Azeem Khan on Miden, Founder Culture and Crypto's Future

Transcript

be ready when you launch a token for death threats. They're like, "You're going to get a constant stream of death threats." And just like be ready for mentally dealing with it. >> Like the highs are really high and everyone loves you one minute and then the lows are so low and everyone hates you and they're here out for your head. And this is what makes the space so tough. >> The VCs who invested in the space that we're in now deserve a lot of criticism as well. Launching tokens and just taking money off the table, clear pump and dumps, stuff that like was never really going to go anywhere. >> Compared to say 2021, the actual adoption of crypto is so much stronger.

Regulatory risk is so much less. Like the space has legitimately come a long way. >> Do you think that it's destined to be an invisible back end or can it become a cultural force? Welcome back to the Fully Vested podcast by DeFi Llama. I'm your co-host Patrick. We've also got DeFi Dave in the house. >> And today with us we have Azim, co-founder of Miden. What's up, Azim? >> What's going on, guys? Thank you for having me. I know it took a little bit of coordinating, but it's super cool to actually, yeah, be chatting with both of you.

>> Right on, right on. >> Absolutely. >> Uh maybe you could start by giving a quick introduction about yourself, who you are, what your background is, and what you're working on now. >> Absolutely. So, I'm like you mentioned, one of the co-founders of Miden. Miden's a new zero-knowledge blockchain that is going to be coming to mainnet quite soon. The team has been working on this for a very long time. I I joined a little bit more recently, but it spun out of Polygon last year and we did a $25 million fund raise with a16z, 1kx, and Hack co-leading. And I came on around that time to be able to help lead the business efforts, non-technical efforts,

whatever you want to call it. Uh I myself have been in crypto for a really long time since like 2012, 2013 at this point. Like reading about it, writing about it, selling all the Bitcoin that I was buying at amazing prices, you know, all the things that happen with most people who enter this industry early. >> We thank you for your sacrifice. >> If I if I had just not sold the things that I was buying then, I I probably wouldn't have to work right now, but I was such a savant making 5x at the time that uh I'm here with you guys. And so >> None of us would be, right?

Welcome to the club. >> Yeah, I'd be retired. Uh other than that, uh these days I I I write for Forbes as well. I was a columnist with CoinDesk for a while. Have done quite a bit of consulting with the UNICEF Crypto Fund. Worked with Mercy Corps as well on on Gaza relief efforts back in 2024. And so it's been like bouncing around doing a bunch of stuff. Did some things with the World Economic Forum and you know, generally speaking have for years now been looking at what we need to do to be able to bring crypto from the fringes into the mainstream. And these days I really feel with what we're working on and the idea of bringing compliance and privacy to blockchain adoption actually really is

that like last hurdle before we get to being able to actually realize the dream that so many of us have so many of us have been talking about for so much time now that it's almost become a meme of like bring a billion people to crypto. >> Yeah, what I really loved about this interview coming together was you actually reached out to me uh to be on my other podcast. And I was like, "Hey, let's just like hop on a call and like actually catch up because our careers have been in parallel for such a long time." Uh and when we were talking, something that you didn't mention just now, but you actually worked at Roc Nation for a bit. Uh >> Yes.

>> And yep. And you gave a phenomenal metaphor in comparison to uh being a founder and being an artist. And you said like, "Oh, like who you raised from like that's you being signed to a label. When you drop a product that's like an album release. Can you go into more detail about that comparison? I guess you can start off with you know, what it's like in the music industry what was what it was like at your time at Roc Nation and what you took from that and brought into crypto and in this whole fundraising life. >> Yeah, totally. So, you know, I was mentioning earlier that I started writing about Bitcoin back in 2013. My first article was about the New York City Bitcoin Center opening in the financial district in New York. I went

to a New Year's Eve party they hosted. And then not long after separately I just realized that you know, as a contributor for the Huffington Post I could write about whatever I wanted. And I was a huge fan of hip hop. I've always grown up a huge fan of hip hop. And so, I realized you know, at the time unless you were Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, or Drake, no one was going to write about you on the Huffington Post. It was just a platform that wasn't available to artists essentially. So, I thought well, why don't I just start to reach out to the artists that I'm a huge fan of and start to write good stories for them. I'm not working in the music writing space so I don't need to go after any of like the click bait stuff. I can just like ask

questions that I want, tell the stories I want. And what this ended up resulting in over time was me building a really large just network of people in the music industry singers songwriters producers, agents, the artists themselves, the label people, being able to be in the rooms to understand what was going on. And so, this resulted in at some point me setting up a dev shop in 2016 where we ended up building products for Kanye West, Teyana Taylor, Bryson Tiller, did a stickers app for Rae Sremmurd. We were actually supposed to build the first iteration of Kylie Jenner's makeup thing. I forgot what it's called, but like we've been reached out to for that too cuz we've been working with

Kanye's team, and in 2017, I ended up co-founding and starting a company incubated by Roc Nation with one of the executives there, Bryant Biggs, who goes by Bee High. And so, it was another situation where like, you know, artists and athletes, cuz they do management of both, and you know, Jay-Z's record label also obviously has like all of the important big people come in, that I was around a lot of them from 2017 to mid-2019, late 2019 before I left. And what I spent time doing in the music industry was like really being able to analyze and understand the way that people build personal brand, more than anything. And so, if you think about it,

if you're a brand new artist and like, you know, back in 2013, 2014, 2015, you're trying to go on SoundCloud, and you're trying to get people to pay attention to you, and the idea is simply like, no one knows who you are, no one trusts you, no one knows anything about you. It's very likely that you don't really have many resources, but you think that you have some sort of innovative product to offer people that they would really appreciate, and that is your art in the form of music. How do you go out there and do things that are going to allow people to actually care about you? And so, when you're resource constrained, and you have a product that you think is better than your incumbents you're in a very similar situation as a startup founder. You're like, I think I can do X

better than the big companies who are doing it. I just don't have the resources to do it. And so, you know, you go about trying to bootstrap what you're doing in terms of like whatever the same product is, and then you try to get it out there. You do the same forms of like guerrilla marketing when it comes to being able to get people to use it. You have to do a lot of just one-on-one reaching out to people, being willing to very much so humble yourself and go out there and speak to people, and just like do whatever you need to to be able to start building a buzz. And little by little you're able to get into media, you're able to start building a little bit of a following, people start to actually like your stuff organically.

And then you get to this place potentially where you've done enough that you're in a place where you start talking to record label equivalents, which are venture capitalists. In the very early stages, if you go to a VC when you've done absolutely nothing, you end up in the same position that you do when you've done absolutely nothing as an artist. Like they're not willing to pay attention to you. Now, if you put yourself in a position where you've now bootstrapped something that people are listening to, that like their peers are paying attention to, there's always that same network of people that are in the labels. It's the same way as VCs. It's a small circle of people who all know each other, and they have access to the financing that you need to be able to take what you're doing to the next level. And so, that's

really like what I saw happening with artists. Like as an example, I mentioned working with Kanye in 2016. I never met personally Kanye, but everyone around Kanye, we did. And one of the things we did when Kanye was doing the The Life of Pablo tour, I went backstage to go watch his concert in New York City, one of the shows that they did. And then after the show, we ended up going out, and it was like Scott Disick was with us, Mike Dean was with us, Travis Scott was with us. And this was when Travis Scott had done like the Birds in the Trap stuff. And he was buzzing, but like by no means like now he's one of the biggest artists out, huge Nike collabs, things like that. And so for me as an example would be Travis Scott, and just seeing the way that he

would be at the studios, the way that he would just be hanging out, the way that in ways he was sort of playing little brother and being able to shadow what was going on, the things that he was doing to try to build his brand. And so, to take it to a little bit of like, you know, with what I started doing when I was like, "Oh, like, you know, real founder life." was it since the same metaphor is there in like almost a one-to-one comparison, how do you go about actually building a brand in a similar way when you're a a founder. And so much of what we've seen, which is ironic about crypto, is that we preach the ethos of decentralization while simultaneously really being obsessed with cult of personality. And so

Satoshi Nakamoto, while no one knows who he is >> contradiction there, indeed. >> Yeah, right. The inherent contradiction that is crypto. Like, sure no one knows who Satoshi is, but Satoshi is revered, right? Vitalik is revered. Toly is revered. Jesse catches a lot of criticism, but like for the most part in many ways has really carried base to where it is now because he acted as that central figure that people were able to associate the idea of what's supposed to be decentralized technology by being able to use that I trust X person. And so in the same way, it's just been thinking like, how do I go about doing those things? And so when it comes to, you know, the long hair, like when I go to when I go to conferences, like on

stages, I'm always wearing a different pair of like bright sneakers. Like I'm very intentional about the hats that I have. Like there are like little things that I've seen artists do that become part of their personal brand that that they really build up and over time becomes part of their personas. And honestly, even the idea like I talked about this recently on a with someone else is that like I'm naturally a pretty introverted person. I'm not someone who's like this super extrovert, but my role as this non-technical business founder puts me in a place where I need to go out. I need to meet everyone. I need to be around everyone. I need to constantly be messaging everyone. You have to get on stages in front of people you don't know and give presentations and like have large crowds. And in so many ways, it's

also one of the big things I learned with artists is that you realize that a lot of them aren't the personality that they portray. They create a character and then this character has different facets that are actually quite opposite to who the artist actually is personally. But they've created a personal and a professional thing, and the easiest example I can give is like Aubrey Graham is different than Drake, you know? Kobe Bryant was different than Mamba. And all these artists, Marshall Mathers was very different than Slim Shady. And you >> Beyoncé and Sasha Fierce.

>> Beyoncé and Sasha Fierce, absolutely, right? And so, that is something that has been another piece that I've really been able to carry with myself, where you know, you get on stage and you're actually like I'm nervous every single time I get on stage. Like 100% of the times that I have to give a talk, whether it's a panel, a keynote, anything, a fireside. And it's almost like remembering to put on the character and like the hat and the shoes and the like those things like they're the same thing that like artists do or they they have the jewelry and they have like the fancy watches and all those things. They create a persona, and then they go up there and they get to feel comfortable acting as the character they've created as opposed to needing to be themselves in that moment.

>> It's really interesting. >> long-winded answer. >> Yeah, I think there's two things to touch on there. There's one, the Messiah archetype that crypto's ever so attracted to always, and two, the mask that founders need to put on uh to the different audiences they're talking to, whether, you know, they're in a VC meeting, they have to put on kind of the founder VC mask and basically talk the language of VCs, and I kind of view it as spell casting in a way. You basically say a few magic words, if you just say the right combination that resonates, you get millions of dollars.

>> Yep. Totally. >> And yeah, and then on stage you're, you know, talking to a much wider audience, maybe you're talking to retail, maybe you're talking to institutions, but you have to be legible to them. You have to be able to stick not just, you know, stick out and be memorable, but like actually provide some unique value and insight to them. And for them to And actually like repeating things is very important as well, so it just sticks in your head and that's how you build a brand is repetition. Like you said for yourself as a founder, you know, the long hair, the hat, the shoes. For myself, for me it was cherry blossom shirts. Now, I guess it's cigarettes, you know, and I feel like we don't have a choice in the matter. I feel like people put on the mask for us as much as

we put on the mask for others. >> Yep. It's why you have to be so careful about the masks you put on, too. Cuz when I look around, I'm like there's natural ceilings to certain kinds of masks that people put on. Right? But they do it without really thinking through the ceiling cuz they see that they get engagement on it and then they double down and triple down. And oh no, where did he go? And before you know it, you know, you're in this position where you're like, wait, I can't change it now because someone has put it on me. Similar to like, you know, I don't know when actors become typecast in a role, right?

>> Yeah. Yeah, I You just reminded me of uh you know who did a great rebrand as an actor was Matthew McConaughey. I'm not sure if you read his book >> Yo, I have not read his book, but it's so so this is super interesting because my wife does not know Matthew McConaughey as the former heartthrob. She only knows him. Yeah, she she only knows him as like through Detective Honor. She knows him as like an actor actor. Whereas I know him >> I remember yeah yeah. >> Yeah, like as the guy who never had a shirt on and like was always ripped and was in every rom-com. But like the switch that he was able to make and I've seen some podcasts where he talks about the difficulty that it was to make that switch. But it's very much

>> He had to basically say no to roles for two years. It was a huge risk because you don't know if anybody's ever going to watch you again. You don't know if opportunities are going to even come about. But if he didn't take that risk, he would still be doing rom-coms now and we wouldn't think of him as this Academy Award winning actor. >> And he won the Academy Award before Leo ended up winning it, which is crazy, right? >> Yeah. Would you say that I I guess like another person would Adam Sandler fit in that category, too? Cuz he was like doing all the comedies and then he did Uncut Gems. >> You know, he just shows for me is like that's like almost breath of his acting cuz he did the other one, too, with like that uh that basketball movie like where

he was like the coach or whatever. >> Did you see that one? It was Hustle. >> Hustle. Like that was So he he's just like to me just shown that he has acting range that no one believed that he had. Uncut Gems was very anxiety-inducing, but was a >> Well, that's the Uncut Gems is the Field of Dreams for gamblers. You know what I mean? >> That's actually a super interesting way to explain >> It is. It's the Field of Dreams. Yeah, cuz you're like at the edge of your seat, like you're like you hate this guy, but you're also rooting for him, but he's also a huge piece of [ __ ] And like he's he's just like, "Oh, I hope he like figures out his [ __ ] and everything." And then I don't want to give any spoilers, but the end like it's

just just like you release your Yeah. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. That movie, oh god. Oh god, I haven't thought about that movie in a while. >> Yeah. But then the other thing you mentioned was Founders and the Messiah complex and how crypto yes, we preach decentralization. And when I hear decentralization from a social standpoint, I think of community and not of like oh like you know, we're airdrop farming, we're the community, blah blah blah or like come up, you know, not just like saying you're the community, but actually being the community and actually doing things for the project you're involved in, whether that's making memes or making writing explainers or like throwing events or like that's what made the early Bitcoin community so special. That's what made the early Ethereum community so special

because we are all Satoshi. What that actually meant was everyone had their little bit in creating the lore and the story of Bitcoin and where it is today. And now it's like it's just like base It's basically integrated in the financial system as this alternative represented by alternative asset. Um But, it's interesting to see now because, you know, we did it with a Bitcoin, we did it with Ethereum, and then like every time has been like less and less. I mean, yeah, I think you can make definitely make further case for Solana as well and also hype, but it's hard for projects to get get to that like same get to basically stroke up the same motivation as the early Bitcoin adherents cuz they

had this like mission of oh, we're going to create sovereign money. We're going to create you know, they they had this like underlying belief. I'm like curious like do you think crypto has like grown past that? Like do you now you think we're just like building companies that aren't, you know, we just want like to just build like products that work or like do you think like we can do you think there's still room for the cultish element in crypto or is it some combination of the two? >> That's a great question. I think it's going to most likely be sort of a combination of the two and I think hyper liquid is a great example of like that combination. Is that for the most part when people first started, you know, I remember when people were pushing all the Bitcoin stuff so many years ago and

a lot of that like I got into crypto not because of looking at prices, but because in 2012 when I was applying to medical schools, I was sitting and reading about like the principles of decentralization and how we ascribe value to things and the philosophies around money. And so, what attracted me to Bitcoin wasn't that I was thinking about how it was going to go to a million dollars. I was attracted to it because I thought, wait, like this is actually a really thought-provoking idea that I've never really given much time to. And then when I would meet other people, they were these very eclectic super intelligent people who also had similar thoughts and so we'd be having these discussions about how we thought the world could be different if we were

able to apply these principles to it. And what ended up happening was that a lot of people did make a lot of money and I think for the most part as more people came in, what it shifted to was pretending to be part of the mission so that you could get aspects of being able to take part in that value creation. And I think that so much of that has, you know, washed into why it's difficult to actually do that, but if you think about those early hyper liquid users, many of which who became very wealthy on hyper liquid as well because of the very good air drop they were able to do and people wanting to invest early was people saw value in something before everyone else did and started finding a way to utilize it and push it. So I do still think that

it exist. I just think it's that the waters have sort of been sullied because there are so many people who've come in strictly for the financial benefits and I don't think that you can fully separate the financial benefits from it, but it's just different now when like at the time I remember when Ethereum launched, there was no competitor. So to look and be like, wait, smart contracts on top of Bitcoin, like this is fascinating. And so you weren't pushing it because you thought that the ICO price would go to where it is today. You were like, wait, like this is revolutionary. And I think that there's just so many people who cos played the revolutionary part or want it to be such, but they don't actually believe it. They're just like, yo, where's my air drop? Where's my air drop?

>> Yeah, I think if you went back to 2021, 2022, um there were so many you might call them strong communities, cults of personalities, Terra probably being the most famous example, that completely imploded that now so many people have like shields come up when you when they see when they see some sort of um it's definitely >> a lot of PTSD. >> Yeah, a a lot of that and and honestly for good reason, right? Um and and and I think the other thing is that there's only so many zero-to-one moments. I mean, there are more zero-to-one moments in the future, but but they don't they don't come around that often, right? How many years between Bitcoin and Ethereum, for example, right? Like I think it like it was together, but it was what? Seven, six, seven years? Like, it is actually quite a while.

>> Yeah. Yeah, but now you just have to pay more attention. There's so much more noise. There's so much more capital in this space. There's so many people larping. So, that's why I think it's like a mix of them still. I I don't think that we can fully separate it. I think we're going to end up finding way more of these things that like when people see it early and they invest early and they get involved early that they're still going to be life-changing amounts of money, but it'll go back down to having a real belief in why the thing that they're pushing actually has some sort of revolutionary benefits as opposed to just thinking that it's going to be something that like gives them free money that they can go sell.

>> So, one thing that's been troubling me recently is compared to say 2021, the actual adoption of cryptos so much stronger, right? And the regulatory risk is so much less. Like, the space is legitimately come a long way. Uh but it's legitimized. Legitimately legitimized. Um Uh but as a cultural force, it feels much weaker, right? Like, it felt like it was a cultural phenomenon back then and and now uh despite actually being used more, it's it's much less of one. Do you think that it's destined to be an invisible back end or can it become a cultural force again?

>> I think it's going to end up being both and I'm going to take a contrarian take here where we traditionally talk about how we've gotten to this place because of SBF, because of Do Kwon, because of a lot of the people who have done very bad things in the name of crypto. My take that I've been really sitting with for some time now is that all of this feedback, criticism comes back to the founders every single time. And I think that if we want to be really honest about it, we need to step one foot back and say that the VCs who invested in the space that we're in now

deserve a lot of criticism as well. And maybe as someone who's, you know, supposed to raise capital again and is in those circles, I shouldn't be saying this. But the reality of it really is that a lot of people knew what was going on. The amount of people who were launching tokens and just taking money off the table, clear pump and dumps, stuff that like was never really going to go anywhere, but they were able to invest in hype. The idea that for years, like I was writing about this stuff for CoinDesk, like, you know, years ago, is that you can't just continue funding ecosystems, but there was a very clear value creation and then value extraction method when you just kept launching new chains. And the idea that we weren't investing in applications that were

actually going to create real use and utility, this was a major problem. And at some point a reckoning was going to come. And I think a lot of what we're seeing right now is just a lack of belief because of that that reckoning has really happened. And now we have a bunch of VCs who are sitting around being like, "Look, the founders need to do better. The founders need to improve." I'm just like, "Yo, who who funded things to get to where we are right now? Like, you guys did. That's why most of them are having so much trouble raising their next funds because they weren't, you know, intelligent investors, you know? And so, for me, I do think that we do get back to it. You know, I had a conversation with the music executive the other day who's talking about like an actually from the

music industry talking about how he feels blockchain rails can fix publishing for a lot of artists. And I have these conversations with people across different industries about how blockchain rails actually have the ability to do a bunch of things. And so, I do think that we'll still see that in itself it becomes a cultural force, but we'll need to move past, you know, it continuously just being speculation. And I think that's just going to take some time like let's say clarity actually passes over the next few weeks and then it gives people even like myself a better understanding of what I can do and how I can do it and what the rules are. My ability to want to be able to launch things and how I can go about doing that completely changes and you

know, we don't have to pretend that we're trying to do XYZ. We can say exactly what we're trying to do. We don't have to you know, run circles around little stuff and I think that in itself like we've gotten to better regulatory clarity but like let's say clarity really passes and things move forward in a real way. I think over the next few years we'll actually see a new dawn of amazing things happening in our space. >> Yeah, it's interesting for such a long time the story was so strong that reds like it was very easy for VCs to tell a story to their LPs to get them to fund their VC to fund what themselves and then they had what they were looking for because in a way they're the customer and they're looking for you know, projects to invest in that

are you know, in a good story to tell that would raise the value of the projects but it stopped being less it was started being less about the product and more about oh, how much can we juice up the story so we can extract and dump. >> And that's it. >> Obviously yeah, that's basically what happened over the past like seven five years seven years. >> Yeah. >> And it really like I think it really topped in like 2024 and then like meme coins was kind of like the Trump moment of all this because it kind of would put up a mirror to the system saying like oh, this is like the financial nihilism end game of just having tokens and like oh, like if you can tell a story about like oh, how this infrastructure is good for this is like oh, I can just have

like a dog with a hat. It kind of became a parody and a mirror of that. And then everything just came crashing down and now we're here picking up the pieces and everyone's saying like okay, like what's actually real what's actually useful what products are actually going to like help businesses? You mentioned how like stable coins and crypto and blockchain can help publishing realms. I actually read something recently that a large majority of peptide transactions and peptides being bought on the internet are with stable coins. Stable coins are actually fueling the peptide economy. Yep, correct. And on top of that, a lot of these UGC creators, you know, they're out in you know, like Southeast Asia, they're getting paid in stable coins. on WAP, they're getting paid in Tether.

And so I find that really interesting as well. And I think you're going to see more and more subsets of the digital economy be funded with stable coins. And this is how you actually grow the digital economy. And this is how you actually grow beyond chain economy. And soon we'll just won't be saying on chain, we'll just be saying just the global economy. >> Totally. That That I completely agree with. I've seen I mean, when Speed was traveling, the the streamer, the amount of times that like USDC and USDT came up. And I saw the investment by Tether into WAP, which makes a lot of sense, too. And so you're absolutely right. And I see it as I go globally, especially. I think as a whole and it's something I've written about as well is that for a long time crypto people have talked about,

you know, banking the unbanked. But then when time came to actually do it, like go to Colombia, everyone was scared to go hang out in Colombia. Everyone's scared to interact with the actual people. And so now I think it's actually finally changing and they're trying to figure out what they need to do to really on board people. And to do that, like you know, if you bring an extra billion people into the global financial economy and you give them access to not thousand acts, but you give them access to you know, money that's just not going to decrease in value. And you give them simple credit and lending markets. Like what is Tether? If you really strip it down, other than a company who is just like, "Hey, to people around the world, we're going to give you access to the US

dollar because we know that your currency is devaluing very quickly. And instead of giving you the like extra five or eight percent that we're going to earn on that money, we're going to keep that. But in the process, we're giving you the trade where you get access to hold US dollars as opposed to a devaluing currency. And then Tether has just built a massive business around that five to eight percent over time. That's really it. Like it's the most stripped-down version of like how you can explain Tether. >> It's amazing how they like the best most efficient things are the most simple. >> It's It's so simple, right? It's just like, you know, you go to all these countries where there's been massive USDT adoption and they don't want to hold their own native currency. They just want to hold dollars and they don't care that they can get

the extra five >> And Tether Tether had such an advantage for so long because they were the first dollar stablecoin started in 2014. Uh it Circle didn't come along till 2017, 2018. Uh and by then Tether became basically the clearinghouse for exchanges. If Tether was created, so it would be a lot easier for exchanges to send dollars back and forth. Uh and then Circle came along. They eventually became the dollar of DeFi, the dollar of the on-chain world. Uh but Tether, uh along with all their exchanges, they went on just complete global domination. Uh and now you're out You could be out of in Turkey and you see, you know, Tether advertisements, Tether stablecoins, Tether gold. I believe like Tether's like the most used stablecoin in Iran Iran, I think it's pretty sure

they're taking stablecoins before at the Strait of Hormuz. >> Strait of Hormuz >> Yeah. There's actually a story of how uh it's uh a ship got scammed uh and they sent Tether to to like a scammer and they tried to follow like go through the strait and Iran started just shooting at them. They're like, "Wait, we paid." And they're like, "Oh, no, we didn't get it." So, yeah, we're we're living in that world now. >> Yep. And And the more we legitimize it, the better of a place we'll be in. It's just like But it's just going to take time. I think it's what we're going through now is a natural result of of our own misdoings.

>> Mhm. Yeah, and I think we will be you know, resolved and absolved our first sins. We just have to like work on stuff with substance and that's actually valuable. >> 100% >> Yeah, yeah. >> Speaking of which, I want to like go into Miden a bit more cuz I think what you're doing there is quite interesting. Can you give like more of an explain of what Miden is and you know, what value can it bring to finance? What substance can it bring to our you know, the world that we're in? >> So, to TLDR it is just like traditionally we've seen either fully public blockchains, we've seen either fully private blockchains, and now we've seen a lot of permissioned blockchains.

And the way Miden sees it is that none of those actually work in the long run for the majority of people. What we need is a decentralized and permissionless and trustless chain that still enables the ability for folks to have privacy while adding compliance to it. And we've been, you know, working hard at being able to offer exactly that. And so, Miden works from a technical perspective as a non-EVM L2, we'd be settling to Ethereum and instead of doing computation that is sent to the blockchain itself to do, we are able to do it through client-side proving. So, you use your phone or your

computer to generate a proof and then you send a proof to the network to be verified that, you know, I sent Patrick 20 USDC and the state change in my wallet occurred. And from there, we're able to allow for scalability in a different way for a blockchain because we take so much of that computation work off chain. This, and I can't explain this part, but by doing so also help on like the post-quantum efforts which we're going to see will be a very big effort and problem that a lot of the blockchains now are going to end up facing. And for us, it's been a lot of looking at it like if we can offer compliance and we can offer privacy, what does this mean for institutional adoption? And it's been something that's gone really well.

It's been, you know, behind closed doors, every institution has said and now they're saying publicly as well is that like all of this stuff is great, but when we start getting into institutional buying, institutional borrowing, institutional lending, institution-to-institution stuff, like we're going to need privacy. Like, you know, I'm tokenizing the money market fund and selling it to retail is okay on a public chain, but they simply legally won't be able to do a lot of the things that they can, you know, because they'd rather, from a regulatory perspective, use traditional rails if they have to.

And so, that's been the the priority of like what we've been focusing on has been how do we go out and and do that? And then we have a a product that will be launching soon that'll be more focused on retail for, you know, private yield, uh cross-chain DeFi, being able to interact across multiple chains, and simplifying that experience. And then, you know, as time goes, you know, continuing to work with met with the SEC multiple times at this point, really walking them through >> It's nice to see that we're in the world now where we can meet with the SEC cuz that wouldn't be able to do that before cuz they would just like I don't know, they got to come after me.

>> It's you wouldn't want to do that before was the thing, right? Because you would know that they're going to come after you, but now it's, you know, there's a form that they have on the on the SEC website for the crypto task force. You send them a proposal for why you want to meet, they get back to you, they and you can meet with them digitally or in person. If it's too cumbersome to to meet in person, you're easily able to set it up digitally. We I went with our CTO and my co-founder Bob in a couple weeks back, maybe a little over a month ago. There's 15 people in the room with us listening to everything. >> 15? >> Yeah, yeah. Commission staff.

>> Yeah, yeah. It's a It's a solid set of people and then, you know, they're team who also like very strongly believes in privacy. And so, we've been very intentional about walking them through how it is we're going about what we're doing and why it is that we think we need to do it that way. And I definitely wouldn't have done that when it was under Gary Gensler. >> Yeah. What would success look like for Miden? Like let's say you guys launch, it's been some time after launch. Like what is Miden uh at its most at its like reaching its full potential?

>> I would love to be able to simply see a company that doesn't need to use gamified metrics to be able to pretend that we're successful. I think in general, you know, real startups take a very long time to hit true product market fit and to be able to show real revenues and things like that. And you know, while we raised a lot of money, we raised a seed round last year. And we're going to be going live and I think this world where people go to Wales in different countries and they buy TVL for, you know, $2 for every dollar in TVL through incentive plan and mechanisms that really are just like gamification methods to seem like you're

more successful than you really are is something that I'm just not a fan of. And so, I would say, you know, whenever the token launches, to me uh the idea would be that we've built up enough of a real business that once unlocks occur, that the token chart goes up and to the right. Not in the first 3 weeks because we do a coordinated campaign with KOLs or something, but after unlocks have occurred when major holders of the token think I'm not going to sell this. I still think that there's more value to be had here. Let's keep holding. They're doing some interesting things. And so, I think that'd be the easiest way to explain, you know, what I think would mean success for us.

>> Patrick, I'm sure you see gamified metrics lot of it at your DFI Lama position. >> Like Yeah, we we we try to um we you know, we basically there's there's multiple people at DFI Lama who's pretty much most of their job is trying to uh like remove gamified metrics um or game metrics. Um I mean the the the most obvious one would be wash trading, right? Like if um if you don't do that, like and some people say just put everything on there, right? The problem is if you don't do that with for example, and there there are platforms I won't name them, but there are platforms that don't remove um exchanges that wash trade. And you can go to the top 10 and it will generally be 10 exchanges you've never heard of.

Right? It's like, "Oh, like this exchange has 10x the volume of Binance." That's because there's no fees and it's all it's all wash trading. Um so so you have to do that, but then there's also, you know, things that are be beyond just volume like TVL for example, most famously uh being being um looped. Uh so we we have a thing where we we pull out double counted TVL, uh but still, you know, it requires a lot of some sometimes people get creative where they try to like, you know, move things off chain or elsewhere and then, you know, redeposit it, wrap it, etc. Uh so so a lot of work goes into trying to account for those things because uh ultimately like it's one of the beauties of crypto is that you have the transparent metrics.

The downside of having transparent metrics is that sometimes the metric becomes the goal rather than the actual underlying >> Is that Occam's Is that Occam's razor? I forget or something paradox. Hot Hotchkiss's paradox. When the metric becomes, you know, what to strive for, it stops being a useful metric. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I've never heard that one. >> That's actually very very true. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And so I think we we saw this famously with TVL. Um I remember when before DFI Lama, what was it? DFI Pulse. DFI Pulse was the one that created the concept of TVM. Um and everybody was just trying to get their TVL numbers up like anyway possible first with like token incentives and yield farming and all that. Um but then like I think something

we learned in DeFi is yeah, it's great to have TVL, but if it's just like a blood clot or something it's not moving then how useful is the TVL exactly? And it kind of I mean I will give it you know TVL is definitely a sign of trust. Uh it's like oh wow, there's like $300 million in this protocol there's a million dollars and that is a signal to you know funds that maybe on the fence a bit in participating in certain projects. They're like oh there's a million dollars in here this reaches our threshold. So there is some merit to it that's indirect that should be like a kind of foreign methodology, but I think the age of just TVL and only TVL are gone. It's like okay, how productive yeah, how productive is that TVL?

Where's that TVL going? >> Yeah. >> So. >> Yeah. >> It It in general one of the things we found is is it's much tougher to fake both a stock and a flow cuz there's ways to also fake like both. >> Wait, can you go into that more? What do you mean like this >> Yeah, so so so like a so a stock would be a TVL um open interest uh basically like a a measure of like a uh measure of liquidity it's not parsed by time right it's kind of cumulative. Um whereas a flow would be volume would be revenue would be fees anything that's going to have a a time component to it. And you can fake a um stock with some of the things we already talked about with with TVL or or it can at least be not uh useful. I mean another way people

fake stocks is they have and you saw this especially with BTC Fi they have like one whale who deposits a hundred million dollars in BTC and often times it's the founder or one of their friends. Um and then they're like oh we've got a hundred million dollars in deposits. It's like but but if you actually look at one of the flow metrics um I we don't usually like to look at users, but you could look at even that users you look at um at uh flows in and out so like how much activity is actually being moved to look at revenue being generated how productive it is. It's like, oh, that that money's actually not doing anything. You know, it's just sitting there. It's not It's not being put to work. It's either It's either in a money market and no one's borrowing it, or

somehow not available to borrow. We've We've even seen that. Uh so, um and then the flip side is you can also fake the the flow metrics, right? I mean, volume is trivial to fake. Even revenue um I mean, I think this is probably interesting is uh last year I interviewed Andre Cronje on my on my channel, and he I was talking about revenue as a metric. And he said, um the problem with the revenue was that you can design tokenomics, and he gave V33, which he invented, as something that was basically designed to optimize revenue.

And like, and and and optimize revenue um using like creative tokenomics, which which I I actually think that was a a good tokenomic design in that case. But basically, point being that then revenue loses some of its value if you have drastically different tokenomics, where you're basically paying for the paying for the revenue by issuing tokens. >> Can we talk about founders uh and the, you know, Messiah arcs, like Andre? Remember 20 I will never forget 2020 YFI. Like, people put him on a pedestal. People were like, oh, YFI is the Bitcoin of DeFi. People People were zealots of YFI. I You know, I'm going to reveal my age, but Blue Kirby, like, let's go to

Tokyo for, you know, when Tokyo Like, but that's how crypto was back then. And people put, you know, Andre on such a pedestal, and then I'll I'll never forget, like, he was like, you know, hey guys, I'm working on this like new project. You want me to like give you a preview, or do you want me just to drop it? Like, no announcement. And everyone's like, we love you, Andre. Just drop it. Just It's It's just like fans like say like to an artist, like, hey, just like drop a surprise album. Don't even tell us what it is. And so, then he dropped the surprise album, and people got rabid about it. It was like a the It wasn't It was like some It was actually like a some game that was too early for its time, but the game was still in prod. And I'll never forget, I

think the the contract got exploited and all the liquidity got drained. And it was like, "Oh, Andre's a rugger. Like, [ __ ] Andre." This and that. >> How quickly it switches is crazy. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the thing about crypto. Like, it just gets so people because of the volatility of because little money's involved, like the highs are really high and everyone loves you one minute and then the lows are so low and everyone hates you and they're off you're out for your head. And this is what makes the space so tough. And like, really success is not just about like, "Oh, can you build a good product?" No, it's really about how much pain can you withstand?

>> Mhm. I've been told by multiple founders, be ready when you launch your token for death threats. They were like, "You're going to get a constant stream of death threats." And just like, be ready for mentally dealing with it. And then the the op sec op sec things that I've been told that I should have to worry about. I've had VCs that I work with talk about like personal security. I'm like, I'm not successful enough to need personal security. Like, objectively speaking, I'm not at that place. Like, but these are real things that they talk about because the moment token stuff comes out, these are real issues. >> Wow.

On that note, I know you need to go soon. Where can people find you? >> I'm on Twitter and Telegram both azeemk. I keep myself pretty easy to get to and then email's ak@myden.team. >> There you go. Uh any final words to share before we close it out today? >> Any wisdom? >> Who are your favorite artists right now? >> Ooh. I've been on a like an alt rock kick again. So, my gym throwback playlist. So, I've been uh going back into Deftones, going back into uh Taking Back Sunday, Breaking Benjamin.

Um I've been I've been like really getting back into my middle school Guitar Hero days. And when I'm like deadlifting or squatting, it's like get it's like it's perfect. I'm in my zone. >> Very nice. Patrick, you? >> Fred again. Fred again. I like to listen to his rooftop sets. I They're like >> You know, I want I >> hours long. I >> Yeah, he's great. >> I lied. I I go I I listen to it like Yeah, I'm going to sound like a lunatic like 8-10 hours a day recently while I'm working. >> Oh, wow. Okay. >> Yeah, I Yeah.

>> But I I I go through phases like that. >> Yeah. What about you? >> Man, I've been a huge Drake fan. I stayed true to Drake. >> Yes. Yes. Me too. Me too. >> I I became a Drake fan starting in like 2008-2009. >> Me too. >> And I stayed true since. >> Me too. He's really the goat. >> Yeah, so I have Iceman on on loop constantly. I'm definitely going to be in his like 0.05 listenership at the end of the year on Spotify wrapped. >> I remember like being in high school download You know how we had all like those websites with the unreleased drops? You would just have to like go and find them. Like crate digging but online. I remember I used to have like

so many of those downloads. >> Yeah, man. I I I'd say like right now has been it's been like a victory lap. It feels like vindication. It feels like your sports team winning a championship when like, you know, all of the like It was like so difficult to be a Drake fan in 2024. And >> Yeah. >> But I was just like, "Nah. Nah, like I'm sticking I'm sticking to it." And so, >> Same. >> yeah, the last few months since since Iceman dropped has just felt like my sports and, you know, my sports team also did win a championship. But like it has felt yeah, awesome. So, yeah, that's primarily what I've been on.

>> Hell yeah. >> Awesome. Uh thanks everyone for I'm sorry. Was there something else you had to say? >> No, no, I was going to say thank you for having >> Okay. Oh, yeah, no, it It it It pleasure to have you. >> And make sure you everyone, like, follow Azeem, follow us, like, subscribe, follow us on Twitter, subscribe on YouTube, on all those thing platforms. We got that up, so if you want to catch up with us, definitely, uh, hit that link. >> Sweet. Thanks, Azeem. All right, guys. Take care. Have a great day. >> See you.