DeFi By Design EP#45: Paving the way with DeFi Masterclass

Transcript

[Music] d5 slate team [Music] what's up y'all real quick if you like the d5 state content on twitter and youtube and sub stack please please give us a like and a subscribe on this video on youtube and join our channel join the community we'd really appreciate it we're pumping this stuff out for you all as much as we can and we really enjoy the support and the community that we've built thank you very much and enjoy what's up guys we're sixth episode by design podcast here today on monday afternoon down in south florida i've been here with robbie this this past weekend doing a bunch of d5 business it's been great and uh the market is

pumping i don't know what's going to be happening when the when you guys hear this but it's it's a good day today for the market i think we're going to see a bit more hype come back to the narrative of defy and and all of that i mean it seems as if uh sushi swap had this vc news where they were selling these shares and everybody just was freaking out and all of a sudden we you know we've got this price floor it's been interesting to see the development of a lot of these new new tokens and new applications coming out during this kind of slow phase i know we've got a lot of layer two scaling coming out between eip1559 which by the time you're listening to this it is already gonna be out uh and there's gonna be arbitrary optimism

launching very very very soon exciting stuff for the d5 community at large now today we have the honor of speaking with anad and kendrick they are d5 experts well maybe they're not self-proclaimed d5 experts but i'm sure they've done a whole lot of stuff in d5 um and yeah we're here today to speak about their entrance uh what they're doing with uh their program their experience um you know things that they've learned and just we're here to impart some knowledge on you folks who are listening uh you know who are in d5 um and can learn from some of our experiences i'm going to pass it over to robbie and let him get after how are you doing rob i'm doing well man yeah it's been a great weekend um i actually jumped out

of a plane on friday that was one of the most just absolutely exhilarating experiences of my entire life so anyone who's considering skydiving i definitely recommend it um yeah i'll be going again pretty soon and yeah market's been doing great it's been a it's been a few days since we've done a podcast to give you guys a little recap um yeah bitcoins 40k as andy was screaming from uh from er earlier uh before we started recording so everything's looking good um rumors amazon might accept bitcoin and amazon coin might be on the way ethereum eip 1559 is looking great nfts um are popping up all over the place so

everything's looking good i'm excited to talk to kendrick and anan uh from d5 master class and and you know we're we're all about this collaboration rather than competition type of philosophy on on d5 and the space is still so new that there's plenty of value still to add um so i i am you know interested in kind of hearing you anan and kendrick you guys story um how you guys got started and yeah really you know what what brings you to d5 yeah yeah you want to get the background sure sure yeah um so kendrick and i are really good friends whether he wants to admit it or not um at least i i call him my best friend i don't think he says the

same thing about me but uh we we've known each other for quite some time and um uh personally for me i'll tell you about my journey and kind of one of these very d5 but uh i think like a lot of folks out there uh i acquired some bitcoin um bought some bitcoin bought some teeth uh and just been holding it for a while but last year uh after i left my previous company uh i was at home with my daughter you know coveted happened and i felt like i wanted to just roll up my sleeves and learn about something new something that i haven't that i felt was going to be a challenge for me to pick up and i kind of fell into the world of d5 through another mutual friend of kendrick's of mine so kind of like i fortunately happened to

get in around the summer or d5 and just got obsessed with it because it felt like just like you know playing golf right there's just like the right number of hurdles to get good at it and it felt challenging enough with all the interfaces that exist today it felt like a video game to me and i kind of got into it last summer and uh one thing led to another and you know kendrick and i collected we made a ton of mistakes um on april 30th and i remember the date because it's my my wife's in my anniversary i sent out this tweet where i'm like hey we like you know we have learned so much over the last year about what's happened to d5 we asked them to do a course so that folks don't have to run into the same issues or make the same mistakes

that we've made and like hey if you're interested in learning about b5 you know just gonna apply here and that kind of snowballed and we got hundreds and hundreds of applications of people who are interested um and uh yeah we kicked off our first cohort in mid-may and we partnered with this website called maven to lot to host our content and they've been great partners to us but yeah that's uh that's sort of like how this kicked off a few months ago and here we are today um but that's sort of my brief story also let kendra kind of you know talk about his side because i mean his i think this is a lot more interesting let me put it that way um yeah so you know we so i i have kind of had an on-again off-camera relationship with with crypto since like 2013. um i've

started a couple companies in this in the space um but uh you know more recently um i did kind of i was caught up in d5 summer um that was a lot of fun obviously i dabbled around yield farming a little bit but really got it really into yield farming kind of uh late last year beginning of this year um and uh it kind of opened my eyes to the possibilities so i i wrote a couple posts around around this with regard to i think that we're on to something in terms of like a financial revolution um personal finance specifically and financial revolution of course but specifically personal finance just because of the fact that the levels of yield and your um you know risk address address the

returns in the space are absolutely nuts and so that's what where um got really into into yield farming uh um wanted to build something the space we've been kind of collaborating with on for for some time talking about it and we shared the view that like okay this is obviously the future but the biggest problem is it's just too esoteric and there's it's super hard for people to approach so we feel like education has got to be um the start to this and so that's uh kind of um after anan's tweet we we put our heads together and said what would be like a first principles approach to trying to teach this and you know how could we really make it as impactful as possible and that's how we came up with kind of the curriculum for d5 master class uh helping people

get from zero to yield farming um as quickly as possible and we always notice it's crazy it's like whenever we actually help people uh get in there start getting their hands dirty working with different protocols the moment they build their first yield farm it's like a light switch goes on of like oh my god like their their expectations about what a dollar should do for them completely changes like no longer are the days where it's like i'm comfortable with putting my money inside of like a cd or or or bank account where you know it's earning me jack um now it's like well for a commencement amount of risk i can go out and get 10x or 20x to yield so it's just bonkers what's going on here guys it's i've never been this excited about uh technology and i've worked my

entire career in technology i just i think the writing's on the wall that this is uh this is gonna be bigger than i think what we even think it's gonna be and i think we're probably the guys that drank the kool-aid on the saturday so yeah definitely are you guys doing uh a lot of yield farming on on multiple chains you know kind of what's been your experience there how's that how's that worked out for y'all yeah um so uh uh obviously on ethereum i like ethereum it's just you can't you can't do it with small amounts of money you got to do i mean like the gas fees suck and it's never fun to pay like whatever 20 bucks or 30 bucks to deposit some some capital to get you know the liquidity pool but um so i do farm on other chains um binance smart chain polygon uh i'm

gonna go over to solana pretty soon um and it's a lot of great stuff it's just obviously once e2 rolls out i think that i think we're going to see a huge leg up in terms of yield farming um i think that innovation has been stopped by people due to the fact that we have these really high gas fees and so it's like why would i go out and improve the ui ux it's like i can't actually like the underlying technology doesn't support me trying to invest in that at all so um i'm really bullish on it once we get e2 rolled out and i think it's going to be i think that the the the types of yield opportunities are going to compound i think where there's going to be all kinds of ways we all make money and earn yield uh in the space in

the future so i'm just really excited about that yeah what what what have you all seen kind of in the demographic of people that have taken your course and and that you've interacted with in the space um you know where is their head at how old are they looking in and kind of what role do they want to have do they want to yield farm consistently um do they want you know someone else to do it for them and kind of you know what are their hesitations what are their concerns for taking the leap you know and getting into d5 yeah you're gonna take it on it uh yeah i'll i'll touch on the the demographic piece and then kendrick can probably talk about like you know their experience um on the demographic side

we've seen predominantly you know managers of family offices hedge fund folks venture capitalists um and there's been some outliers uh you know that i think that's but that's sort of like where if i had to pick a specific category that's sort of where it lies at the moment if i had to pick a persona um but uh you know we've seen folks from you know we've seen developers we've seen folks who are the cusp of starting something um a son kevik that one of our attendees in this cohort has uh um you know worked at a unicorn and sales a unicorn company in sales based on new york and now wants to make the transition into the world of beef exclusively so like it's been it's it's

a little uh interesting you know we're getting to meet some really cool people through this process but uh yeah alternative uk in terms of like how they approach your farming and and what happens downstream because i don't care works a little bit more closely with some of these folks yeah so um you know i think kind of as i mentioned before it's it's uh the yield is too high for people to ignore um and it's funny there's a um i was doing office hours with some people teaching uh teaching people how to deal for them they had some questions and so um uh it was uh it was myself uh a um uh a gp uh sorry uh a partner at a venture capital firm um some executive in some

silicon valley company and then another kind of high net worth individual and we were forming on ethereum i remember there we went to kind of somebody was sharing their screen they were trying to submit a transaction and it was literally all four of us or five of us that were sitting there just sitting there and watching waiting for the transaction clear and i was like oh my god if that's not an indication of like how bullish that we should all be on the space it's like you have some very very um impressive people in their own right they're waiting around five minutes for a ui ux to clear a transaction just sitting there it's just insane that we were doing that but that's kind of the case and point around kind of the uh why i think this industry is going to grow so much is like our ui

ux right now is god-awful and yet we're still willing to suffer through it um but like so that's uh kind of an aside but to answer your question directly that there's a lot of people want yield for sure they want to look at that their expectations around what a dollar can do is just completely different now um but uh in addition that what's really interesting is people are um uh and i think honors touching on this they're shifting their careers like i always just like should have a disclaimer it's like if you take this course careful because it might put you into a situation like some cognitive dissonance where you no longer want to actually work on whatever freaking business or industry you're in you're gonna drop everything and go over here um because we've seen it happen several different times where we have

executives who are pivoting their company entirely towards this or or people who are very promising careers and some very well known companies that that immediately stop what they're doing and go and and look for a career in d5 um so so that's certainly a component of it i think um what other the other interesting thing is like there's a very um uh there's a component of it of like the fact that i think there's a lot of people that are very interested in the fact that you're able to this industry has the potential to bank the unbanked which has really what we're talking about is like actually significantly uh decreasing or ending um uh poverty in a lot of nations in a lot of nations um and so i think there's a lot of people who are coming to saying altruistically

saying you know this is the right we're doing good work here and we gotta we gotta focus our attention here um so i think it's kind of a mixture of all those like yield um uh uh you know just the fact that this looks like it's the future um and and altruistic aspects of why people uh join the course and what they look to get out of it yeah i'll i'll piggyback on that that last point a bit um in terms of these people altruistically coming out and supporting the system yeah that that is what they're doing because it is an inconvenience to to kind of move away from what you're familiar with but they're also self they're self-inclined they're incentivized to do so so it's actually in their economic best interest

to act altruistically and i think that is one of the pillars of cryptocurrency and it's been a main ethos um which is great because i i mean it's a better for everyone really if everyone kind of supports each other um and what we're kind of seeing i guess is i i see a potential riff and i'm not sure if you guys see it as well but between these anonymous developer teams and more of the vc type of other side of the spectrum um you know we've seen now there's decentralized teams getting vc investments so there's there's potential for an integration there and those two kind of sides to meet but there's also been you know some

animosity between anonymous developers kind of just not really supporting the the ecosystem from a investment standpoint being more community and grassroots driven um and then the more traditional route and seeking investment and going that route um and i'm interested you know just kind of in your in your perspective on that um if there's kind of a better path forward um or if really it's just integrating between the two and and that that'll be the way that everyone can kind of get gain the most effective uh value from this yeah i could take a swipe of that um and i mean i feel like i represent both

sides in some ways i'm a i'm a builder i'm a developer at heart i'm a vc and i belong to many communities so um so a few things about vc right like vcs are uh you know i think everyone's greedy with vcs are long-term greedy the goal is not to be short-term greedy like that's that's a different kind of uh investor and when you think about the value add that vcs bring to various teams right and i've seen this both as entrepreneurs race capital for some of the best vcs and now as a venture capitalist myself we can uh yeah vcs can come in and provide and you know they have such a holistic lens right like as a developer as an operator as a protocol developer

like you go several miles deep maybe a couple inches wide and vcs have to be several miles wide and maybe a couple inches deep in each project but with this broad lens they're able to see a lot as to what's happening in the landscape and the best vcs can give you guidance and advice and and and pattern match very effectively we can see okay that's what's happening over there and these are the trends that we see happening and here's how we can impact your project and i like to think of the best investors as literally performance coaches or your best therapists really like that's what they are that's why they're there to help support you um and uh you know connect us back to what you were asking earlier these aren't two different entities they're like you know they're the incentives are aligned here right when a

protocol developer wants to go raise capital they can raise capital through institutions uh like vcs or you know if they're more mature and they're ready for a token sale when they can raise your token sale um with the vc approach and of course you know there's many protocol developers who've done token sales on them and then done uh you know a follow-on um you know vc uh vc round right and i think i mean there's many protocols that i can alluded that are doing this and of course it's kind of like in the middle of this as we're recording this right now um to the end of the day it's a community and for the protocol developers to figure out if the incentives are aligned you know do we do we take money from these people and if so what can they do for us

uh and those are all the right questions i think i think it is a concern about centralization if these vcs kind of coop up or or not monopolize i don't think they can quite get to that extent but gain a large portion of a lot of different projects i i think that's the concern when um these pillars of finance start to get decentralized again are we kind of just following the same path of history that led us down this this path yeah yeah that's a uh again there's there's the ability to hold tokens and then there's participants there's investors there's like different entities right and if all the token holders are all the same then the incentives are not aligned well um and i think that's where the you know

protocol developer can take a stance on how they want to approach this but um yeah you know at the same time if you think about someone who's sort of pre-product right and that's typically why the earliest vcs tend to dabble um you know someone's taking a bet on you someone's going to give you a bunch of money and say hey like someone wants to build a team of 20 developers build a great project and they need some capital some runway for that um you know vcs are naturally uh you know take risks in those regards when they're when they're able to check off all these different boxes and uh contribute in capital knowledge to get some of these teams off the ground for which they get a conventional amount of equity in the company right so but no i don't disagree that i think as the project starts to

mature there's going to be a natural demand for for these tokens and i think it's going to be incredibly hard for vcs to play that game downstream like that's just that's challenging unless the protocol developers like the initials drama that came out from sushi right like hey maybe you'll offer a discount etc to which the community rightfully revolted and said this doesn't make any sense like why would you want to do this at this point uh you know in fact there's people out there there's entities out there again not necessarily people by the way there's institutions like i said that said i'll buy the same number of tokens without a discount right so i think it's about where the money tends to aggregate and uh i i don't disagree i think you know disarming uh or rather spreading the wealth i think is a

noble goal of b5 and i think the better i think we'll all be better off if we work with that i really just find it interesting that it early on it was i guess more so the bitcoin days 2013 you know even before that 2010 all the way through like 2014 um it was insight and it was you kind of had to know a guy um and now i i think it's more about timing in terms of kind of how how you find out about these opportunities sure yeah yeah insights will always go a long way though right right yeah yeah i'm disagreeing so interesting stuff when you combine these different entities of people you know and get them to align themselves to

create the success of any given project you know you have all these sectors of d5 that is kind of a part of a greater whole um you know i'm not i'm i'm curious what your what your your mental model is on investing in in different sectors of d5 you know so is there is there a sector that you're more bullish on or is there is there a sector in which you have found yourself spending more time doing research on um you know you two kedger i'm keen to understand what sector of d5 you know you guys are all really excited about and kind of where where your mental models are as far as investing in particular you know areas of d5 uh yeah i can start cataract and i think

we have different rubric we have a different rubric each of us right and i think will be interesting color um to me i think in in when it comes to d5 i mean it's still very early stages and just there's just so much development happening here um where i see a lot of uh particularly i'm interested right now and i mean this is well so kendrick and i we have this like stack diagrams block diagram that we use for our class of which um you know because i i tend to think in that way it's a very engineering-centric way of thinking about things that things stack from top of one another and um you know there's various like everything from like the lowest transaction layers like layer one layer two all the way to like front ends like wallets and dashboards etc right so that's kind of

like the stack diagram um so there's two things that i think i'm particularly interested in one as i looked at it today and this doesn't mean that i don't i think the stack has a lot of value and this stack on top of like another uh up and coming blockchain is even more interesting right so it could be solana it could be algorithm it could be terra so i think there's a lot of buildup on the ether blockchain and i think there'll be single purpose blockchains that come up um whether it's flow or another one for nfps what have you right so like i think there's a lot of opportunity here in the full stack that all that being said particularly for me right now is the on-ramp opportunities from um you know for those who are not in crypto right like that's what's most

exciting to me um i think for all of us here listening we're you know we get what defy is and you know that's a term that we're familiar with and it's kind of first-time knowledge for us um even for you listen to the podcast but for me what's interesting is you know the you know kendrick alluded to the unbanked how do we get the the other billions into the world of crypto and d5 right because this is you know and ken are going to talk about slav which is we believe that this is going to be i think you can see pictures of my and my daughter behind me and i believe that in the next few years like she's like she's going to be using crypto whether she knows what it is or not and the question is who are the developers of building those on-ramps to

make this the fabric of the internet and that's super exciting to me so um i think outside of the world be fast like how do we get people into the world someone tweeted this recently i thought it was so amazing it's like i think the next billion dollar startup is a better defy user interface you know like that in and of itself i think a huge idea but uh i yeah i still believe that the on ramps are going to be cool um i think using real world assets as collateral uh and bridging that into the world of d5 i think is a huge opportunity kind of like what centrifuge is doing as a protocol um and and and mass you know making that more mass market sort of speed i think is a huge opportunity and the

third bucket i'll say is lastly a freaking idea like i mean there's just you know this is it's not very smart people are investing in this space but i i think to be thesis driven at this point it's like saying i know exactly you know back in 1994 saying by the way in in 2008 there's gonna be a device that you can hold in the palm of your hands and on which you can listen to streaming music or you can order uh a cab or something or deliver food to you you could never have envisioned that right so i think we're like in the 1994 of this movement and it's moving really fast by the way right like but to think that we know exactly what's going to happen here i think it's it's um it's a it's a tough call and if that's the case that you have a crystal ball

that no one else has so i'll stop also rambling i'm curious to hear what catas is saying i know i i agree with the assessment that um being thesis driven at this point in time in terms of specific vectors that will work out um is is really really tricky if you if you kind of take it from like i guess maybe maybe it's more like first principles of course like what's what's really happening here um and and for me in terms of how i think about this i think we're switching we're seeing a migration from traditional finance into decentralized finance the the real fundamental uh innovation that's happening though is um a dollar is no longer

constrained inside of some sort of walled garden a dollar in decentralized finance has the ability to zoom around all kinds of places and earn yield that was not possible for in in centralized finance um in that old world right everything all innovation was permission now we're transitioning to a permissionless innovation world where uh innovation is stacking on innovation is stacking on innovation and at each level are new yield opportunities so i think what's happening right now kind of the framework i'm using is like oh my god i have no idea what's gonna happen now but it's like now we're actually seeing innovation and and we're rethinking what a dollar can do like we've all been trained because of

traditional finance in terms of what is an acceptable risk reward for a particular dollar right in traditional finance and and part of this process is is unlearning that we can't operate under that model anymore because now a dollar is able to go out and do all kinds of work and zoom around all that different types of places what is the implications of that in terms of gdp you know obviously one of the main major factors of gdp is like capital outlook well we're talking about potentially orders of magnitude increase in efficiency of capital allocation in this new world so what does that mean um for i agree with honor like i don't know what this will turn into but it is the the most fundamental shift in terms of how

commerce is conducted that i think we've ever experienced um even more so than the internet uh in my opinion because money is is power in terms of economics okay activity that can be achieved and now it's able to zoom around i'm looking for is like um i think what we're going to see is like ana said new opportunities coming online that maybe never had the opportunity to gain access to capital previously maybe it's you know traditional offline type opportunities but even even new kind of stacking innovation and innovation where like maybe this is you know maybe there's new types of yielding

opportunities that that like for example the metaverse like what's there's an entirely new world that's being built in the metaverse that are going to have yielding opportunities in there that are going to be an entirely like explosion of growth and explosion of value in that what does that mean was that translated to i've no freaking clue um and and that's why i think you know from our perspective the way you think about us is like this is too big and moving too fast for any one individual or even grouping individuals to do that small and neat you need a more kind of community type approach and so that's why we're trying to do with d5 masterclass build out that community so we can share ideas and figure out where it's going to happen um you know beyond that like i think community tokens are really interesting uh i think um

the ability to align incentive interests um within difference amongst different stakeholders is is a is a we don't fully get how big that's going to be um but it it's because we can't we're going from the old world we we're needing to retrain our brains now so um you know what is that i'm not i know i'm not giving you any alpha in terms of what you go out and try to you know figure out what you know what's investing in i think that the moral story is like we don't know yet this is too big to even try to pretend like we have an idea how what to go out and put money you just got to stay on top of it and in my opinion drop what you're doing and build your career in this space uh because um the amount of wealth that's going to be

generated over the next five 10 15 20 years is going to be like nothing we've ever seen before in in our lives in my opinion yeah yeah um what we do know is what is what we've seen thus far um it has unlocked nascent markets um that innovation that you're talking about you know creates value and now it's kind of about you know where where does that take us now that there's new markets you know how how deep can we build that that rabbit hole um and what what kind what what can we make of it um so yeah i really think the

the themes and and growth vectors of d fire still being built um but we know the rails are lightning quick um so i i'm curious kind of you know who who is going to adopt it the capital efficiency here um and and capital growth is immense so you know as the capital efficiency is sped up some people are going to adopt this technology sooner some of the some are going to adopt it later what is your position on uh central banks nation states adopting this currencies uh these digital currencies and if it can improve the life of their citizens you know how do they uh create the most

effective solution there yeah yeah it's good great question i mean obviously like you know obviously i'm extremely bullish on bitcoin um you know at some point in time the equation is going to work itself out like you can't just keep printing a bunch of money and expect everything to keep going on as as as it has in the past it just doesn't the math doesn't work out right so um i think that certainly nation states are going to be are going to be interested in this um i'd say uh i'd say anybody who's who has money in a savings account um when they understand how to approach this and our given tools bill approaches um i think that it's like it's you were talking about like

what do we look for in terms of innovation of a product right typically you're like well you have to have a 10x in innovation or for them to get gain adoption typically that's done in a very um soft science way like does it is this a 10x better user experience it's not very quantifiable with this it's actually quantifiable we know that you're getting 20x your return uh in you know a tenant let's say a 10 return in d5 for a savings account uh and in you know traditional banking you're getting 0.5 return so we know it's a 20 x return we know the math in theory is there to get massive user adoption towards that particular product um i think nation states are are going to realize that this is uh this is a massive opportunity for them to be able

to um potentially you know not be so reliant on the dollar um and there's a lot of risk associated with holding dollars long term in my opinion do i know but um and then thirdly i think that we're going to find that cbdc's are a lot of people say like they're worried like what are see you know cbdc's are going to come out and and nobody's going to want bitcoin they just want cbc's this is it's they're just not understanding what bitcoin solves and why cbdc's represent from a from a pricing perspective in my opinion one of the most bullish things that could possibly happen uh sorry cbdc's for the audience is central bank digital currencies so you know a

digital dollar or a digital uh you know a additional whatever whatever your centralized currency is um that represents effectively uh a pipeline of the irresponsible money printing from the government directly into into this this ecosystem and so what's you know does that change the uh the thesis and the use case for bitcoin no it strengthens it now it's an easier way now you have more and more money chasing the same asset that is finite so i and i think that it's an inevitability that they will adopt cbdc's long term and kind of end their relationship with uh you know they're gonna they're gonna they're gonna be separated from traditional finance at some point in

time because of the fact that the amount of control that governments are going to be able to gain and i i don't know this is a good thing to be clear i don't know that this is a good thing but the amount of control that government's going to gain through cbdc's um in terms of being able to apply a scalpel uh of uh of uh stimulus within the economy right and i use the example like imagine god forbid there was a pandemic and you know nobody went to restaurants for a year and that entire industry was decimated like in the traditional finance world they give some money to the banks and hope the banks will give it to uh the the actual users i equate this to like imagine you're at a dinner party your champagne glass is empty uh the host takes your champagne dust and

sticks it up bought more of those champagne pyramids and then pours the top and like hopes that eventually your champagne glass will fill up it's insane this is in cbdc's they would be able to have the opportunity to go out and um and specifically stimulate any business owners that are our restaurants um say here's twenty thousand bucks and you got three months to go out and spend this so that that type of finite control and the ability to apply a scalpel in terms of innovative uh uh stimulation i think is gonna be massive um but uh uh but yeah i think that's that's how i those kind of those three different things kind of coming together i think is is why this is um not the only reason but certainly major factors of why this is the the future sorry i'm going to stop randomly

i'm turning on and get your get your thoughts on it no no i think um generally speaking i mean i think i'll just zoom out for a second i think it's exciting for me because um when you think about like traditional banking infrastructure like how long that's been around and how many decades it takes like i mean you would never for example be able to audit the code that runs inside of a bank like bank of america or wells fargo i mean it's never going to happen right like you just can't i look at the world like decentralized finance how open and transparent it is and how quickly like if it takes decades to get to this level of like being able to bank online how quickly deficits it's all promising i'm just glad that we've been having this conversation or the fact that like now

banks want to take some next level and think about cbdc's um i think it's a good thing honestly from a competition standpoint to have these cbdc's um i think it was uh the sec commissioner uh pierce i think she was on a um uh she did she was on a panel it was all about bitcoin or something a few a few days ago uh and uh i mean i think she said it well she's like i actually prefer stable coins over cbdc's uh just because i mean cbdc's will have to force usage you know like and that's that's not necessarily a great thing um whereas stable coins are you know they're not again depends on which one you're looking at right let's be careful about that as well but they're generally accessible right like it's not coming from a centralized authority right kind

of defeats the well i think it goes back to concept i would say defeat but it just challenges the notion of decentralization to some extent so personally for me i think i'd rather hold like you know usdc or ustera uh to a centralized you know cbdc um but you know again i'm just like to zoom out and just put things into perspective i'm really glad we weren't having this conversation because you know i i this feels momentous in so many ways uh that uh we're able to have such conversations with what felt like you know large moving uh institutions that didn't feel like they could adopt you know new technologies yeah yeah i i i support that yeah i mean i really agree with kind of kendrick what

you said about um central bank digital currencies being being a bullish event for the ecosystem um the way i see it we have you know we in america we have capitalism private entities compete with public entities and we have these privately created stable coins and now we can have um potentially a public uh stable coin in addition to those in and compete and i don't think there's any reason why uh the public shouldn't have access to the capital efficiency that d5 unlocks so yeah i i do see cbdc's as a bullish event and um

i'm in yeah just kind of interested what what that means as far as the masses um if the cbdc works and and the federal bank kind of adopts this digital currency anon i you mentioned you know whether your daughter knows it or not she'll be using crypto um you know what what does that look like um as far as someone using crypto but not really knowing that they are using it yeah uh and i think this goes outside of the world at d5 to some extent right so i'll give you i'll give you two examples um we'll start with d5 first but um i i envision a world in which you know there is uh there there's a new bank right like

let's say she looks to go to college and when i went to college it was like an arcade process right i needed to go in and use this local credit union i filled out an application i was an uh an immigrant and a national student i don't have a social security number and all these things were sort of complicated right um and you fast forward to today and that landscape has looked very different so we'll just take my daughter as an example i think it should be relatively easy for her right whether or not um you know depending on again what what they're looking for but there should be an easy way for her to create you know an account somewhere where her assets can be stored and using which she can earn eye high yield uh and not have to worry about you know the constructs underneath right so

like that's the most basic and that could be powered by d5 right like kendrick mentioned anchor protocol as an example earlier i mean you know there should be a seamless way for someone to be able to tap into those kinds of yields and i don't think those are going away in fact i think these are going to get bigger and greater over time so i think that's one example the second is uh i mean i'll just think again one on-ramp like gaming right like look at axi look at uh you know even fortnite right like you look at various different games and there's this concepts are in there like you know being able to sell skins as nfts or being able to use these axes whatever the case might be like that is an on-ramp into the world of crypto right i think those are just two sort of basic

examples but i see that becoming a lot more pervasive um i mean uh you take helium as like your your decentralized wi-fi provider right like i mean it starts to get so massive and pervasive at that point where every sort of incumbent analogous solution starts to have a decentralized notion to it even i mean decentralized file storage decentralized video streaming decentralized audio streaming right like all these things start to become more pervasive and um you know maybe like today spotify is huge maybe it's uh audience right maybe it's uh theta for video streaming whatever right like maybe there's a new messaging app that comes up that's not you know facebook messenger whatsapp or

you know more a the lines of what signal has to offer so i think that's where i think the entry points start to come in where the you know this this mission like this middleman middle entity gets broken up and this several nodes are participating and therefore leveraging the value of the network right so you and i get to benefit from being the ones who power this network so that's that's what it looks like for me at a high level and i think we're on the cusp of this movement um you know being very positive right it's it's the evolution of products that are able to be used by anybody you know our friends our family people that we that are completely unaware of what's even happening and then making them so simple that right they are just using them and it's just a

matter of time until uh they understand the intricacies and they you know kind of dive deeper into what could be you know and the potentials i think um you know coinbase earn as an example right where they pay out people to learn huge example about of of kind of this model like play to learn earn you know it's it's very very uh prominent in in in in the current times and i think coinbase is a is a huge player in in onboarding the masses 2d5 um so i'm curious what your thoughts are on onboarding people straight from coinbase or from gemini or kraken or other large exchanges right into the d5 world you know what are some

of the improvements you guys think could could be made whether it's onboarding right to layer two or what kind of education could we see you know how can we take the world of crypto from you know using these centralized exchanges uh and taking them into you know the self-custody route to be your own bank kind of concept what does that look like i think you're hitting on some really some interesting concepts um and and i think uh it's probably an amalgamation of several things in my opinion like what's the ideal onboarding for for people in d5 um education is is critical right we can't can't even start to have these conversations of like convincing people to come over here without uh without taking a very deliberate approach in

terms of helping to educate people about it's why we started d5 master class we think that this is the starting point um so we we think about it as education and then enablement so like obviously um education ideally in a gamified approach like i'd love to see you know material you know uh orders magnitude improvement on the ui ux um and then is there a way to be able to educate um in a gamified approach and and get people into this uh environment uh and make it fun right i think that's the key it's like remember this is money money historically has a very um emotional it looks a very emotional response from people so how do you shift

that right how do you how do you shift that emotional response into something that they enjoy well you gotta gamify in my opinion um so so a gamification of this uh would be huge um and then uh and then yeah i mean the good thing is like they're a large and growing and the the acquisition efforts of these centralized exchanges is extensive they're spending a ton of money they bring people in that's the first step you gotta you gotta you know turn your money from um from fiat to crypto um and they're doing that um and then the next step in my opinion is like okay i can't what kind of experience would can we bring people over to where they enjoy this and it's fun and it's gamified um so that you don't you don't elicit the same kind of you know uh nervous

response you get when it comes to money um i i feel like that's probably a big component but like yeah that's why that's why we think it starts with education yeah kendrick i think that gets back to your point about altruistic and really i see that as infectious in the in the ecosystem um team building i think is intrinsic to that gamification model um and traditionally finance has been so independent people have been very private about these are my funds you know don't i don't share these with other people but getting into a gamified approach you you reach and you know a pooled environment where there's energy and people can support one

another that's really what we see with all the tools in u5 yeah yeah that can the community aspect of that is implicit in that gamified approach it's not typical but i would i would look at it as implicit and i totally agree to be able to make this um plus it it makes a lot more approach that's what we find is like people people like to take our class together they like to bring their friends in because it's it's a it's a a safety net in terms of you know they're much more comfortable going to their friends like you get this like what the hell is this guys talking about i don't you get it um it's just it it makes it so that community aspect which is so inherent to crypto i think is is a critical component so yeah you're absolutely right i think you brought up

an excellent point in terms of what's what's necessary community's got to be got to be at the forefront so you guys are working with quite a few people who are i would say you know more sophisticated in terms of their of their approach to uh to investing and and defy right so a lot of people in d5 i would say a lot of them are younger folks um you know there's there's a majority of of of retail investors so you know college kids um people who are working in finance or who have been in crypto for some time and of course you've got like the influencer crowd and then you've got kind of this this suits crowd these these more um you know proliferated people who are really into

uh the nuts and bolts of the traditional finance world so you know i'm i'm definitely curious to understand some of your experiences working with um people in in in that kind of realm and what you're seeing on that institutional level uh interest wise you know what are some of their interests where where does it peak are they is it the stable coin rates is it the deflationary mechanism of each that's coming up is it the store value of bitcoin you know are they interested in the lending and borrowing like what what are some of the the major interests of of these larger institutional players or folks from silicon valley in d5 specifically i can take a crock head and then

um you know love for your thoughts as well um i think the very highest level is there's two kinds of people there's people who get it these people who don't um and then for those who don't get it it's just like you know we are we can have all the conversations we want and uh you know it's just it's scary for them and they don't they don't get it so like those people are already out and i think the hooks that you're talking to is like we get it we want to learn more you know what what does this landscape sort of look like let's understand the you know let's understand how the car works before we take it for a spin right so like then that's kind of when ken and i come in faster class we get to talk to them about all these different like plumbing

options that exist in the world or d5 um and then now lastly last question which is like what are you know what's attractive to them again it's about like once they get understanding the landscape what i've seen the best investors do is to be able to draw these parallels and they go all right and i kind of see what this landscape looks like i see how this car is working you know like what is a faster car more efficient more effective car look like right so it's like you have these gas port vehicles and then you know like maybe there's an electric vehicle that can go much faster right it can be more efficient for the world and that's gonna like maybe the analogous their situation is like hey you know layer two solutions optimism or you know maybe net new blockchains all together

that are high proficient to begin with right that use proof of stake or another consensus mechanism that's a lot more um a lot less like hardware intensive and and uh you know has has different mechanisms to it so um i think that's what i've seen investors sort of get into like all right i see this car now i get it how can you make it better efficient or is it a car is it a motorcycle is it a plane you know it doesn't need to be lighter footprint heavy footprint do we cater to developing nations um you know are these people have internet connections right so like that's the kind of stuff and then of course how do we apply these to other parts of the world right is it file storage is it as i mentioned wireless so on and so forth so i think

there's a lot of things like that that are starting to track like how do we find the next big project that's going to and that's what these investors are looking at is you know like okay this is how it works today what where does this go from here and then as this becomes this becomes the internet of like this decade right uh what does that mean like what is other applications that are gonna be built on top of it where did the value start to crew where do we start to support or start to send dollars right so i think that's the that's sort of the high level that i've seen across the board um and uh that's that's sort of like how the thinking cap sort of starts to get on but i you know it's and that has to happen if people believe that this is

the future right like once you're bought into it and of course there's people who've actually you know they're still skeptics for like i mean i don't think anyone should drink the kool-aid right like i think you should get a taste for your yourself and then if it's great then like yeah dip your toes in even further but um and i think skepticism is a good thing we shouldn't be like you know blindly believing everything that's told to us so but i think for for anyone to sit back and go like hey this is complete horseshit and like we should no one should ever get into it no one should put anybody into it uh i i think that you know that's that's uh a fool's errand i think they'll have to eat their words that's my that's my two cents but curious to hear what you're saying

yeah just real quick and on ever everyone kind of comes in at a different point on the learning curve and it it's yeah everyone will have a different reason for for choosing to learn and um some of those people are just naturally you know want to do hard things they want they want to take on challenges and they're going to be attracted early on um and learning about it because it's still esoteric and it's still exclusive i think that was very attractive early on um now there was that headline probably during 2017 or 2020 all your friends are getting rich and you're not you know and now the late majority is born and people are starting not all right grand scheme of things late

majority is way down the road right but it's this feeling of okay now the the mainstream has has found out about this why don't i know about it and just kind of tracing these patterns as they start to evolve um we can kind of see these cycles you know be be be born and um they they just keep growing the ecosystem more people get involved more more of their friends want to get involved and um once they find out that it's also in their self-interest you know i think at that point it just taps into the natural human instinct and um people are driven from there yeah

yeah i mean i i've i remember seeing this stuff from the very beginning of 2020 and just being like what is what is going on here it's just absolutely gnarly um you know just been it's been a great great turn of events so i'm kind of wrapping things up here kendrick and anad any any closing thoughts on kind of where you guys are at with d5 masterclass anything that you know our audience should know um and yeah guys thanks so much for coming on yeah i appreciate it yeah i mean well it says um we we just released uh dates for our uh august cohort um so uh you know if anybody's interested in kind of coming in uh checking out learning kind of uh directly from us on this i would

highly recommend checking that out and uh um and yeah i mean again we're still you the good thing is you're still you're still really really early in this space and um and if this is going to be as big as we think it's going to be um you know it's is a you can't ignore the you can't ignore this this is something everybody has to pay attention to and i'd say go out and quit your job and start working in d5 that's what we've that's what really needs more more hungry smart people coming into the space and making this happen sweet and um yeah i mean guys it was an absolute pleasure to speak uh i'm excited for for future collaborations uh between d5 slate and e5 masterclass um

and yeah thanks for coming on guys and good luck out there thanks very much i appreciate it