Building Models For Coins, Fixing Arbitrum, and Intents| Brick & Tumilett

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I'd say the market is still pretty young and one thing I think about often times is like at least when I used to do like I don't know more liquid stuff or trade on my own am I going too deep into this analysis like for example trying to do su of parts in crypto is pretty pointless right now because like nobody thinks that deeply I feel like most coins basically trade on like shortterm narratives that might not even always be like fundamentally sound chaos Labs the leading onchain risk management firm recently launched its new flagship oracal product Edge Edge delivers integrated High Precision risk and price data for any application with the market follow and reach out to chaos Labs on X

to learn more what's up guys just want to tell you a little bit more about fuel labs and their new ethereum L2 fuel ignition so fuel Labs is launching fuel ignition a high performance E2 powered by their fuel VM with the launch of ignition the team is also launching phase two for their fuel points program to reward users and promot make sure to check out fuel. Network to learn more nothing said on zerox Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions not Financial advice Pacho Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed what's up guys welcome back to another episode of ZX research today I'm joined by Ryan Connor from the blockworks research team as

well as brick from entropy and Jose from Spartan uh thanks for Brick they should be familiar with you but Jose maybe you want to give a little background on yourself and then brick you can also talk a bit about entropy as well absolutely yeah uh I can go first so let me start with the background of Spartan and then I can introduce myself so Spartan is uh Broly composed of three main pillars first the fundamental Ren hedge fund we take long-term views and also cataly trades in altcoins that we're bullish on and this is basically where I spend my time on secondly there's the Venture arm with two funds focus on Defi and infra and the other one focus on gaming and lastly

is like an advisory team that handles m&a fundraising and economics design for myself um I got into crypto during college while I was on an International Exchange in the US around 2021 when crypto was going parabolic started like er farming flipping nfts mainly to cover like this expenses that I was having on on on the exchange um yeah it was like my way of earning something extra in crypto and I guess what drew me to work in this space is actually like I really like the mer the meritocracy of it uh from a double perspective first because there is a lot of Alpha and if you work and

um spend time on it you can like discover these so-called undervalue tokens either by reading a lot of governance proposals looking at dashboards or creating ones yourself you know how to program with you in SQL um yeah there are like a lot of marketing efficiencies and that's opportunity and the second aspect is that if if if you basically like spend a lot of time and you want to work in the space you can just get out there start delivering actual insights and you will get recognized and that's basically what call me into spot and having in the fun for one year and a half um and yeah mainly focusing on liquid markets and I remember meeting brick on Twitter back in the days when I was doing the first interviews and he started doing them

also at blog works and now here we are fantastic yeah I completely agree with you on the meritocracy thing I think it's quite underrated about crypto you can do stuff like you can just do stuff and people will notice and you can make money because it's very inefficient yeah brovich I am here for you um yeah going back to that beautiful moment Jose to be on the podcast which one of the first people in the crypto industry I really like connected with and yeah as you said I quickly joined block Works after that most probably know me uh who are listening to the this podcast like through that but recently transferred over to entropy where basically if you want to put it into tradify terms a consulting firm or act into a consulting

firm we're currently uh in an exclusive deal with arbitrum uh trying to make the Dow more efficient uh basically writing governance proposals trying to align key stakeholders doing all of that good good stuff uh we've been in the deal for two months now uh things are going really well a lot of interesting stuff going on on that front uh thanks for inviting me on this podcast guys thanks for coming on I um I think I want to talk about arbitrium and then we'll also talk about uni chain uh we talked about it a bit before we started to our listeners but to get started the main reason that I wanted to have both of you guys on as well as Ryan Connor is I trade basically exclusively on narratives um as well as some I guess

like fundamental stuff but as far as I've seen both on your Twitter like brick i' I knew you I don't really know you that well any more but I when I did know you and Ryan Connor as well big cash flow guy um how much do you think fundamentals matter within crypto Ryan left he doesn't like talking about this topic but maybe we can start off with brick yeah I mean he's clearly the big boss now if he can just like leave the leave the podcast come back in when he wants to huh but yeah I think fundamentals really matter but I'd say the market is still pretty young and one thing I I think about often times is like at least when I used to do like I don't know more liquid stuff or trade on my own now I'm just a you know full-time entropy guy

don't really have time to trade that much anyway um like one thing I always thought about is like am I going too deep into this analysis like for example trying to do some of parts in crypto is pretty pointless right now cuz like nobody thinks that deeply another example would be people don't think far enough in the future like I feel like most coins basically trade on like shortterm narratives that might not even always be like fundamentally sound and like cash flow to token holders isn't really a thing it's more about is this protocol making a lot of fees or Revenue even though there's no clear way to like

actually earn those fees as those holder like it can the value flow can go somewhere completely else but the main thing that like I feel like a lot of coins trade on are like those high level numbers and the industry is still in a point where like we a lot of people disagree on like even the basics like what's the pnl or what's the income of like an L1 or can you even build that for an L1 and like what are operating or well I guess yeah like what are operating costs for diesel to I don't know I'm kind of yapping here but I guess my point is that there's like no standardized way or well adapted way yet to like value a lot of these things as well as then people

don't look into the future like far enough in my opinion which then makes the like investing scheme completely different from Trad five well you have like funds that start like you know they talked with uh the C Corp they're trying to figure out like especially in more stable Industries like oh what's going to happen to like this company in like six years or seven years out in the future and here it's more about like oh what's going to happen today what's going to be the big narrative that's my two cents I guess um I totally agree I think uh we or the space has to agree on those on those things and but it's also like where the space is going I think it may

not be trading on fundamentals now but it will be increasingly trading on we're seeing that right now for in two things it's like sell side and B side and buy side sell side is getting better fundamental based coverage here blog Works obviously so we are seeing like this growing number of research companies and uh data providers D analytics defi Lama kaido uh blow gr research uh dashboards on Celestia and all of that um and then on the bu side I think if you think like crypto is growing 10x then the incremental buyer is likely to be a liquid fund uh which is more of like an Institutional player training fundamental based approach right um uh yeah and actually there's like this new thing uh that I don't know if you guys know bit Club but Jason from

folus released it a few months ago and it's where kind of a face a value investors Club where analysts and liquid guys share investment thesis uh they share the Frameworks and uh many people there can play de Devil's Advocate into asking questions and kind of contesting some thesis and it's pretty cool um and again yeah yeah the space may not be fundamental based right now but it will be and it will be increasingly be more um but again like not iory to like you have to be Crypton native I'm a de at heart and for me fundamentals like are always Revenue even cash flows to token holders I think that's like kind of a limited way of saying it fundamentals are like what's important for the market

right now and what the market is tracking for a spe for a specific protocol uh you briefly mentioned about even for per taxes rather than cash flow return to token holders like more most people just focus on poor volume or volume based market shares why because it's like easily accessible on defa Lama because defa Lama right now it's pretty much like the only agreed data provider side where most of the people look at if they want to buy a token or if they want to compare to like a basic relative valuation um same for Lending protocols if you look at historical correlations they're mostly correlated on TBL and not really on volum on on on earnings um and why again because it's easily accessible on theama um and yeah and to briefly mention here I actually think one of the

main reasons why salana has been doing great since last year is probably because of you guys uh at blorg salana data your good coverage and um also the fact that relative value traits historically have been performing good if was kind of having troubles with the narrative uh that was the opportunity for salana salana found its way with the Meco and yeah that's that's pretty much I guess two things to I want to like kind of touch on that you talked about first one would be I mean I'm I I went be definitely clear on the fact that like value investing kind of still works and I think a good example of that not to glaz you too much so say but like uh the

across stuff you posted about on Twitter it was across right like six months ago or whatever and like nobody was really paying attention to that so that's just to me like you're thinking about that market vertical in a very fundamental way and there's like no clear like kind of narrative right now that's like easy to Market or was back in the day and then suddenly like it's a good fundamentally good project it starts like expanding a lot and then the market like catches on to it and I thought that was a really good example of like kind of how you should do liquid investing in crypto yeah I I to be honest I I got into the cross trade if you can call it that just by trying the products like I was bridging all the time and I tried

every bridge out there and across was the fastest and the cheapest one then I got into like why is this happening like is there some tradeoff insecurity out there and it wasn't it's just a good mechanism design um and then you start like talking to the team you build the thesis you see kind of where the space is going um and you build like a gross story right yeah yeah and then the second part I guess this goes out to The Block Works panel um how do you feel about like the whole salana stuff with especially I think what the market is now kind of attaching itself to is purely what you guys call I guess real economic value which is basically like transaction fees

plus than me tips or GTO tips um and if you look at for example ethereum like the chart is if you map it out in the previous cycle like the charts are pretty much following each other right where like the fees explode kind of in the bull market and then they just like immediately drop so I guess what I'm asking is like where do you see Solana's future because like what happens if mcoin trading basically leaves the chain what's the next thing that can like uphold The Narrative apart from memecoins leaving my whole thing has like these past few weeks I've been Solana gets really really congested to

the point that I don't like me coins leaving might not be the issue but I think like the only the big issue that it's going to face is congestion and just transactions consistently failing throughout the B I think that's like I don't think mem coins leave because it doesn't make a lot of sense like it's fast the infrastructure is there there's ecosystem around it like you can borrow on Meme coins you can even short New Meme coins for like dumpy do fun and stuff um I think their main problem is not going to be meme coins leaving it's going to be the fact that you can't use the chain but at that point do fundamentals or matter probably not I think The Narrative is going to be oh like so people are actually using Solana that's why the chain is down as opposed to arbitrum or polygon you know Ryan you can give a more well-rounded and good

answer yeah so I think just to kind of like piggyback on what you guys were saying earlier and how much fundamentals um matter or don't matter um I think that they objectively matter the question is always just how much um and I think if you want to explore that you can kind of like look no further than the sole eth ratio over the past 12 months um if we look at like this new measure of real economic value call Price to real economic value or price to sales um you know salana started out the year trading somewhere around 50 times sales whereas ethereum was trading at somewhere around 300 times sales and then that varies depending on your forward growth rate right right but like

eths was clearly declining um their growth in rev is 93% or more off its highs and the plan is to grow it less right and salana was going in the precise opp Opposite direction right compounding on a year-over-year basis at like 1200 uh 12 1200% something like that um you don't get setups like that in trafi but you had it in crypto and like the so eth pair expressed that valuation Gap and those forward expectations now like does the market always do that like no right like there's a path dependency to crypto we started trading like you know arbitrary like pieces of tokens on ledgers and over time they made more money and over time institutions came in and they

started trading marginally based on those fundamentals and like the conversations that we have with Subs um everyone asks me what the valuations are everyone asks about fees everyone ask where you think the fees are going um I think some of the most well-known funds in the space like they'll tell you like we want to invest on a 12 to 24mth time Horizon and we do do some narrative trading but like fundamentals are always in the backdrop right so like how does that change um going forward with more institutions entering the space like I think the answer is very obvious um like you probably have a part a portion of crypto that always trades on like silly stuff and that's fine it's a permissionless thing but like the capital is going to make these things

look more like you know stocks or bonds than crypto tokens over the long term uh but things can stay silly for a long time um I think to answer Brick's question about like salana fundamentals and meme coin trading um I think a good analyst will discount that activity to some degree in their forward estimates I think that a you know a good analyst will realize that salana activity is going to fall 70% or greater in a bare Market but I don't see that being very different from any other chain I think that historically you know this is a very levered space I think they all fall 70 to 90% in a bare Market as they have historically as people get wiped out as market makers blow up like it's the only ecosystem on the planet where you can do

100x trading and people do it and it impacts uh Market positioning and price action so um I think a good analyst discounts those things but with like the understanding that like dude it's everyone's going to blow up uh Dan Smith at blockworks is always um pointing out that um you know if you look at the top gas consumers on eth it's all memec coin trading too it's like the Pepe pair right so I don't know um salana is certainly win winning with this meme coin activity but like does it matter a lot cross ccle like I don't really think so yeah I guess what I'm getting at more is like what's the future there like I I totally get why the valuation is up

right now by the way you talked about the multiple uh I guess similar to price to sales price to real economic value like has he expanded in this um like recent times or has it kind of stayed stable with RV growing yeah if you're going to if you're going to look at an easy way to calculate this is just to take the last one or three months and annualize it if you just want to normalize for like zero growth across the board and we're trading at a little over a hundred times on salana um eth depending on how you want to slice it is like between 200 and 300 times onized yeah and it the the valuation Gap is still there right um so well that's the decentralized premium you get huh correct that's that that's money premium

that's the centralization premium vitalic premium I don't know what you want to call it but it is an objective premium to Soul but not to other chains right like arbitrum is trading without time boost um on a trailing basis at like somewhere like 200 times uh maybe like 150 I forget umu is trading at 2,000 times like now like there's a growth story ahead of it but like does s have more monetary premium than eth like I don't know you tell me I you can't parse it from the data um so big question mark um for Brick what you said I guess like next steps for Solana apart from mem coins I guess it's deepen no Ryan you a big deepen guy but that's like the thing that's touted I I don't I think it could be I just feel like deepen isn't a

huge huge fee um bringer I'm not sure though Ryan maybe you're I mean that's kind of what I'm saying here like yeah you can get activity on your network but for example deep in transactions I don't think they really would produce that much value for like the network itself and I think this is the trend that we're kind of going towards with everything so like at the end of the day like L1 tokens should be I guess valued more on like a utility basis or money basis or whatever that like comp is there uh which isn't an easy task to do like again someone would need to standardize that but like where I'm getting at with this salana stuff is that like right now

everyone's super hyped about like all of this especially like the part of the fees like they're raking in and like it's all just meme coin Traders getting kind of screwed on the chain and my thesis is that that will go away at some point so like do you see kind of the chain being able to compensate for that with something else or will it more become like a similar narrative as it has become in the last 6 to 12 months where it's like yeah we don't actually need like execution fees we can do da even though I feel like that's a bad argument or then like replace those Fe with something else I

will say one thing Daniel Smith made a good point about this thing he said the act the token price doesn't have to be like High um and I think like instead of valuing these on utilities or whatever money it the price just might go down because we keep valuing them as fees but they actually make more and more sense um I agree with you though brick it's like if your bull cases idiots will keep like slamming gas to and paying priority fees to like get their transactions for that's not particularly sustainable um I just and also just quickly to say I got to give a disclaimer here I have nothing against salana uh salana fanbo and Twitter don't don't come after me it's all L Bros uh yeah Jose I would like to I would like to hear what you have to think and how Spartan things but um I

yeah I I I always think people find a way on gambling on chain like I think there's a s trade of people wanting to do stuff on chain if that's gambling Let It Be it um like if you look is um sports betting Revenue over the last two years they've been growing like two act every year St suddenly became like this huge um Revenue generating company it's private we don't know the valuation really but still like it's something that is happening even even like here's the AI agent thesis even if it's not like actual users on chain maybe it's like AI agents using uh salana blockchain as the payment rails for doing all of the AI interactions or uh I don't know some weird stuff that maybe we are not thinking about yet um but it will happen like I'm I'm pretty

confident in that what Solana or whatever blockchain maybe um so the gas usage or whatever blockchain may be in the future will be very different from now and but it will still be like execution fee driven I think just different I guess all stuff yeah I think um I mean look to to Bak with asking if you know dpin are going to drive a lot of fee activity for the chain like the answer for any sector or token is no the things that drive fees for the chain are traders who need specific access to pieces of State who want to pay high priority fees because they see some opportunity in front of them um it's a better model than traditional exchanges like the L1 model and that not only are

you paying on a per transaction basis but you're also paying on a priority basis um so like what's going to keep Traders on Chains It's going to be interesting assets to trade so the more deep in issuers you have or the more like a and Camino and you know legit projects issuing their token on your chain um that's going to be the thing that's going to drive fees um so you know what's it's I'm not so much concerned and regarding the meme coin thing I'm I'm not so much concerned with people losing money on Meme coin activity and that being bad for people because people like to lose money on a lot of things um like one of the fastest growing Industries in the united states is

gambling it's growing at gez like five times the rate of GDP and every male in my friend group is losing money every week on DraftKings and they're they're happy as a clam they do not care um so it's it doesn't bother me that memec coin trading is extractive I think it's just people having fun um there is some natural cap on that activity um I don't I don't know where it is though if it's anything close to sports betting like I don't think we've I don't think we're there yet by the way your friends are weird because I don't like losing money I don't think they like it they think they have edgetic Edge they don't have realized Edge chaos Labs the leading onchain risk management firm recently launched its

new flagship Oracle product Edge Edge delivers integrated High Precision risk and price data for any application with the market after 2 months of securing Jupiter Edge has already secured 30 billion in volume and more than 60 % of all Salon of per volume edges comprised of three components High Precision price data with an integrated risk engine automated delivery of real-time parameter adjustments on chain and secure delivery of custom data points Bea zero knowledge proofs follow and reach out to chaos Labs on X to learn more thanks again to chaos labs for sponsoring today's episode what's up guys fuel ignition is finally here fuel ignition is a high performance L2 solution that aims to solve both state sustainability and performance execution as an e for allout ignition is built upon the fuel VM and a utxo based asset Centric architecture with e security make sure to check out the growing fuel

ecosystem by participating in phase two of the fuel points program today visit fuel. Network to learn more B Jose what are some I guess specific sectors that you guys have been interested in uh I mean obviously intense right I we published a report this week with the centralized Co guys they're like a a research newsletter in the space it's one of my favorites um and we basically basically got into how we think the intense at least cross chain intense supply chain will play out what different plays Will there be um and where we see value flowing and yeah like basically briefly there will be like three key players first the front ends uh where you basically go it's like your

normal tabs think of across Unis swop one inch any front end any5 front end you go and you select what you want to do on chain um then you have the the solvers this third party that are sophisticated actors that completes the user orders and then the last um the last part of the layer is the sediment Network which is the other line infra that handles sediment sediment understood as intent fulfillment verification so like the verification that the solver fronted the user on the destination chain that that happened and also the second part is repaying the solver that front of the capital so they have to be repayed by the user your uh initial capital on the deposit chain or whatever um so those are the free key players or free key layers and then

where value flows there it's basically solvers getting commoditized and value flowing either Upstream to the front ends because they they hold the orderflow orator power or D stre to the sement network because um they can offer differentiated Futures to solvers and charge them for those Futures that make their life feure when solving user orders um I I can go deeper into anything there feel like yeah but that's pretty much the the brief on ask one question about the the value side and that's do you think that wallets will be able to capture any value because to me it makes so much sense for like rabby to just introduce some solver Network into it exactly exactly so the way it will

probably work in the future is you will have rabit introduce some kind of chat where like your arit show can go on it and say hey I just saw this on Twitter I want to get exposure to this or let me know what's happening on Twitter and what's my best risk adjusted way of getting exposed to this trade or like to this shield on Def whatever chain it's on and use whatever assets I have on this wallet whether they are on like on a on a layer two on e minet um and you just basically specify that to the solver on a standardized way which is what uh that standard the ERC 763 enables a standardizing hint and orders and you enable the solver to handle all of that for you uh so the future is like

probably like the wallets introducing this kind of chat um that pars the the user orders into like an llm and the LM speeds out an order for the solver yeah brick I want to get into your f as well but before last thing for intense my biggest fear happened to me last week and I got slipped 8% on intense and that's my like big bare case for intense is I'm getting dominated by toxic flow like sophisticated solver just nobody else feels me and this guy fills me that's solvable that's solvable and and the way to solve it is you slash the solver so you implement like um even you can use igon layer to do that so so you

have the solvers post bonds every time they want to solve in your action and if they behave badly like they did with you with the 8% slippage you can just slash them and they will never do it again at least yeah yeah I was going to say like my knowledge in this vertical is pretty limited but I guess I want to hear your take on uh like the wall wallet front of things or like commoditizing wallets because basically I saw kind of counter take to what you was just talking about where the take was basically that most apps will introduce their like own wallets as well which means that at the end of the day like in the future it's actually the like DBS themselves that get used that have most of the value

flow even in that like vertical because like they also own the wallet that the end user is kind of transacting on and especially if you get into a situation where like you get that apps uh on your phone or like phone usage in crypto increases more than like you just open a certain app let's say I don't know the vertex app you go in there and the wallet is just like it's kind of abstracted from you but the DAP itself like owns it yeah I so the frontend category includes both wallets or apps I haven't really think about what what's the split between or what's the power dynamics uh on DS versus wallet but probably still I think the the one that is closest to the

user which is the the wallet right even when that's abstracted away if that's the closest thing to the user that should hold the most amount of power on this like value flow Dynamics on all of that um that will be my only take there yeah I yeah there there there's this there's this notion that being closer to the end consumer is um you know there's a moop there that you get to extract more value to me that sounds in some senses it's true right if you own the Ender user relationship you should get more value from it there's like a cost per click analysis that you could do it's just harder to make those hops um but what about crypto makes that different I mean like the fact that I can like take my wallet address and just put it into another wallet and like very

easily change seems to be like a much lower Moe than what you see in web 2 but I don't know what about the nature of crypto might change that Dynamic do you guys think I mean I'd want to say that the switching costs should be like exponentially lower also taking or like counting for the fact that like it's just kind of quote unquote easier to become a service provider or like the application layer itself like if you think about I don't know arbitrarily saying Amazon here like you can just build up another Amazon like that and then somebody goes and like can order stuff on your website but in crypto it's like oh let's say this wallet or like

this burps de is like bad or it has too high fees or whatever somebody else can like relatively easily spin up another similar product that should be good and basically just like undercut the other player but that's not really what has been happening at least on the wallet side right like in my mind metam mask is probably again no hate against metamask but like one of the worst user experiences I've had and then like I of course started out with that switch to Rabbi uh and not endorsed by Rabbi nothing like that but like that's the kind of evm wallet I use and it's just like so much better so so much better and I actually tried to do some stuff on

metam mask a few weeks ago again and it just reminded me of like how big the difference is and still like I guess metam mask is the biggest wallet Provider by a large amount maybe but like it's just mindboggling to me that it's so sweet easy to like switch from one wallet to another or like wallet provider to another and still people keep using the same stuff yeah and like one example of the amount of power that metamask has if you actually look they introduce a new update future a few months ago it's called smart transactions they did it with mechanism group it's basically like an me protection where the me that gets recaptured from their users actually does not get it's not like given back to back uh to the users they just keep it

for themselves it's not like M blocker where they give it back it's not like M share from flash where they do give it back it's just metamask activating it and they haven't been really public about it of giving it back yet but yeah uh and if you look like historically number of transactions of ethereum M that go through the private mle after that upgrade go through it went like from 20% I think to like 40% um so it was like pretty impactful and yeah still no no MB back for the ones that have it yeah about the wallets um brick I think you're right mamas has like still relatively dominant but is losing market share but about this topic in general I think this is actually one of the things that Unis swof does maybe like good for us analysts um like they went out and

built out their own Wallet app so we can see if that actually impacts their fundamentals and they're also building out their own chain so we can see if that's going to work out as well but I think that's got to be what you track like are people actually going to use the Unis swap wallet because how easy are they going to make it are they going to continue shafting people on the front end even if it's the wallet um so that'll probably be the best way to keep track of it as opposed to I don't know like who else is going to capture the value I like you said Ryan I'm not really like sure how relevant Wallace will be but to me it makes a lot like if there was a mobile mobile app moonshot Etc um and there was a wallet that was as good as that that to me would be

difficult to switch away from one thing you can do is uh account abstraction stuff like privy um and you can make it more difficult for people to take their keys from one service to another but that seems a bit antithetical to keep the like against not your keys not your coins I mean I I think that's kind of nextg crypto user though like I hate that I have to be responsible for my own stuff I want someone to blame if my assets are stolen and I want them to have an insurance policy on that um that like immediately top me up if they get hacked um and I'm not going to have that for myself personally um and it's very um there's an established Norm around not custody your own assets and you know big funds like service providers that do

that like I'm sure every big fund in the crypto space uses a custodian they don't self custody right um I think that's the next wave and and metamask does have a pro a pro um they have like some custody solution there right like I think you need one for retail too I don't know when right because it's still crypto natives but that's one thing suie does with ZK login maybe that's why they have the 2000 multiple because they have a very good ZK login page um brick what about you what sectors are you focused on I mean really just on this one AKA arbitrum uh I haven't like really traded in a while I guess I've talked about this before in the podcast but like what

I usually try to do is just like time the cycle so like I try to buy semi early or if there's like a big Catalyst idea I think can run until end of the cycle I'll go into that and then if I have like some spare time I try to do some liquid investing but um like I'm still in Tia somewhat I've been starting to sell on that front like the pump was over so for context I bought like pretty early after the token generation event or whatever the right term there is hold held through the massive pump and then imagine that now this narrative will continue and now it's been at like what six five four

bucks for a while and I think it's time to start getting out of there uh sold my near bags I think a few months ago did some SOI farming I actually bought in a pretty bad position like not in this recent pump but the pump before that uh I think my average entry was something like 180 or something like that then I just started farming um what's it called aftermath and then the market dropped or Su dropped like what almost 50% and I was like yeah that wasn't the best idea ever but luckily it came back and I was like yeah I'm done with this uh other than that I haven't really like deeply looked into anything else than like

outside of arbitman just like since I'm super deep working in the ecosystem like now investing just looking at kind of how to make the ecosystem better if that makes sense brick what are you doing at arbitrum what I'm doing myself or what the team is doing or yeah yeah yeah want to hear more about arbitrum and your guys rolling it is Sam around well yes you want to him to jump in here uh yeah basically we we work super closely with the Dow as I said like we have a exclusive inclusive contract with them basically trying to like um ideate ourselves as well as then like gather ideas and consensus from

like key stakeholders and like key thought figures and all of those people to like create proposals basically that push the ecosystem forward as well as then like introducing new partners uh to the Dow itself and I think for example what I've been working on for the past I think a month and a half uh is called upo basically a dow adjacent like legal entity that would have the uh like ability to hire service providers into the legal entity as well as then like kind of creating an operations arm for the D so You' get more like of these operational type roles because a lot of D struggle with the fact that like you have one off

ini iives that get like started which don't play together in any way like there's kind of no mesh layer of information in most ecosystems or in most Dows and everyone's just like incentivized to push toward their own initiative and this would kind of be a way to create uh a unifying factor for all of those like initiatives and basically like trying to make operations more efficient by I don't want to use the word centralized but like like concentrate people into a structure where like ecosystem contributors more easily can like read synergies by for example like sharing information more efficiently and getting like to a point

where everyone's kind of working in a unified manner um another thing we kind of floated was increasing the base fee for arbitrum but that was somewhat contentious so we dropped it because it also seem that like the new meta for l2s is just to like you know pump the gas limit to infinity and like get as many transactions as possible in there um and I'll mention one more thing and that's like we're currently trying to formalize a Mission Vision purpose for the do uh which would then lead into another proposal which we're calling the Strategic objective setting framework which would basically

allow um anyone in the Dow to propose one to two year goals for the Dow like interim goals that would push the Dow towards its Mission Vision purpose so trying to like kind of get everybody on the same page and big shout out to Lio because they kind of came up with this structure and we've just like um kind of taking that and formulated it into a format that we think suits arbitr pretty well like SL of Rus uh Rus yeah exactly or it was originally called goose and then because of the uh not LST but reaking narrative started like they had to kind of yeah refocus or Rego their like strategic objectives which is why uh hu posted the

Rego proposal but that ecosystem is also interesting or that project because hu is like of course really well respected really like smart guy and he has the ability to like kind of direct the whole D with what he's saying while in arbitrum like you got a spectrum you have like the builders on one side and then I guess what would be the other side kind of the investors who whoever and then like the builders right now kind of want to grow the ecosystem as fast as possible don't care about like profitability and then do that stuff later while then like the investor side is more I feel like let's take it easier uh I don't know maybe they're trying to save their unlocks or like save some um

juice for their unlocks in the next few years uh but yeah it's like arbit is a super super interesting ecosystem because like you have such a wide range of like different actors and it's a good and a bad thing at the same time right like you get a lot of different ideas but then sometimes like consolidating everything and getting everyone on like an equal page can be uh pretty challenging I have a bunch of questions about this but before that I want to ask Jose when you guys invest do you do any activist investing or do you get involved in those or are you mostly trying to stay out of it as much as possible and just let your analysis do the work I share the analysis on Twitter so like not really activist investing in terms of like making the Dow Mak make

changes either on management or on turning on fee switch it's mostly like sharing the feces on Twitter making people realize through coverage that something may be undervalued or that there is a good growth story there for a specific protocol in a vertical or whatever um but not really like yeah like making it making them turning on this the switch order yeah yeah that makes sense brick I have two uh questions but I think the first one you're going to Yap about a lot so I'm going to ask that one um later in terms of actors and dealing with them what's been like the toughest thing on and I I actually want to have Sam and Matt on from entropy as well block Works might

get upset with me at some point about this but I really want because like governance is something that like I don't do we have a governance arm but I don't do any governance stuff so I like is it annoying to deal with people especially I assume with delegates and protocols there's a lot of conflicts of interest and you can stay diplomatic but how what's your experience thanks for giving me that permission I mean I think it's just an interesting set of actors you get to like be with and it's super like it's been a super like thoughtful Pro not thoughtful what's the correct word I'm looking for here like I've learned a lot from that process basically because like you need to be able to kind of put yourself in many people's shoes and at the end of the day like

um yeah I mean entropy has a delegation as well but we're like trying to stay or especially when we're like working on something that's going to be implemented into the Dow like we want to stay neutral and just like take everybody's opinion uh into account which can be quite hard sometimes but it's been like a great way to basically learn how to communicate within the like crypto industry and yeah I've always been more of like a valuations guy uh so this has definitely like made my whole skill set more robust if that makes sense that makes sense I think my last thing is and Jose I also want you to bring in your uni chain um discussion in here how will arbitrum or how do you see arbitrum

positioning itself because l2s I mean base is dominating optimism has pretty good BD which is apparently just giving out $45 million chains to come on but like how do you see arbitrum and Jose I guess how do you see do you see unic chain being a competitor to arbitrum or is it just we're all growing ethereum well maybe I'll start by talking about the arbit stuff and I mean that's kind of the um through the Mission Vision purpose proposal we've like made that's one of the key things we've laid out that like at the end of the day arbitrum is trying to like just scale ethereum without compromis and I know this is kind of something that a lot of people get like

dunked on on Twitter for saying like oh we're just scaling here and then somebody else comes and says like yeah but you're taking the execution fees away from the L1 that turns out to into another like fully Com or different uh conversation but at the end of the day that's also how I see it like we're just like trying to scale the L1 and I know it can lead into some like fees being missed out on basically but I think the model there or we're kind of working towards makes sense at least in my mind what makes arbitrum different I'd say the Dow is probably or like arguably I know you could argue about this but I think the Dow is like probably the best across uh like

objectively the best across l2s so like you get a lot of support on that front the foundation is super good but then also like the arbitrum Readiness to like kind of attract Financial actors like real try actors uh in my opinion like sets it a part like that's like the main differentiator between other l2s like I really like Solana's whatever the slogan is like become the onchain NASDAQ or something like that and I see like arbitrum kind of going in that like similar Direction where I could see like those two kind of competing around that stuff and we've

actually onboarded a lot of like rwa providers as well recently like real institutions so like I guess that's also where I think like the future is going for arbitrum and as you said like optimism seems to have good VD but at least I'm not like super super familiar what they're doing in background but at least from what I read on uh the internet like it's them giving out tokens while like arbitrum has been at least somewhat organically uh able to like get these uh notable names in the ecosystem sorry I that was a complete like yapping sesh but Brick we're all we all growing a no

op versus versus AR we all grow in athere man uh yeah my my my summary of my thoughts on on uni chain uh so I think it's two first it's quite difficult to quantify unit Chain's impact because it will be very dependent on the amount of tbll and volume that moves there um having said that probably like just after lunch which should probably happen this month in a few weeks uh at least they will have 200 mil daily up volume this 200 mil is basically what unisoft x currently has they control that so they can just quickly Lo it on and say oh your you permission market makers are going to start solving on on un chain rather than having your liquidity on on these leros and because they control that autoflow so that's one second um rather than

being seram or PVP versus e main or other Le such as arit I really think that their implicit strategy is like going after salana and more if you want to be more crazy or more bullish is going after Texas so my framework is that unisoft um wants to compete with this mean coin offering uh by offering like better ux uh via M protection lower latency lower similar latency to salana uh and does attract mcoin issurance to happen on unit chain rather than no salana because the most important thing here is like where these assets are being issued right um and few reasons why I think this is first their uni chains flash BL flash block uh which reduce the sandwich

possibilities and improve the ux of trading m coins if you guys obviously like trading on salana you have to pay like 15% slipage or priority fees uh to get into a radium buy that sucks I mean it's fine because you're you're you got I mean you're searching for a 2X a 3X so you kind of don't care but over time it kind of sucks um so on on uni chain that doesn't have to happen uh that's the first thing secondly there is this project called Doppler uh it's being led by Austin Adams not Hayden but Austin he like another uh developer that used to work for unisoft and now he he's still an adviser in unisoft but now he has his own mechanism design firm um but yeah anyway like

Doppler is is just a better P fun it improves the price Discovery phase during the M lunch so you don't get Snipes and you don't get you actually like get F launches and it's built as as a hook on un before so there's like these two things that at the very least should attract some percentage of the solam initions to happen on uni chain um and that's generally the thesis um and yeah obviously they have also a lot of catalyst ahead but in terms of um their implicit straty I think that's that's pretty much it and also maybe for uh a little bit more abstract is like unifying eum through the front ends so once like unisoft X cring future goes live

you'll probably like just uh go on the front end and say oh I want to buy bread on base and I have e on this chain and you can do Crossing swaps without even knowing which assets uh which chain your assets are living on yeah that's more into the future for the end of the year or January I guess something that somewhat might tie together on like a higher level un Chen and then arbitrum is like the uniqueness of the Tex teack in a way like you know arbitrum has stylus you can basically code in well I don't want to say whatever language but like it expands on that you got time boost like you're pretty much one of the l2s that's like furthest on the decentralized Spectrum or whatever L2 is

calling the if you've seen the pie chart thingy um and different levels of like L2 and then un Chen has the I forget the right name for it but what was it that was built with flash Bots again the flash blocks or the the uni validator set or I think there's an other name for what you're saying but yeah yeah I get what you're referring to Brian do you have any hot takes about uni Chain versus AR I mean I think it's clearly a competition um maybe not today best case scenario but yeah that's that's my hottest take yeah I T I'd say that that was a boring take no I think they'll be more

challenged than people think and starting up their own chain like going to an island and starting your own thing is always really really hard um they do have the brand to maybe overcome that um so I think if anyone can do it it's probably Unis swap but there it's it's it's not going to be easy I I do agree with like at then end of the day everyone's competing for users Capital whatever whatever uh I guess still L2 is built on utilizing like ethereum still in my mind like scales ethereum itself but it's true that like l2s probably can be seen as really like competing against each other and like of course interrupt

will get better and better and better but I think maybe in the near term what's going to happen is like um I know CK Sync has these chain clusters optimism has the uh super super chain uh standard and like arbitrum is working on a similar uh it was called chain I think it's called arbit from orbit it's the same cluster as as op super chain as polygon cdk as elastic chain of from cing yeah all of those yeah well orbit is just like the the like development or like you can have an L2 or an L3 that's an orbit chain but um I think they call it chain CH clusters or something no well anyway I you get

what I'm saying like you'll basically have these hubs where like within for example arbit you can easily move between chains but then it might be a bit more difficult to go from like the arbit MOs system for example to CK sync that makes sense that's why I'm so bullish on across like uh this is like a very brief thesis but it's so the ERC that I was saying before 7683 it's basically like this unifying glue of all of those Layer Two e assistent clusters that you said so when you have like an a user that wants to bridge from uh between op super chains from base to op uh you will be using that ERC to get like instant almost filling automatically transaction and then the

solver behind the scenes they can settle through the layer two to ecosystem cluster a specific n and drop so so in terms of user experience it probably is is like cheaper when they reach from op to op super chain um and if the user wants to bridge like from a ecosystem cluster from a optimism to arum it also provides that same level experience maybe a little bit more expensive because they it's like different clusters but again like from the user experience it's just a matter of different fees and this across architecture and this ERC it's basically like this unifying glue of all of ethereum that's why it's also endorsed by ballic and yeah I think it's pretty cool I will say I do like I love intense like before I got butt by Macha I

did I I was like I love intense um I do because I remember bridging over I say this every two pods Ryan's probably still comp hearing this but like before I remember bridging using Wormhole to Solana and it's like you got to go on the Discord and say please can I have my money back and now brid is just the easiest thing and so is a cross consistently cheap consistently quick I don't know I'm very happy um so I agree with that Feast solah if there is going to be some goofy multichain world and we're not all on Solana which is bricks nightmare probably that um that's the block works we um yeah I think that's it Ryan do you have anything else you want to say or shall I wrap it up

I'm good guys this is a lot of fun should do it again we should um brick Jose thanks for coming on um do you guys want to give out your twitters and brick maybe you can give out the entropy Twitter as well so that people are listeners yeah for sure I'm _ oror break on Twitter yes I need to change that um and you can find entropy advisors on Twitter just entropy advisors fantastic how's it what about you and for myself I'm tumet as it sounds and just another TM so to me L and I'm pretty easy fantastic yeah guys thanks for coming on this was a lot of

fun thanks for having us [Music]