venue for most of these where were you when where were you when the the you opened x and saw the the president posting a meme coin do you remember where you were were you sleeping oh man this this is that okay so i had just bought eight sleep okay no um it was it had uh just came to the uae um it's literally the last ad we have to do five year warranty 30 night risk retrial free returns code tbn tbn free shipping you go check it out continue so you're in a deep slumber you're like night you got 90 minutes of deep sleep you get you're comfortable somebody shake you awake what happened Amen.

3:57:07Yeah, so I'm like extremely pumped. I'm like, oh god, this is like the first night I'm gonna get a great sleep tonight. Right. And at like, I don't remember quite the time, but I remember just getting all these calls. And like, I slept through most of them because of how good the, like there was a new future on it. And then so one of them finally broke through and I opened my phone and I was like, oh shit, Solana has gone down. I'm going to kill myself. Everybody's going to troll me on the internet. And then I look at my like company Slack because we power like a lot or most of the infrastructure on Solana.

3:57:40and then I'm like dude how come I'm getting paid so much and then my co-founder's like oh yeah like Trump launched the shit coin and I was like what uh and I was like is this real I was like Chad is this real um but then like um it was handled so well by like the existing infrastructure and the team that like nothing was actually happening except for just a lot of like shenanigans on the internet um so so that was uh that was the story of trump and uh it was a very chaotic day and then so at the end of the day i was like oh finally let me just crack open a beer and and you know watch like an episode of madmen or something and so i sit down and i shit you not the the second i cracked it open um i get another call and it's like dude melania just launched a coin and it was like that george bush meme yeah it's like just pick her a second shit coin is at blockchain i was like oh no um oh my god and then that's when things started going really haywire because you could not tell if it was a hack or like it was legit um and and so those were a very fascinating it was very hard to describe to my dad what was happening and what i do for a living that's hilarious hey well hopefully he understands what fantastic war stories yeah thank us thanks for taking us through those those were really fun um it was great talking to you we got to have you on again um this is this is fantastic uh we'll talk to you later have a great time cheers mert have a good one enjoy montana get a nice nice uh nice round of sleep uh well next up we have dan from farcaster coming to the studio and big news you can watch tbpn on farcaster someone built a farcaster mini app and which is a very cool novel sort of experience that you have on farcaster people can create kind of sub apps within the app and they live in the feed.

3:59:33Yeah. Let's bring Dan in. I think it's Jamie Hoffman who built this for us. Good to see you guys. Dan, what's going on? Are you talking about the pirate feed of TBPN? Yeah. It's not a pirate feed. Authorized reproduction on our customer. It's authorized. As long as it has our ads on there, we're happy. It's authorized. You guys are like the Grateful Dead. Anyone can record the episode as long as the ads are on there. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. It is fascinating because I remember, I mean, when Forecaster dropped, it was like very much like it looked a lot like Twitter back then. But you look at the trajectory of the two platforms and now like you think about like, oh, you can build a mini app that like repurposes TBPN.

4:00:12And like that is something that's completely not on anyone else's roadmap. And the products evolved in a very, very interesting way. So, I mean, anyway, can you just give us kind of the update on like how things are going? What is the current pitch for Farcaster? Where do you see it going? And kind of take us through a little bit of history. Yeah, I have to say, Dan and I were neighbors. Oh, really? We lived on the same street. No way. Very cool. And it's just been amazing to watch you build Farcaster in such an intentional way from the very beginning. I think you kind of had, I don't know if you had a master plan, but you guys seem to have this pace of building, but also like patience and just like long-term thinking the entire time.

4:00:53So it's been awesome to see. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I wanted to point out that I am the almost last person in the group chat that started the MOZ podcast back in the day that's been on your show. Antonio has not been on your show yet. We missed Antonio today. That was a miss by us. I'm just going to say I'm so happy I'm on this show before Antonio. Yeah, bragging rights forever. Yeah, exactly. Open invite to Antonio. Yeah, so Farcaster, five years in this year, when we started Decentralized Social, pretty contrarian. I think Elon changed the dynamic a bit in the sense that all of a sudden people got interested in building alternative versions of Twitter.

4:01:36I think we've tacked more into crypto over time. And so I think where we are today is we're a decentralized social network, but it's targeted for crypto-native folks, right? So there's a built-in wallet and many apps, as you point out. And so if you want to do fun things in crypto, you use Torcaster. And we're increasingly making that happen in the sense that we support a bunch of different chains. So you can use Ethereum, you can use Base, you can use Solana. I think we're going to add other ecosystems over time. So if you can kind of think of like if you've ever had to do something in crypto where your friends tell you, you know, you got to get into this, you got to mint this or do whatever thing that you're trying to say, uh, you could just get on Farcaster and it's like two taps away.

4:02:13And then there's no complexity around switching chains and bridging and gas and all this other kind of stuff that if you, if you talk to like the average web two founder, it's like the, the UX that's acceptable in crypto is crazy. And so, you know, 2025, we finally actually have the infrastructure to be able to like build decent consumer experiences. And so that's what we're trying to do. Do you Do you ever loop back around and go back into crypto non-native folks and tuck some of the crypto features under a stable coin wrapper or something that abstracts it away over time? Because you've gotten that core fire going and then you need to turn it into a raging fire.

4:02:55I guess the meta question is, in 10 or 20 years, does the average consumer just in America, does everyone become crypto-native? or does crypto native cease to be a concept? Because everyone just - I think it's probably more ceased to be a concept in the sense that I think stable coins are working. So we do all of our weekly rewards. So we pay out$25 ,000 a week and our version of X payouts. It's a little bit broader base and you can be a much smaller account and get it. We do that with stable coins. So we do that every week, works perfectly fine. We didn't have to integrate any other fintech provider.

4:03:28There's no, just every user has a wallet. We're able to stream stable coins to them for a ridiculously cheap amount. That's amazing. In terms of like fees. You know, so there's no middlemen. So that's for sure working. I think, so we originally tried to do this whole thing where we were using crypto under the hood, but the whole point is like we're using it as a technology, not the kind of forefront. And I think that the reality is 2022 left crypto with a pretty big black eye with like FTX and a bunch of that other stuff. And so I think there are a bunch of people that I think otherwise are pretty intelligent and I would say reasonably open-minded.

4:04:04But when you talk to them about crypto, they froth at the mouth in terms of, you know, it's all scams and grifts. And look, there are plenty of scams and grifts. It's a reputation that it's earned over time. But I actually think there's plenty of good stuff being built in increasingly. And so I think stable coins is probably the thing to highlight in the sense that that's just been chugging along, right? And where did stable coins start? Tether was a scam and a grift that for 10 years, everyone kept saying, it's on the verge of exploding, right? And it's now the most profitable business in the world.

4:04:34I think it's like they make like$80 million per employee. And so stablecoins have taken a while to bake. The infrastructure is finally there where it's like, I mean, now Stripe's in it, right? So it's like Ramp, one of your sponsors. So I think like stablecoins are just going to make crypto way easier. And then I think there's this concept of embedded wallets, which you may have heard of, but like there are a bunch of providers. We use a company called Privy. and basically i think over the next three or four years like every app uh whether it's like a you know kind of fintech app or consumer app will have built-in wallets they probably will use stable coins now whether you can buy like fart coin or whatever meme coin in your you know bank of america account probably not but i do think um everything will get kind of like crypto enabled and to the degree that you're using a more crypto forward product like a coinbase or a robin hood or like a completely crypto native product like Farcaster.

4:05:31I think it's just like a more of a personal preference. It's top of mind for me. Yesterday you launched Farcaster Pro, a subscription. You brought the 10K NFT collection back. Talk through the whole process there. You know, why use kind of that mechanism and it sold out. So it sounds like a cause for celebration. Yeah, as Kobe would say, job's not finished. So I think good progress. I mean, we sold$10 ,120 subscriptions with stablecoins in a little less than six hours. The 100 % of the revenue we're generating, so this is kind of like for the protocol, is going back into creator rewards. So effectively, we've doubled the amount of weekly payouts we're going to do for the next year.

4:06:22and I think I think you had Chris on earlier but this idea of like a zero take rate network I think it's pretty powerful and going back to your question John over like how do you actually get out of the like crypto native and move towards a broader base is just like most social networks you use today what percentage of the value are they capturing like you know Meta's market cap is pretty high like they're capturing a lot of that value I think that the way for protocol based social networks and specifically ones that use crypto for the economic plumbing the way for them to win is to have it be as close to zero take rate as possible um and and basically you by participating on a on a crypto social network one you're you're you know decentralized social network you actually own your audience you can't get your like links nerfed like you guys are building uh like an amazing media brand if you lost your ability to do streaming on a couple of the major platforms tomorrow that would hurt your growth and so the idea of like actually having a a social network that you can be guaranteed to have direct access to your audience.

4:07:21I think that's built different. We would, we would just mail everyone a DVD every day. Easy. Daily. Problem solved. Daily DVD. Daily DVDs. With stable coin payments. Yeah. I want to know about some of the economic incentives on a social network. It's been like the micro payments thing has been floated around. Is there a world where with AI slop, we need to be charging people to post or can just algorithmic feeds kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff? Does any of that make sense? Are there any new trends in kind of like the design of a healthy social network that has high, I guess, not just high retention and ARPU, but also maybe high NPS?

4:08:02Because the classic thing with a social network is like it's printing money, but everyone says they hate it. yeah so i think that's a stated reveal preference exactly money people are yeah totally totally i completely agree so yeah but i actually think if you bring up a great point and we are for sure at the forefront of this because if you know anything about crypto and people think there's an economic incentive you you bring a lot of uh coin operated uh users right yep um i think that any version of pay money as a solely a mechanism for like oh there's some version of quality or non-bot like behavior not going to work i think any version of i prove that you're a human well you're proving you're human but i could go use chat gpt to write the responses so like i think this is an extremely hard problem um if you actually go look at like metas 10ks like they specifically say that like they are the biggest and best in the world this is still an extremely hard problem for them to solve they estimate something like 10 of like all users are potentially like spam or wow is it still you know but i think it'll be kind of a a variety of tools right so i think economic activity is really hard to fake like one thing we had yesterday is a bunch of accounts paid 120 dollars to a protocol no refunds right like you know stable coins nice thing is like you can't charge that back um whether they're a bot or not that money is now going to an algorithm and this is where i'm actually a big fan of algorithms now maybe algorithm the choice we could talk about but the algorithm, if you design it right, is going to reward the interesting posters, the best posters, and you're extracting revenue from the bots.

4:09:39So I do think charging is actually a good idea. And then I think algorithms are the way to actually, as you point out, wheat from the shaft, so to speak. How do you see crypto long-term as a funding mechanism for creators, artists I mean we had um um Ben Pasternak on earlier today to talk about you know his vision for Believe and it's yeah you people are using it to create meme coins they're also using it as a you know funding um you know funding mechanism for for different projects and and I bring it up because uh we've talked about you know we had Chris Best from Substack on um uh maybe a week or so ago and and there's this idea that like people subscribe to substack to get value in the form of content but it's also a mechanism to just support support somebody to just do interesting things in the world and be able to spend all their time you know thinking about a specific area or um sector and it feels like there could be some element you know some i could imagine world in the future where farcaster is powering that type of of activity is that correct incorrect is that is that a problem space that you think about yeah although i to substacks credit i think they're doing better than the vast majority of web 2 in the sense that i think what they take 10 and you know like youtube i think what is the 7 30 70 30 cut in terms of i think they take 70 and you get 30 yeah right so so so like we're improving in the web 2 spectrum i think what Crypto does in a world where the UX is good and it's pervasive.

4:11:20I think these are like embedded wallets with stable coins. You just start competing things down to zero, right? Like the ability for the platform to take a cut of payments, um, I think drops pretty significantly. And what the platforms that do take a cut, they are going to say, Hey, I'm getting you distribution, right? If you go on an app like sub stack, a lot of, then you talk to sub stack newsletter writers, they're getting a lot of their subscribers these days from the sub stack app. So that's value that Substack is providing. I think where crypto is interesting is that basic payments, you're talking like 10 % improvement, like marginal improvement.

4:11:57And I think where you're looking for is like 10x improvements. I say you're pretty aware of the space and believe is a great example. This is like, I think capital formation, fundraising with big quotes around that, because obviously that's a pretty loaded word. but the ability to kind of like internet flash mob money into a certain thing whether that's a meme coin or uh like a gofundme equivalent or a kickstarter actually someone built a mini app with stable coins uh called crowdfund on farcaster basically is very cool right like you use smart contract you put your usdc like stable coin in and if it hits the funding threshold it's unlocked so it makes so much sense 10 years ago now now it's a someone vibe coded over three days right Yeah, it makes so much sense as a mini app because in many ways people would just go to GoFundMe, create this thing, and then take it to social to promote it.

4:12:47And why doesn't it just exist natively in the product? Yeah, and I think the other thing that you have is like the liquidity in the sense that I'm not fragmenting. I don't fund my GoFundMe wallet over here or I have to like connect this payment method for the seventh time. And again, anytime you're using like a card-based payment method, Visa and MasterCard and the banks are getting their 3%, right? So I think it will be slow in many cases, but this stuff will just become increasingly pervasive and people will choose it if the kind of like platforms or creators are giving an incentive, right? Like if I can not have to pay 3 % to a card network by having you as a stable coin, I'm going to make that the default payment off it.

4:13:25And maybe I give you a 2 % cash back or you get some loyalty points or an NFT or whatever reason to get you to switch your payment method. Yeah. What are you seeing? How do you think about international long term? I know the Farcaster network is like default international because because crypto is default sort of borderless and international. But I feel like the conversation in the beginning of the 2020s was really around sort of social media censorship. And then, you know, we had Balaji on the show earlier, and he's talked about this moment with X where he created this kind of fragmentation and, you know, censorship on X potentially being solved.

4:14:07But then there's plenty of countries, you know, globally that have even bigger issues than we have today around censorship. And so how do you think about enabling free speech through Farcaster over the long run? Yeah, so we're a U.S.-based company. So I'm a big believer in the Constitution and U.S. laws. Farcaster basically is exporting that as our social network's policy. So if I get a local jurisdiction somewhere in the world and says, please remove these activists from Farcaster to, quote, Elon, they can shake their fists at the sky. Um, like there's, we're, we're beamed in over the internet.

4:14:46If you want to block, you know, our, our, our app or, or the network, go for it. But I think, but then in theory, somebody, a dissident could build up, spin up a new iteration of the app on the Farcaster network theoretically, and it would be out of your control, right? They say it's in addition that, that, that person could be directly posting like via the command line or something and having it go to out to a global audience. And so I think that the network design of Farcaster looks a lot more like a blockchain under the hood. And one of the reasons is it actually provides really strong censorship resistance, whereas something that's a bit more federated.

4:15:21So if you kind of look at like Macedon or Blue Sky, like there are instances where they're already complying with local law of like, OK, well, we won't be able to serve our other users in this country because they will just shut down the whole site. So I think, again, it's not like a primary consideration, but should we be successful in continuing to scale the network? I'm confident that if you think that the U.S. free speech laws are like a good baseline global policy, that's basically what Forecaster is going to follow in terms of our app. Yeah. Amazing stuff. Thank you so much. We'd love to have you back.

4:15:54Yeah, come back on again soon. Thanks for having me. I'll put it on the record. Some of the best taste in crypto. When I put it out there, it shows up in the app and everywhere. Yeah, it's great. Great to finally have you on. come back on again soon. I love the new studio. Thank you. Yeah. Come by, do your next appearance in person. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be great. It's only three hours away from the West side. Next up, we have the CEO of Lava, Shazan coming in the studio. We've been talking about with Bitcoin, it's at 107. You can lend against that. You can borrow against that and buy a Patek Philippe.

4:16:36Yes. No brainer. Yes. No brainer. Use leverage to buy a luxury watch. Anyway, welcome to the studio. Shazan, hopefully he is here. How are you doing? Hey, can you hear me? There he is. Yes, we can. Welcome. Take us off with an introduction to Lava, and then I definitely want to know about the announcement that just went down. So lava is the most secure way to borrow against Bitcoin. So a lot of Bitcoiners, they believe that Bitcoin is the greatest appreciating asset of all time, which historically it has been. And if you can avoid selling your Bitcoin, why wouldn't you? And historically, if you wanted to borrow against your Bitcoin, you had to use a custodial platform.

4:17:18So give full ownership of your Bitcoin to someone else and trust them with it. And we all know kind of what happened with these custodial platforms like FTX or BlockFi or Celsius or Voyager. They took your Bitcoin. They'd start trading it or rehypothecating it. And ultimately, over the last few years, these custodial platforms have lost around$100 billion in customer funds. That's so much money.

4:17:46We don't like losing money. Not good. Not good. That's insane. Not good at all. So what's the solution? So Lava, what we've done is we've embedded the logic for a loan into a Bitcoin smart contract, which basically means that when you borrow against your Bitcoin on Lava, you can verify on chain. Like you can go to a block explorer, for example, and see that your Bitcoin is safe and secure, that it's not being rehypothecated. And you have cryptographic guarantees, not just legal or reputational assurances from Lava, that your collateral is safe. So that's why it's the most secure way to borrow against your Bitcoin.

4:18:21And not only that, Lava has the lowest rates on the market, even lower than custodial platforms by 20 to 30 percent. And we can fund loans of any size. You said Bitcoin smart contract. I thought that was an Ethereum thing. How is this working? Is this new technology? Is this something that wasn't possible previously? Because the basic pitch seems like we should have been doing this all along. So what needed to happen to get us to today? you know it's it's kind of surprising to me because bitcoin always had like scripting um like bitcoin's always had like programmability it's not just like moving money from one address to the other lava's kind of leveraged certain like core bitcoin primitives to kind of take that and use what primitives bitcoin has available and create this like loan contract does that make sense uh bitcoin's not like turing complete to what you can't do is like you can't do all sorts of things that you could do in Ethereum on Bitcoin, but you can do certain very important things.

4:19:20And one of those is non-custodial borrowing. And honestly, if you look at the rest of crypto, I think the majority of the main use case of DeFi really is, in my opinion, being able to borrow against an asset and see that it's safe and secure. Now, I imagine that it's pretty expensive. That's the whole narrative. Maybe that's not true, but it feels like if I want to borrow 50 cents against my Bitcoin, probably not going to have good time, is that roughly correct? Where does it start to make sense? Taking out a$100 ,000 loan, the gas might be, or whatever the equivalent is, might be a little bit more reasonable.

4:19:57Is that roughly correct? The gas fees on Bitcoin are extremely, like Bitcoin is really inexpensive right now, like less than a dollar. But what you could do is you could lock a bunch of collateral roll up and over time take out more and more in loans right so uh we have a product in beta right now where you basically can lock your bitcoin up and get a card and as you swipe the card more and more gets borrowed it's kind of like a line of credit if that makes sense yeah and then what what was the announcement today so today we actually like fully officially announced lava loans like out of beta alpha uh we announced that we can fund loans of any size from a hundred dollars to a billion dollars just based on the capital.

4:20:37A billion dollar loan? That's so insane. And we've already done, we've already made loans like millions of dollars and like single loans that have been worth like$5 million already, which is pretty interesting. And we announced that our rates are like 20 to 30 % lower than the next best rate on the market. And then walk me through all the different counterparties, who's getting paid. Obviously, as a consumer, I have a Bitcoin. I want to take a loan against it. At some point, I'm probably getting stable coins out. But then who's on the other side of that contract? Or how much money are they making?

4:21:16How much money are you making? So there's a bunch of different lenders on the other side that Lava works with to facilitate these loans. So as a borrower, the way it works is you download Lava, you put your Bitcoin on there, it's all self-custodial. You say, okay, I want to borrow$10 ,000 for one year. And then your Bitcoin gets moved from one address to this smart contract address. And when that happens, you get stable coins directly to your Lava app. That's all abstracted away from you. For us in Lava, we leverage stable coins because they enable us to do instant dispersal of loan capital. But it's just seen as dollars.

4:21:53You just see dollars coming into your Lava app. and you can even use lava to withdraw those dollars to your bank account within lava you also have global free instant dollar payments so kind of like what cash app when most style payments you have that uh within the app for free as well you don't have to worry about any of like the blockchain complexity we abstract away all the blockchain stuff the gas fee stuff the stable coin stuff uh and you can even use a card that we could issue to you to start spending those dollars that you've borrowed. That's cool. And then what drives the interest rate?

4:22:25Is that just driven by Bitcoin volatility? Or is there some sort of like underwriting of the individual? Because I imagine it doesn't necessarily need to know anything about me other than the fact that like the Bitcoin is in the wallet and that's it. Yep, exactly. There's no like underwriting of the individual. So everyone gets the same interest rate. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And how are the interest rates calculated? Where are they sitting right now? Where they've been historically? And how do lenders like think about that risk but today if you borrow you can get a loan from five percent for a one month loan up to 9.99 for a 12 month loan and that's really like the sweet spot in duration that people want people can uh like refinance like extend their loans later if they want to yeah um and like lava earns like a little bit of a spread and the rest is kind of sent to the lender essentially like the rest of the interest payments um historically the i think over time the rates will just come down i mean they're always going to be somewhat variable to whatever like the treasury rates are right because you're going to want some premium over that but i think long term the rate for a bitcoin back loan should trend towards the rate for borrowing against equities and in fact like barring against like lending against bitcoin is a lot less risky than lending against equities because it trades 24 7 so it's way more liquid uh it will over time it is already more liquid than most like stocks like individual stocks right and as the market cap grows it will become the most liquid asset in the world so i think you could even argue today it is that because it trades 24 7 and is there some sort of like reserve ratio where if you have 10 bitcoin you can borrow x amount against that or yeah how does yeah how does volatility work here because i imagine if you borrow if you borrow against all of your at some point they're to take your bitcoin right like uh but but but what what triggers that so when you borrow there's like an ltv right so kind of like if you borrow against your equities you can maybe get 50 against value that you collateralized which is similar to how lava works and there's flexible ltv so maybe if you want to be very conservative you might only want to borrow 20 against the collateral that you put up yep and then every loan has a like a price a liquidation price where if bitcoin gets there and you haven't repaid your loan or added more collateral, there will be a liquidation.

4:24:44But you can kind of verify that. Lava sends you notifications all the time to make sure you're aware if you're getting close to that liquidation price. Yep. That makes sense. Jordy, any other questions? No. Very cool. This is fantastic. I think a lot of our listeners are going to go lever up and use it to buy fine Swiss watches. I guess my last question is there's this weird dynamic in crypto right now where There are some seriously scaled founder mode companies in the space that have huge distribution advantages that can offer competitive products. And then there's kind of this history of when something's working, it gets forked and open sourced and there's a lot of competition there.

4:25:23How are you thinking about the competitive landscape as it evolves over the next couple of years if you're really successful? It's interesting. I actually think there's no company in crypto today. like every i very much view bitcoin as being very distinct from crypto i think a lot of the companies in crypto today are serving this like trading speculation use case whereas lava is really uh serving this bitcoin saver use case like these there's these bitcoiners out there they don't touch any asset in crypto other than bitcoin they just want to save in it and what we're really building are like north stars whatever fidelity kind of offers equity asset holders we want to offer bitcoin asset holders so there's people out there that we're serving that have basically replace their savings portfolio that's, you know, with equities or real estate with just Bitcoin.

4:26:09And they don't really have a trusted brand that they can go to that they feel is secure, that they can rely on to borrow against their Bitcoin, to start spending dollars to buy more Bitcoin. And that's really where lava is headed to. Is that a common use case? People take a lava loan and just buy more Bitcoin? So it's not like the most common use case. We've had people borrow against their Bitcoin to buy houses, which is pretty interesting. Buy cars, pay their taxes, like fun, like vacations. But there are some people who will borrow to buy more Bitcoin. But what's like more interesting is a lot of people come to Lava, they borrow against their Bitcoin, but then they like stay to do the other things that they were already doing, like do like dollar payments or when they do want to buy more Bitcoin later, they can actually do use that, use Lava to do that as well.

4:26:53That makes a ton of sense. Well, good luck. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is great. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats on the launch. Cheers. Bye. Next up, we have a last minute ad. Brandon, is that right? Surprise guest. Surprise guest. Brandon, co-founder and CEO of Phantom. Phantom. One of... Wallet. Yeah. I don't know how many billions they're worth now. Brandon, welcome to the show. Hey, what's up, guys? Thanks for having me. The wallet king. The wallet king. The second greatest wallet salesman in the world. Second only to Sean Frank, the CEO of Ridge Wallet, direct competitor to you.

4:27:32Direct competitor, both whole assets. Phantom Wallet, Ridge Wallet, you can only have one. Collaboration. We got them on the bullseye in the office. Sean, you're on notice. What's happening? Where are you right now? Are you in Vegas like a lot of our other guests? Dubai or Monaco? In San Francisco, in the trenches, so to speak. The trenches. The trenches of S &P. That's where I'm from. Awesome. I mean, how are the trenches? I don't think fandom needs a ton of introduction, but because our audience is not super crypto native, it'd be great to give a quick kind of backstory on your history and then the company, and then we can kind of talk about a number of other things.

4:28:17Yeah, that'd be great. Yeah, totally. Well, yeah, thanks again for having me on, guys. And you guys have been on quite the crypto marathon. uh today um how long you guys been going at it like since 8 a.m i think i finally understand it's like it's like electronic money is what i'm getting from people it's money but digital digital money that's that's my takeaway the big takeaway from today for john yeah um well totally yeah i can i can give a brief overview about myself phantom um you know got my start working uh in silicon valley back in 2013 uh at twitter uh pre-ipo sort of that's where i cut my teeth on building mobile apps um you know working on tech that reaches millions of users uh around 2017 was bitten by the crypto bug that's sort of like the white paper ico era I did a tour of duty there from 2017 to 2021 at this early stage DeFi startup called ZeroX, which is still very much around active.

4:29:25It's where I met my two other co-founders. And that's basically where we decided, hey, at that time, most used wallet was MetaMask. We had this kind of very unique perspective, not only being power users of MetaMask, but but also developers in the ecosystem as well. And basically recognize that the number one problem holding crypto back today, still back then today still is usability and the wallet is essentially the key to unlocking the ecosystem and supercharging everything that everyone had been working on. And so, yeah, that's when we decided to start Phantom. And yeah, four years later, phantom is now biggest wallet in the ecosystem what uh what went into the decision making to choose solana when you guys came out with phantom i know now you support a bunch of different chains but i'm sure that was somewhat contrarian at the time or at least you know very early to kind of make a bet totally yeah i mean i think i mean i think the initial insight was focus on like build wallet that focuses on an ecosystem on a on an ecosystem that was not ethereum um you know we have spent you know four years in the ethereum space and i think had a number of pretty interesting insights one metamask continued to be sort of this monopoly monopolistic product and despite a number of different attempts they were sort of everyone kind of understood and you know there it's not great UX.

4:31:02So like, obviously, we should try to attack them by solving that problem. But despite that, it was very difficult for people to break through. And then I think the second thing was after spending a while in Ethereum, we kind of actually just got a little bit, I think, jaded by the culture being very dogmatic versus pragmatic and not really emphasizing user experience, cost, efficiency. And so I think those two kind of insights combined, we decided, hey, how about we essentially create our own home turf on an up-and-coming ecosystem. That choice ended up being Solana. And that was all being contemplated late 2020.

4:31:47So that was pretty early on. A lot of people have flagged that dogma today. What is the shape of the Ethereum dogma right now? What are they dogmatic about specifically? Yeah, well, it's definitely ebbed and flowed. I mean, I think from the very beginning, it was all about decentralization at all costs, and decentralization as this meme, which attracted a number of different folks for a number of different reasons. you know people who are more anti-disestablishment people who felt like the centralization was a method of security um and and all of that and i think that uh it ended up it obviously the spirit of it makes total sense and and is um something we should all be striving for but i think in practice the uh sort of uh decision by committee nature that that kind of uh bread uh ended up basically fast forward into the state of ethereum today where it's like there's no really cohesive strategy i guess there's no there's a lot of different competing l2s and different technologies and that the end states it's very confusing and quite frankly just dangerous for like an end user to use.

4:33:08Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sure you guys have been hit up by a bunch of your investors sending you tweets about pumps, revenue being like, hey, have you guys thought about doing this? And from what I can see, you guys haven't built a launch pad to date. Talk about how you view phantom's sort of interaction with with some of these new you know we've had both uh the founder of pump and believe on today which you know are getting quite a lot of attention but uh i i'm curious to get your point of view on how you think of that market or category evolving and how you see phantom interacting with it yeah totally i mean um you know really at the end of the day um it's all about tokens, essentially.

4:34:02Tokens being this common sort of protocol and format that is emerging from the ecosystem. And then all of these apps sort of in this open and permissionless way coming out and creating different mechanisms for creating tokens. And so I think what we're trying to do is just ensure that users can navigate this new trend and meta like in the safest way possible. And that's something that we've done a number of times before, whether that's with the NFT wave or whether that's for, you know, emerging stable coins and real world assets trends. And so, yeah, I think we're just kind of trying to promote the folks to sort of easily discover and use these things.

4:34:51And, yeah, kind of see how all the trends shake out. But yeah. Can you talk to me about Apple's role in this ecosystem? I remember I first onboarded to Phantom as a Chrome plugin. I believe there is an app, but Apple has not been historically the most receptive to crypto native apps interfacing with all the different UI elements all over the phone. Coinbase was kicked out of the App Store for a while. They came back. And so what has it been like historically? I love thinking about the Apple execs being like, wait, Coinbase does billions of dollars in volume and we're not taking 30 % on that? I know.

4:35:39But it feels like from the other stories that are going on in Apple world that there's a little bit more pressure right now than in years past to open up, whether that's the Siri button for other AI apps or the App Store with what's happening with Fortnite and Epic. um give me like the state of the union on how easy it is to implement crypto wallet features on apple and where you see it going over the next few years yeah so um yeah interestingly enough like when we started uh like you called out when we started phantom we actually started chrome extension first that was actually a pretty contrarian thing to do um i think it was kind of a mixture of a couple of different reasons one the predominant use case of crypto at that time or on-chain crypto being defy and that being sort of more of a power user thing that people like to do on desktop anyway um and i think the also the prevalence of uh sort of ethereum as the main l1 that people were using ethereum is just not really uh compatible with mobile uh as a technology in terms of people who want to use things on mobile.

4:36:55They want things to feel fast, cheap, instantaneous, fleeting, all of that. And so nowadays, because you're seeing the protocol layer of crypto and infrastructure layer get a lot more mature, now we're seeing a lot more prevalence of crypto on mobile. So I think in the next couple of years, mobile is going to be a huge story for crypto. And yeah, I think generally, um you know personally we've we've had a great relationship with apple we've never had any big scuffles or uh had the app taken down or anything like that uh like you said i believe that as an eco as a general tech player they become more open and are facing down a lot of competitive pressures in different areas like the epic case and and all that so yeah i mean i do expect them just very similarly to all other a lot of other tech players like big fintechs etc i do expect them to be embracing crypto more and more often or sorry more deeper um and yeah um yeah and making it easier for for folks to deploy apps last question on my side what is the state of sf's crypto scene today it's certainly not getting nearly the attention that uh ai is uh but but is it alive and well or are you traveling a lot and and hiring outside of the city quite a bit no yeah i mean we uh so all three co-founders are based out here in sf i've been living here for 12 years now or so and yeah crypto scene is definitely it's definitely not ai but it's uh it's alive and well of us folks like paradigm uh alchemy uh some of the a16z folks etc yeah um so yeah definitely alive and well um new york is definitely uh another huge scene but i think um places like miami they kind of they kind of turned over a bit uh during covet

4:39:01it i love miami i love miami we're in the miami of california we're in los angeles we are what's not to like this has been fantastic thank you for joining and capping off thank you so much the first inaugural crypto day no thank you first week maybe we should make a weekly weekly crypto day that sounds like a lot a lot but maybe quarterly this has been fantastic thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for popping on. Good luck. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Bye. This entire stream has not been financial advice. I was thinking we should ask the guests, hey, just why don't you close that with some financial advice for us?

4:39:38How much everyone would hate that. Anyway. We never give financial advice. Massive, massive success. We're just a couple of golden retrievers. Yeah. Yeah. We're just having fun out here talking, pushing five hours on the stream, pushing 42 ,000 viewers. Thank you, everyone who tuned in. I think this is officially our biggest stream ever until tomorrow. Thank you. Until tomorrow. When we got Ashley Vance on the show. It's going to be 100. We got some heavy hitters. We do have some hitters tomorrow. And there's some big news coming. And our first Fortune 500 CEO. Huge, huge milestone for us. First of many.

4:40:13First of many. Huge milestone. Anyways, thank you folks for tuning in. Thank you to our sponsors. It was a long day, but it was a great day. Yeah, it was a great day. Thank you to our lovely sponsors. We will see you tomorrow. Goodbye. Thank you.