E105: How To Get Rich With Crypto AI And Content (Without Getting Lucky) - Kaito AI Founder

38:28which, because I really want to talk to normies here and be like, hey guys, I'm not saying you should not trade, but like you should understand, right? Talking about stocks only because crypto is more inefficient. Is it even possible to trade stocks and consistently make money today without AI trained algorithm? I think it's still possible, but it really depends on like, like picking your component, right? So when a long time before LLM, you know, when what quantitative trading strategy came into the, you know, battlefield that essentially killed using human to trade on the back of news because you can never be quicker than a machine.

39:22and all at the same time for example when earnings report came out machine can quickly very very quickly digest it understand the numbers compare that with people's expectation and the prices will instantly move that part of the game is killed what still remains to be made is picking a battlefield where you are betting on other strategies versus other human beings, you can be better than them. So identifying certain things that can have third or fourth derivatives of repercussions and maybe you have a certain long-term thesis that no one else is seeing or maybe playing in a time horizon that no one else is competing with you.

40:12And most of the fun strategies are based on, you know, they get the results every year. like kind of more short-term bit you know focused that you can you can come up with something else that you know can completely win it's still possible but i would say in the way that normal people are trading then it you'll for sure you'll be losing to you know majority of the yeah strategies and crypto the same right yeah because i was listening to this uh podcast with Alex Good I don't know if you know him and and the threat guy and this guy is he was working for Palantir before trading Palantir right so but that's why I'm asking you all this question about Citadel because you know AI Citadel trading Palantir they do like some similar stuff for trading this guy is so smart and he's he was making consistent money using AI strategies for trading but even he's like oh man thinking about ai and agents and all that stuff like yeah i'm he's he says he's and he's so smart right and then meanwhile you have all these other people and i'm always trying to tell everyone in crypto like build something and buy bitcoin eth whatever but like solana but or be early to a community and right but but the trading is it's impossible like it's almost impossible for a normal person you don't even realize who you're trading against right like you have these super hyper smart people who themselves think they're kind of fucked in the future because of AI, right?

41:46So that's for me, like the key takeaway is boring. Yeah, everybody wants to hear like, how do I make the next 100x by closing my eyes and just like throwing a dart, but like it doesn't happen. Yeah. Right? The next 100x should be focused on yapping. We'll talk about that. That's why machines can't eat your lunch. We'll talk about that, 100%. How did you get so fascinated by the world of cryptocurrencies? I think it's...

42:25I think it's fascinating to me from two perspectives. One is trading. I was naturally kind of very, very drawn to it. The other one is the deeper societal and social aspect of it. which is which is everyone has a fair shot and there's no um there's no ultra focus on like your previous experience nobody's everyone's new in this space right and and you can be young you can be old you can be very good at certain things versus you know other other other stuff and that people are giving hope of a way to essentially make it I think I was I was fascinated by that as well not not to the fact that like I need that to kind of make it but I want to be in that environment where everyone I can I can see a lot of people rise from nowhere everyone is new to the space that is very important actually I remember 2020, I think it was, where there was the DeFi and CeFi, right?

43:42They would call it CDFi wave, Celsius, BlockFi. I mean, all these companies that blew up. I remember Mashinsky from Celsius saying that, right? He was saying, everybody's new. Like if you join now, you're kind of like only six months late, right? And I was thinking, I joined crypto in late 2018. I was thinking, saying, yeah, but not really. It's, I understand people who feel they're late, right? Because it goes so fast and so on and so forth. But actually today we're in 2025, early 2025, and you're saying, you're saying the same thing, right? Everybody's new to the space. It's true. Yeah. It's true.

44:22And even the people were like, you could think, oh man, the guy, Bam Mashinsky is saying that it's easy for him to say hey everybody's into the space because you already built this i think like they had 30 billion in AUM at that time right so you're thinking the guy yeah but this guy blew up right yeah so like even the people you think because you're maybe insecure or it's intimidated intimidating to think about crypto you think oh they're so so many miles ahead like they can still blow up and basically get back to zero like be even less than you right yeah so it's so important for most people who are intimidated, which crypto can be intimidating.

45:01Everybody is new to the space and therefore there's so many things that can be built. And people who are complacent, other people or businesses who are complacent will be very, very quickly overturned. What is Kaito AI? If you had to explain it to your mom.

45:21My mom actually follows us very closely to my surprise. I pretty much never explained what Kaito is to her, but she's following my Twitter. And, you know, whatever the stuff that happens to me, like she understands and knows and tracks very closely. I would say...

45:46And that question, if you ask me today and ask me maybe 12 months ago and maybe in the next 12 months, I think I'll give you different answers. and my answer today will be I think Kaito is building a platform and a system where information and capital can be distributed in a fairer, more transparent and more efficient way. And then everything that we built in the past and what we'll be building in the future will essentially be centered around these. Why did you launch Kaito? Why did I launch it? Because initially, I mean, the most obvious reason was I was the biggest user for Kaito and I wanted to build something that can solve my pain points.

46:49that was, you know, not going through Twitter search, not using Google search for any of the stuff that it needs to be, and be able to listen to my, or go through the transcript of my favorite podcast and, you know, all that kind of thing, in a very, very efficient way. So, you know, those are some of the reasons why I built it in the first place. You mentioned this term before called InfoFi. What is that? InfoFi is, in my understanding, basically using market forces to allocate, to signal the truthfulness of information. So if you think about polymarket, that's kind of InfoFi because it's using market forces as in people's betting to signal what's the closest source of truth to the election results.

47:53What did people use before InfoFi? So there are different spectrums. I think if you think about Keitel, I would say there's kind of three different spectrums. The most primitive one is, actually maybe there are four. Actually there are three. So the most primitive one is that information is disorganized, right? So you basically, like, you don't know what's valuable and then basically you just go through everything and then make your own judgment. The second phase is, I think, AI-powered. So using algorithm, to try to make you understand what is better, what is higher signal, which is a lot of the stuff that what we did and what we're doing today.

48:50Even YARTS, for example, is trying to give people signal in terms of who has more influence and attention in the space. From a content level, which piece of content is getting more attention? If you aggregate that token as attention, then you get to token as influence, which is at the account level. And that's using algorithm. And algorithm is powerful because everyone understands some of the bigger picture stuff. If you say that, hey, who are the most influential people within crypto, then people can give you a list. But algorithm is very, very powerful to solve the long tail problem. So you can essentially have a leaderboard for every single community.

49:37And no one on earth will be able to do that. You can have a ranking for every single query that you're interested in. So a search engine can essentially solve that problem because AI algorithm is coming in. But that is still not the most efficient. The most efficient will be using market forces to determine all of that because algorithm can be biased and and there's also a kind of a longer period of time that's needed for signal to surface the market forces can be instant it's it's scalable to the to the infinity because if you want to bet something that's really if you want to bet big into something you can deploy in theory infinitum amount of capital it's a really signal that what does that look like except the polymarket example right yeah which was pretty amazing yeah especially during the election we could see yeah the the power right yeah so gotta stay tuned to what we're gonna be announcing sweet you tweeted as a trader I learned throughout my whole career to diversify my bets over the past three years however I learned to unlearn all that and just go max along my team looking forward to the next chapter of Kaito in 2025 why is it so important to learn to unlearn I think the most dangerous thing is you don't adapt and environment is always changing.

51:35And in my view, so Kaito and my previous trading lab is actually very connected in a way that I learned all the best practices in traditional finance.

51:54And they're trying to replicate some of that into crypto. But crypto is very different. And building and trading is also very different. So they're very connected. But you need to have, but you need to unlearn a lot of the stuff that you did in the past. And then to really focus on what brings the best value. So that's very, very important. I think even on a micro level, people in the space always need to unlearn, not be path dependent. Otherwise, you're going to get really burned in the space. And oftentimes, the biggest winners at any single point in time is doing something that no one has done before.

52:52and it's creating its own matter rather than trying to copy something else. And that's the only staying power, I would say, in a fast-moving environment. I don't remember who said that, but I think someone said something along the lines of one of the most important kind of proof of intelligence is I don't know. Yeah, yeah. I don't know, but I want to find out. I don't know. Instead of like, it's exactly what you're just saying, right? Is instead of like being sure like everything is path dependent and like therefore because it worked, it's going to work. It's, I don't know. But I'm curious and I'm hardworking and I'll find out, right?

53:38Yep. Because you actually, if it comes to kind of the, you know, where the future of Kaito is going to be, like we're in this uncharted territory, in my definition, we're doing something that we can't rely on any presidents to really make decisions on that's so important when I interviewed Jeff from Hyperliquid I asked him what's the future of crypto and what role are you guys going to play in there and probably the thing that made me the most bullish on Hyperliquid and him and I mean obviously they did amazing things we're going to talk about them later because I know you're also kind of pretty inspired by the team but it's his answer was i don't know but i can't tell you i know but like i know we have a good trajectory and we're going to be able to to to to guess and make the best bets on the future yeah based on where we're at and the context because we understand the context instead of saying like i know this is our this is our five year ten year vision and blah blah blah which everybody's asking you all the time.

54:49I don't know, man. In crypto, it's even more crazy because it changes so fast. But the big green flag is that kind of answer. I don't know, but I'm confident.

55:03Let's get to the meat of this podcast. The megatrends of the future. Right? We talked about that a couple of weeks ago. Yeah. the first one is personal brands why will having a personal brand become increasingly increasingly huge in the future I think

55:32I think it's a it's where I think maybe two things one thing is where how social media is changing everything now and and that has really profound impact outside of crypto as well so you've seen that in the past mainstream media is having such big influence now the top person within the media shop can essentially come out and you know like yourself like have a very, very successful brand and business that can be valued in the billions. This is something that a human society has never seen before. And it's a huge trend. And it's happening everywhere. In normal businesses, in the Instagram matter, the YouTube matter, all that kind of stuff.

56:34And it's only going to be more and more in the future. and then that's the first one and then the second one is I think in the AI era people are going to really value personal connections because AI can do a lot of the stuff like even within crypto you can see AIXBT or whatever the agents can very quickly rise to the top replace a lot of the very commoditized distribution channels. To the extreme, I think there will be a huge reversal or focus or emphasis on human connections. And that's why I think personal brands are going to be very, very powerful and very valuable. And at the end of the day, I also think that a lot of the times actually even just within our space when sometimes you look at a project you look at the person hundred percent that's that's the next question that give you the temperature absolutely oh you look at no you look at x you look at elon yeah right you look at tesla you look at elon right

58:00I understand the do we say reticence like maybe it's a French word I think it's like you don't want to do that right I understand that oh man this personal brand thing I don't have time as an entrepreneur right but ask this question to Raoul Pal actually because Raoul Pal real vision you look at Raul Pal right but he he's he's gone much more down the the personal brand rabbit hole in the last maybe I don't know one to two years right which is like doing his own podcast channel YouTube channel all that stuff right because at the end of the day personal brand yeah Twitter very important but YouTube extremely important yes Instagram all the other ones I'm the real game today is probably YouTube right I mean depending what you're doing obviously but and I asked him and I asked him this question do you think that it's still possible to make it big for an entrepreneur without working on your personal brand so I'm asking you the same I think very tough you're always you're creating a huge headwind to yourself if you're doing that yeah that's what I think I think even now like the docs teams are doing much better than a non teams in this cycle and people want to relate to that like it is a huge change absolutely yeah not only you want to know who you're trusting right with your fans or with your whatever money or or time but it's all about thought leadership right do i like the idea of this person do i like they were thinking sometimes i don't agree with them but like am i learning something versus just buying a service or product that like the personal brand will make the complete difference if there's two similar products yeah or services but one has a founder with a big personal brand yep and the other one i don't even know who's behind it it's kind of become almost i don't want to say lame but like who are the yeah and you can see a big difference between the generations right yeah and i was like that i was like a boomer i mean you also right you say i just started yeah like and a swiss person you don't want to kind of show off or talk don't talk about money or you don't talk about yourself you want to like do things right look at my product or my service to see like if it's good but that's not the world we're living anymore.

1:00:41Yeah. And I think that the decision in the consumer eye, in the user's eyes will actually come much before they make the final decision. Because the product that have like a personal brand attached to it will essentially occupy so much more mindshare during the entire process that are leading towards the final decision. So that in a lot of the circumstances, the final decision makes, it's only natural and that people are not even making a decision anymore. And maybe for entrepreneurs or people who are kind of still against all of that or thinking, I don't have time, by building a personal brand, you're pretty much diversifying your risk, right?

1:01:35Because if your product or your business doesn't work, but you still have the brand, you really have a lot of, you have social capital, right? Yeah. Which is so important. Yeah. It's like almost everything. The financial capital, you can go raise it, et cetera. Like social capital is much more powerful than financial capital today. Yeah.

1:01:56So the first mega trend is personal brand. The second one is attention is the currency. Yeah. Your favorite topic. our favorite topic everything is manifested around this Twitter Twitter paying people I mean Twitter X paying people meme coin mania key opinion leaders and people who have a voice being paid for this we even saw that during the US elections yeah with Kamala Harris hiring a bunch of celebrities to supposedly come to sing but then just come and talk right and being paid millions of dollars just to do that yeah some personal brand are worth billions of dollars like Mr. Beast right yep why do you think that's the case I think it very much comes down to that what people want to see right so it's how attention has been distributed nowadays that people want to see these things people want to make shopping decisions based on a you know person that you can relate to.

1:02:56People want to buy certain things and choose certain lifestyles based on people who are heavily, heavily being influenced by these things and that have significant value. Despite the fact that not every attention is worth the same, attention has fundamental value in all of these. And even in crypto as well. there's there's actually

1:03:29there's actually interesting um analogy in terms of how attention is so tied to liquidity like in the like in the last cycle the reason why you know some of the market makers are having so much influence is because they determine where liquidity goes Even nowadays, you have certain exchanges that have a lot of power because they decide where liquidity is going to go. And the same thing will actually go to attention because attention determines how much people actually look at this and also drives liquidity. And hence why, even from a more abstract level or from a more concrete level, it has significant value.

1:04:23absolutely especially if everything becomes financialized there's so many things to choose from yeah and limited amount of capital yeah that the only difference is attention which one has the attention yeah and that's where that's where it's extremely tricky for crypto is so tricky for traditional investors right because they look at these fundamentals p ratio all that stuff and they're like yeah but this one is making so much money etc but if there's zero attention it could have the best fundamentals no one gives a fuck therefore no one will invest therefore the price is not going to go up right and that's so tricky you have like additional kind of factors to factor in to be able to make an investment or trading decision in crypto yeah yeah and it almost comes to a point and it's actually happening everywhere it's not just in crypto in a lot of the traditional you know equities investing as well so I used to be kind of investing in Tesla you know stock like these you really have to understand social attention all these kind of stuff and then if you think about our space then it's almost like if you have very good numbers that needs to essentially manifest itself into a narrative or attention that someone has to you know you know talk about it absolutely

1:05:50what do you think of the web to companies way of rewarding creators and users until now i think we're still in the very traditional model and i deeply think that's going to change. If you ask me a hundred years from now, would, so effectively what's happening right now,

1:06:22tech platforms are making huge, hundreds of billions of dollars of money through content that creators are creating on the platform. And you have a bunch of obviously content consumers And actually, you know, nowadays I tend to call this attention creators, attention consumers. And then you have attention distributors being the tech platform. And actually, only the very, very minority part of the people, the attention creators are being paid. The vast majority of the attention creators are actually not being paid. even like within crypto if you see how many people are actually getting paid by X very very little and the top guys are being paid 500 US dollar a month which is laughable but it's still so if you think about the tech platform you have let's say TikTok, Instagram YouTube, LinkedIn X x since elon musk yeah is doing one step towards that direction right yes it's much better than the other ones which are terrible i was looking at a youtube um my my friends were asking me like how much do you make on youtube i don't remember the exact number i looked like maybe for a video that has like 150 ,000 views, maybe a thousand bucks, right?

1:08:02Or I think the number was like per 1 ,000 views, $8 or something like that. I don't remember. Obviously it depends where you are, advertiser, all that stuff. But the takeaway is like, you're not gonna go far with this stupid revenues, right? Yep. Which is why you even think about, should I, my rationale since the beginning of the podcast was I don't wanna have any ads. Yep. I have the ads from the sponsors because it's much more better. They pay much better, right? But, and also I can basically choose who is advertised. Yes. But the logic was not even that. The logic was I make so much no money.

1:08:42I make no money, right? $8 for 1 ,000 views that I don't want to bother people who don't have YouTube premium, which is the majority. Yes. With these stupid ads, right? Yeah. Then the problem I had was, from what I understood, if you don't display the ads, you actually get less views. Like the algorithm favors the people who show the ads, right? Because it's good for YouTube, right? So then I'm like, oh, fuck, right? So the end result is like people have to deal with these stupid ads that bring me almost no money, right? Yep. So this is terrible. Yep. so I think up until this point is mostly indirect monetization through building your brand through you know doing collaborations through selling other stuff which I think will change in the future nowadays I think primarily is because platforms are very closed and they have huge bargaining power like they have a choice they have a choice and think about how many complaints they have been in terms of like on YouTube, for example, your channel is being shut.

1:09:52There's very little power that you actually have in terms of, you know, right? And the same thing actually goes to many other platforms. I think that's the first inning in terms of how do you get a fairer distribution of revenue share among the attention creators. And so that's number one. And I think the number two is how do you actually have a, like overall speaking, much more efficient distribution platform that actually involves all the market participants to have skin the game. And that's a model that none of the Web2 platforms will ever have. But that's a platform a Web3 platform can have.

1:10:42if we think about Yaps that is where Yaps is going absolutely yeah I see where we're going we're getting there we're very close to getting there just think about X and Elon strategy right what do you think of his strategy of rewarding X users with X payouts what is it incentivizing

1:11:09I think so it's very clear that I think he's doing it in the right direction. There are good outcomes, but also unintended consequences that came out of that, which we can kind of relate to the YAPS program as well. They've been kind of going through different waves. But obviously, like, the intended incentivization is people are incentivized to be sharing more. especially content slash attention creators that are more dedicated to acts, sharing more acts, making your earnings here, being more loyal to the platform and create better content so that all the attention consumers can actually stay on the platform for a longer period of time.

1:12:04That's a very straightforward equation. But obviously the unintended consequences we've seen a lot of bots. Nowadays, if you see certain viral meme and then the reply session, it's never talking about the meme itself. It's just posting other memes. It's completely unrelated. It's all dominated by bots trying to get impressions because the methodology that is very primitive, I would say, it's solely based on impressions. and has nothing to do with the content so basically you said you're in they're incentivizing creator to create better content but that's not necessarily true more content but not say better content right i think this it that becomes the on it on the unintended consequence being that it's like it's a scenes policy that you actually have there's so many more so many more bots was the right way to reward content creators, according to you?

1:13:11Well, obviously still experimenting. I think YAPS went through different phases. One common complaint about YAPS is, like, why is my YAPS not increasing? Like, why is it still zero, et cetera? As much as we want to have... like we want to reward everyone we need to have a mechanism that is it's almost a very very stringent so that um so the best content can be can be rewarded the most and the and none of the farming activities can actually gain from that system which is very very important because otherwise it will be it will be a net negative for everyone. It loses all the purposes. The algorithm is never perfect.

1:14:12But I think one thing that's maybe consensual among, like at this point, maybe majority of the people is the ones that are actually being surfaced, what people really believe are good content or attention creators in the space. And people actually, nowadays, a lot of people are going through the emerging Yappa leaderboard to see some of the smaller accounts that actually have very, very good content. Similarly, people go through the market leaderboard that people are creating daily content discovery based on this kind of stuff. And what's very unique about that process is we made it so difficult in a way that I think if we look at the kind of the farming, what we classify as farming activities, it hit the peak during Christmas.

1:15:10Absolutely. Yeah. When you announced, hey, you have a couple of days to earn that much, right? Then everybody was going crazy. I was thinking, fuck, I should have done this podcast two weeks ago when we were, I mean, one month ago. And then now would be the perfect moment for the mindshare, right? But absolutely. and fairly quickly we saw people saying fairly quickly we saw people's it didn't last long right this farming very very quickly because people realized that it wasn't earning any yaps and what's also really funny was we saw a lot of people using clickbaits or engagement baits saying that hey I did this I earned a thousand yaps which is absolutely untrue because and even it's even around in a way that there is a public dashboard but nobody goes and verify and then people just like oh holy shit like i should be doing the same and then everyone's like farming but very very quickly people realize oh it's actually not working and it's actually hurting your reputation which hurts your ability to be doing anything else in the future so that very quickly stopped you said no one is going to the leaderboard i don't agree i'm going every day You manage to, like, you literally manage.

1:16:26You know, we all use X and maybe like a WhatsApp, Telegram, like a few past. I'm going every day to freaking kaito.ai, like literally, like every day. So doing something right, I think. Okay, we're going to dive much deeper into yapping, mindshare, social score, all that stuff. Yep. Before that, we talk about Web 2, right? And rewarding users. So let's add the Web 3 component. in the attention is the currency kind of concept. How is Web3 reinforcing this attention is the currency concept?

1:17:07I think the market is implicitly doing that, right? So I think obviously like memes is a very, very pure form of attention. It actually put up a framework saying that the valuation framework for a meme is attention multiplied by narrative. So the fundamental is your attention. And then the narrative is how much people are willing to pay for one unit of that attention. So within, among the companies or among the memes that have the same attention, then people compete on narrative. like which one is bigger like which one is more promising etc which one is more unique and original among the memes that have the same narrative that people compete on attention like which one is gaining more attention etc and and I think that a lot of that a lot of the stuff in crypto is being valued that way absolutely absolutely you mentioned before ai xbt right yeah ai xbt is an agent an ai agent who provides i mean who that let's say it's not a person that provides trading information about different crypto projects and gathered like 350k followers and the top mind share on kaito ai in a matter of weeks yeah you said and that's like so linked what you talk about right now You said the value of AIXBT agent isn't its answer engine.

1:18:55Few would rely on it for trading decisions, let alone paying for it. But it's distribution. The rich the brand and the attention it can gather. It can garner. Welcome to the attention economy. And then we even had AIXBT replying to that, right? the attention is always more valuable than the product you get it anon can you explain that to you said your mother follows you so can you explain that to your father oh that's tough i think i think in a very abstract way a expt is being valued as an akol rather than being valued as kind of an answer engine or whatever, like a terminal. That's just my perspective.

1:19:50Because if you're being valued as a terminal, then you're being valued based on the willingness to pay for your terminal. But actually, that's not the case. And people actually very quickly realize, okay, it's making a lot of mistakes, it's setting old data. I can't really trust it. But people are so willing to engage with that because it has a very wide distribution. It can garner attention in a way that no one else can and also doesn't have any baggage. You tag XBT, you get a response. You don't get that for any other influences in the space. Absolutely. You know, it changed the profile picture and it can change it back.

1:20:41Like, I think that's even also something, right? So for example, for me to change my profile picture, that's like a, it's almost like changing my identity. AIXBT can essentially do an auction process if it wants to. And I use that as, you know, a revenue generation activity.

1:21:05You said before. personal brands are so important people want the human aspect right but we're seeing in the in the crypto context that the biggest personal brand is an ai

1:21:24and it's just now right so this is just the beginning yeah can big human key opinion leaders even compete with AI KOLs? Yep. I think both were specialized in very different things. And as a matter of fact, if you see the leaderboard, AI XPT is actually the only agent that made it out there. And it's still heavily, if you count how many agents that are out there in the market, right? So it's not on the leaderboard. So there's only one agent that really made it. And part of the reason and part of the lead was also because AI doesn't rest. And it's not just kind of posting 24-7, but we also had a Christmas holiday.

1:22:17And all the other human influences basically took a rest. And AISBT was just like churning out content nonstop, even during holiday. day but actually you see that dominance going down and nowadays that you know back in the day like the SBT will be always number one number two at least top three and nowadays will be you know just shy of top ten mm-hmm so I think the I think the power shift always happen based on the people's attention in general like how much do people focus on a agent at this single point in time versus maybe a week ago that's also kind of changing and the ai expertise is so unique in a way that like comparing with any of the kind of the web tool um agents or you know let's say for example like agent KOLs in the space that it has a token so it has a massive token holder base that wants it to do well as well.

1:23:32So that's very unique. That's very different. So that's almost like let's say you're Mert. You tokenize yourself. You guarantee that hey like all my future earnings we're going to be redistributed back to my token holders. I think you'll be by far the most popular account in the space by a mile because so many people want you to win as well. Not that he's already... It's a double-edged sword, right? Yeah. Actually, I don't remember who said that. It was Kiao Wang from Alliance. This is social tokens, right? Yeah. Basically. But the difference is, I heard some people say, the moment a celebrity or a KOL launched their meme coin, which is kind of like the same, it's the end of their career because it's so risky, right?

1:24:28Whereas the AI agent doesn't give a fuck. They don't have these emotions. They're like, oh man, even if it doesn't do well, they don't care, right? Yep. Like, so that's one of the big differences on why these social tokens almost make more sense for AI agent for the moment than for, because you say, you're seeing the optimist side, which is a MERT launches his token. He will be super popular so long as the token does well. Then you have like a bear market, everybody gets wrecked. It's like a crypto project. Your token does well. Your product is amazing. Your token doesn't do well. Your product is shit.

1:25:09For people, right? Yes. But I think historically, there's a big disconnect. At least I think people are giving benefit of doubt to AIXBT in the fact that this agent is not going to launch another token. And then historically what happened in the space is like there's a huge incentive disalignment for any celebrity to launch a Mimcoin token and then subsequently abandon that. and not accruing any of the utilities because there's a natural disconnect between like all you make all your money on Instagram and all the other deals, but like have no obligation to do anything with a token. So you always end very badly.

1:25:58Frontech took maybe one step further accruing some fundamental utilities, the key being the access but still relatively loose. If there's a way, which we're going to try to do something and see if it works. And if there's a way to essentially tie that, you know, if you have a different relationship and dynamics between you, your fans or attention consumers and the attention distributors and the earnings in the whole ecosystem and then make that basically, you know, you enforce the value distribution in a trustless way. Maybe there's a way for it to work. We talked about KOLs launching their, tokenizing their sales, right?

1:27:05another entity that can tokenize itself is a business right you built a beautiful highly profitable equity business in the last three years and are now working on a token powered business why would you do that? there are I think there at the surface level there are probably a few reasons one reason is we always wanted to build a retail product and fundamentally I don't believe the way to build a retail product at least in our business is to have a freemium model or a light version that only gets very very limited set of the features that we currently offer I also think that the majority of the people don't necessarily derive sufficient value from using a search engine.

1:28:09It only makes sense for certain professionals and certain team. So the majority of our users on the Kytopro side is basically project teams. Ethereum, Solana, Optimism, Arbitrum, Eigerly, Baruchin, etc. they have to make very good decisions on strategy. They have to have a, you know, feedback loop in terms of how the marketing is doing. You know, all this kind of stuff. Plus all the, obviously, our liquid funds, VCs, and, you know, traders. And for those people, then there is significant value in using a product like that. But for the average, for the average people, they probably can't derive as much value as those people.

1:28:59And I think the retail strategy is not to kind of just build a freemium model, which I think doesn't ultimately make much sense. So that's number one. So we think about kind of doing something different. Number two is we're in the business of solving problems. For the longest period of time, we have all these teams coming to us and say that, hey, that you have search engine, you know what people historically said, you have everyone's influence, you know, smart followers, you have K-O-O-Mindshare, you know, how people are performing, you know, narrative and, you know, token mindshare, all that kind of stuff.

1:29:52can you help us streamline our KOL strategy? So in the past, people will be, usually speaking, there are four different parts of that. There is the mapping part, right? So KOL mapping, which accounts are potentially relevant to you for the space that you operate, what kind of businesses, what kind of narratives that you're trying to convey to the market. and then it's the analytics part based on your profile based on your you know mindsharing geography based on your current audience which carriers will fit into your campaign strategy etc and then there is the outreach after you pin down okay these are the 10, 20 sometimes even 100, 200 people then how can how can it outreach to these people.

1:30:51And then the fourth part is how can I do performance evaluation, attribution, like who is doing better, who is doing worse, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. And the whole process is very painful. And then teams have to go through that on a very, very regular basis and oftentimes a very, very inefficient way. And imagine, and everything is also kind of

1:31:24the payments put forward in a way that you're paying people up front and then measuring people by number of posts that they're doing yeah it's the same as everybody was kind of acknowledging that the whole low float IFDVC game was kind of fucked up right and couple with that was the KOL game and you have all these KOLs that most of them they just do shit content probably a lot of fake followers fake you know it's very easy to fake your numbers and but he was kind of going hand in hand with this VC model it was a playbook right and then you know you talk to I mean I'm an advisor to a few project and I was like this is not there either oh yeah I need to go on i mean i can't i can't mention names but like i need to go on this space on these these whatever podcasts or these these i need to have these kols and i'm like this is gonna give you zero roi yeah and you're gonna overpay like crazy and like these killers are paid way too much like way too much for for the the the return right like this is terrible but and there's the the point they know that they're like yeah i know that but what else do i do i don't have any attention right so you'll pay way too much for very average attention or actually bad especially the projects were not very crypto native they come they say i need to go to these guys a lot of followers and like this is if you're a crypto twitter person you know like this is yeah scammer right like literally but like this this is a massive problem yep it's yeah it is a massive problem and i actually think that everyone is stuck in that game.

1:33:17And the project teams don't have any alternatives and they're desperate. And by the same time, the good actors in the space are also very disincentivized. And I can tell you some of the stories after. But essentially, because of this structure, and actually oftentimes, there is an ever-selection problem, which made it even worse in the fact that the best projects maybe don't even have to do any of these and then they get attention and then the ones that want to do it or for example the or from a different perspective the best accounts and KORs will never charge and then they will just be organically talking about certain things and then and then the ones that you actually pay for you know it could be could be a different game so there could be an adverse selection problem there so that's kind of the problem that we saw and obviously everything comes back to these are the users who have been using kytle for a long period of time we have a very long-standing relationship with all these teams we can see the struggles and the pains that they're going through and then we want to find a solution to that problem.

1:34:42So that's kind of the second reason why we're thinking about YAPS. And the third one was strategically YAPS is also an insurance policy for Kytel Pro. So Kytel Pro actually, we index a lot of different data sources, Twitter being one of them, but also at the same time, like Discord, Media, Mirror, Podcast, Governance, Votes, Research, all that kind of stuff. It's a very comprehensive social listening tool versus slash a research platform. But Twitter is so important in that. We have no control over the access. We obviously have a relationship with X, but we have no control over the continuity of the data.

1:35:36But crypto Twitter is actually dominated. Social media in general is a very 80-20 split. The majority of the high-quality content is actually dominated or produced by the minority of the people. If we have a mechanism that can set up a direct relationship or direct dialogue with all the people who have been producing very good content, then that becomes a very valuable insurance policy that we have. So that's kind of strategically why we're also doing that. What do you mean by insurance policy? Insurance policy being that, hey, like for example, for one day, Twitter decides no one can ever have access to Twitter data.

1:36:21Can we get the consent directly from the users and the most valuable users actually still have access? Obviously don't foresee that happening, but as a business, we're going to think about that business risk. What's the single most important thing to focus on when building a token business that most crypto projects lack? I think for us, it's probably the demand side of the equation. I think without the demand side of the equation, that Yaps will be completely useless and it will be just another social farming campaign or whatever that doesn't have any inherent intrinsic value. But that's very quickly changing.

1:37:14Even just this week, for example, we had a movement, we had a story, we had corn, we had anime, and obviously we launched quite a quite a few of Yappelietables before. And these project teams are using this whole new way to essentially incentivize the community in a completely different manner, completely public, transparent, and freely accessible to everyone. You don't have to be a KOL. You can fairly participate in the game. and everyone is being assessed based on performance and merits rather than based on who you know. Yeah, so ultimately you need to create something that's useful, right? And that makes money.

1:38:10Yeah. It's the same conversation we had with Jeff actually. He was saying the biggest use case until now for crypto is launching scam tokens. Basically, there's no underlying value because it's very hard to build product that has actual demand, right? Which leads us to attention, mindshare, and yaps, right? Or, I called it to get views on YouTube, how to get rich with crypto, AI, and content without getting lucky. You tweeted, years of our SaaS business plus trust and relationship with hundreds of different teams brought us one thing that is unique, the demand side of the equation. Kaito built the apps because of demand.

1:39:04There's a real problem to be solved here. Just the start. What's the real problem you're trying to solve today? I think it's the...

1:39:18I think crypto is unique in a way that TGEs are such a big event and everyone's thinking about decentralizing ownership, but people historically struggle to find a very good way to do that. Actually, I read Haseeb's 2025 predictions. Within that, he wrote, obviously, certain projects that will be using, for example, if you're building up a pub or exchange or whatever, then your points is basically your users. Whether they're farming or whatever, maybe it doesn't really matter because they're your users. And then there are kind of a second tier or second category being that maybe you are infrastructure play.

1:40:06And historically, you essentially reward testnet users, et cetera. But then nowadays, there's so much industrialized farming activities that would essentially crush the whole initial reward mechanism. do you then look for alternatives? And then his prediction is people will start rewarding social contribution plus doing more crowd sale because they can know that these are the real people. And you already seen these. I would say that Eigenlayer probably led the trend back in September. then they distributed, you know, millions of dollars to content creators. And that was a surprise drop. We helped them essentially going back two and a half years of time, identifying all the accounts that have been generating meaningful content for Eigenlayer.

1:41:06And after that, so many projects came to us and say that, can we also do the same? right? Because we know that these people are real and we know that we can put a content filter. We can leverage other land to understand everything that they said. And actually, so in the whole game, so it's, A, there's kind of the demand side of the equation that people want to do this. People are willing to kind of set aside very substantial rewards to reward things like this. and there's also the other side that the technology is ready to kind of make a lot of the stuff that was previously just completely impossible.

1:41:53And so that was unique in a way that, you know, even right now we have so many projects in the pipeline want to launch Yappa leaderboard and then they all set us our rewards for this. And if you really think about a very, very simple business or equation, every year airdrop is last year, for example, is 15 billion. Every year is above 10 billion. If you believe that in the future, social airdrop with like you can with a very solid mechanism can take 10 % of the contribution within the initial airdrop. that's a billion dollar of value that we can distribute to all the users. And to the right users.

1:42:48To the right users. Not the farmers. Yeah. The right people. So like it's just a win-win because the right people are being rewarded. Yeah. And then you have a stronger community who will be your evangelist, right? Yeah. And I think one of the misconceptions that people had was, oh, okay, then everything can be gamed and then you have this leaderboard and maybe it doesn't make sense. But actually, people have much more data than that. If people want to assess your loyalty, people can see how much you've been talking about their project versus others. If people want to assess your value set, everything can be...

1:43:20It kills the whole like classic KRL game, which is I shield something every time I'm being paid for and then I forget them and I go to the next one, right? You can see that directly. Yeah. It's completely... It's so good. Finally, it's so good. I want to talk about mindshare, yapping, social score, right? And criticism of the Kato AI algo. Yep. What do you define as mindshare? Mindshare is is the share of it's like a share of voice that you occupy in people's mind. So effectively the the definition is you know how much you are appearing how much percentage that you're occupying and people's mind based on all the activities that you're doing and mostly for example on Twitter is posts okay but it's it's complicated in a way that you can't use for example if you have a metric based on the impressions is going to lead to all the wrong answers absolutely yeah so that's you know maybe the secret sauce is kind of how we how we calculate it how the algorithms evolving um and behind the scene there's so much computation that was that was done what do you tell the repo we say yeah but you're the one deciding that for every kpi right yeah you're the one creating the calculation so it can be wrong or biased.

1:45:02Yes. I think so the first so the most important answer is everything that we're doing now so what we're doing in the future is effectively withdrawing Kaetor from everything. So we're very well aware of the risk as I put it. but there's a natural progression. So as I kind of mentioned, I think the first inning was information is disorganized. The second inning is there is a relatively good or consensually good algorithm that does a decent job, but it can have risk. So that's what we're doing right now. So this is kind of the second inning. And then that's the third stage. which is financializing everything that market forces decide.

1:46:01So very quickly we'll be actually just, I don't know when this is going to be released, but in January we're going to be launching an auction-based Yappa leaderboard mechanism where Keito doesn't get to decide which project gets launched on Yappa leaderboard. actually all the yappers slash the market will essentially decide who holds that spot to distribute attention. And the future will be more of these. So yeah, I mean, that's the kind of the future direction that we're heading. And the whole narrative about InfoPhi is essentially to solve that. But you need a natural progression there. You need a reference point.

1:46:51and that's that's kind of the the algorithm part and actually if you really think about this in the whole world crypto is probably the only industry as ironic as it sounds that doesn't use ai to distribute attention efficiently because the so many scams so twitter ads is completely useless in every other industry people are using algorithm to essentially make advertising decisions only in crypto is using the most primitive most opaque most inefficient distribution mechanism to do this so we talked about Mindshare let's talk about YAPs what does a YAP represent concretely? YAP is basically tokenized attention.

1:47:56And the aggregate of YAPs to an account level is effectively, in our view, tokenized influence. But before we talked about people who, you know, around Christmas, I want to earn YAPs and I'm going to start to do engagement farming and all that stuff, but it doesn't work. what does it tell about how yaps are calculated basically yeah how do you come up with this is this deserves a yap or a point which probably in the future is going to be financialized right yeah with the token yeah and this doesn't deserve it like how does the algorithm think yep so there's very much the algorithm can be bespoke and custom made so for YAPS because it's a points program when it's a heavily disincentivized farming and heavily incentivized real engagement original content creative content all these kind of stuff that would essentially let the algo evolve in a certain way but actually if you see some of the community YAPA leaderboards they're being run on completely different algo because ultimately that's where that these projects would essentially decide it can completely be custom made so for example a simple example would be in yaps you wouldn't be earning points just by vibing we like for kaito we don't necessarily want to incentivize that but actually for some of the community projects they won't right so you don't have to be very very insightful or original like copy-pasta can also be fine as long as, hey, everyone is saying, you know, for example, we're launching on Q5 or, you know, Oga Booga or whatever, G-Move.

1:49:53And the people, you know, want, you know, essentially want certain, you know, subculture to evolve. And every company is very different in that construct and setup. So the algorithm will, you know, all be different. But what you're doing, you said is not - Disensitivized. Disensitivized. That's how you evolve crypto into a better place, right? The problem for me of like a project can come and say, oh, we're going to do our own app and then we're going to twist the algorithm. Like they can still not change much of what has been done now because they just want the attention. If the founder is very short-term focused and wants like a huge valuation and then get the money and then leave, right?

1:50:40or the product, they can still say, okay, the algo should work that way so that we're maximizing for short-term attention and buzz and all that stuff. And it doesn't really matter, right? Yep. So you need to have a human who is well-intentioned, right? Yep. I think we obviously, as Kayato, we have a North Star. And we can maybe talk about this in a bit like we are especially like with a business that's already kind of decently profitable and successful in people's eyes whatever we do we have a north star and a mission driven

1:51:30you know we're effectively kind of mission driven believers in that construct so that you know that's kind of up onto how we've been selecting certain projects over the others. But I think eventually we'll be left to the market. And you have to put the trust into the market somehow that people collectively, that people collectively, but also that obviously there's gonna be a part of our job as well. Like for example, simple example, if people are voting with YAPS, we essentially determine who gets YAPS, right? if we're distributing yaps in a relatively good way then people with the right influence will essentially you can trust them with the right absolutely decisions but over time i i totally see i think kites are gradually being removed and withdrawn from the entire system and you know and also you know cut part of the network the ownership of the network was also going to be decentralized.

1:52:40And we've seen that for people who might, even me, I was thinking, can you really let markets decide? But we've seen it with Polymarket, how right and how early they were on like US elections. So like, it's kind of like the ultimate proof on markets can do the job much faster in a much more efficient fashion than anything else. Right? Yep. you built a social score. I look at that all the time. Social card, yes. No, because like you're thinking in crypto, when you're trying to create good content of quality, your numbers, all that stuff will increase slower than if you're just like engagement farming.

1:53:16It's the same on X. Oh, I'm talking about the fires in LA and the day after I'm talking about Ukraine war and then I get my numbers and maybe the payout, right? Whereas like with your algo, like you can see, oh man, And this thing seems to be really rewarding, like quality stuff, right? Obviously everyone is biased towards their own content. This thing is quality. Yep. But what is your concrete goal with the creation of a social score? I think, I mean, the whole social card was obviously part of the marketing campaign. But I think deep down, a lot of the metrics that we're really focused on is at least from the demand side of the equation, like what these high quality projects really focus on.

1:54:06So people are very fed up with fake numbers. So we came up with smart followers. It's never going to be perfect, but it kind of takes one step further. It's what people want to see. And then the problem arose being that, okay social graph can be relatively static right so you can have like people um who may be respected in the past and then now completely ruins everyone's trust and no one no one wants to be engaging with this particular person anymore so it can still have a relatively high smart follower but actually the mindset can be much lower today. And then that's a very dynamic equation.

1:54:59And ultimately, that kind of paints a better picture than you're looking at some of the alternative headline data. For example, how many followers? To be honest, I think everyone is already doing that in the space in a way that people, for example if you click consulting piece of profile that you'll be seeing how many people are you follow actually follow this particular absolutely so we're just doing that on a on a bigger scale and quantifying and tokenizing attention and influence in a you know in a kind of a more algo driven way talking about the algo what are the current flows and biases in the way the Keito AI algo works.

1:55:42Yeah. I would say the YAPS points system has a more bias towards whether you like it or not like it, but has kind of a more bias towards how the inner circle perceives. inner circle means big people but no it's not big people so it's based on a social graph so this is an objective social graph so if you think about the entire CT so at this moment 250 ,000 people have registered to be APA the entire CT is rather including some of the not very active accounts will be 20 million different accounts of which you know 400k 400 ,000 accounts or so will have a few smart phones which I tend to think that this is kind of you know people who have some sort of social reputation and and then within this if you kind of just map out the entire CT graph And then if you condense that to kind of the smallest circle, then these people historically would have done something different to have earned that social capital.

1:57:16And Vitalik, for example, today is number one in that social graph, not because he has the large number of followers. He actually doesn't, but actually he's followed by the most people. he's done something to have earned that social reputation and social capital. And if you extrapolate that to have a big enough social graph then these people would essentially be considered as smart followers. But it's very dynamic. How many people are in this inner circle? It's kind of in the tune of like tens of thousands. Tens of thousands? Yeah. So the yaps are more rewarded based on how many of these, let's say 10 ,000 people are interacting with your posts?

1:58:12Not necessarily, but that's kind of - Vias. Yeah, so that's kind of where the reputation-based engagement works. And the underlying premise is if you're able to get more reputable people to be engaging with you. For example, if you can get Elon Musk to be engaging with you, then your content is probably worth something. But that's only one part of the equation. Even if people are outside of crypto Twitter, if they have big accounts and they interact with you, you're being rewarded for it. TBD. Okay. Yeah. But obviously there is other metrics. For example, if you say that, hey, I'm going to the gym, all that kind of stuff, that's not considered as crypto rather than content.

1:58:58So there's, you know, a lot of stuff. Like, for example, we have a metric checking originality. And we can actually see the whole distribution. And it's a very normal distribution with a peak on the kind of a close to kind of 100 % part. 100 % being that you're a complete copypasta. So a lot of people, they... So we'll essentially kind of... So if you inspire yourself too much from other people's content, the AI will see it and will be like, this is not worth points. And even just a kind of a direct translation. Because across languages, paraphrasing, summarizing content, and it's very evolving as well.

1:59:50So what I said today could also change quite a bit. And kind of AI is also having that dynamic evaluation mechanism. There's also kind of a difficulty adjustment. As more people come in, as more content comes in, then, you know, it kind of always adjusts. What's the goal of the YAP campaign? I think YAPs to us is just onboarding. It's nothing more than onboarding. So it's very, very early. And we have the demand side of the equation. And then YAPS is our way to bootstrap the supply side of the equation. To get people to start being part of the ecosystem. But it's not a product. I know that a lot of people already kind of check out the leaderboard and maybe find out some of the newer accounts, et cetera.

2:00:52But in my view, it's not a product that people can use yet. Like you earn your yaps, you can't use your yaps. And that's going to change very soon. The only way to earn yaps today is to yap? Yeah. Yap points, right? Yeah, or refer people. Refer people? Yeah. so does that mean that YAP points are part of the future token or because I'm guessing like early users of the product maybe I'm wrong I'm guessing YAPers I'm guessing maybe NFT holders like different ways to earn some points or whatever maybe you're going to create new ones I guess Can you tell us more about like the ways today and maybe the new ways to earn points because because basically how to get more engaged in a community that we know is going to reward in a fair fashion people when you launch a token in the future.

2:02:00Yeah. So obviously comment on the distribution and who's going to get what. But I think in our view, we'll want to see two things happening. one is we want people I think the ideal state is people keep doing what they're doing absolutely and almost forget that there is the apps and we're doing everything that we can to essentially get to that stage and the second thing is we want this to be as fair and as a level level playing field as possible and you actually see that nowadays a lot of the very very small accounts with a couple hundred followers can essentially make it a leaderboard and we want to have this mechanism to improve in a way that you know good accounts and good content and good voices can be heard yeah so these are the kind of the two things that we're definitely working on but the first one is very important we want people to almost forget about yaps and keep doing what they're doing that's actually uh when i started i was it was my thought i was like first i'm like oh i'm getting some yaps then everybody's trying to game that obviously yeah and then you're like the first because there was a guy who commented uh i wrote that somewhere lol i skip all these gamification services that try to reward your you to tweet they all fall and tokens aren't ever worth it because everyone is trying to farm it not worth my man my time and mental capacity and for me i was like this is the ultimate test to see if the farmers right how many days will they continue or they realize oh i'm not getting earning points yeah so i'm gonna stop and it happens so quickly a few days yeah done right I was like, wow, this is different from all of these other kind of protocols that can be kind of farmed and you end up in this, or even just Twitter X where you have all these noise makers, right?

2:04:18Who end up getting rewarded with actual money. Yep. One other thing that's also unique is we don't require people to be talking about Kaito. You can talk about anything. I will want to see you talk about everything rather than just directing all this stuff at Kaito. You mentioned the NFT before. You launched the Kaito Genesis NFT a few weeks ago. 1 ,500 NFTs minted at 0.1 ETH. That went overnight to about 4 ETH. So it's like a 40X overnight just for minting an NFT. Pretty amazing. why do you think people value the kaito nft so much i think i think one of the most important uh fundamental reasons was the the majority of the nft allocation was to the early users and even to this day they're using kaito from the you know the pro side right so like yesterday we also made a big launch for every single project team right now they can track all their social kpis impressions by share sentiment breakdown in terms of attribution how my uh what are some of the most popular tweets i had from my brand account from my affiliated team accounts external mentions how do i break down my mention mentions mindshare sentiment involvement doing social listening across all the other you know all the other platforms these are our users are using our tools on a daily basis and you tend to have a very strong conviction because of that so I think that's one thing that's very unique that's how you create value actually right that's what Hyperliquid did amazing you have the big believers and these one these people will be because they're believing they're just holding the thing therefore if there is more demand and there is like limited supply the token or the nft goes up I tend to really not focus on the prices and everything but one thing that people told me was like there were only like 20 or 30 after he's been listed yeah which says a lot about I think how much how much conviction that our users are placing onto us so what you just mentioned before is basically what you call proof of attention proof of attention is now accessible and verifiable on-chain and verifiable on-chain builders no longer need to ask for our permission to access our apps we hope to make this a frequent update and ideally a broader set let the innovation begin what is proof of attention proof of attention is basically people's the apps and and in an algorithm obviously you know that we designed and people have to be trusting the algorithm is working but obviously like all the public leaderboards is out there for people to sense check and verify whether that kind of aligns and everything is being updated on a real-time basis that people can check hey over the last 24 hours who's making the list and over time that if you have that trust on to people's yaps uh some sort of proxy for people's uh for attention that people garnered and for the influence that's kind of being reflected by the amount of attention that they can garner, then that's proof of attention.

2:08:07What we did was we put that YARP's data, proof of attention, at least for the top 1 ,000 YARPers on chain, so that all the people who want to build on top of that doesn't necessarily have to get our permission. and that's a huge enabler because as a builder A obviously it reduces friction and B is you have peace you have peace of mind that that one day this data is not going to disappear you can always rely on some sort of data that that exist there so since that we have had voluntary collaborations and oftentimes that people would just essentially come to us and say that by the way we've done this using the data and that is great can you give some examples we have a lot so for example people are doing the so I think quiet was for example, doing the, you know, incentivized testnet and then essentially whitelisted all the NFT holders and YARP users.

2:09:30Soon did the ICO, essentially giving all the, you know, YARP users a discount based on the YARPs that they have and based on, you know, the social reputation that they have. So we supply that data. And I think quite a lot of, you know, projects within the bearer chain ecosystem, which are very focused on the social and connection side of things, also doing the integration with the YAPS data. So it becomes, and we also just had a conversation I can't share, but it's one of the very, very prominent fundraising platform, ICO platform, that essentially decides to kind of all thinks about integrating with YAPS because they know for sure that these people are real people and they have some sort of influence and social capital within the space.

2:10:32And it becomes very composable, completely permissionless, and it's always going to be there.

2:10:43I had a conversation with Wiki, the co-founder of Virtuals, a few weeks ago, and he told me how much Jeff Yan and Hyperliquid example forced them to change their fundraising model. They essentially said, we wanted to go and raise, but we're not going. We're not going to raise any VC money. You said the significance of Hyperliquid's rise goes beyond the product itself. It deep inspires all builders who come after. This is likely the profound impact it is making on the space. Yeah. What did you decide to change at Kaito after seeing what the Hyperliquid team pulled off?

2:11:25I think there are certain things that we're learning from Hyperliquid. And when I was, you know, posting that tweet, one aspect which that we're already doing is I think that the Hyperliquid model inspired the builders to be thinking that good products can actually win in this market you don't necessarily need uh to be like chasing narrative if you actually have a good products your users will stand beside you and then support you and if you take over users then then it can become a very, very powerful thing. And that kind of changes the whole relationship in the ecosystem. I think that's something that we're already doing because we've always been very, very focused on building a product that people use.

2:12:31That's kind of in my bio as well. And I think that's very aligned with Hyperliquid. And then what I really learned from the hyperliquid experience is once you have a good product and we're not doing everything perfectly, we're kind of taking a lot of learnings as we go as well. and criticisms and feedback from the community, et cetera, that we need to create a very fair and good and married-based and relevance-based and maybe loyalty-based distribution system as well. And I've been praising the Outpoints program. So initially we're kind of debating between different setups. But I think ultimately, I think the Hyperliquid model gave us an inspiration in a way that points doesn't have to be, it's okay for it to be hard to earn.

2:13:39And but like people can have a different ways. We're going to be introducing them, but you need to be very, very clear in terms of what's the desired behavior that you want to incentivize. And so that was that. And also obviously like second thing is the how you think about the whole distribution. What's the relationship between you and your users and kind of the broader distribution? That's kind of the second thing that we'll be thinking a lot. and you mentioned uh building a useful product right the reason why hyperliquid has so much leverage and could create such an impact on their early users life and the crypto industry as a whole is because they have a good product and because they have users and they're paying basically they're making money right yep you also created the business that is very profitable you said that Kaito AI grew ATX last year?

2:14:43Came to 110X. 110X in the last couple of weeks. We had a good December. That's a decent December, yeah. So there is probably something that entrepreneurs can learn from you in terms of thinking about the product idea and how to reach product market fit and how to go to market. How do you start a business when there is no comparison? I think it always comes down to the first principle. at least that's kind of how we operate. And first principle in a sense of not be afraid that something hasn't been created before, that something hasn't been done before. First principle as in, is that a problem that is worth solving and that is a valuable problem to be solving for?

2:15:38I think that's fundamentally everything comes down to that either you're building an equity business either you're building a token business I think it doesn't really matter ultimately it's just a kind of it's a different distribution that you're thinking in the end and these things can change over time depending on circumstances but the thing that's not going to be changing is whether you're solving a problem that actually exists and whether people care about that problem or not. You said the only way we can collectively be a positive sum game in the industry is if more entrepreneurs try competing in new different products instead of slight improvements.

2:16:30Yeah. I think I'm a firm believer in that. And I can give you an example where we probably ask millions of different times whether we want to do on-chain analytics. Because people perceive us as an analytics company. But the way that we're really thinking is if there are other people already done certain things, than we might as well just stand on the shoulders of the giants and then push the boundary somewhere else. Yeah. And I truly believe that that's how the whole industry can move forward. You don't think about, obviously I think like marginal improvement is important, but I think that certain times that people being too focused on, you know, creating something.

2:17:35Even a lot of the time it's like, because I think part of the problem is PMF is very, very rare in this space. Like people are dying for that. And then people will just do everything to essentially copy the leader. But innovation doesn't come from that. A lot of the times that people want to be, hey, I just want to be a beater of that leader. But as a space, we should be inspired to be doing, or at least not afraid to be doing something that completely no one else has done before. Or even if you're inspired by certain things, then maybe think about an angle that's very value creative. so I actually I you know I think obviously last cycle that people have been talking about vampire attacks all that kind of stuff I think it's as an industry we should we should move away from doing all of those but actually thinking about creating new things you have a team you have a great team obviously to help you do that proud of them yeah but you're a solo founder yeah is this good or bad I think it's both good and bad

2:19:05in my case that just happens to be the case

2:19:12I think the good thing is the team can be very focused and there's pretty much zero time wasted on debating certain things Which can be dangerous, obviously. And it can be vulnerable as well at times when things are not working so well. For examples? We've been building, obviously, since 2022. It's not just all good times. They're kind of one and a half years of bear in between. Many tough decisions we had to make. even just 12 months ago, like 12 months ago, when we were kind of first launching, because we knew nobody at the time. And then all the people that we knew were, you know, some of the VC investors.

2:20:12And then they looked at the product and then they were like, okay, I'm making this venture investment. And your search engine doesn't give me a lot of information about these private deals. I don't know whether like I support your mission, but do I really pay 10 ,000 US dollar for this? Right. So that was even just like 12 months ago. I think about the adoption that we currently have and things, things can change very, very quickly when, you know, the adoption starts. but you know at times of difficulty there's no one else that you can rely on chat tool obviously like I can talk to my team but no one else is in the exact same shoe as you yeah for the bad times absolutely it's great to have co-founders but if it comes down to the same thing as we're talking in the beginning which is a trading or investing or entrepreneurship.

2:21:20When you have your gut feeling about like, you have your idea and your North Star, and sometimes you can't really explain why this is the right decision. You just know it, right? When you have a co-founder and you have to explain why, it can be very hard, right? Or it can be like very frustrating.

2:21:44Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. it's almost like a marriage but not based on personality based on complementary or yeah oh you have exactly complementary and you have people who say okay this guy has a vision and even if i'm a co-founder i'm a co-founder for technical for example so i make my vision on the way we build the technical side but the vision of the business is left to this guy because he's the kind of originator of the idea it's very hard to have like i guess multiple people who are originator of an idea and how it would evolve right yeah

2:22:20now I have too many example in my own life with that with businesses yeah like I realized I'm I always ended up I always started businesses with co-founders and I always ended up being solo founder every business yeah and it's exactly because of that in beginning I was thinking I can't start this thing alone it's too hard blah blah blah but then you have your good finger finger they don't understand like they don't understand where why i don't want to take the shortcuts here and the shortcut there and why i don't want to make money now because it's going to come in one year because first we need to build this this this this this because there's a logic but i can't explain it yeah i mean i can explain it but it take me too much time like you should understand it like you know and it's yeah yeah i feel you there is a button on your website called kaito connect yeah i clicked on it i'm early bird number 58227 i felt very special how does kaito expand its social score or yaps or tool set outside of crypto

2:23:29it's definitely something that we're thinking a lot I think crypto is unique in a way that there is so much in the stake in terms of the value distribution and it's so inefficient just in terms of the distribution as the status quo so we obviously also we know the space so that's why we focus on that but I think the two expansions that we're going to be looking to make is even within crypto beyond X thinking about other platforms and the unique problems that's going to create is actually very interesting if you think about TikTok as an example right then it becomes a multi-model because most of the content is not just text and it's video.

2:24:37But also sometimes you have certain content that's completely just, there's no sound. And then you need to extrapolate, extract the text, try to understand what's happening. There's no social graph. It's not like, you know, crypto Twitter. There's no repetition. It's kind of repetition works in a very different way. And it's siloed, et cetera, all that kind of stuff. So it's very, very unique problems that people got to be thinking about. But essentially, you have TikTok, you have YouTube, you have all the other different things. Maybe you can do GitHub as well. Different things, right? You can do on-chain reputation, et cetera.

2:25:18So even within crypto, you have multiple other platforms that you should bench out to. But I think it's completely compatible to anything that's outside of crypto. If you dream of a situation that we're able to redefine the relationship between attention creators, attention consumers, and attention distributors within a space right now, and are we able to do this across all the other space? and with the added benefit that you can actually link everyone's identity across platforms. Everyone's identity, everyone's content across platforms. No one can actually do this today. And none of the tech platforms actually will talk to each other.

2:26:17You said before we're not an analytics company. Yeah. I mean, what are you? Because even me, for me now, I understand exactly what you're trying to do, but I can't like put a word on it. Yeah, I don't know. I think where it was some sort of hybrid between tech and crypto. I'll say that the big difference where you think about analytics company is, for example, like Google has Google Analytics. You wouldn't be calling Google an analytics company. I'll say that the core DNA of an analytics company is data science. and they have to be very, very good data analysts. Like we're not data analysts. We are software engineers and AI engineers.

2:27:06And that's actually one thing that's the most different. If you think about some of the data giants in crypto, in the space, they come from that part of the domain, but we're different. You explained how you want to connect these different platforms and create social profiles based on reputation. If you had to explain in a sentence, what's the big vision for Kaito, what would it be? I think the big vision for Kaito is to come up with a better system and a better network that can distribute information, attention, and capital in a better way. And that will cut through everything that we do. What excites you the most about the future?

2:28:07I think to let people have the aha moment of realizing, okay things have changed for the better

2:28:21and that's kind of if you really think about this like for example once you kind of put the builder's hat on and then the kind of the happiest moment is never that okay you've seen like certain people paid or whatever but it's actually people will come to you and say that, hey, like I really enjoy using your product. It's the same thing that every builder will say to you. And for us into the future, like all the stuff that we're doing around Yaps, the single most important North Star from our perspective is whether this is doing something for the better.

2:29:11what's your biggest prediction for the next 12 months yeah this is gonna be a currency i think i think that's very important i think um

2:29:28some of the some of the things are really interesting like for example um on this defcon and we hosted a growth con, you know what I'm saying, growth conference. And I showed a couple of different charts. And one of that was Mindshare. 12 months ago, very, very few people were talking about Mindshare. And then today, a lot of people talk about Mindshare. And we obviously, you know, certainly didn't coin the word, but we'd essentially build a lot of features around that so that people can start relating to it reference to it and then so now now that becomes a such a such such an important word in people's mind and starting from November so we start talking about yaps yapping I had this thesis of that yapping nowadays is not considered or that was that before we launch jobs as I tell everyone that yapping is there's a huge narrative change around yapping the yapping is no longer negative it was negative it absolutely is like you're just yapping on your side blah blah blah yeah renting and then I even I even remember I think a year ago I saw a common which campaign it was like comparing Gavin Wood versus Anatoly from Solana and then And they were comparing how many, you know, number of tweets that you sent versus number of reposts that you do on GitHub.

2:31:07And it was a very big negativity towards, you know, founders only, you know, being very vocal on X, but not necessarily pushing calls on GitHub. I think that whole method is changing. actually now founders are being praised if they have a very strong cultural presence on the community and on social side of things and I think over the next 12 months that this will be more decentralized and it's not going to be just for the founders and we're already seeing a lot of that for example team marketing is no longer just the founder plus in the past it's the marketing department and last day it was maybe the marketing department plus the founder.

2:31:53In the future, it's going to be the marketing department plus the founder plus everyone on the team. And community will play a huge part in building that vibe and that will manifest into distribution, how everything is being measured, all that kind of stuff. It's going to be a level playing field where everyone can participate rather than just a handful of people control the distribution. so good i mean you talk about the aha moment like for me i completely had it i mean i'm having it every day more right but i had it like i'm like this is finally something that makes so much sense and it's true i'm just saying that like that's why uh two like a month and a half ago two months ago i was like no one is talking to you right i mean i don't see you anyway like why like these guys are the mind share of kaito is like growing so much and like people talk about this thing but why and then i started to get more involved and the the with this yap uh kind of program just i connect i did a bit too late uh but i connect and then i just start to understand i'm like man this makes so much sense for so many things and we're just at beginning right so thank you so much for doing this today thank you for having me and thank you for what you're doing for the industry like it's so needed and I mean the crypto space needs more transparency for sure and I have no doubt that your yaps social scores and everything else you have in store we have a profound impact on the way crypto protocols organize themselves do business and reward the community in a more fair fashion moving forward.

2:33:38Hopefully one day people will forget about Keitel, but we'll be leaving the network as our legacy. And then everyone can benefit from it and also be the building blocks of seeing that coming through. Amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. That was so, so, so good.

2:34:05Oh, got William chelps goddamn