ETH Merged, Cosmos Spotlight, LSDs & Doodle Raise | Roundup

Transcript

[Music] [Applause] this episode is brought to you by core the brand new non-custodial wallet that offers a seamless and secure experience on avalanche you'll hear more about core later in the show all right happy merging happy merge everybody uh welcome to the roundup we got santi here it's ianno santi welcome happy merge my friend happy merge everyone it's uh it's a great day uh you know for for most of us at least it's a very uh i think it's like a crypto holiday that will be i think it i think it will be i think it will be it happened at two so the merge happened at 2 43 a.m eastern time that was like morning time your time were you were you

up were you having your espresso i was i was just waking up yeah i was tracking it nice um so it was a great way to start the day and the fact that it went so i so far very smoothly was uh just just really nice to see yeah what's the what's the first time you heard about the merge oh like the the word itself not the word but like just this idea of moving from proof of work to proof of stake oh gosh well it's been like since like the super early days like it's been talked about forever as far as i can remember we there's ongoing discussions around talking about scalability i should say and and also as part of that

uh we kind of touched on it on the cosmos episode which we'll talk get into it later in this in this pod but um right around like i'd say the first two first you know 2015 or 16 or so um and back then maybe a lot of folks remember or not but like proof of stake wasn't this there was a lot of contention criticisms a lot of people didn't believe the proof of stake was gonna even work and were quite like there was a lot of criticism and i've observed that a lot of people have you know maybe it's because there's other networks that have launched that look ethereum is not the first network to it's the first network i think that like has upgraded migrated to proof of stake and

done this transition which is really hard and i think it's some perhaps one of the more important things of like this adaptability of the of ethereum and the community and like upgrading the same that you upgrade your operating system like you know these these things are it's pretty hard to coordinate but there's other networks that went way before them right cosmos you got tazos you have uh other versions of proof of stake that like went before ethereum and i think it's been pretty interesting over the years to observe that like i guess call it lindy of okay proof of stake can actually work and it can be a viable consensus engine that can work and proof of work it doesn't like it's not to say the proof of work

because you know for a long time which is like proof work why would you do anything other than proof of work but anyways uh yeah long winded answer but i think uh it was right around like 2015 or so i think yeah yeah and we we uh we do talk about it in the cosmos episode that comes out on monday um about like that 24 2014 presentation from jay uh it's really interesting but i think uh i man i just like woke up in such a good mood and uh was just thinking about how crazy it is that you know you have these 200 000 person banks that can't even ship like a usable mobile app and we have these eth core devs that have like worked tires tirelessly and ship this thing and i think it's i

think it's not just a win for for crypto uh and not just one for eth but i think it's a real win for decentralization and for for just open source software honestly yeah absolutely i think um maybe that is the most important thing really the fact that yes okay it was delayed yes there was a lot of um i guess people were critical of that but in many ways like we have to think about as you said which is centralized organizations this integrates dilemma that it's really hard even for for centralized organizations to make radical changes and the fact that a decentralized organization certainly not as hierarchical as you know companies if you will was able

to do this and pull this off is a pretty remarkable feat and i think it gives us hope on you know this idea that we're very early and we don't know if we're designing like very we're probably designing like the first versions of a consensus engine that there's like it's hard for me to believe that we're not going to be making other modifications over the next 10 20 years and i think this is a really good precedent and case study of it is possible to upgrade it is possible to modify things and sure it takes time and coordination but the fact that we're able to do this in an open source context is even more remarkable and i think is for me one of the more bullish one of the more exciting and like things about ethereum is a community that is adaptable and and i think if

you're adaptable in this open source world where it's very competitive it probably it sets you up more for success yeah yeah exactly i want to um so i was looking at mainstream obviously like all the publications including i think block works had really good coverage of the merge the last couple of weeks but other publications did a really good job too it was very interesting looking at the mainstream publication coverage of the merge um so let me just share my screen i'll show you this anyone watching on youtube can see this but i can also just talk through it for folks listening on like spotify and apple um this is cnn's coverage of the merge uh the world's second biggest cryptocurrency just got a lot greener this is the verge ethereum will use less energy now that it's proof of stake this is forbes ethereum emerge here's

what to know about the hotly anticipated upgrade turning the crypto player green and this is politico pro uh green crypto ethereum wins applause in brussels and in washington i think this is the most important narrative that crypto has ever seen right we saw bitcoin get really really hamstrung and just hit uh very hard last year by the bitcoin is bad for the environment and this obviously trickled down into ethereum with like nfts are bad for the environment there are a lot of good things about the merge there's you know it turns into a deflationary asset uh it becomes yield generating asset but i think this like esg it satisfies the esg mandate and it's this green like i think we're

moving from um ethereum moves from this like thing that's bad for the environment again in the eyes of investors and mainstream media to something that is like innovative clean new tech so it was just i love seeing how mainstream media covered this is very very interesting absolutely not only that but it comes at a time where there's a lot of of attention on rising energy prices and the crunch that right the impact that's having and i think when you look at it from that perspective i mean timing is key to construct narratives and you know the fact that it happened in this particular moment of time where natural gas prices are through the roof work and we're in this environment where there is

a lot of criticism around even more so around like proof of work and the the wastefulness of the energy which i don't necessarily agree with on but nonetheless yeah um it is super important from that narrative right the esg narrative is something that we've talked about a lot about of how that is a positive setup you know people should go and and listen to the podcast that we recorded with travis from ikeguy um you know this was in may or march of last year of this year sorry and i think this is uh i agree with you it it's probably the biggest narrative shift um and with a lot of momentum behind it and so timing here is very key that we there's a very good tweet from vitalik that quoted uh

justin drake which is one of the core devs he says the merge will reduce worldwide energy consumption by 0.2 percent now i don't necessarily know the basis of of that we can link to it and uh but nonetheless if you just take that at face value it is uh it's pretty interesting yeah it is i think there are two other or another big interesting thing that's worth talking about and again i will link uh we'll we'll throw it in the show notes or i don't know you can just search for it but we did an episode with travis cling that i think was really good on this um the other big thing outside of the environmental impacts is this so if you can see if you're on uh youtube you can see this the total east supply peaked at 120 million now that the merge is live eth is currently

deflationary over 80 eth have already been taken out of supply and this chart just shows it really really well um moving from this inflationary to a deflationary asset really important and just in general like the supply demand balance of eth changes dramatically here right so in a proof of stake uh excuse me in a proof of work system uh miners spend like significant sums of money to run these like large what people would say is energy intensive compute facilities to secure the chain for doing that they're rewarded with tokens uh in in east case obviously eth tokens and then they have to sell those tokens to pay their bills and their hardware costs and things like that in a proof of stake system validators stake significant amounts of of the base take

token so in eth's case or in ethereum's case it's eth and then they risk losing them if a bad transaction is validated so there's really very little cost associated with the staking so the tokens that are earned from the staking are mostly held right so in proof of work you have to spend money on hardware and all that stuff so then you have to sell it the token that you get to pay for the hardware costs and staking you don't really have those costs so right i've seen a lot of estimates on how this shift is going to play out and you know i think i think as fred wilson put this in his blog is that ethereum moves from a system that has roughly 20 million dollars a day of structural outflows to a system that has roughly 500 000 a day of structural inflows

right so you're going from 20 million a day of structural outflows to half a million dollars a day of structural inflows and that that's a very important supply and demand dynamic shift there absolutely two things i want to point out one this feels to me like a more balanced and incentive aligned where all of the stakeholders or most of the stakeholders that are securing and validating blocks are long are more aligned with each other whereas if you think of a miner has really high capex and operating costs and they naturally have to recoup right and sell so there's this constant cell pressure of what is being mined and in a pro and that's improve at work

in a proof of stake system that's not necessarily the case and so the more so that's one component uh which to me feels like a more viable security mechanism for the long term and second of all is this idea that as more talk tokens are being staked there's sort of like this balance right because like the staking yield is factors into this of like the opportunity cost and what people do but nonetheless like you know the more people are staking float really reduces dramatically um or you know and and that has pretty interesting dynamics right if there are not a lot of sellers because they're staking well combined with the esg narrative combined

with the ability to perhaps earn the staking yield with the you know cbe through sde or what have you um it uh it puts a lot of upward pressure and so it takes an incremental a marginally less amount of demand to increase the price this is just standard economic terms and so it's um yeah it'll be pretty interesting uh i think what i'm looking at now is what will happen with a lot of the players that try to play the proof of work like the approval like before eath and those forks and um that's gonna be an interesting one the second one is you know um you know the stake derivatives um and as these tokens are unlocked like what happens there and

so and with a lot of things to unpack but yeah um yeah yeah let's you wanna actually talk about liquid staking derivatives one one thing that um uh garrett brought up that we could talk about i i sent this tweet out about like narratives after the merge and i was like the six big narratives after the merge are going to be one is talking about mev one is talking about cosmos ecosystem one is onboarding real world assets uh one is new d5 primitives and uh one is protocol specific stable coins the last one though was um liquid staking derivatives and um i don't think we have to talk about all the six big narratives here but i you just mentioned liquid staking derivatives mika sent out this tweet he said liquid staking derivatives are likely to replace regular eth as the primary

transaction currency in defined nfts nothing else post-merge is guaranteed to be up only except for lsd liquid staking derivatives supply i'm just curious i'm curious if you agree with mika there yeah it's definitely possible um for sure um but look the derivatives markets are much fast much much larger than the notional like spot markets i guess and so i i would think that um yeah especially as more people like if you're holding e there's a big opportunity cos i'm not staking it uh right you're just being inflated out and so most people will want a steak but also maybe just do that quickly the ability to come in and out of that

um without necessarily gates is is pretty valuable and so liquid staking yeah likely will have much much more volume you know over time not initially but over time like maybe the next five years there'll be like this flipping of like the liquid staking derivative volume like far far is a multiple of what is being transacted on like of just eat and yeah i mean what is the here we can we can pull this up but what is the uh yield now on something like lido let's see it it almost just brings up the question of like why why would you use eth now instead of steath or cb eth or one of what's the coinbase's other thing

alluvial ether something like that cb isn't that cb no they did they have two it's cbe and then they did the partnership with like figment and someone else called oh right i think alluvial or something like that yeah so it's right around four percent yeah so it's kind of like why not just use why would you use eth uh i mean obviously i guess there's the risk there's you get four right there's risk and there's like a bit of you know uh what happens even in a deep pegging event and the yield also factors into that based on how many people are staking right and so um and composability is another right i mean i think just pure eth could be accepted it is more widely accepted at least today than than most taking derivatives um

and and or has more favorable like borrowing terms or what have you so yeah um but yeah i think um i think native staking integrations into these these exchanges is going to be i wasn't like realizing how big that was going to be but i was looking at a cosmos last night on just coinbase actually you can get five percent yield on your atom tokens on on coinbase just natively like directly in coinbase it's really interesting so yeah they were doing that through bison trails i believe right those i think they're bison trails who met we learned i learned this i didn't know this fun fact in the cosmos episode that comes out on monday the bison trails founders met in that cosmos kind of validate our chat in the early days i think that that google group that they were talking

about so yeah um what'd you think of the cosmos episode by the way let's do a little uh i want to get your take on just like that that zacky and that yeah before we go there i just want to point out something that's pretty interesting here which is uh we've talked about in other episodes but like i think one of the more important metrics to now track obviously the issuance and burns like just if ethan's being deflationary and what have you gas continues to be an important one that does not solve with the merge by the way it's just more like youtube's really kind of solve that but the other one is i think which is i think of if you think of the entire defy stack the analogy to like traditional markets is like this four percent number that you're seeing right here on the

screen this this like staking yield of the base layer is kind of like the fed funds rate if you was this is like a the the risk-free the the bottom kind of standard um of the this economy and then everything on on everything needs to sort of compensate for incremental risk on top of that right and defy anything else that you do right because that's really the opportunity cost right um it's like libor if you will or you know uh the 10-year treasury or you know um or treasury rates and so i think that this number is really important because i think everything else moves according to that um right because if you're getting paid less

in d5 which has way more risk than staking your ethan well just you know uh in a rational market there that shouldn't be the case right you your rational economic being should stake as ease um unless of course you see upside in like whatever the the the governance token or it's not apples to apples right because sometimes you're earning yield on other things right which you may see some upside but strictly speaking like like for like this is this is like the benchmark yield that you should be looking at for everything else um so it becomes very very important yeah it's interesting like if you think about the traditional economy you have uh you have the fed you have the uh you have a yield curve right and the yield curve basically shows like how

much uh if you if you push out on the yield curve you're getting higher yield usually unless it's inverted um you could kind of say like the staking rate here is similar to short-term government loans um but there but we don't have like the equivalent of in ethereum maybe yet i would say like the one year or the two year or the ten years right you know yeah well i've been thinking i've been talking to this team um that i mean the the landscape of each state liquid staking derivatives right now is very bare bones right it is floating but you talked about this in another episode but like why don't i think there will come a time where we're going to have fixed rates um and and very very

more robust markets around that right if one player might like like you're just basically playing like the interest rate swaps and fix and variable and i think that that is a pretty interesting market opportunity right now because there's going to be a lot of players are going to want to capture this yield maybe risk the notional like the underlying exposure they want to just bet on the on the rates and i mean these are huge huge markets in international markets and and they will be very big in in this proof proof-of-stake uh system yeah comparing ethereum with other proof-of-stake networks and there's just so much you can do um that uh you know i think we're we're very early in this but uh i think mika is hinting at this yeah the staking derivatives market is going to be

massive there's another podcast from from block works called bell curve actually and we just had the episode that came out this week was the fixed rate lending unlock we had um simon jones from volts and alan niemberg from yield protocol is really good episode so i'd recommend folks check that out um uh cosmos yeah yeah definitely what do you think about the episode well you kudos to you for lining it up uh we had saki and jack yeah jack two great guys long time long times in the cosmos ecosystem i've known psyche for such a long time and uh it was good to get a refresh i've admittedly lost a bit of touch on cosmos what's your cosmos story can we start there like you saw cosmos in the early days super early

days i wanted to buy like a lot of atoms uh back in the day and it was hard to start like i didn't invest like like i guess in the first round i guess but i was very encouraged by what i was seeing like this like tender mint um and i really liked they there was a lot of people who were coming from berkeley um kind of blockchain um group which has historically been like really good um shout out to them and i was in san francisco at the time so i just became part of like this like discovered it that way and wanted to at some point like uh invest in tender man and that i think was one of the first rounds of deals a paradigm did actually and uh this was like right during the

bear market and uh yeah over the years i've been very fascinated by it i was increasingly very interested by ibc and what that could do to connect other like kind of like becoming this web of connecting chains and the communication protocol which is kind of the key i think i think is a key value proposition of of cosmos as a network and so it unfortunately took like longer than anticipated and so that like i just turned my attention elsewhere and then kind of d fight took off and kind of put it in the back of my mind but i've always sort of felt that cosmos hasn't gotten enough um i guess recognition um and most people i think would be surprised to learn that like binance smart chain tara

facebook like there's been a number of like proof-of-stake systems that have used the tendermint and fork that code uh to run successful proof-of-stake like networks now the the collapse of terra and other components of these networks there are critic you should like strip away the fact that tara collapsed with like the fact that they were running a pretty successful proof of stake like like a tendermint implementation so i think um yeah it was a good to have them on i think there's a lot of really exciting things happening perhaps my biggest takeaway in a question that i asked from the episode was now that ethereum is migrating a proof of stake what does that mean for cosmos right and i was encouraged to hear from them that it's quite positive right because

now that ethereum you know that is you know the more dominant network if you will other than bitcoin but the more kind of where developer activity is and what have you it can now like connect to cosmos and there could be a lot of really interesting like connectivity there and it's very refreshing to hear folks like that and i think is representative of the cosmos community which is this win-win mentality um and yeah it's going to be really exciting i think they're they alluded to it and hidden hinted at it um there are some exciting updates coming out um right around devcon and so uh definitely something that i'm paying attention to uh but i'm curious to get your thoughts on it it got me pretty

excited about cosmos honestly like a lot of our research team is very into cosmos and they've been really i wouldn't say shilling cosmos to me but like just you know i i tend to lean into the eth side of things usually um yeah and they've just been like you really should spend more time in cosmos and so i i use this episode almost as like an excuse for myself to go pretty deep into reading about it and learning about it more and just getting an update from cosmos folks uh as i did prep for for the episode just to figure out like what's been built and then i will say like jack and zaki i was really impressed by by this honestly just the story going back to the early days that that conference in mountain view in 2015 jay getting vitalik on board with proof

of stake back in like 2014 you know they they had the vision for a lot of the things that we now think of as like these mainstream crypto ideas proof of stake even like del like slashing liquid staking like these were all ideas that came out of cosmos in the very early days so it was impressive there and then also just the app chain thesis um i will say like uh i still need to dig deeper into it but like this idea that you can have like these sovereign chains there's no mev leak uh you can customize the consensus model security runtime mempool all of that kind of stuff is it's a really interesting thesis so i do believe that one day

we will see a world where something like ibc can i don't even know if i'm technically saying this right but like can live on ethereum or can like talk to ethereum and like all these systems will one day talk to each other in the same way that you can build on amazon like aws or azure or google cloud or alibaba's cloud service but like they all can really talk to each other i do think that's the world we one day live in yeah absolutely i think that's well said and i think uh transitioning a little bit uh one of the things that i asked them towards the episode is the the fact that uh they are more of in the less centralized uh they don't have a marketing team they kind of don't care about that they have really good tooling and dev resources i think they place a lot of

emphasis from that because it is a very dev centric kind of team but nonetheless i mean i asked them the question look there are other teams particularly like polygon for instance that is crushing the bd game and do you ever wonder that do you ever want to do that and maybe this was the idea behind tendermint but then tenderman kind of flopped and um and it just got disbanded or i think that a lot of the team left and so it's like the tech can be great but do you wish that you had a really good bd team sales team are we there in that like implementation where you build that really good tech and infrastructure but at some point i think you need to sell it and just this week alone like you've seen

starbucks partner with and uh with polygon um which is i think a huge testament to the bd resources and success of that team ryan watt i think came from youtube was a big hire and like that makes a big splash and anecdotally i've heard that like solana has developed this kind of rep among enterprises that it has issues with downtime and you know i think it is really important because i keep coming back to sometimes the best tech does not win like this is classic like vhs versus betamax betamax better tech mp3 standard not the best tech like but it won right and so at some point you need to have sales muscle and bd muscle to kind of go out there and evangelize and a lot of people are critical because they say

wait a minute this enterprise interest in crypto we've seen this it's it's all pr stuff it's there's no real real there but i kind of feel and i want to get your thoughts on this i kind of feel like this time it feels more substantial you have reddit you have cons like across different brands there's i think there's real interest in in adopting this and leveraging part parts of crypto whether it's nfts of your consumer retail brand uh or social app um or you know just um i i don't know i'm like i'm i i do wonder um about this kind of um

idea of course like does that make you more bullish on like more centralized teams like solana avalanche you're saying like what's the what's the this idea there the the idea that like some teams have these like strong bd and marketing teams and then other teams are more just like natively growing and yeah like i believe in the multi-chain thesis like i believe in like there won't be a winner take all maybe i want to take most but i do believe like maybe ibc helps stitch together a lot of these systems in a more secure fluid composable way but like that aside um i think i think we're still very early i don't think ethereum has won the race um but uh yeah it's sort of this idea of trying to

a lot of people ask me okay which which which are the more exciting like other l ones it's a constant it's a constant question that people are interested in whether you're a game and you want to deploy in another l1 or an l2 or you're a newcomer and you want to understand and maybe go to another ecosystem and we're seeing it's a constant wave right every cycle we have like other competing l1s and maybe competing is a wrong word it's just alternative ones um i think you have to start with the end goal in mind actually like just like you're building any other company you have to start with the end goal so like let's look at some of the l ones here like um we'll use avalanche solana like polygon cosmos or something like that as as examples here

like so avalanche's goal their one-liner is to like tokenize the world's assets they need a bd so what they've done is i would say they're heavier on the bd and marketing side but if you look at actually and you talk to their sales teams and marketing teams they come from finance right because they want to tokenize a lot of the world's assets and put it on avalanche and actually shout out to avalanche had a really interesting deal they tokenized one of kkr's funds this week oh there's some yeah yeah i don't know if you saw those pretty interesting their healthcare one of kkr's healthcare funds um and that deal only gets done if you have a very strong bd team that comes from traditional capital markets so that's like an avalanche strategy you look at someone like polygon and i don't actually know their like one line

strategy but it feels like they want to bring on like enterprises and like big companies like the disneys of the world and the starbucks is of the world so they have a very feels a lot of gaming entertainment yeah just given ryan's background at youtube so they have a very strong sales and marketing team as well similar to avalanche but like if you look at who they hire very different hires it's not the finance folks it's the like disney people it's ryan from youtube things like that then you look at solana 92 of projects on solana come from their hackathons so salon is salon is basically building what i would call like nick from like crypto natives from like the ground up very grassroots very grassroots very focused on the developers um and that's what i would so like they

have a smaller bd team because they're focused on like crypto natives i would say then there's cosmos which is like as crypto native as you can possibly get they're basically saying look someone like polygon and like finance smart chain they use tendermint but they'll get those big folks um we're gonna focus on we're gonna we think that the crypto pie is gonna grow so much over the years that we're just gonna focus on like the crypto natives so i think it just is like different strategies yeah yeah plus now then you have other new newer projects like aptos and um sui so is that how you pronounce it just came out yeah yeah that look a lot of people raise their eyebrows when they see these massive

raises of 150 million 300 million but the reality is you're gonna and you talk to these teams and it's like yeah we're gonna need a lot of these resources yeah uh to attract developers and build out bd teams and so it's it's uh you know it's not a cheap uh proposition and so i think uh in many ways it doesn't hurt to be super well capitalized because it is very very competing um space out there the last bit of cosmos so you guys should all listen to the cosmos episode when it comes out on monday we talk about this presentation that zacky's giving um the one thing to flag is like there's this uh one of the pushbacks on cosmos is that value doesn't accrue to adam they are releasing something called atom 2.0 at the cosmo verse conference september

26th so you will like that's the probably thing to keep your eyes on i would say yeah there's a definite a bunch of other things that they're launching so and we'll have them on again uh for a part two after they released uh this which they weren't very they didn't give us much details but after 26 we'll have a part two yeah all right folks this episode is brought to you by our friends at avalanche and ava labs they have just dropped a new crypto wallet called core you're going to be hearing a lot about it over the coming months you can now be one of the first to try it out here's the reason i'm excited to partner with them on empire right now crypto wallets and browser extensions they feel clunky they feel non-intuitive that's why ava labs built core it's a free

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dollars to crypto right now using the moonpay integration just takes a few clicks download core today using the link in the show notes it's really really nice if you are interested in the avalanche ecosystem at all you have to be using core download core using the link below now let's get back to the show um i want to give a couple shout outs here one is to coinbase actually so coinbase released this thing again i'm going to share my screen if you're on youtube you can see this um starting today this is a brian armstrong tweet i don't know if you saw this starting today coinbase is going to integrate our crypto policy efforts right into the app this is going to help our 103 million verified users get educated on the crypto positions held by

political leaders where they live that's really cool you can see this like this is the tool let's see if i can see so i can actually see like you can click new york you can say in the house or the senate and then i can see these people like richie torres leans positive um if you look at like it's really that clark like somewhere in the middle like patrick maloney somewhere in the middle carolyn maloney very negative lies alden not enough data to to determine i think this is really i just love this move by coinbase so i just want to give a shout out to brian and the policy team there and i think this is a cool move yeah it reminds me of the uber playbook actually i don't know if you know what uber did in the early days when they were getting like a bunch of pushback

they basically built natively inside of the app a way to you like click a button and it sends an automated letter somehow they're right yeah so they're supportive the taxi lobbies exactly so i just want to give a shout out to them and then i also want to give a shout out to the block works team um we had digital assets summit this week and it was just there's an interesting data point in here we in bear markets crypto events get hit pretty hard actually so we budgeted like usually we have two two events we have permission list and then digital asset summit digital asset summit is like our institutional conference um but like buttoned up i'm convinced it's the only crypto event where people are

still wearing suit and ties we usually get like ass did you wear a suit so interesting this is the first block works event i didn't attend uh well way okay this is it was a really surreal feeling just because uh a significant life event going on or significant live event coming up next week and uh yeah lockdown um we it was really crazy it was like such a trip it was the first of i i didn't sell a single sponsorship i didn't get a single speaker i didn't i never visited the venue i barely sold any tickets like it was i was kind of a surreal moment like i woke up and watched the live stream and i was like man we have such a good team around us i just want to go shout out to the black yeah that's great yeah i've been to one

or two of these or at least have either streamed it or been and the other excuse very institutional i'm curious the composition of the crowd the level of interest some of the major topics that were discussed i saw the newsletter um which goes into it a bit it sounds like you had some really good speakers yeah um but yeah i'm curious to get any sort of highlights um from the context from you i would say um so there's a couple there's like there's a couple things one is um the makeup of the the audience numbers were really interesting so again like crypto mark so crypto events get hit really hard right like if you look back in bear market so if you look back at coin desk i'll use the last bear market

as an example coin desk their biggest event ever was consensus in like 2018 may of 2018 so there's a there's like a six month lag on conferences by the way so a little peel back the curtain here it's like if the the the market peaked out in december of 2017 coindesk hosted consensus in may of 2018 that was the biggest event ever biggest revenue generating event ever then their numbers got decimated if you look at their 2019 event for so for us we were looking at we were looking at our um at das this year usually we get like 800 900 institutional folks uh there so we had budgeted we're like we'll probably take like a 30 or 40 percent hit honestly maybe we have like 600 700

people or something like that we had i think the final number here is like 1300 or 1400 or 1500 attendees so biggest gas ever most sponsorships like most tickets like and if and like if you look at the crowd i think we had like seven people from apollo 12 people from jp morgan big group from goldman every single bank attended every single bank sent at least five people uh a ton of the big like the large institutional players like the black rocks and stuff were there but a lot of the smaller like funds who are like like the tiger cubs like the altimeters and like holocenes of the world matrixes like they were they were all there so it's really interesting to see and i

think the big conversations were like uh the merge was was was very prominent regulation was very prominent uh because you got to think about what this institutional crowd cares about so it's the merge it's regulation and then it was macro which was really interesting so we had actually had a lot of the macro folks uh the like danielle dimartino booths and the alfonso picatillos like the the kind of macro crowd there um on stage with like the robert leshner's and antonio's from dydx so that was very fascinating nice is there a way to listen to these live streams at some point or the live streams yeah we're going to put all the live streams up for free actually so you can go to the website and look at um and we have the whole live stream but then we're actually going to put up

videos on our youtube channel too so that's awesome yeah so you'll be able to see that yeah but a bunch of good talks we had like mark usco dan tapiero and bill bar height from abroad gave a really good talk robert leshner i thought gave one of the best talks um no he's a good one yeah so all right um moving on yep i wanna i wanna get your take on this doodles fundraise actually so for those who don't know doodles are a collection of ten thousand nfts one of the most popular um nft collections out there they've done a really good job i would say of just like keeping keeping the hype alive uh they had like this awesome thing at um south by southwest last year or maybe earlier this year owning a doodle allows you to

like vote on community driven features products events things like that doodles um announced on tuesday that they had raised 54 million in a round led by 776 alexis ohanian's firm um 10 t holdings also participated ftx ventures also participated yeah so and this value doodle's at 704 million dollars now here's where it gets interesting this value the equity of doodles the parent company behind the collection at 704 million um the announcement resulted in like two million dollars worth of nft sales for doodles and the floor price jumped a bit but not even that by that much um

it begged the question of like i think there are a lot of not i think there were a lot of people in the nft community that were upset by this saying that these investors should have just bought just bought the doodles basically um and then there were other folks saying that's ridiculous you don't like vcs aren't just going to come in and like sweep your floor so i'm curious like how you when you see something like this happen like what do you think is the right way to raise money as an nft company should they have just bought the doodles or should they have uh done done what they did and invest in the equity i think the precedent here is hugo labs the thing that you probably need to ask is you're investing in the company the studio behind these nfts and

they're investing equity into that studio because perhaps they believe they're going to do much much more with that and so i think the structure makes sense in the same way you would have invested in i guess uniswap like it'd be i guess like fortnight you know or like world of warcraft like if you could invest in the developer game developer and or buy a bunch of like in-game assets and skins like i think you want to own the developer part of the developer to have a voice and say and capitalize them to support now i think the doodles team is as you said like they gain revenue streams the the studio itself the developers that started this

from secondary sales i'm unfamiliar with the percentage of fee but typically that's what five percent or so sometimes more but give or take so they're earning that so yeah i mean at some point like i think they i didn't get the pitch but they went to these investors and said hey listen we're gonna this is the vision this is what we want to build and get on board or not right and so i think um i don't see that much of a problem with the structure actually um if you're an nft holder i also don't see why it would there's a lot of criticism uh other than some folks saying i'll pump my bags yeah when you try to flood 54 million of nft sales and you're a doodle holder like

whale and of course you want them to buy and sweep it but it's very short-sighted i think what you this is much more positive if you own doodles or track the project you know you basically now have 54 million um to go out and do partnerships with other people and build out whatever it is that they're going to build out a game [Music] movies coffee shops beer whatever like we've seen everything in in nft land so i don't have a problem with it uh it will be interesting to see where they prioritize that obviously hugo labs is an order of magnitude i think more capitalized than these guys but that's i mean it's it's like saying

like disney competes with mgm it's like the entertainment space is vast and massive and where you can take this is yeah pretty big and so we talked about this actually jason in the episode when when you collapsed raised we said how many other teams are going to do this and we kind of i would have thought by this point you would have seen much much more moon birds i mean it's kind of all the tier one ones have done it it's like moon birds cool cats yeah moon birds doodles uh so yeah not surprised then i don't think white people are really critical of it um i agree here's what i think it comes down to holders of nfts think that they bought a

an investment in into a company or something an asset that would go up there is an expectation of nfts that the price of them will go up that it's an asset they're not assets nfts are not assets in in this sense well they're well they're a collector asset they're a collector asset they're a consumer they're a consumer product they're a consumer yeah if you guys if you go buy a patek philippe you can't go knocking their doors and and so tell them to say hey guys i want you to make up you can be hopeful that it goes up the laffy out of the room yeah yeah exactly no like thank you for watch we love that you love the brand and they're a collector but we are the watchmakers not you so yeah i mean like the i think people are forgetting that they are that you are a

customer of a consumer product you are not an investor into an asset you're a collector of a consumer product and a collectible that collectible can go up hopefully it'll go up i do think doodle i do like doodles but it is not and i have some yeah so it's not a protocol token right it's not it's it is a high-end consumer product a high-end it is a collector it is like buying a watch or wine or a consumable if you like this is the thing folks like i asked uh i met with a team earlier this week they're just building like uh like a more of a marketplace for nfts and basically allows you to like short nfts and like if you're if you have a huge doodle collection say and you

you can deposit it and earn some yield because someone's gonna take that and sell it immediately and short it and anyways basically financializing nfts um my question was like why would anyone do that like i feel pretty attached to my nft is like i like my doodle not the other guy's doodle right but i think like it goes it begs the question of like how many people in this market that are buying nfts are just speculating on it versus just collecting because um i don't know i think that i'm just a collector oh like this is i'm not so i invest and there's a big part of what i do but i don't think of nfts as investments per se i buy them because i love them aesthetically pleasing and i

don't ever plan to sell them and uh and so it's just a different mindset and i'm curious if you've seen data or what you think around like what percentage of the nft market today is purely speculative and or in in just pure collecting because i think it does beg the question of like i think the the things that i'm very curious to understand is as prices have come down the value proposition the community the road map where does that go right and look punks it's crazy like go on

the punk's website and look at the prices of these punks in like as early as two years ago um but there's a very die-hard community of punks there's a great great interview that i i retweeted uh that was done like by signing messages actually this guy is the number one or the number two largest punk collector holder he has like he or she has like 500 punks at some point had 704 punks yeah massive collection had sold some like 200 but it's retained a lot and i think crypto punk holders generally are just built different they're just they're just like oh like but some of these earlier more recent projects i do question like

you know when you see this kind of criticism it's clear to me that there's just so many people that are just a number go up i want my nft to go up and so i'm gonna buy it like yeah i i think um i think basically the market is you're you're asked you asked that question of like how many people are collectors what percentage of the market is collectors versus what percentage is um people speculating i think it's a large amount of people are just speculating but the microstructure of the markets the things that got built out in like 2017 and 2018 and 2019 for crypto like derivatives and uh really good otc desks and all that kind of stuff to be able to trade in size just doesn't exist in nfts we have i haven't told you this melton is going to come on the pod um she wrote this

great piece we're going to link it in the show notes called um nft building market microstructure for nfts really really good piece i'd recommend people read it i'll send it to you too santi and melton's gonna come on to the pod uh pretty soon to talk about just like the evolution of the nft markets and like it taught one of the things that is in her post is like the ability to short derivatives all that kind of stuff the ability to trade in size the ability to like algorithmically trade this stuff doesn't exist yet but it's coming i made some investments in this i i do question like what i'm just curious like i do think there's always going to be a subset of people that buy whatever wine watches collectors market are massive the the art market is massive not

everyone is going to hold on to the picasa for life like at some point you know there's a price for everything i guess but it just uh has felt especially towards the later parts of the cycle that it was just very speculator heavy um yeah and and i'm not like bearish on it i just think it's a it's important to observe uh that um and a lot of a lot of these buys were done on leverage and these are the things that i was like my what my expectations of when the nft market was going to top or and i think yours too was it was terribly wrong like the same way that i like widely underestimated the size of like deposits in d5 way back in the day just went from like zero to like 100 billion

uh and was crazy to see but at the same time um yeah i think nft markets are going to be massive there's going to be potential and and and these money markets financialization of entities i think it will be a thing um but i just got you got to call a spade a spade like i mean i think a lot of teams we should always be critical of teams that just you know are talking about utility and are talking about road map and all this jazz yeah i think 99 of projects are just not going to deliver on that now if you're doodles probably higher like this is conviction right you know you raise 54 million to build whatever it is that they're going to do so um i mean i place more emphasis and be more excited about seeing what comes out of

that than a team that you know is just kind of wishing that the floor price goes up and they get more secondary sales like that just feels artificial yeah um i have an acquisition that is non-crypto related that i just thought was really interesting uh do you do you know figma design yeah design so yeah yeah okay so figma basically powers the design of like everybody adobe xd and stuff but nobody uses that um adobe just acquired figma for 20 billion dollars today uh happened like right when we were recording this i think it might be one of the biggest private software acquisitions ever like gotta be top five um whatsapp with 16 billion

intuit was 12 billion for mailchimp this like this is i think it was 20 billion maybe 15 but um yeah really impressive so that was just a huge acquisition i don't know want to call that out so anyhoo santi what else we have to talk about here nothing really i mean some there's a few other things here and there the thing that is we're recording thursday september 15th today um the chair of the sec um gensler is supposed it will testify before the senate committee uh around what the um around a recommend he's supposed to recommend a pathway for digital tokens

to register as securities he of course has been very vocal around this point that he believes that a lot of token issuers are securities and so a lot of the kind of open questions are just you know give us a list give us a more precise uh way to do that and uh and so he sort of backed off a little bit from his stance i is my understanding where he said look the it's written there on our website like it's like a normal issue or like go and read it and abide by that whereas now i think he's saying um you know that uh it's it quote unquote it's sort of like i think his latest remarks uh soften that tone um and

perhaps says you know hey this is new tech this is yeah you know the token is different than like equity like uh stock apple if you will and so it will be interesting what comes out of that um so we'll be looking at that and i think that was one and second there was an arrest warrant for dough korean authorities issued an arrest warrant for dough the founder of terra he's supposed to be in singapore which my understanding is doesn't have an extradition treaty with korea nonetheless will be interesting to see that very interesting i feel like they're going to try to make a case out of this one yeah yeah yeah absolutely anything else on your mind

no not really i'm feeling good like six for the entire industry um yeah all is good no macro talk successful too no macro talk you know i don't like the macro talk yeah yeah yeah really nice i want to point out just two book recommended or two book recommendations actually one of them is uh the beginning of the end i just started reading it actually earlier today this is why i was late to the podcast the end of the world is just the beginning um by peter zahan there's a great youtube interview oh so oh peter is great yes very refreshing take um pro us from why the us actually survived this and this uh but yeah a really good

book um and so i would encourage folks to check it out the other one you talk about design this is more of like a like a coffee book table web design oh i love that cover that is awesome the evolution of the digital world um really actually just fantastic like i was i sometimes buy these are there are there pictures you know i like those pictures in the book yeah yeah yeah yeah it's just great it's like uh what what they're called web designs web design the evolution of the digital world 1990 to today it's uh it's amazing it's like i love how the internet happened um just chronicles like the evolution of the internet and just

gives us some really good uh appreciation for the that historical development to then i think think about how this new world of internet 3.0 is going to develop and this one is kind of second to that it's just really nice to go back in history and look at the first websites and how clunky they were and why it was being used and literally like websites that have pictures of cats like and then you think about like okay we had crypto kitties and like uh it's it's really i think it was again cliche mark twain history doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme and so anyways pretty interesting uh book and so uh it's a fun read

nice very cool i'll check it out santi good chat my friend uh everyone should check out the cosmos app on uh on on monday if you're not subscribed to the pod already and i guess the nft music nft pod with koopa who just raised the fund koopa troopa yeah coop just raised 10 million bucks for music nft fun we recorded with him we have a lot of good episodes coming up soon great good stuff uh sir thank you very much and thanks everyone for listening hope we didn't bore you or i keep telling a lot of people this is like free melatonin that you can just uh go to sleep but hopefully it's not and if you want to hear about anything specific drop us a comment we're listening santi i just gotta say you you know the panda eat merge meme i can't stop looking at you and sing a

panda i'm just gonna say because of your headphones it's the rev you've got the headphones are like the panda ears what are you talking about i'm a panda i don't like i like to think about double men okay i'll take it as a compliment panda's like sleep a lot i wish i slept like a panda i don't thank you jp morgan investment banking uh i should probably do a class action lawsuit around my circadian rhythm being totally destroyed but yeah anyways thank you i'll take that as a compliment thank you be well my friends be well [Music]