E67: Igneus Terrenus: The Crypto Market 5 Years From Now

38:07In order to kind of print something new, a new book, you need to carve a new wood block. You can't just smudge some words off. Whereas a modular chain is more like a movable type, like Gutenberg Bible. You can just rearrange letters and then you can just print it, which makes it a lot more agile. we are able to adapt to the latest technology. We are able to adopt the latest advancements and we're able to kind of like make things, have the latest innovations in a very agile manner. And yeah, another thing that Mento is excelled at is because Mento inherited the large treasury from BitDAO, I think it's more than three billions now.

38:51And it's also the treasury. The treasury itself is more than 3 billion. Yeah. It's the single largest on-chain treasury when you discount native tokens. So there are some other treasuries that claim to be bigger, but 99 % of that treasury is denominated in their own token. But for Mento, it has 270 ,000 ETH or ETH equivalents and hundreds of millions, like 300 ,000 ,000 ,000 of stable coins, making it the single largest on-chain treasury, are even bigger than Ethereum itself. So, you know, of course, we're going to have, we're just starting the bull market. There's, you know, there's going to be some dips here and there.

39:30So everyone is going to be doing great. But, you know, inevitably, like, this is just being real. A bear market will come eventually. And, you know, what you're able to kind of like consolidate and build when the bear market come is hugely important when you have a large treasury at its back. And Mento has a larger treasury than basically all the other L2s combined.

39:59So guys, you guys are rapidly gaining momentum, right? Because you have one key product? Yeah. So aside from the first core product that's Mento Network, we also have this Ethereum staking protocol called Mento LSP. And the token is METH, which is a great name. You know, we've been just totally abusing Breaking Bad memes like, you know, I am the danger and say my name, so on and so forth. So Mental Staking ETH was launched only in December. So it's like less than three months. And it's already the fourth largest. Already kind of like breathing to the neck of Binance staked ETH. Already leapfrogged FRAX and Coinbase months in the past.

40:48I think within the first three weeks, we already leapfrogged Coinbase staked ETH. And yeah, even Rocketpool, the second largest staking protocol, is not that far. So currently, we're actually limiting the cap because our mental liquid staking protocol is actually giving users double the market yield. So the average market yield for Ethereum staking protocol is about 3.6, and mental is offering about 7.2. So yeah, the level of enthusiasm is just great. People really love the math. The reason...

41:29Sorry.

41:33The reason of the addiction of people, right? Yeah, because we can't say it. Double the yield is an incentive mechanism purely or you guys are able with other ways to generate a better yield than the... Oh, yeah, yeah. Because we have three... People love the myth. Yeah, we have 300... We have 270 ,000 ETH in the treasury. So we're actually staking our own ETH. And then we're just giving the rewards from those ETHs to the users. So it is only something that someone who has already like a large ETH holding is able to do. Of course, that is the biggest kind of like a gateway drug into meth but when people actually start to use it they really feel kind of like the UI the UX is just so smooth it's also because we had the benefit of hindsight building only you know after the first generation of liquid sticking protocols are done and now there's a lot less friction so you know remember the early days of LIDL and Rocketpool you can't even withdraw because the merge hasn't happened so when you actually put ETH into to the beacon chain, you can actually withdraw afterwards.

42:47And then for us, it was started after the merge. And then after Kainai, all the kinks are ironed out. So it's a new generation, a modern design, really takes advantage of all the new technological advancements and weeding away the lessons we learned from the previous generation. So 600 ,000 staked ETH, right? which is about 2.4 billion in total value locked.

43:18If the main way to get people addicted to mental is incentives, how do you make this grow and sustainable at the same time? What's the plan there? Yeah. You know you said you're just on the neck of Binance. How do you overtake Binance? And I don't know, who is the second one? Rocketpool. Rocketpool, okay. What's the plan there? So first of all, of course, you want to use some kind of like incentive to lure people in or to attract people. But once they come and really like the product itself, it makes it a lot easier. Like, you know, what happened with Uber and Grab in the early days, there was like a fierce competition.

44:03like they needed to kind of like give, not incentives, but they subsidized the cost. Now that is like, you know, ride sharing, it's like in Singapore, it's all grab. Like they're not giving those incentives anymore. We will, you know, try to give it as long as possible. The benefit of having a large treasury is, and the whole thing, like the whole kind of the mental ecosystem is built with this, this word is like, I think a lot of like Silicon Valley people like to use Is being supple So We see like a lot of others Like They're building kind of like At a breakneck space And Speed and so on and so forth But they're really fragile It's like You know If anything Any of the variable changes It makes it very Very difficult for them to For the enterprise to make sense Financially And economically But for Mento We have Very Very How to sound Less crass than Deep pockets We have large financial cushion to really allow us to make those decisions and then to be less absorbed by, you know, the whims and the momentary kind of like fads.

45:11And we're able to kind of build more deliberately, think in much more longer terms. Like, you know, there was this recent kind of meme from Dune and they were like, we make our plans in centuries. Yeah, something like that. Not necessarily centuries, but definitely like we have multiple bull bear circles, cycles of plans so right now we're drowning a sea of layer ones and layer two what does the crypto world look like in five years well consolidation evidently it's it's for every technology we like I think in a way like having a lot of letters I just saw like two letters who's announced their launch or I announced announced can I plan launch after a successful fundraising round and One is called Zeria, another is called 10.

46:01So like maybe you're going to have like all the different, like they're just kind of even too lazy to name, to have an interesting name. They're just going to name them after numbers. But yeah, you have all of them because it's actually not bad. It's actually a social proof of where I'm on the right track. This is something that have people's imagination. And this is something that is going to be an integral part of Ethereum. As I said, layer 2 is our Ethereum now. But you need to have enough suppleness To go through bull-bear cycle When hopefully it takes a long time For the bull run to have its full run But when bear finally comes Who is in a good position financially?

46:45Who has made good decisions To ensure that the community That they have acquired sticks around Even though a lot of the incentive Is going to be gone And they still have enough runway to both sustain on the engineering side and on the marketing community building side. A lot of times when both of them share the same budget, it becomes a very difficult decision to make because you still need to retain on to your users, but then are you just going to cut the engineering cost? Mentor has always separated those budgets and then Mentor has always had the benefit bit of, you know, a lot of support from our ecosystem partners, a lot of support from, you know, Bybit still gives us kind of a lot of like technological support.

47:31They would like look at our code, like they would have, they would do help with a round of audit. And we receive a lot of support from like the likes of Eigenlayer and so on and so forth. And we also, you know, repay those help handsomely. So EigenDA, mentor actually contributed a lot of the code base. so yeah it's kind of like making good decisions making sound financial judgment also building solid partnerships like a lot of times like the greatest asset you have is not necessarily you know the money in the bank but rather the people you're coming to contact with we really just view the likes of Eigenlayer and Bobby with such esteem and respect and really just like appreciate them so much a lot of like great dApps that deploy on Mento like Ando Finance they have this tokenized US treasury bills so like acts as a stable coin but instead of kind of say the likes of Circle or Tether they keep the yield from the central bank Ando actually gives that yield to user holders and we are the first one of the first chains that actually the first chain outside of Ethereum to have Ando finance USDY and then Mento has a mental exclusive version called musd and you know we're working with athena athena is this uh sort of a stable coin built out of uh uh futures uh positions on centralized exchanges because they're the bull market there's so much money to be paid to to be in a short position so they can actually kind of give people really really good returns uh by holding this uh synthetic uh us dollar code usde uh like 20 apy that's completely different than sort of how terra uh luna did it because they just kind of like we're giving people money from their treasury whereas if you know is actually making money um on by by earning those uh uh uh funding fees funding fees on central exchanges uh and while still able to give that yield to users you said before that what made you guys decide to kind of transform BitDAO into mental and become a layer two, Ethereum layer two, is that your thesis was that the layer ones would fade away and Ethereum basically consolidated as the main layer one.

50:05Yeah. Why are so many Layer 1s still launching? And maybe we can put that, I mean, there's probably a, you know, you mentioned before, for the Layer 2, it's a good sign because it means that people are very creative. But I see also by being not, let's say, not too naive and we get the financial aspect of launching tokens for VCs, right? That is extremely profitable. Mm-hmm. what's your take on like the launch of all these later ones and I actually interview a lot of them right yeah no I won't say like I think all of them gonna fade away it's just kind of like they need to kind of really find a niche to occupy and it doesn't actually matter that you don't become the the the dominant kind of like smart contract platform as I said like the internet is so great that the world is so big that if you just occupy a very small niche and then you have very passionate users it's actually enough but in terms of being the sort of almost a commonwealth of uh of of uh of of the internet computer we really do not see anyone challenging ethereum's supremacy at at least kind of as as the current like we just project we just extenuate we extend the current kind of trajectory out to the next bull cycle we still think ethereum is going to be dominant uh you know is is solana doing great it is absolutely Avalanche is doing great But is it going to be Replacing Ethereum Is it going to be The Ethereum killer No It's not going to be that Because it's now Catering to A slightly different audience Yeah People are going to Try new things You know One thing about Like human endeavor Or really any endeavor Even like the endeavor Of You know Evolution The unthinking evolution But like It throws all the possible ways at it.

52:02Like when you look at the fossils, there are so many interesting choices made. Like to think like, you know, everything living on earth at this moment actually share a common ancestors all the way back, right? Like we share a common ancestor with the lunch we ate because the only thing that we eat that has never been alive is salt. Everything else has been alive at some point in time. And how many choices have been made? Like we look nothing alike, say, like a watermelon even though we share like a lot of our DNA with even a watermelon or like a banana like we share 90 % of our DNA with a rat we share 98.2 % of our DNA with a gorilla like people like to talk about you know how different cultures are different when all that difference and all the things we are able to achieve with you know all the monuments or the cathedrals sending a man to the moon creating you know blockchain is just in that 1.8 % You know, like I should never To be too quick To judge other people's choices And then, you know They are just throwing Different solutions At a problem And see, you know What sticks And I think, you know To have more Project launching Is actually a positive sign Of people Seeing opportunity In the space And then, you know Their enthusiasm Will bring more people in Because there's nothing So magnetic And so Attractive than passionate people at work.

53:32Absolutely. You talked about Solana, obviously. The other layer one that's starting to pick up. I mean, actually, it's kind of like booming right now, especially because of the meme coin mania, right?

53:47And you said, hey, now with these upgrades, layer twos are actually cheaper than Solana.

53:56but the cost is not everything right and i i'm gonna challenge a bit the the layer twos here yeah um because that's my job obviously and i think as a i understand crypto i've been in crypto probably six to seven years but i'm not a very technical person i like and i think i'm like most people i'm kind of lazy right i don't i don't like hassle we all are little so i see some people writing some things on Twitter that actually makes sense to me and that I want you to challenge or to basically give your own honest take on. And there's two things. The first one is about Solana. Someone saying, I'm now completely normalized to Solana speed and UX, painful to get back to ETH.

54:40It's like when I first got used to ETH and then had to go back to Bitcoin or except going back to BTC, the slowness and rawness feels like you're moving gold. with if it's just annoying many such cases so what's your honest take on that if you have to take you know obviously there is there is good and bad everywhere right maybe you can give us both aspects yeah i think it's uh i think those those those uh considerations are very valid but i think it also is because the industry is still so new that people are comparing ethereum and Bitcoin and Solana, in 20 years time, if all three are still thriving, they will be doing very different things.

55:26It's because we are at such beginning. So like, even though they're making very different choices, it's like you go all the way back to the Jurassic or the Caribbean evolution when everything is just starting. Like nowadays, you wouldn't compare a human and an elephant or like a whale, even though they're all mammals. it will be the same with enough time. You're already seeing a divergence between the audience for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for Solana. Of course, there are people who use them more and people who use them for different purposes. And as time progresses, as more choices are made, you will see those divergence become even greater.

56:05As of this bull run, especially since the start of year, Solana has really captured people's imagination with its great meme culture. and Ethereum tend to be, have more whales. Like whales are not going to be chasing every meme coin. And then they have the greatest number of developers working on it. And one thing about Layer 2 is that I really truly believe this is, Layer 2 has now become Ethereum post-Enquin. You know, Layer 2 is just how people with, you know, less capital to start with will interact with Ethereum a little, a few months down the road. Like they would be, their transactions will be eventually included in a blob on Ethereum, but how they deal with it, especially with the help of account abstraction and the abstraction in a way of like multiple chains, they will just look at, say that someone is a Coinbase user, they will just look at, oh, I can get something from, something that's on Ethereum and ERC, but Basechain is the cheapest and fastest solution.

57:11I'll just use Base. But obviously, ideally, these people don't even have to make that choice. Yeah. It's made for them because there is another layer on the top that's kind of making the best decision for them. Because like the next point is exactly about that layer tools, right? There's a guy, he's a friend of a guy who is pretty big on Twitter and who is like a really smart dude. Writing, lol, well, I do pretty much only use mainnet. Talking about ETH, right? I'd rather pay the fees than deal with the brain damage of understanding the liquidity fragmentation landscape and bridging. And to be very honest, again, like, because at some point there's so many layer tools and you're doing different things and you need to bridge.

57:53Obviously, like, you use your metamask. It's not that complicated to click a button, you know, a year, two years ago. It was more complicated to add arbitrage or more polygon. Now you just click a button and you go on a dApp and you say switch network. Yeah. But you still need to do all that stuff and then you need to fund your wallet with the right coin, right? To be able to pay the transaction fees. This is a problem. Absolutely. This is a problem. And this is a completely valid criticism because it shouldn't be on the users to be able to figure that out. It should be the user experience that is made for them that is better.

58:26And the reassuring thing is like the best minds are already working on it. Like our friends at Safe have been safe to, you know, they created a safe, like the previous is not safe, but they already charging away account abstraction and then a lot of people are working on that like with now they call smart wallets basically like you don't you don't need to have all those technical know-how or the understanding of the difference between multiple chains the user interface should just give you the best choice given the time and given the decision you're trying to make so one thing that's truly something that it's a great investment thesis as well and so like mental has its eco fund that's a catalyzed uh capital proof 200 million it's investing a lot of great projects it's already uh completed its first round of 10 million asking for the second uh capital of 30 million now but one of the things that it's investing in is intent-based um protocols so it does is like it doesn't like oh look at you know user oh i want to bridge to arbitrage like oh like oh i i need to kind of move funds from this chain to that chain is what do you want to do?

59:35And then we'll just find the optimal routing at this moment in time, given the status of various blockchain, find the best route. It's like, you know, almost like using Chagibity or AI, try to figure out kind of what is the optimal. There's this famous kind of mathematical problem from the 17th century in the city of Cunisberg that is now in the Russian enclave that is surrounded by the Baltic countries and in Poland. but it was also the birth city of Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher. But there's famously like seven bridges in the city and then mathematicians were trying to figure out if there's a way that you don't repeat your path but cross all seven bridges.

1:00:16And it was like remain unsold for hundreds of years and then Google came along and actually used machine learning and AI decided it's impossible not to trace back. So in a way, it's just kind of, you know, let's find the best route to be able to do this. and it's intent-based, meaning that, you know, user, you only need to tell the user interface, this is the end result I want to see. Figure out the best way for me. Oh, that rhymed incidentally.

1:00:47So to that kind of comments, you're not going to say, I don't really care. You're going to say it's valid, but it doesn't really matter because the current state of the technology advancement and progress in crypto regarding these layer twos and even layer ones is

1:01:11there's a layer on the top that should make the decision for which one is being used for the user. but it's not there yet it's not there yet and therefore it's completely valid but then it poses a challenge for the layer 2 strategy in terms of development because the way you you need to build something that's going to be used but without people knowing it but currently this layer on the top is not really there but if you want to survive obviously you have a big treasury but you want adoption so you still need to have the users probably the meth one is a really smart one you know as i get people addicted to my platform i have more tvl but you almost need i'd say it's almost like everything in life which is there is the main let's think about someone who works in a corporation right in a big corporation with a lot of politics it's the same it's do i think about the big vision of the company or do i think about myself in this kind of context and make the best decision short term that will lead me to my decision my goal long term but i need to take all these other things into account which are not optimal for long term but that are the case right yeah so one of the key challenges for most layer twos today that's that's a great observation i'll try to kind of like uh take it into into different steps so first i'll say like about you know uh just like people people saying you know this is this is this is not great enough kind of user experience and they don't want to use it.

1:02:42I think it's just a momentary thing. It's like, you know, even the CEO of IBM itself in the 40s said the market for personal computer in the world is like four. But he was just looking at the moment. Like nowadays, like, you know, with the hindsight of 80 years advancements, everyone almost like have a personal computer in our phone. Right. So, you know, those challenges, they will eventually be overcome and then people will be using all those layer twos they will be interacting with ethereum primarily through layer two but they wouldn't even need to notice that um but then when you talk about kind of brand building yeah i mean you know it's great like you have a recognized brand but you don't need to be a recognized brand to be successful so you know who of us are thinking about the utility brands that provides gas electricity and uh and and different kind of utility internet to ourselves as much as we're thinking about sort of like popular kind of fashion brands.

1:03:40And even to talk about fashion brands, so I don't even remember the name, but like something, something Lutica, whatever, they're actually the brand that produces sunglasses for almost everyone, including Ray-Ban, including like Chanel, all those. It's actually produced by the same company, but you barely heard the name. And they now are looking at, I heard on a podcast, they are working on smart glasses. they already had a partnership with Ray-Ban and Meta with the Meta star smart glasses and they are now working on another thing is the hearing aids because one of the things that comes problem with hearing aids because it's so obvious so it comes with a lot of stigma so people don't want to use it but with the new sunglasses you wouldn't know they're wearing it so that's a great way to but have we ever heard of this brand?

1:04:26We've never heard of this brand so it wouldn't be a bad world if people are using Mento, just like how they are getting other electricity or sunglasses without even registering in their mind the Mento brand. So what we think is that we are building a sort of like technology platform on which you can build the killer apps. So, you know, for example, this account abstraction, ultimate routing, intent-based ultimate routing. It doesn't need to be built by us, but we will work with, you know, Dapps trying to build that. And Mentor is one of the best when it comes to kind of like enticing and encouraging and supporting Dapps.

1:05:19Like when you talk about, talk to different ecosystem partners, they always say, you know, Mentor gives them the best support. Mentor's BD team, Mentor's engineering team is just like the level of responsiveness and the level of support. It's just, they've never seen any other chain. And we also have, you know, a very robust grant program. We have one of the single largest ecosystem found and it's denominated in stablecoin. Unlike most of the other ecosystem found, they're in their own coin. So, you know, when we give money to others, there's no price pressure on Mentor's own coin. And then, you know, we just really believe that, you know, we don't have to find solution for everything.

1:06:03We just need to create a great incubator working environment for the brilliant minds who will come up with those solutions by building their depths to entice them into mental and then to build our mental. If just one, if we're able to build all that and then people forget about mental altogether, but people are using mental every day. They only remember the dApps that are able to do all that. They don't even remember what mental is. That's fine by us. Yeah, absolutely.

1:06:38You talk about, you know, all these dApps, right? Obviously, every layer one or every layer two needs a lot of application. That's what you derive your value from. And these dApps, they come solving some specific issues right and then they work or they don't there is also another specific kind of it's not really applications but projects and obviously i'm referring here to meme coins the reason why solana is basically so successful is meme coins yeah that where you have like actually if i talk to the meme coin thing is really interesting one because in the beginning in crypto you think it's dumb right but the more you go through cycles and the more you talk to big brains the more you start to understand the concept and actually a lot of big brains again like you know you have the classic meme the meme coins the right curves and left curves understand meme coins it's the ones in the middle that don't understand anything if you talk to the right the people in the right curve the big brains one of the things they say is i think meme coins are really interesting and i like them at least a lot for one reason they don't promise anything yeah that is right which is a lot of the problem of a lot of um crypto projects right obviously when you have this cycle and people want to serve the wave when it's going well you're going to promise a lot of things and talk about narrative that you're not necessarily even in so what's your big brain take on meme coins yeah i wouldn't call myself a big brain but like i think meme coin is definitely uh something that no one should uh just kind of think it's stupid or write off um because i think if there's one thing that is even more a scarce resource than money in in this market is actually uh the amount of attention span and meme coin is able to because in a way it has the best technology It's a technology that's called prices go up.

1:08:45It's this amazing technology. In a way, it captures people's mind more so than Rolup and L2. The greatest mind-concentrating technology of blockchain is called prices go up. But when you actually think about it, really, like any technology, you need that option for it to really go parabolic. Because we live in a society, coming back to that, what gives anything value is that humans value it. Like, you know, why does anything has value? It's because humans value If humans weren't here If there's not another species that come up to society Nothing's going to have value Like, the whole thing about supply the amount of scarcity It's only because humans, we decided We're going to exchange value We're going to pay for it So, you know, if something is able to capture people's imagination Simply by being a meme and being a mind-consider It has both the idea of being a meme So it's hugely transmutable, virally transmutable.

1:09:42And it has the other compelling case that is price go up. It's a great way of putting that in front of people's mind. And those people who would come just as most people came to our space in the first place for speculation. Absolutely. I was about to say that Bitcoin price is when it goes up like crazy or in 2013 or 17 that people get attracted to the space. Yeah, like with a few autistic spectrum people aside, I have huge respect for those people. Well over 99.99 % of people came to this space. The first thing is speculation. And then when they look around, they find something they like, they stay, they mellow.

1:10:29You know, this is kind of a funnel that filters through. But everyone comes to this place, first thing first, speculation. So when you're able to Have this powerful tool That is meme coin That is able to Capture people's imagination And bring them in It's actually great Because then A portion of those people Will stay for the technology And I would even say Maybe technology is third You have price go up first Best technology Second you have the actual memes So not talking about the meme coins You have the memes Came for price go up Okay I got direct Fine but I stayed for the memes Because I have so much fun right Right.

1:11:07Yeah. And if you think about it, and actually meth is exactly used to, the thing you used to talk about is obviously you have your rate that's higher, but how do you even capture people's attention in the beginning? Hey, let's do something about Breaking Bad, right? Yeah. Meth, and you have a chief alchemist, right? Yes. So it's just all, it can sound so stupid, but like the most scarce resource is attention because people have known. literally so how do you attract people attention price goes up and memes and now you put both of them together and you get these meme coins absolutely and if you understand that you realize it's pretty amazing and there is still a lot of people who are very smart in crypto who are kind of like mid-curving memes or are starting to say ah yeah now okay maybe I'll go into dodge but now you have a lot of different flavors and some actually when you're deep like in the meme rabbit hole I'm not talking about the the meme coins mania on solana right i'm talking about a few meme coins that i would say like have certain market cap maybe in the billions but like you actually start to realize it makes sense and then you also start to realize if you want to be very honest to yourself most people love to gamble so and meme meme coin is basically gambling but the new type of gambling right a lot of people go to play the lottery but now you can do that online while having much more fun and what if meme coin are a new way for people to actually gamble but it's much more fun absolutely and like so this is an interesting because I studied psychology in university like actually evaluated why people gamble it's not necessarily they always want to win sometimes just adrenaline itself is what they are after so they don't of course when you ask them they were like oh we're chasing for the big win a lot of them are But at the end of the day, a lot of them, those playing the slot machine, maybe they just want that rush of excitement.

1:13:11But yeah, I think even for meme coin, it's not just gambling. It's storytelling and finding a community. It sounds like our cliched, old-timey, but when you think about kind of like, how did, like, what is the thing that really sets us apart from the other lives, the other creatures on Earth? Humans since the beginning, even what we are doing now is we huddle around a campfire. We huddle around a bonfire to tell stories. At the end of the day when it's dark, you know, like we need the human need of warmth and community. and you know meme coin is the best way to feel invited because otherwise is that my campfire there's other people's campfire meme coin is so welcoming it's like come to our campfire we'll tell some silly stories you don't need to have any prior knowledge you don't need to have any skills you don't need to belong to this group as long as you you decide oh you know this is campfire I choose I want to belong to this group and it's just a very welcoming you know a lot of people they just want to find the group that they belong and this is the innate human need to find belonging and to find their community.

1:14:23And then, you know, if they, of course, like money is great, but, you know, it actually satisfies, you know, multiple desires and needs in yourself. So it's actually a very complex and very sophisticated thing. And, you know, don't let anyone sort of chastise meme coin as dumb. I love it. That's a great one, actually. so we have a section in this podcast where we talk about the guests' favorite projects and teams and you have a few projects you're really bullish on we talked about two already Eigenlayer Athena we'll go through them separately again but because we're talking about MemeCoin yeah and I know there is a MemeCoin that just launched recently BOM are you talking about BOM or BOM and I was talking about on Mentor on Mentor Puff yeah I mean let's talk about BOM first and then talk about Perf the Dragon on Mento so let's start with BOM yeah great stuff like I looked at them having been paying too much close attention it launched like less than 48 hours ago now it's already more than 1 billion and it's it's like just just outside of 100 top 100 coins like by the time we finish our recording if we looked at CoinGecko maybe it's already within 100 how do you explain that?

1:15:50you can't explain it it's just the power of of course because it came after sort of a whiff and all that people are already primed to think if this is the first meme coin in this season they wouldn't be so successful so fast but it definitely pays to be on the right trend having the momentum and a lot of times meme coins are actually launched by very smart people that's what kind of we can segue to Puff the Dragon yeah so

1:16:23Puff the Dragon yeah first meme coin on Manto one of the first it's not the first but like what's so special about Puff the Dragon except that it's very cute very cute and like I think in a way it's just kind of like it's already doing so much world building it's so great and then it takes math and then the UI UX is just great like it's it's it looks when you look at it you just know a lot of work was put into a lot of heart tear and sweat was put into it um you know our our own uh uh beloved esteemed colleague uh uh chief alchemist jody alexander is is is involved in it absolutely of course like uh in his personal capacity and there's uh you know it's it's it's it's a completely completely uh uh community run meme coin but when you look at the level of attention the level the level of uh preparation and thought deliberation put into it, it just is really almost like a work of art.

1:17:21And they have a lot of interesting, so that currently is chapter one, there's a lot of things being cooked. Yeah, so I know more than I can talk about. And I'm not personally involved in the development of it, but when I look at all the partnerships and all the next chapters they have planned, it just can't help but be super bullish about it because again coming back to what I said a while ago it's like there's nothing as infectious and and and the magnetic than dedicated people passionate people at work do you think that's the most important thing for him meme coin to be successful because if you look at for example with right it's a cute dog with a hat and that's one of I mean, obviously then you have like some mega influencers that are, I mean, I even chipped in for the Las Vegas sphere because I'm also a holder and I was like, man, this makes so much sense.

1:18:18And it's going to be fun just to have like the freaking dog with the hat on the sphere. But there's much less work put, let's say there's a lot of BD and marketing work put on that, but much less on the entire concept. Yeah. I mean, something doesn't need to start fully. So like a baby doesn't need to come out of the womb fully I just like to throw out tangents so much So like if you go to like look at So those European museums You would see like those medieval paintings All the babies down there so ugly Do you know why? Because most of them are actually depicting Jesus And they're trying to depict Jesus as fully formed, complete So because medieval paintings They're not for aesthetics They're for storytelling Because back then most people are illiterate So all the arts, they were meant for churches And they were trying to tell the story they're trying to teach morals.

1:19:06So, you know, a baby like this is long way of saying it doesn't have to come out fully formed. We love Renaissance babies who are cute and Sheryl been like a lot more. It may start it as a silly idea, like, oh, it's dog and hat, it's cool. But the success it has had since you cannot just chalk it off to just a bunch of silly dudes came out with silly idea. anything that's successful I we always like to you know chalk our success to to to grit and to to inventiveness and other people's success to to to to luck luck is hugely important but I think any success there is a lot of hard work and grit and stick to itness that's involved and I think for for something that's more than a flash in the pen something that is a success that will that will sustain and last you basically see this curve of silly inventiveness start to diminish in its importance and grit and stick to this grow importance throughout the time axis absolutely so there's these two other protocols that I mean we talked about before already but let's go one by one and again here let's imagine that you're talking to your mother, right?

1:20:25The first one is Eigenlayer. So first explain me what Eigenlayer is, if you had to explain it to your mother, and then explain me why you're so bullish on Eigenlayer. Right. So Eigenlayer, I actually said a little bit before, it's like, you know, on-demand liquidity and security. It's like, it's liquidity and security for blockchain, like Uber is on the mound ride sharing for mobility. So what is kind of one of the biggest initial challenge for a lot of project owners, founders, is that when they try to build something new, they need to bootstrap liquidity, bootstrap security, and they don't have that.

1:21:12What Eigenlay allows it to do is like, you know the joke is like new economy uber has no cars airbnb has has has no no rooms and so on so forth a lot of those founders they have a brilliant idea but they don't have the the entire market cap of ethereum at their back for liquidity and security eigenlayer allows you to do that so you can start from day one you can if you build an eigenlayer you're able to basically have those ETH stakers to restake on your protocol and then supply you with the security and liquidity the way Ethereum is already built gives you the tap into the greatest liquidity and security of any smart contract platform in the world.

1:21:57Why is this so important for the space? And why was this not invented before? The second question is I don't even know. But a lot of times like when you have when you have sort of like something of this color you just think oh you know this is such a simple idea it's such like but a lot of it is like people can have ideas they default as execution and a great and stick to it I think why is this so powerful is because now you really open the door for the Caribbean explosion like now the the the threshold for someone coming up a great idea and execute it becomes so much lower because before like you know someone who is building a new layer 1 they need to figure out you know how do I not get 51 % attacked nowadays like you know you can just build an icon layer and then you know even if you don't have any startup capital you can do it you're going to be as secure as the Ethereum it's essentially the same way as I mean the internet evolved everything became much easier and then you started to have platforms that enable you it's less it's less a problem of security i mean you could say the cloud for example you have a few companies running the cloud and then you don't really have to worry too much about security i mean obviously this could be a rabbit hole on its own right but hey i can build my own stuff and kind of renting cloud up from from out there or just building a business or startup i can just internet lower the cost massively yeah because of the evolution in time right here is kind of the same in terms of security and liquidity that's made easier right yeah basically it abstracts away two of the greatest kind of like a block of like like writer's block status block like uh and they allow the uh the project developer to focus on the problem that they're trying to solve instead of like the the problems they need to address before they can then that's an opportunity you're also hyper bullish on Athena I don't think you are the only one what's Athena if you had to explain it to your mother and why are you and pretty much your entire space so excited on what Athena is building it's a synthetic dollar built with basically positions on centralized exchanges the way it works is this was an idea that Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX, had several years ago.

1:24:34He was trying to do it on Bitcoin, but if he's doing it on Ethereum, is that most of the people, like vast majority of the people in the crypto space actually still are centralized exchanges. And centralized exchanges are actually far more powerful. Like we love all the innovation in decentralized space, but we cannot, you know, not admit that centralized exchanges, they have the lion's share of basically 90 % of the liquidity that goes through the space goes through centralized exchanges. And there's actually money to be made there because what are some of the biggest players in the space, actually market makers and investors and how they make money is to be market making on centralized exchanges earning a funding rate.

1:25:15So especially for futures, for perpetual contracts, in order to kind of like have the price anchored to the spot price, They apply this thing called funding rate every eight hours. If the price is above the spot, you will basically have people who are long paying, people who are short, and then vice versa if the price is lower. So it's basically, to make it simple, it's because a lot of people love leverage, right? Yeah. Because you can make much more if you're right. Obviously, you can lose much more if you're wrong. If the price of Bitcoin goes up or any altcoin that has perps, right? People we anticipate is going to go up more on average.

1:26:00Therefore, they're going to long more. But at some point, because long and short is a market in itself, you need to have a mechanism that incentivizes not everyone to be long, right? That's the funding fee. To keep equilibrium. To make it very simple, right? That's the funding fee. And so, but obviously a lot of traders or retail traders don't necessarily know that. Let's say like the normies, right? Or don't care because think that the price is still going to go up. But then you have some other people who are very smart who come and say, actually, I don't really care whether the price goes up or down.

1:26:40I just want to pocket the difference on the funding fees. And during the bull market, everyone is long. let's say to make it most people are very long therefore the funding fees are very high and pay the people who short very well yeah and that's the mechanism yes underlying ethena right stablecoin so they're able to give people like almost uh i think like around 20 percent apy by holding their synthetic dollar usde while making millions every day and that that also just tells you how much centralized exchanges actually make. Yeah. That they're able to afford like sponsorships like Rebel. Just like the amount of money centralized exchanges make is just astounding.

1:27:26And market makers too. Yeah, absolutely.

1:27:31I mean, I had a bunch of CEOs, founders from centralized exchanges. I had also the two co-founders of the, you know, GSR and the Wintermute. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I kind of know about like the, let's say potential of, But I think a lot of people still don't understand that, how crazy the money is in those specific companies, basically, verticals. Whereas for a lot of other people in crypto, it's much harder to make money. A lot of other, I mean, this is like kind of diverting, but if you think about what are the best ways to make money in crypto today? Market making, exchanges, right? and then you have these projects that are sitting on a huge treasury and generate yield from that treasury and then can fund their operations, right?

1:28:26But it's still very hard for other kind of projects to make a lot of money, especially in the long term. Yeah, I mean, since the beginning of time when you have a lot to start with, like even if you're just making penny on a dollar for what you're holding, like if you start up crypto, capital is huge. It's like, you know, the Nobel Prize. Nobel Prize is still, you know, after more than almost 200 years, still giving all those prize monies, a million dollars for like a win of Pemistry. Just from this inventor, like his savings from all those years ago. And they're not touching the principle. They're just giving the interest.

1:29:00So, you know, in this sense, Athena is doing something similar to what Mento does. It's like, you know, we are just taking the interest we are earning to fund development. And Athena, like, is it building something that is truly groundbreaking? I mean, in a sense that this product itself is, but is the concept behind it not necessarily? It's just we have a lot of money that we can throw around. And just the money that's grown from that large capital is enough to make everyone happy. So what's the bet there? Obviously, you're going to take the opportunity of the bull run, but what's the bet in a bear market?

1:29:36Can you make the funding fees on the other side? by being long when everyone is short. I mean, probably there's going to be much fewer people who are short because the retail people are not going to short, right? Or much less, I'd say. Or saying, hey, we have accumulated so much money that no problem doing a bear market. We can either still give some incentives, like you guys are doing at Mantle on ETH or METH, or just say, hey, we can even give a portion of the treasury away and build other things, obviously, right? Yeah, I mean, crypto people are looking at much shorter terms. I think it's very good to look at long-term and we are totally for that.

1:30:14Sorry for that. No, no, but I think, you know, they obviously have a plan, but I think as of this moment, the launch is very, very up-tuned because we're just at the start of a bull market. So in a way, maybe they can make so much in this bull market that that's enough to sustain them for several bear markets. Yeah, absolutely.

1:30:35what's intelligence to you I asked you yesterday what's your IQ right you said you don't know you don't want to say or you don't care but then you started to question what is intelligence right I mean this is a multi-layered question so that when people talk about IQ I think like one of the things that most of us have in some way taken an IQ test but most of it is actually kind of pattern recognition and problem solving i don't think that's the fool of intelligence kind of i was i think yesterday i was i was throwing out uh mozart and bach as examples and the dolphins yeah uh they they are famously both of them are able to play a piece of music after hearing it just once and they're able to play the entire thing perfectly and this is something that you know someone who because i like rome uh uh cicero like cicero basically is is is the guy who who who is most famous for for like The way Latin languages is coded, established, is mainly contributable to him, like modern English, a lot thanks to Shakespeare.

1:31:38Shakespeare invented more than 2 ,000 words, including eyeball. Apparently, we didn't have the word eyeball before Shakespeare. And then Dante was hugely responsible for the modern language of Italian because he just had the Tuscan dialect and people wrote in Latin back then. Not a lot of them actually wrote in dialects. But, you know, intelligence, like, you know, they can be very different. And if we're only measuring, like, problem-solving skills and pattern recognition, they're very important skills, but we're not really capturing the full spectrum of what people are able to do. And then another thing that I said, I was like, you know, we have heard dolphins who are able to master thousands of human words, but not a single human who are able to master multiple dolphin words.

1:32:19If we're measuring, like, intelligence in that way, dolphins are smarter than humans. Absolutely. Another thing is like we just decided the things like even when we're measuring intelligence of other animals, are they able to recognize themselves in a mirror? Are they able to understand human words? Are they able to do pattern recognition? Some gorillas can even memorize places on a screen better than humans. But what we are testing them is for human tasks. I think a true measure of intelligence should be like how a species is able to adapt to the environment the best so when we are testing for like you know animals it should be like what benefits them in their natural habitat instead of like the task that human can perform but also just like you know when we talk about oh you know people like to say oh you know humans are intelligent species or like you know why um why aren't that like there must be other there mustn't be other intelligent species in the universe because like why why haven't they visited us so one thing is it's just like hugely uh assumption uh assumptions of us to to say um we are the only intelligent species because we define intelligence it's like a vc sort of like investing like when we talk when we were at this dinner the other day is like vc going to every next round round a round b investing the same company leading the same VC they're marking their own work in a sense that's like you know we just decided what we are able to do is intelligence why is it why is that true it's like you know like alien species and I I truly believe space aliens exist it doesn't even require belief it's it's a matter of fact it's just there are trillion stars in the universe and when people ask oh you know if they exist why haven't they visited us it's because like you know even if they don't even need to be that smart, to be able to traverse the space-time, the vastness of space-time, because the fastest human-made object hasn't even left the sun's gravitational well.

1:34:29To go to the next closest star, it's four light years. It takes hundreds of thousands of years for the fastest human-made object to travel there. If an alien species is able to travel multiple light years to visit us, they will be so far advanced as nothing that we have is of interest to them. Just think, when was the last time we stopped to have a conversation with ants? Because you think, oh, ants are so primitive. We are only 1.8 % smarter than gorillas in terms of the difference in DNA. And ants, not that different. And just imagine there's an alien species who are 1.8 % smarter than us, the way we are 1.8 % smarter than gorillas.

1:35:16What are they able to achieve? Everything we do will be not of interest to them. Like, yeah, so one thing like people often talk about, you know, like when aliens come to us, that one thing they will want is Bitcoin. They would have figured that out. One thing that's actually not bullish for crypto is like, When we actually encounter alien species, nothing that we can offer will be of interest to them, not even cryptocurrency, even though maybe this is the most supreme form of currency and method of exchange we have created. But there's actually so much abundance in the universe. Gold may be rare, but gold is actually not rare on Earth.

1:35:57The rarest thing is actually ruby in terms of gemstones. But everything might be rare, but when you look at the vastness of the space, nothing is rare. So I'm obviously not going to ask you the, I mean, as a wrap up for this podcast, I'm obviously not going to ask you the, sorry for going on so many tangents. The kind of logical question where a lot of people will ask you, so do you believe there is life somewhere else in the universe? Obviously there is, right? Like it's mathematically almost impossible or let's say it's mathematically impossible that there is no life somewhere else. My question would be, how many?

1:36:37How many other planets or stars or maybe even things that we can't see? Because we have our senses. How many other civilizations exist? Yeah, it's going to be innumerable. So the observable universe is about 192 ,000 of light is across. And then even just beyond that, because light hasn't traveled far enough since the Big Ben to reach us. And they may never reach us because the universe is expanding faster than light can reach us. But even just in our own backyard In like moons of Jupiter and Saturn You have Enceladus that has like warm plumes Underneath its icy shell You have water there You may have water You may have water on Europa Which is another moon of Jupiter Europa is what Europe, the continent was named after Because Europa was a princess of Phoenicia Modern day Lebanon, Levant It was abducted by Zeus, carried on Zeus' back in the form of a bull to Crete.

1:37:50So Crete was actually the original name of Europa. It's like Asia. Now we think of Asia, we think of East Asia, Singapore. Asia originally meant this Roman province on the west coast of Turkey, modern Turkey, Anatolia. And Africa used to just mean Tunis. That's where the old Carthage is. But if we find life on Europa, what are we going to call them? We have to call them Europeans. Sorry, that's not a joke that I really clicked with this audience. But, you know, there might be life in our own backyard. It's like to say, oh, just because we haven't seen aliens, they must not exist. It's like to take this glass and go to the East Coast park, go to the beach, scoop up water into this and see, oh, there's no fishing there.

1:38:39There mustn't be fish in the entire ocean. Yeah.

1:38:46yeah but when we meet space aliens like there's no even point to resist or anything it's just like you know we submit to because like if they're able to have such technological announcements to to travel all the way here then there's nothing that we can do to resist them or like to like like basically they can have that pick man the next podcast is going to be about that aliens astrology astronomy i'll be sure to watch that's going to be no i'm i mean the next one with you the next one with you because it could probably be another 5 hour conversation what's your biggest prediction for next 12 months?

1:39:21next 12 months? full bull run like we're before Bitcoin halving and we already hit multiple all time highs it's yeah if history rhymes like a lot of times it rhymes you know just how the price performs after halving as compared to the price at halving we are looking at Bitcoin at least doubling if not like even higher 2x 3x of its current price so yeah very excited about the bull run that we are already in absolutely amazing thank you so much for doing this man that was a helpful conversation proud to be here thank you for having me