E123: Sophon CoFounder: We Built Crypto for the Wrong People (Crypto Natives)

29:38Was this bad luck or a blessing in disguise? I think it's a blessing in disguise. I think a lot of things in my life have happened the through fate or through having this kind of like journey that i meant to be on or this path but yeah it was the timing was again it's like the adhd stuff you can look at it and say timing is really bad or timing is really good i'm a very positive person the glass is full person so i look at it as this is a great timing you know actually when it's the fun it's always the best timing. It is because it flushes all the shit and then you're there and you can kind of prove yourself.

30:19And we started this podcast. I mean, I was doing stuff before that, but like very regularly in studio every week in December, 2022, the month after FTX. I was like, this is the moment because everyone is gone, right? That's how I'll get the big people on because who wants to talk to them now no one so they'll tell yes right and um absolutely the worst timing is always the best timing yeah if you're still alive i mean i remember eth was at uh 80 bucks back then i had taken my my savings and i bought uh yeah i had plowed the savings i had into eth at$100, you know, which is crazy now that you think about it.

31:05But I just thought, okay, this has gone down so much. You know, now's a great time to get in and let's see what happens. I sold all my stocks that were down 30 % to buy ETH at 1, 110. When did you get into crypto? So late 2018, early 19. Yeah. So I kind of like caught the bottom. I sold the data analytics company that I built in London for three years. Then I read the Bitcoin standard and early 2019, I was like, I need to put all the money from these business sales into Bitcoin and ETH. And it was, Bitcoin was like 3.5K. It was complete luck, right? But then I wanted more Bitcoin. But was it luck?

31:45I mean, conviction, but also luck of like timing, right? Then it was luck, but you're never lucky forever, right? I wanted more Bitcoin, but I didn't have more cash. So I discovered BitMEX and leverage trading where you would use Bitcoin as a collateral. And so I was like, this is amazing. I can print Bitcoin, right? Like out of thin air, beautiful. And I was just like one to two X leverage, right? But in March crash, COVID crash, even two X leveraged. So I lost, I had 80 % of my net worth or 70 % in crypto. I lost everything, but I had so much conviction when ETH was at a hundred dollars and I sold all my stocks, my remaining 30 % of my basic money that I had from my business sale, all the rest was gone, right?

32:28And I was like, I remember I was there like sweating like crazy that morning where I got liquidated. And I was like, in the next few days, I need to send all the freaking money to Coinbase to buy ETH because this shit is gonna go back up and it's gonna go back up to$1 ,400, right? The period's all time, man. And - It's crazy. I mean, my friend's dad, he says, he's a big Bitcoin bull and he says, you buy it at the price you deserve. Yeah, everyone says that actually. A lot of people - You buy Bitcoin at the price you deserve to buy it at. Yeah. You know, so you were early, you had conviction and you bought it at a great price because you deserved it.

33:03Yeah, but I lost a lot of it afterwards in Luna. That's part of it. That's part of it. Everyone who's been in this space long enough and who's really been in this space, not just been on the side watching, but who's been active, you blow up once or you take a punch once, you know? When was that for you? When was this for me? And what was it? Last year when I was in Dubai, when the market crashed, if you remember when Solana, everything took a big dump last year during token 2049 in Dubai, and I was exposed then. But then as a trader now, I don't perpetrate that much. I think it just brings too much stress and it can kind of take your attention away from things.

33:51Luckily, I never got massively, I mean, I got rugged on some stuff, but I never got like scammed or phished or things like this. But those are the lessons you learn, you know? The leverage trading lesson I think everyone needs to learn. Everybody learns it, you know? I think it's just a good life lesson in general. Because numbers go up very fast, right? and I think it was, you did the podcast recently with Raoul. Yeah. And I was watching it on the train and I think it's on that one where he says that there's this moment where you start thinking about, how much money have I made? But if it just two X's, I can make so much more.

34:32And in the podcast, he says, that's the moment that you start to take money off the table and just like buy a house, you know, like buy something that people can't take away from you. And I think he's clearly blown, he's been he's been through it right so he knows like that's what you're meant to do the the meme is i just need another 2x yeah yeah just just you perpetually need just another 2x one time baby just another 2x you joined matter labs a company that raised 250 million dollars that's right big number and that is behind the zk sync yeah the ethereum layer 2 yeah when you left the company you were the head of defy that's right how is that possible if you were in your i would say late 20s probably and not a nerd i don't think you need to be a nerd to be good at defy uh i think you do need to be curious you need to use stuff you know i'd used everything figure out how it works um and then it was about building uh ecosystems out and having a really a good network, which is what I had at the time.

35:46Working at Matterlabs, ZK Sync was very, very, had a lot of mind share, was very hyped in 2023 and 2022. And I use that as a calling card, right? Like every project in the space, if ZK Sync came knocking, they would answer. Because like you said, they had raised a humongous amount of money they were gonna fix. scaling in Ethereum. And that allowed me to build a really good Rolodex. What's the biggest problem you've identified while working at Matterlabs? Their problem? You mean? Like a problem that they would have? Give me two problems. One of their problem and one of the industry's problem. So Matterlabs is a great company.

36:33It's an engineering company and they have incredible engineers and they built very, very, very complicated technology that is meant to just be used in a very simple manner, right? I think they did an incredible job at this. But then there's a whole other part. There's a crypto part. There's a token, things like this, that it's almost like a second company, right? And managing those two things, those are two separate businesses almost. And I think that's where, you know, with the airdrop that they did last year, that's where they had some difficulties. And it's tough. It's a very difficult thing to go through as a founder, you know, and I think Alex handled it well, but it's a tough one.

37:17Looking at most, or like the space now for L2s, the main problem that I've identified, and the reason that I think Sofon started to exist is that a lot of these L2s or these ecosystems, there are engineering companies that built them and they built very good technology, but then the overall product experience is also built by an engineering company. And typically that's not really what works. You need to have it built by very product focused people, UI focused people, or consumer focused people, right? You wouldn't ask Amazon or like AWS to build a Netflix for you. You wouldn't expect them to do this, right?

37:59Those are two separate entities. And so I think stick to, you know, building really, really good tech, and then find people who are very business oriented or product oriented to build the best products, the best, the best businesses on top of this good tech. You're a business guy, not a nerd. I guess I am. What is a nerd? How do you define a nerd? My wife calls me a nerd. I don't think I'm a nerd, but I don't know what a nerd is. I think a lot of women actually find nerds very attractive. So they like to think. She's down. That's why she's like, check it out. You're a nerd. Even if you're not or you don't want to be, you're a nerd.

38:44Yeah. I mean, yeah, I can explain to you how ZK architecture and stuff works. It's pretty nerdy, I guess. Okay. But I do think, you know, when you say I'm a business guy, I think that's what interests me. I like building stuff. And my goal was to build a company that used the tech that I think understood pretty well for a non-engineer. And on the other side, I could be very observant in looking at how non-crypto people or non-crypto users use technology. What are their habits? How do they interact with products? And how could we fork that into a crypto setting and create something new? my goal is to is is not to do the next like the next iteration of something my goal is to create a new paradigm like that's the mission right if i can create a new green field in the crypto space that gives birth to um new concepts new products then i've succeeded you said in crypto we don't have a tech problem we have a crypto problem what was that what does that mean so i said that because Because if we dial it back, everybody between the ages of 12 and 50 is using tech, right?

40:00And they use it more and more. You do everything on your phone today or like everything, every aspect of your life is activated with technology. So people don't have a problem accepting technology in their lives and accepting innovation. We know this, but somehow the amount of users and the amount of innovation in crypto was not growing so the problem must be from the way crypto is presented then right not the other way around and so that's where i think there's a there's a problem in crypto where we've been building too many things for very crypto native uh users which for the crypto native users like take hyperliquid for instance that's the best one of the best products that's built for a very crypto native user right for speculators for traders they nailed it and so within the the addressable market that they have for their product they found perfect product market fit and they're killing it but at the other end of the spectrum and that's the end of the spectrum that sofon is interested in that i'm interested in we're looking at well who are the people who are not using crypto and how are they using other kinds of of tech products or what are the things that they're doing on a regular basis and how can we use crypto in those habits and that's what i'm trying to solve for hyperliquid and jupiter you mentioned hyperliquid right great example of knowing who you're building for yeah what did jeff from hyperliquid and meow from jupiter do right that most other crypto projects are doing wrong i think they built uh they just knew exactly who their users were and they built very a very good product a very good ux ui jupiter is very pleasant to use right it just works well it does what you need it to do um it's not trying to do more not trying to do less it just works and people like that and again this kind of goes back to ux ui and this obsession that i have with product if you present things in a way because even like the most hardcore hyper liquid user he's he he doesn't want to like look at the matching engine and the risk engine he just wants to go on hyper liquid there's liquidity things work well you click a button it gets filled and that's it and sometimes there was mistakes right like there was the that pepe wick um i think it was like a year and a half ago or something um when the oracle uh didn't update update correctly and like liquidated a trader who was actually a friend of mine who was super long.

42:37And recently there was that issue that they had with, what was it called? What was the token? Jelly Belly? Yeah. So you fix these things, right? But in general, they just found product market fit for the users. That's every founder's dream, right? It's finding product market fit for an addressable market. We talked before at the beginning of this conversation about Revolut and its founder Nick Storansky that you like a lot. Nick says you need to know who you're building for. Can you explain why the Revolut example is very relevant to crypto? I think Nick understood well that mobile first experiences are important to our generation and the younger generation and it simply goes around building an experience that people enjoy and making things and solving for problems right like people people travel a lot today you need multi-currency accounts you need to be able to send money to your friends quickly all the things that his target audience does on a regular basis, Revolut made easy to do.

43:54And then they just built a great design around it and people love it. I think they say 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, 10 times faster, something like that. Yeah. How do we replicate the Hyperliquid and Jupiter success in other aspects of crypto than perps and speculation? That's what I'm trying to do. That's what everyone's trying to do. it's slightly different because and i think it's harder to be honest with you because take jupiter hyperliquid they are solving for an existing problem so the problem is you want to trade on chain you know you have speculators you have traders so let's just and you know who they are so let's build the best application for them we're the other end of the curve where i'm trying to get more people to use crypto.

44:49I'm trying to grow this pie. And this is a green field, right? There are no rules in this space. For the hyperliquid stuff, you know the rules, you know, you have to have a good matching engine, a good UI. It has to be fast, snappy, good liquidity, and rewards, right? Like the vault system. But we're at the other end. So you're trying to solve for people who don't know that they want it yet, right? And that's a big challenge, but I think that's one where we're well positioned to at least try to succeed. Yeah, my dream is really to start merging crypto with everyday consumers' lives and to build something.

45:32And we can start talking about it, but the sort of Trojan horse that we use is this data component and ZKTLS to do it. but to merge both of those things together where then crypto becomes part of people's everyday lives it's already started with payments right like actually i've seen two interviews recently which i thought were really bullish for us for our space one was from the chief product officer of open ai and the other was from the ceo of visa and both of them were talking about how they're positioning their businesses to leverage AI agentic systems. This is now going to become a big reality, right?

46:16Like we had AI agents, you know, tokens last year, which is fine. But there is a reality behind this where you're going to have these incredibly complex agentic systems that are going to trade with one another, do all sorts of things with one another, and building on blockchains is a great place to do that. And so more and more, I think you're going to have companies like Sofon who are going to be trying to blend these things into everyday consumer's life. You're the co-founder and CEO of Sofon. What is Sofon, if you had to explain it to your mom? Sofon is onboarding the next generation of crypto users.

47:03It's a place where people will visit on a regular basis to monetize their data, earn rewards, earn loyalty, social verification, social validation. Yeah, that's maybe the shortest way I would say. And maybe a place for developers to experiment. If you have to think about an application that a lot of people use in the non-crypto world that does something similar to what you guys are trying to do, for normal people to understand. For example, I had Yevgeny from Wintermute, right? Ask him, what is market making? Explain to your mom. He said, it's a kiosk. And then he started to give an example about kiosks, right?

47:54that's a good uh that's a good way of thinking about it actually for market making how do you think about so phone for a known crypto person at all if you have to explain and give like hey look this is kind of similar to this thing that you're doing now but much better i think it's um it's a marketplace for data that's maybe the shortest way of explaining it why does my sister because because maybe our parents is less relevant, as we said before, my sister, I mean, she owns some Bitcoin, some ETH. She owns some Luna because of me. Sorry, sister.

48:34Why does she need, or why should she care about a marketplace for data? So your sister, she has tech habits, right? She might have a whoop band. Maybe she has a Spotify account. Maybe she has a Ticketmaster account. Maybe she plays chess.com. There's various things. What's for sure is that what she's doing is generating data, right, on a regular basis. She's using technology on a regular basis, and that generates data on a regular basis. This is true for 99 % of people who lived in a developed market between the ages of 12 and 50. Okay. Now who profits from this data? It's the, the end, it's the, it's the company that she's generating the data on.

49:27And to some extent, um, a company that's buying aggregated versions of this data to then target people with marketing services, that sort of thing. Does your sister profit from any of this? No. When you visit a website, websites have cookies to track you, right but only on the particular website that you're on what if you could have a unique you know one-stop shop profile for all of your data and that's what so fun is doing with our so fun account and our so fun data hub you you log into the account your sister would log into account with her gmail or her passkey right so super easy it looks and feels like something that she already does with her other tech habits.

50:18And then she can share all sorts of data points from the applications that she's using regularly. And so then we've created a unique profile for your sister and all of her data habits, let's say. If you do that with 100 ,000 people, you start to have extremely complex visualizations from a data perspective of these person's habits, what they like to do, where they spend their money, that sort of thing. If you give this from an enterprise perspective to marketers, to companies, to Coca-Cola, a clothing company, you know, On, for instance, that's worth a lot of money because you have very, very detailed versions of what people are.

51:08And typically these companies, when they have a marketing budget, you know people spend a lot on marketing today are they who are they spending it on they're they're they're paying meta maybe for reach they're paying a tick tock influencer an instagram influencer but what if actually the money went or part of that money went straight to your sister where she was actually getting rewarded for the habits that she already has and i think this is the kind of revolution that we're going to see between the use of ZKTLS, which is a technology that is available for everyone that SoFone uses a lot, and crypto.

51:47And that's what I'm building. Why would she receive money? Because the model today is, ah, all these horrible Web2 companies are using my data against me. I don't want to share my data. And even like, now you're telling me, ah, I can receive money for sharing my data. I don't trust you. What if I told you that the way that you share your data is private? It's insured by ZK proofs. So I'm actually not really divulging personal information about you. It's just people can query, okay, who wants to play, who plays chess.com, orders from Lululemon and buys tickets to Taylor Swift concert? Oh, that's your sister.

52:28Oh, wow. She sounds like the perfect person for this campaign that we're doing instead of paying the influencer for this campaign I can drive rewards to assist her immediately and attract her to this campaign that we're doing it's rewiring the way you know if you think about how advertising spend worked before meta before Facebook and after and then now again it's changed with the way people pay influencers like most most fashion companies they don't pay vogue or vanity fair anymore they're paying uh some some girl with 200 000 followers on instagram to to wear their stuff or a hotel will pay for your trip right so then other people look at it after but that's just one person profiting from it but if everybody can share into this pie there's um there's a huge amount of advertising that uh money that wants to understand their customers better and if you make the customer enjoy those those rewards as well it becomes much more sticky to the brand how do you change the mind of these customers what's the one or two things you can do to say hey guys like try and you'll make money because they probably don't believe it in the beginning i think if you i think if you give you know it's a It's like a carrot on the stick exercise.

53:59If you give people an opportunity to continue doing what they're already doing, but reaping rewards from it, they will try. There's some ideas that I have for some fun activations. So again, maybe we can take your sister as an example. Let's say that she was a Taylor Swift fan. and I get tickets to a Taylor Swift concert, which usually go for like massive multiples online, right? They sell out immediately, they get bought at that sort of thing. And through the data sharing, I know that I'm only going to give them to massive Taylor Swift fans because your sister can verify her ticket master history and I can see that she loves Taylor Swift or her Spotify listening history, for instance.

54:49uh your sister will sign up to so phone just to try and get a ticket for free right and a hundred thousand other listeners of taylor swift will do the same and then once that they experience how they can earn rewards how their loyalty works i mean just from a ticketing perspective we we actually just um uh we haven't announced this publicly but i'm happy to do it here. We acquired a ticketing company recently at Sofon to do exactly this. I mean, you can solve for fandom, let's say, where only the proper fans get tickets to the concert or the event that usually sells out immediately or gets botted.

55:34And again, that's attractive for people like your sister. Sofon is an Ethereum layer too? Yeah. Do we really need another layer too? There's two arguments. People think that either you need thousands of them, the same way you have thousands of websites. Just think about it as a network. Or you don't. I think we're kind of in the middle. I think you need more of people like Sofon, people like Abstract, people like even base to some extent who are trying to create new paradigms what you don't need is another just general execution layer that you know oh yeah you can you can do your decks and swaps faster here than you could before that's not interesting as a founder i cannot design all of the applications that will be on so fun right like i i can't i don't have the creativity or the crazy consciousness to do this right it's the same thing everywhere else what you need to do is to create an environment that people come and experiment on just like nick does with the revolute he's not sitting down and like coming up with 30 different concepts, right?

56:59Nobody can do this on their own. He's taking many teams and letting them experiment. And sometimes the experiment actually really works and you get a breakout moment. And one thing I can tell you for sure is from a crypto perspective, it's one or two applications which carry the chain. So, you know, pump fund for Solana is a great example, right? It was there, it brought all of the attention, it made all of the success. And you need to be able to be building an environment where builders will come and experiment. So the data hub that we're building, where end consumers will share all sorts of data, I call it a social oracle.

57:47It's a completely new paradigm in the crypto space. We don't have verified aggregated social data that you can query on chain. It doesn't exist. But now it will. And if you allow developers to build on top of this and you make an environment where it's a green field and they can experiment as much as possible you will have someone who will come up with a crazy concept. So I have concepts like the ticketing you know fandom them, loyalty, things like this that I'm already subsidizing. But I think that the big breakthrough will come from something that we don't expect. And as a founder, you want to be putting people in that position.

58:34You said Sofon is a product-led company, not an engineer-led company. What does that mean? Well, it means it's the product team that... The company is designed around the product team. The engineering team does or basically serves the product team because you need people to build stuff. So they're implementing things, but it's around the product and it's around the product because I have to know my customer. And my customer is someone who doesn't use crypto before. So they need to be presented with something that looks and feels like what they're used to. and that comes from product that doesn't come from from the engineering obviously you're not doing that alone right you have a team 25 people you said yeah there's a pretty famous anonymous guy part of the team called pentoshi that's right how did you manage to get him on board it was pretty straightforward to be honest um sofon was born through an incubation um from beam previously called Merit Circle one of the largest gaming or entertainment DAOs in the space Merit Circle was and Beam is also an SDK for those games to work and Pinto has always been their advisor and like a big supporter and when we started Sofon Mark from Merit Circle from Beam helped incubate us you know he's a big um a very very big contributor to the success of so phone and um pentoshi was interested and that's it that's that's all it was really how does a project like so phone enable crypto to go from zero sum games yeah that the industry is currently stuck in yeah it's pvp stuff to positive some games that are needed to expand our footprint and grow the pie Yeah.

1:00:40It's like we were saying earlier, if you're the concepts that I'm trying to solve for or that I want to build, it's around rewarding people individually. So if everybody can come, use applications on Sofon, share their data, use applications in the ticketing space, play games. I mean, we have some incredible games that are going to be launching on Sofon where you earn rewards from the games. There are actually advertisers advertising in the games, which is pretty exciting, to be honest. You're going to see more and more of this in-game advertisement happening over the next few years. Those are all things where every individual who's using it can win.

1:01:30You're not in a paradigm where you must lose for me to win. and so everything we do is kind of built around those mechanics we don't like too much to talk about technical stuff here but there's one thing we need to talk about that you mentioned a few times already it's called zktls yes sir i came here in uber yeah maybe you too i'm not sure i did you did perfect what is zktls explain to your uber driver zktls is an invisible technology that verifiably proves the data that you generate on a blockchain so i could actually prove anonymously or you know conserving your privacy your your uber trip on a blockchain it's a web proof okay i'm your uber driver i'm like kind of understand what you're meaning but not really so i ask you why is zk tls a game changer zk tls is a massive trojan horse for crypto and consumer because people are generating data every single day through all of the habits that they're doing right and people they don't want to learn new things or difficult things or have these like crazy complicated you know i log into my metamask i have my seat raised i write it down i put it under my pillow all of that is too complicated because zk tls allows you to prove different forms of data on chain and then do things with that data you you can attract all sorts of people simply based off of what they're doing already so you're not asking them to do something new a lot of crypto problems like the way a lot of crypto products have been built is you're telling people oh you should use crypto because it's better for you you should change what you're doing stop banking use crypto instead stop doing this do that instead and it worked for a few percent of people and that's the current users we have but most people would be like i don't want to learn i don't trust blah blah blah if you tell someone hey keep doing what you're already doing and just log in with this and xyz is going to happen it's a much easier customer onboarding phase and again we're at a stage where we've onboarded all the early adopters all the kind of like techie people everybody who wants to learn so how are you going to get the next wave of people it has to be through making the onboarding easier and through leveraging what they're already doing a project that has been doing that amazingly well kaito yeah hey just connect to your x account easy done no but it's true yeah kaito kaito have done a very good job there's you know i'll give a shout out to um some of the other companies in the zktl space like opacity like reclaim they're doing a great job at this, you know, at kind of making the whole crypto part invisible, leveraging what people are already doing, and that's attractive.

1:04:56And I think it's, I can't remember if it's Reclaim or Opacity, but one of them is actually like really trending high in the App Store because people just like, you know, and it's easy to use. You mentioned ticketing before. Maybe there's other examples, or maybe there's one even better. Give me one real-life example or application used by the masses that ZKTLS could improve by a factor of 10 times, enabling a potential completely new use case other than perks and speculation. Because you need this 10-time improvement for people to change their habits. You do. Conceptually, I think the way that people are using things on a regular basis, all of this data is being generated, but they're not making anything from it.

1:05:45Needs to change or has or will change because the use of ZKTLS in crypto allows this. Whether it's any habit that you have, but you're basically monetizing your attention now. Before you're not making anything from it, you're not making anything from all of this data that you generate, but it's worth so much. It's the most important self-commodity of the 21st century um in general i think that anything that pertains to an emotional attachment will have a lot of uh a lot of attractiveness from users so ticketing is a good one because whether it's sports music theater whatever people love loyalty people love uh when you're a fan of something, you will spend a lot of money around it, right?

1:06:40When you love something and you have a loyalty element to it, if you can start rewarding people in a more fair way, proving this loyalty, having the social verification, you know, things like leaderboards, seasons, we know this in the gaming space, right? Like people love to get ranked for things. And ZKTLS enables you to do all of these things, but in an aggregated way across, you know, you could build a profile that shows all of the different achievements, badges, that sort of thing. And if you can, because you want to stay out of the speculative element, right? You don't want to have these PVP exercises.

1:07:20If you build around something where everybody using it is winning, then you have a clear paradigm shift. So I'm trying to be very practical. I watched Netflix sometimes. yeah i listen to spotify a lot yeah i watch youtube a lot yeah can i make money while watching youtube videos can you get the data from these big providers like youtube you can you can um youtube you could maybe yeah you could scan your your youtube history your viewing history for instance um you could actually connect your revolute account as well or your normal bank account and just share what you've been it's anonymous right but you could share what you've been spending your money on and you could then understand much better what the behaviors of people are what their preferences are and then market things to them directly i think there's a lot of uh there's a lot of things that are going to be built around uh this georgian horse but that's not all that's so fun is a hundred percent focused on as well you know there's there's a number of um games that are building with us and when we build with games we really want to be focused on games that are built by web 2 companies or by traditional mobile gaming companies not uh necessarily um a crypto game that i mean we have some crypto games that are going to be launching actually but those are very very much for crypto native users um but what you really do want if you're going to grow the pie is to have games that are already on the mobile uh on like app stores, right?

1:09:00So the largest game that we have that'll be launching with us, Trial Xtreme, you know, they've done hundreds of millions of downloads. They have been on the Apple Store and the Google Play Store for years. And the new version that they have, which is coming out soon, integrates crypto in the backend, right? Through payments, through loyalty. There might be an element of advertising in the game as well. And this is just a fun game that already has millions of fans. I think it's like 2 million monthly active users or something. I mean, it's crazy numbers. And just to put this on-chain or have an on-chain element, I think once that starts to be successful, you will have a lot of mobile games that will start to pivot to integrating crypto into their backends as well.

1:09:53You know, there is this meme that, yeah, that crypto gaming is dead, like it's never going to work. I completely understand it, but I think it hasn't, it just hasn't been executed in the right way. It was a massive narrative for VCs, right? Crypto gaming, social fi and AI. It was too early. Play to earn executed well in a way that's fun. It's brilliant. I mean, do you game or were you a gamer before when you were younger? I gamed a bit, but I got so addicted that I stopped directly. i have a very addictive person what did you what did you play i was playing this game called uh i think it's called all game okay which was a it was on the computer right like i don't know 15 years ago and you had this planet yeah like you were basically could colonize other planets right yeah but the whole game was also happening while you were not on the computer so i was literally starting in the morning at 7 a.m before going to school i was in secondary school probably i was like i don't know 13 14 whatever play quickly in the morning make sure i'm not attacked go to school go back home for lunch quick check if i'm not attacked always online and then basically like it's always happening while i mean maybe now it's very common right but back then it was kind of like new thing like fuck like you can get attacked while you're in an exam or whatever right test and you're like fuck always so like three times a day i was like always going like morning lunch evening quickly going back home.

1:11:22I was like, man, this is making me too crazy. Then I would play some, I would play PlayStation, but I would do more sports game, but I was getting, I was so competitive about smashing remote controls, right? I was like, man, I need to calm the fuck down. So like, this is not good for me. I need to do more sport. And I was doing a lot of sport. I was like, I'll go and spend energy in sport, tennis, football, gym, volleyball, badminton. I did everything. I also smashed everything, ligaments, knees, shoulders. You look like you're in good shape though. I just do gym because it's the thing that I can do at any time and I can also be careful to not like destroy everything, but like running.

1:12:06I did some paddle a few months ago and I was like, I know if I'm going there, I'm gonna hurt myself because I'm 200%, right? And then boom. Smash the record. I smashed the, no, no, no, no, I will not smash the racket. I never smashed a racket, but I tore my ankle directly, right? After, yeah. Because you want to win as a competitor. Yeah, and I was, I mean, I was playing with a girl, with me. Yeah. The girl who I like, and I was, I wanted to show her that we're going to win together. Yeah. So I just fucking went crazy. No, I was not. Okay. Not, but I, basically, I just running around until I smashed my, I tore my ligament.

1:12:43Classic, classic me, right? So I do gym because I know this is less likely to happen. Makes sense. But you see, on the gaming tangent, I asked you if you played video games because all of these video games that we played when we were kids, but that still exists now, they have marketplaces. And everything is synthetic, but doing the play to earn stuff, doing the crypto gaming stuff correctly, those marketplaces become alive. I was a big World of Warcraft player when I was a kid, like Vitalik. was actually you know vitalik started ethereum because uh of world of warcraft i know that because some item uh in the game got stolen from him or something and he was pissed and he's like oh yeah blockchains could solve this but in world of warcraft you had an auction house and there was a full economy in the game that existed but it was completely synthetic but if you could make this economy real with tokenization with blockchains things like this all of a sudden people could make a living by farming stuff in the game.

1:13:46And I know it sounds far-fetched, but I'm convinced that that paradigm shift is gonna happen in the next few years. So phone was the largest node sale ever done by a blockchain? Yeah. 21 ,000 ETH,$60 million. At the time. At the time. I would get back there, I would get back there. Come on. ETH massively pumping today and yesterday like 20, 25%. Crazy, yeah. I think it's a big short squeeze, but yeah, massive. Let's be more optimistic. You said you're optimistic. I am, that is optimistic, man. Price is going up. I'm happy. And this was, so$60 million, just a few months after starting the project.

1:14:26Yes. Which is crazy. It is actually. There are many founders struggling to raise even 1 % of that. Yeah. How did you pull this off? It was great timing, I think. I had left ZK Sync. When I left ZK Sync, I wrote a post on Twitter about it, which I think was viewed 1.2 million times, which is insane, which is fucking crazy, right? And I announced that I was building Sofon. And right after that, we announced the seed round that we had done with Sofon. So we raised$10 million. And that caught a lot of people off guard. They're like, who's this guy? What's so fun? What are they building? And everybody was very intrigued.

1:15:16And we were very mysterious, right? We didn't reveal too much information. I remember the tweets, actually. Very mysterious. Yeah. Pentoshi helped us grow our community as well. So everything looked very good. The community was excited. They didn't really know what it was, but they knew it was something new. They knew it was something exciting, and they knew that the people involved were good at this. and then we saw Aether, one of our core partners, they did a massive node sale too. 20 ,000 ETH, so 1 ,000 ETH less from what I did. No, they actually raised more than us, but they're not a blockchain, right?

1:15:53They're a protocol. But they raised like, I think it was 40 ,000 ETH. Insane. I think it was 100 mil plus at the time. So crazy. And we're super close to that team. you know, Aether's deployed on Sofa and they do a lot of transactions there. We consider them a core partner. And we thought, okay, this is an incredible way of raising money because you can raise a huge amount, not directly from VCs, which now upsets community a bit, but you can raise directly from the community. And if you're successful in doing it, you've basically formed part of your early community before the project launches, because you have people who are basically long year token.

1:16:38So just to be clear, we raised 21 ,000 ETH for 20 % of total token supply. So we essentially sold 20 % of the company for that, not over its emissions over three years. So that means people are taking their money and they're betting on Sofon in the long term before it comes out. So if you're successful in doing this, you've built an incredible community of retail people right off the bat. That's massively valuable, right? And how did we do it? I guess it was good timing. And then it's just telling a story, right? And as we were getting a lot of pre-commitments, more and more people were excited.

1:17:19And then I remember I was in Dubai for Token, and I would tell people, we've got 30 million pre-committed from these different investor groups or some funds who wanted to add more money. And then I would see them a week later. I said, you know, now it's 40 million. People are like, well, fuck, this guy got another 10 million. This is insane. And by the time we did the public sale, yeah, it was up to like 60, 65. What the hell do you do with$60 million? You use it to build an incredible team. You use it to make really good partnerships. To be honest, we farm some of it. We try to seed liquidity for protocols on SoFund.

1:18:04So, you know, just to generally support the ecosystem and have a great runway. You know, some projects, they do another round. But the problem is that when you do another round, you're selling more of your companies to VCs. And seed round is fine. But if you're doing a second round or a third round, it's a lot of the company that then is going to venture capital firms and less for their community. and people know this, right? It upsets them. Whereas for us, we can say, yeah, it's 20 % of the company, but it's going to retail buyers. Everybody's happy. Everybody's winning, right? Now that's pretty much it.

1:18:45How do you measure success? Product market fit. I thought about it the other day. Like what would make me, because I care a lot about SoFone, right? And it brings me a lot of stress, a lot of worries, you know, are we doing the right thing? Is it, we're going in the right direction? Will the community be happy? Will this, will that? And I thought, okay, well, what will make me stop being worried or kind of stop having this founder stress? And it's just purely finding product market fit. And that's why at the beginning, SoFan was purely going to be a gaming or entertainment chain. But then I realized we need to do something that's more unique, that's more different in order to set ourselves completely aside from either competitors or just the crypto space in general, right?

1:19:37Like let's make us special. And that's where this whole ZKTLS and DataHub idea came and we developed it. I think that's what we're betting on now, is to be an incredible company that helps people monetize their data, that builds around this new primitive creates this new paradigm and that working fighting product market fit there is success and it's working already or what was the day you can look back and say that's it like we've made it at least for this first big stone i i told so these products are being a lot of the products are being rolled out at the end of this month when we TGE. So this is the month of May and progressively the data hub will be built out.

1:20:28It will take time to become, you know, it's a product in itself, like it takes time to grow, to become more and more appealing. I told my team if next year or even the year after, people look back and say, wow, oh, crypto changed, or there's way more people using crypto, or in a different way, and SoFan in particular was responsible for catalyzing this, that's success. I will be really, really, really, really happy. If we can say that the SoFan team helped change the way that consumers work with crypto, got people excited about crypto again, the way they were a few years ago, that's success. Because think about it, like 2021, you had bored apes.

1:21:17Some people thought they were cringe, things like this, but whether you like it or not, or that whole NFT boom, that was the moment where crypto was the closest to the consumer ever. You said NFTs are the closest thing to crypto consumer that we've ever had so far. Yeah, I think that's where we've done. And, you know, look at this guy. There's a question on that because you mentioned before Abstract, right? We have a budget penguin on the table. So tell me more about what you think of Lucanet, Budget Penguins, Abstract, because you're in the consumer game, right? And they are too. Yeah, for sure.

1:21:48And they're also building on the ZK stack. So we're our neighbors. They focus a lot more on streaming. That's their sort of go-to-market, looking at how younger generations stream a lot, follow streamers, things like this, and how streamers can monetize. Again, it's all about monetizing your attention, things like this, right? I think they're doing a great job. It's amazing to have, you know, some people come to me and they're like, oh, Abstract is a competitor. Actually, I don't think so at all. I think we're building in the same direction. We're actually helping each other out in a way because we're trying, we both have the same mission, right?

1:22:29To get consumers on chain. Abstract is one thing. Pudgy is slightly different, right? They go together, I guess, now with Luca, but it's still considered a different project. Pudgy is one of the most successful NFT projects. Guys like this, little furry stuffed toys that you can get in Walmart, I think they were selling them on Amazon before. That's a great way to get people excited about a product that all of a sudden has at some point a crypto element to it, some IP, things like this. And I think Luca was a very good founder for this sort of thing. I think we're very similar in a way. He also, you know, when you interviewed him, I think a few months ago, he also understands crypto very well, but also how consumers think.

1:23:23I think he's also very observant and he kind of gets how people use tech, how people interact with brands, how the emotional bond that you have with a product matters. And he built a company around that. I think they've done a great job. I asked you before, how do you measure success for a cell phone? I'm going to ask, how do you measure success for yourself? Professionally or like as a man? Life-wise? Me, it's just being with my family. Having a family, being with my family, being with my friends, being able to help people around me. having something that I do professionally that satisfies me so in that case it's so fun doing sports that satisfy me I started playing golf recently just becoming a new obsession so kind of like pursuing things constantly that are satisfying your curiosity yeah that's it and just lowering the stress levels I guess that you have because you know all the founders will tell you the same thing you ebb and flow between euphoria and despair it's like uh you're either holy shit like i'm king of the world this is it or you're like oh my god fuck we fucked up we gotta do something differently this doesn't work that doesn't work this team's not doing what i told them to do and you know you get used to it you go back and forth and a lot of founders complain about it myself included sometimes but actually it's I wouldn't be doing anything else you know it's the most exciting way to to live in my opinion how do you deal with stress I go to the gym I run that's usually a pretty good way to to deal with it I talk about it as well talk about it with my wife she's great counsel and sometimes I scream in a pillow if I can't take it anymore.

1:25:26Better to scream at the pillow than on your wife, obviously. In general, I would say I'm a pretty calm, pretty stable founder, you know? And I don't show my team my stress. It's important that their leader is calm and composed. And in the end, you know, crypto, So you get in a lot of stressful situations with markets, things like this. In the end, everything is okay. Most of the time, there's a reversion to the mean. When the market crashed after Trump tariffs six weeks ago, I had my weekly call with my team and I said, why don't we spend the first 20 minutes talking about the market? And I gave them my interpretation of what was going on.

1:26:12I reassured them. And yeah, six weeks later, which is not a long time, right? We're back at levels we were before this happened, right? We're so back. And you were not levered on perps. Exactly. So you're good. Safe. Don't use perps. It's stupid. Were you levered on perps last week? No, no, no. I haven't done this shit since March 2020 where I lost all my crypto, levered two or three X on Bitcoin and ETH. And I realized there is a flush once a year, twice a year where no matter how safe you think you are, you're gonna get fucked. So like, it's not worth it. Yeah, it isn't. It's not worth it. It doesn't make any sense.

1:27:01Just don't do it. Crypto is a, I think Bitcoin is what? 70-volt asset. So 60-volt asset and the other ones more. You already have leverage without having leverage. You don't need it. Build something, do something useful. Don't gamble. like it's so stupid but we'll go through that

1:27:21thank you so much Seb thanks for doing this and for giving us some hope that we might one day have something more than speculation store of value and cross-border remittances coming out of the crypto industry yeah yeah I'm excited I think especially with the regulatory regime changing in the US now you know people can launch tokens they can launch companies they feel safe rebuilding at home. I think a lot of cool stuff is going to happen next few years. We need more concrete use cases that onboard the non-crypto crowds. And hopefully, software is one of the answers. Hopefully. Thank you. Thanks a lot.