MakerDAO and Visa Adopt Solana, Nima Capital MIA, Spot Ether ETF | Roundup

Transcript

all right everyone I want to introduce you to Bumper a new D5 protocol that is here to redefine how you protect your crypto assets obviously Market volatility can be a big concern for us crypto holders go check out bumper It's bumper.fi take a step towards smarter crypto Asset Risk Management welcome back to the Roundup folks um a couple days out from permissionless super excited how you feeling Santi I feel excited I'm I'm you know I'm going to Austin I love Austin uh it's been a while since uh since I've been in a crypto conference actually it's really excited to meet up with a bunch of folks out there you know teams I've invested in first and foremost you uh Mike the rest of the team

uh yeah it's uh it's a great time uh we'll see you know I'm also really curious I think as I said before you know I think the mix of people that are going to be a permissionless is is going to be interesting just the gauge sentiment right right you had a tweet yesterday I think which was like the the timeline the sentiment on the timeline and I'm talking about crypto Twitter seems to be very negative you know everyone's fighting everyone's bitter and Hallmarks of bear markets but you talk to builders just in one-on-one very different I just had a great call with someone who you close down a prior project in his building again and I get so excited when I see that because he's not leaving he's

like yep you just got it wrong bad timing whatever I'm going to build again so the one-on-one conversations are really positive now which don't get appreciated on the timeline um but there's also going to be an interesting mix of people right if you look at ECC that's like pure Eve camp I feel like there's always techno optimism in that type of conference but um a permissions you have a whole host of folks right you have JP Morgan there you have you know industry crypto non-crypto people and I think it just gives you a a better flavor at least that's what I'm going to be looking out for of what people are interested in what are the narratives um you know what is the skepticism in the room what are the things you know

learnings and so uh that's uh something that I'm really curious uh I'm so yeah long-winded answer of how I'm feeling but I'm feeling excited because I'm going to be up in Austin how about how about you I know you're critically uh redlining and not sleeping yeah yeah not looking my best these days uh need definitely needs more sleep no it's always just a crazy time like hosting conferences is uh it's one of the best things we do and one of the worst things we do because there is so much work that go like the day that permissionless ended last year we started planning permissionless this year and I think that people don't see the amount of work that goes in I mean

for this year's permission list like this is many it costs us many many many millions of dollars to host and you have to start you know you have to think about everything right you have to think about like you have to print the badges you have to print like you have to print so much stuff you have to do so much stuff you have to time it all you know sponsor wants like a new thing at their Booth but that already went into production two weeks ago but they paid like there's so many little things across the board and you know there's like 40 or 50 different side events already planned um we we rented out like a dozen or two dozen just block works alone like bars in Austin so it's just a lot of stuff that goes into it you know we have 65

people at the company now and there's a lot of people are hands on with this event so I'm excited is this like a Taylor Swift um economic stimulus for the city kind of situation I mean how many people are going to permissions it is actually it is I mean Austin less so because there's so much that happens in Austin but when we hosted actually fun story when we hosted uh permissionless the first permission list last year in Palm Beach the mayor of Palm Beach came to us he actually came to the conference the third day and he heard that we were moving to Austin the next year and he said we're building a new hotel we will like we want to incorporate you guys into this hotel somehow like I think it was like we'll give you upside in the hotel or

something like that if you just stay and Host this thing in Palm Beach again and I mean we couldn't do it because we grew at we outgrew the city um we outgrew the size of the city it was too small of a city for us but it was crazy like we had local news at the you know at the event yeah um it was nuts so oh wow how many people are gone this year um we'll have somewhere between like almost like I don't know third like a couple thousand like probably 35 for I I bet I bet like who comes on site to permissionless like walks through the booth hall probably 3 500 of them how many people come down to Austin probably

like six thousand or seven thousand sixty five six thousand yeah I mean that's that's good yeah um excellent yeah okay so we're excited man we're excited so this week yeah oh by the way we're still on the fence yeah this week if people are still in the fence for permissionless there's a Code Yano 50 that marketing gave me it works for the next 48 hours so if you're listening to this you're on the fence uh you can sign up for you know 50. I think I'm assuming it gets you 50 off so you know 50. um this week here's what I'm thinking so maker so roon had this interesting post about kind of moving maker not to Solana but on kind of this

Fork of Solana so I think we should talk about that um yeah metamask introduced the cell feature like not that interesting but kind of just funny um and and nine percent fees yeah future baby um Visa uh this was cool like Visa stable coin settlement expanding to Solana um we could talk about that and then there's also like Lido Lido's actually so light has obviously been dominating on ethereum but kind of struggling on Solana we could go there and then there's this Fund in Nima Capital um you know kind of their firm website went offline the account on Twitter got locked and they kind of it looked like they kind of renegged on this uh synapse uh synapse like agreement that they had

so we could talk about that but you want to start with maker stuff yeah let's do it I know you're super close so lead the way sir I'm actually looking now but did I tell you my maker story aren't you well I knew you were a delegate or you were supposed to be a delegate so I was I was a delegate I am a delegate I was a delegate I am a delegate and I was a I I had been get I had been getting every weekend like get more and more delegated tokens basically it was becoming one of the bigger delegates to maker and at one point I voted against the there was this proposal like maybe four or five months ago where I vote where they wanted to pay a bunch of people a ridiculous amount and I actually have a pretty good insight into

like how much to pay employees I'd say like how much to pay people because you know we employ 65 people and we've hired and a bunch of people over you know we've probably employed it I don't know roughly like 100 people over the last couple of years prep pretty good insight into you know Fair compensation I'd say and maker was like just exorbitantly overpaying these people and everyone had voted yes on this and I took a kind of hard stance and voted no and it was kind of like hey you're supposed to vote Yes on this you're not allowed to vote no and the next week I woke up pulled up my maker portal all of my delegated tokens were gone so I voted the wrong way uh let's dive a

little bit more into that actually what was the what was the compensation relative to like a senior engineer makes a web 2 company I think they were paying a BD I got I'm gonna botch these exact numbers and who it was because it was maybe I don't know four or five or six months ago or something but I think they were paying a BD person I don't know like three three or four hundredk bass and then Commission on top of that uh they were paying Engineers like half a million that's in in you in stable coins like die or or make or or a mix of stable coins and tokens that's in Stables it's a lot

yeah for for a media role yeah yeah it's a lot I mean BD like sales people are oftentimes the highest paid people at companies but they're but yeah yeah yeah you eat with your kill not you know when you get paid 400k like the incentive to really go out and Hunt is uh not much yeah so I don't know I I was very into maker I was following maker super closely was like really into everything that was going on um and then this happened and I just got kind of discouraged not only by maker but like I don't know like it it made me a little more bearish on just governance because at the end of the day like you'd I don't know it's supposed to be this fair and open system and you you vote

against how the power people want you to vote and I don't know yeah so yeah you know I've I've experienced that actually um well I was a big part of the involved in the Wi-Fi proposal to actually mint 333 Wi-Fi which is there's a hard cap on Wi-Fi ten thousand there's this whole Bitcoin analogy Meme and whatnot but you know all that was farmed away very quickly and and that was a big fault of the protocol so I'm a big believer in incentivizing people and giving employees a contribute upside but I do think that there is a worth and revising in a lot of these Downs there is not a lot of really good transparency

a on Treasury funds uh the people that are voting this is the turnout's really low people not paying attention to stuff to the degree where there's been protocols that have actually rugged because they may come proposal no one is looking no one's noticing and then they just kind of like you know distribute funds in a way that I think if you were to ask people if they were aware of that they'd say most definitely not and if you were to ask them they would have voted to approve that they would say yeah most definitely not and so it's sort of like this this weird and I agree with you it is crypto in many ways sometimes can be advocating for transparency advocating for inclusion you know and and yes it is open source but in in other ways it's a

contradiction because it can be very clicky and not transparent in in many ways and and then sometimes in the things that matter most right and getting the incentives right um and I think Dao's have been largely a failure uh primarily because people don't recognize the that humans don't like in any democracy like people just don't really show up and vote like they don't really pay much attention yes they have skin in the game and you would think theoretically that they would be paying more attention and on the margin they are but um sometimes a token distribution is very skewed right and makers struggle with this quite a bit actually like there was

very strong contributors and that I remember in the Maker Camp and the maker uh forum and Discord that didn't have many much tokens weren't compensation we're putting out very interesting proposals uh and then you had a lot of the a16gs that held a a large share of the tokens and were not voting we're not delegating and so it was like very hard to pass proposals and that was always I struggled with maker and I'm singling out maker I think this is also something that happens in other protocols but uh yeah I mean even in even in uh I guess we shouldn't say the name but

there's another doubt that you and I are both in I don't know if you've been checking Telegram and like these messages but like yeah that was definitely struggling right now you know there's like yeah so I think a lot of folks are struggling definitely um so here's what happened with maker so maker um so roon launched this basically five phase end game back in back in May so phase one was kind of the beta launch right first phase of end game would be establishing this new unified brand with its own stable coin and governance token separate from die and maker uh mkr phase two is the subdial launch so following the beta launch they're gonna create six maker sub-dos each one with its own governance token and the sub Dows are designed to function independently for maker but are tied to the protocol

through its Mission as roon would say um phase three which is where it kind of gets a little wonky was uh the the governance AI tools if you remember that so they wanted to or they want to still want to design tools using AI for governance and that's the third phase of makerd House end game phase four governance participation incentive launch so the launch of what was it called Sagittarius lock stake engine SLE I think um where you know you had this engine that was designed to ensure that the token holders of the new governance token would be actively incentivized to participate in governance and then phase five is this is the important thing because this will tie into the news is uh launching a rebranded new chain it was you know like capitalize and

capitalize chain new chain that would be the final stage of the end game um and uh the the new chain is designed kind of to be the The Hub of all the tools operating maker Dow and now that's like this super important probably the most important phase of phase five so this past week a couple days ago roon made this post uh titled explore a fork of the Solana code base for new chain where he says the fifth and Final Phase of end game is the complete re-implementation of the entire maker protocol built natively on a new Standalone blockchain codename new chain um the fifth phase is a major long-term project it'll take at least three years if not longer before it's realized

um et cetera et cetera some more things and then he goes on the important thing is Solana obviously says Salon is the most promising code base after being after having researched all the different options available to act as the foundation for new chain I believe that the Solana stack is the most promising code base to explore further he lists out three reasons for that I can basically summarize them as first is that there's this highly optimized Salon is highly optimized for the purpose of operating a singular highly efficient blockchain second is that uh Salon ecosystem has proven to be really resilient post FTX and the third is that there already exists examples of the Solana code base being forked and adapted tax is a snap chain so

um I have a lot of thoughts on this but would love to hear your ideas around good idea bad idea don't really know yet like what are your thoughts around this particularly on maker going to Salon or explain this for me anything related anything related to this news and maybe if there's any context and backstory to make her that like would be helpful to tee up here too well I the thing that I've been paying this amount of attention is the reaction of room just exploring going to another chain and I think look uh a lot of you got a lot of criticism and I I don't think it's um I'm more of the mind that you should be

exploring I think any D5 founder that is deployed in ethereum should be exploring constantly like you're never in a binary that you should constantly be exploring other change right there's like there's no benefit in being super loyal to just one particular chain you might have preferences I get it I understand that ultimately I think you care most about providing the most amount of benefit and having an edge versus other protocols like Antonio from dydx right he got a inordinate amount of criticism when he did that I think he was one of the person it was a big splash you know uh and he's one of those that I actually respect and have respected more because he's vocal extremely vocal on a number of things and

I think that's a Hallmark of good Founders candidly um going back to just the general stuff I've been of the mind that and I've been vocal about it which is there's not enough there's not enough um critique within the ethereum community you know we there's certainly a lot of critique outside of things in other experiments are happening outside and that's that's the sort of accident that that can't that in my mind just led me away from Bitcoin this unwillingness to entertain other points of view and other design you know choices and whatnot I think ethereum is is not on that I think theorem generally is what has made Ethan greatest this idea of experimentation um and willingness to adapt because you

don't have it it's so early you don't to assume that we've got it nailed you know perfectly designed is unrealistic right um but uh but I did see some some pretty heavy criticism towards roon from from a number of D5 Founders and other folks saying hey look this is a betrayal you know you owe a lot to ethereum and I get it but still um you know I think um perhaps the the broader question is are we going to see more protocols do that now compound people forget but compound put out a white paper or four that was it two years ago saying that they're gonna explore polka dot pair of chains kind of didn't I I don't know if it's I don't think it's gone anywhere or

haven't heard much they didn't like them they didn't like polka dot but I do wonder if the world I do wonder if it would be different if they you know explored Cosmos for example instead of Pokemon right what is interesting though is uh I have been noticing a sentiment shift in Solana particularly more interest much more optimism and uh you know I think you know the pendulum is Howard marks like to say the pendulum strings to extreme right of sentiment but the reality the the reality the economic reality is that things never gravitate to such extremes and I think Solano is one prime example where people totally given out given giving it up right they're highly highly critical think Salon is dead look at all the projects that are leaving uh surprises are coming back some products actually

looking at the merits and exploring hey but there's actually pretty interesting there's there's some good stuff happening here so it's good to see that you know I I take it as a very positive towards the end game and often like we had people should refer to the episode of Rune coming on and he explained this in like an hour and a half I still don't understand it you know it's highly confusing maker is one of those protocols that is it is hard to um to fully understand and I'm not close enough to it to Alpine on these things other than the fact that I take it as a positive that he's exploring Solana and maybe he's full of Cosmos and something else Aptos well all of them you know is my point yeah um all right I have two questions for

you why do you think they like why do you think they're not exploring why aren't they just building smart contracts on Solana do you think like why do why do they need their own chain that's a good question I do not know maybe they want to own like my immediate reaction is we we've talked about like the distorted like vertical integration if you can build your own L1 why not you have more design trade like choice you owned like you know if you can do that then then it's worth exploring perhaps now the question is always how do you bootstrap a validator set how do you you know it's a bit of a go to market right like building your own we also talk

about like building your own L2 right there's an explosion of l2s why would you do that well yeah you get some benefit of controlling the supply and the sequencer maybe and there's some economic upside certainly a lot of economic Upstate we do it right but it's a it's a challenge right to bootstrap it right to get a validator set to recruit you know economic hardness Economic Security um or you know if you're a proof of work protocol uh to say you know even more hard even harder uh but uh yeah I don't know I mean I I I I do not know yeah it makes me think so roon is so focused on governance if you read his endgame a couple times it's like very very always brings up governance and it it does make me think that the because it's a pain in

the ass to build your own L1 right it's it's like you don't do it if you don't need to do it and it makes me think that I think governance is probably a play here right if you the best way for to do govern the best way to do governance and defy right now is coin weighted voting and that's a [ __ ] way to do governance um but if you actually look at l1s they have a different way to do governance you can just Fork the chain even even if you have zero State you can always detract it's like am I great right if you don't like your country you can go to somewhere else yeah but you have to go build that Island which is a challenge um and yeah I I don't I mean you could have I mean the thing that I don't understand

yeah he's so focused on governance but what can't you have if you're built on top of Solana you can build a layer of governance right at the operator uh yeah but it'd be coin yeah it'd be very like it'd just be the same like coin weighted voting uh you could probably implement a different schema so maybe he doesn't like the validators like group and that he just doesn't think it's especially like uh I don't know I really don't know I'm not sure but I actually I mean it sounds like there are other folks who've done this but it's cool to see this new iteration like this is an svm app chain right TBD on if it gets passed or not I don't know if you listen to Mike yeah went on Bank list and had this really good episode I hate to you know

promote Bank list on a blockworks pod here but I got to give him credit is a really good episode yeah and um he basically talked about how like the lines between different blockchains are blurring in real time right and I think one thing that you start to see at the depths of a bear Market is like ideologies about where you should build like that all gets wiped away because you know what matters getting users keeping your costs low and scaling and uh look security you don't value security then go then don't even consider a blockchain this is just a database let's just stick to web too um and so go to the most secure chain if you don't think there's a secure chain

and you think you can build a more secure chain okay go for it I do think that security is pretty like there's a this idea of Lindy effect the thing you can never be fully certain that things are 100 you know secure you just have the the longer something exists the more certainly you have that it's secure so Bitcoin is very secure um for that matter um and you click you know hash power ethereum is very battle tested so our you know Solano You could argue but less so than ethereum um so marginally more risk deploying there um but you can look at the Nakamoto coefficient you can look at the validator said how distributed decentralized the two different concepts right so there's a number of things you can kind of hone in on on on the

security of stuff which I believe is the most important thing but this this uh I I'm just standing in mind like governance is one of those things they go back to the opening statement here the podcast is the more and more I see stuff is it try to like Trust minimization of governance it should be the goal here like if you can get rid of governance like I just I'm still not convinced it's like chopping right you simplify stuff get rid of everything that if you can you know I think this is what makes like l1's beautiful because there's no like actual governance as you say you just you know detract and go somewhere else there's no like actual voting of of how the blocks can be ordered it would be total chaos

100 so um do you think this should happen or no like let me ask you a question this is very lore me I mean like you asking the question for my response does that mean that they're going to leave ethereum like there's gonna be a maker in theorem no right so kind of like the implementations that can be there like how do you like I actually don't know I actually don't know that I don't know I don't know so I I can't answer if that's the case you're trying to do that feels like a huge overhaul if it's more of like a cross chain deployment yeah feels like I don't see much risk or downside I should say risk I should say

I see limited downside more upside right you get more users you get more but and we've seen other protocols deploy another chains but I I don't know whether if the center of gravity is moving or splata what does that mean for ethereum does that mean that it just no longer exists like no no right because there's so many users in ethereum that want to use maker like if you're volunteer like you're not gonna I'm just really struggling to understand it I don't know because I haven't looked closely enough what is it at the end of the day as you said what does that mean for someone that has a ball to open a maker what is he gonna have to do if nothing really changes from that front then I I don't really care you know uh what happens on the back end yeah yeah

so it's funny you're starting to see this app chain thesis really play out but it's not happening on Cosmos right and that's like I don't know you gotta feel for the cosmos guys like they like that was that was the the app chain thesis was the cosmos thesis but it's and it's happening right it's really happening we had Jack and Zaki here one of the last questions I asked him is how do you feel about BD now you're not supposed to pay 400k for your beauty folks but how do you feel about BD because Cosmos I've always felt tender myth as a consensus engine for Cosmos is pretty battle tested but I think that they've all been on one of those protocols that super smart guys they've had some drama but Founders and whatnot and you know IBC was delayed and

whatnot nonetheless I think the tech is pretty cool um but I don't think they're Killers I don't think they're they're BD and I think they get their name out there and you need to have them I appreciate we're early and but the best tech doesn't always win and and I know there's really vocal folks out there some of the guys that work in blockworks we had on but it you you know you just don't compete right um yeah it's a number of things right and I it's again we might be revisiting and you know you know come back six months saying wow we're so wrong they wrote the cusp of this huge growth but it doesn't feel like it right

um you know I may remind listeners Libra at Facebook Fort Cosmos I mean tendermen use tendermen or were you gonna use it binance Merchant uses tender are you sure about so many other proof is that true yeah yeah we're gonna use Thundermans absolutely I didn't know that and then they started developing what ended up morphing into Aptos into a number of things right yeah but initially yeah it was a fourth version of tender uh so yeah I don't know I think I think it's uh I don't want to call it too early but they they need a BD overhaul uh they need to get more out there and and maybe part of the problem is the incentives

right they don't have enough tokens like as an organization to do all out or whatnot attract teams when you're competing in Zapdos or some of the other new L ones or even l2s like they have way more muscle right to convince people games nft projects and whatnot right yeah so yeah yeah it matters all right everyone I want to introduce you to Bumper a new D5 protocol that is here to redefine how you protect your crypto assets obviously Market volatility can be a big concern for us crypto holders bumper alleviates this by allowing you the user to lock your tokens into the protocol and set a price no matter how much the market fluctuates your investment in your token won't fall

below the predetermined value when you compare this to traditional options platforms bumper offers a non-custodial and actually cheaper on average alternative that protects the value of your crypto from market price drops if you are looking to earn a yield on your crypto bumper has you covered by depositing usdc into the bumper protocol you can earn a return which is derived from the premiums paid by protection buyers early adopters and Empire listeners have a chance to claim a part of the 250 000 early adopter bump rewards go check out bumper It's bumper.5 take a step towards smarter crypto doe Asset Risk Management hey everyone we'll get back to Empire in just a minute but before we do that I

want to let you know that we have permissionless coming up permissionless is Big conference that block works and Bank lists put on together it is the biggest the best defy conference in crypto this year it is in Austin Texas September 11th through 13th if you've been in crypto for a while you know that bear Market conferences are the best kind of conferences we have a phenomenal lineup of speakers a lot of the guests that you hear on Empire are both going to be speaking there you will have the opportunity to meet them there and a lot of the topics that we cover on Empire ZK attack roll ups account abstraction Mev app chain thesis a lot of that kind of stuff that will all be discussed at

permissionless this year so because you are a listener of Empire you get a special discount that's right Santi and I negotiated with our marketing team you get 30 off if you go to blockworks.com forward slash permissionless Empire 30 is going to get you 30 off your ticket today when I'm recording this that's about 300 off your ticket so type in Empire 30 when buying your permissionless ticket you get about 300 bucks off click the link at the bottom of this episode it's in the show notes do it quickly because prices go up all the time and if you are going to permissionless hit me up let me know shoot me a DM on Twitter I would love to meet up with you there foreign should we stick with uh Solana talk

about Visa sure yeah I think there's a great announcement that was when they really caught my eye yeah so Kai Sheffield who is uh just an awesome person but also head of crypto Visa uh big tweeted out this big announcement on Tuesday I'm just gonna read it we are excited to announce that Visa has expanded our stable coin settlement capabilities to Merchant acquires launching Pilots with World pay nouvet the important part here utilizing the salon of blockchain and he goes on to explain it when a consumer uses a Visa card to make a purchase at a merchant they experience the convenience of instant payment authorizations what they don't see is that the value for their purchase needs to move between their Bank the issuer and the Merchant Bank the acquirer Visas Treasury and

settlement systems enable the clearing settlement and movement of billions of dollars a day making sure the preferred currency is received in the correct amount from the issuer and sent to the acquirer in 2021 Visa began testing how we could use usdc inside our treasury operations leading to a live pilot where we now accept settlement payments for crypto.com's credit card in Australia over the ethereum blockchain Visa managed Circle accounts goes on to kind of explain that pilot and now he gets into Visa can now set all these payments to World pay and usdc enabling World pay to more flexibly manage their own treasury infrastructure and Route the usdc directly to their Merchants with less worry about wire cutoff times and bank holidays super cool it's still early

days but Visa has already settled millions of dollars of usdc over both the ethereum and salon and blockchains between our clients we're committed et cetera et cetera et cetera so really cool announcement from Visa I'm very excited about this and very interesting that they chose there's like two stories here right there's awesome to see Visa the largest one of the largest payment networks in the world the largest um the largest yeah yeah and uh like just pushing forward with like on-chain stuff and then uh also very interesting that they chose Solana absolutely I mean I'll just comment like yep there is so many parallels when Visa started like there were so many Skeptics of how

you could use not traveler checks not cash and use this thing a plastic thing could be used to like pay for stuff and you didn't have to carry these travel checks when you travel and what like that's the thing in the past and these are really pioneered that um there's a great there's a great ad on the newspaper like ninth Circa 19 I don't know 60s or whatever black and white so it's like this thing Visa like revolutionary and so many people are critical and you could you see the same you know level of skepticism around stable coins but we were talking about this uh I think in a prior episode of the coinbase one right away the coinbase ventures kind of ideas right which is what guys are right like the amount of

fees that happen behind the scenes to enable you to swipe your card anywhere in the world it accepts Visa and it's part of these Network is is a like is is pretty large there's an interchange fee there's settlement times that are harder Merchants don't get money in time we're talking about the the attack like the instant settlement of these things is huge it benefits Visa because it you know they can earn some fees elsewhere I believe like y'all we'll get that in a second uh but it certainly benefits Merchants I think because they get instant settlement and you know they can have those funds you know working capital uh it benefits the consumer um I think as well these are probably benefits because it's like there's no

like fraud there's no reversal of these transactions they probably cut a whole host of operations in the back end that are people that are checking the stuff to enable you know the you know the accountants that are making sure that everything is balancing out right that doesn't happen we have like a smart contract that you know verifies movement of funds in an instant manner um and so it's pretty awesome to see you know this is this is uh one of those where a lot of people that are skeptical of show me you know it's really just a bunch of like you know people that are speculating gambling and or like crypto punks that are really interested in this technology I'm like no no no from my vantage point banks are really excited and interested in deploying this technology for real Visa as well like

they because there's a meaningful cost save on the back end and and that is enough to like get people really interested in this you know you've seen the likes of Santa there and a few other Banks like explore you know Bond issuance and settlement or just the record keeping itself on an open distributed Ledger like it makes it's so obvious right that this needs to happen like that you can measure risk easier you can understand like the the composition of the of the ownership of these instruments and the trading of these instruments can happen faster there's no sediment t plus three or two or 30 or whatever and that has a whole cost saving benefit to that so look it is very impressive that Visa is the largest is exploring this and that tells you everything you

need to know about where stablecoons are going I mean it's just unequivocally going to be how e-commerce is going to be run full stop May of 2020. you remember Paul Tudor Jones called Bitcoin the fastest horse in the race and what that did is it unlocked institutional capital and the reason it unlocked institutional capital is not because you know obviously some people you know said Paul Taylor Jones is doing it we should do it too that's one of the reasons but the real reason is it took away the career risk for portfolio managers to allocate to bitcoin previously if they thought Bitcoin was a good idea to allocate to they wouldn't bring it up because of the career risk but now you can't get fired for allocating to bitcoin because folks like Paul Tudor Jones do it this moment

is huge for the stable coins I think it's a similar type of moment for stable coins it is a massive validation right not every Merchant wants to accept usdc and let's say you're the head of infrastructure for a huge Merchant and you you you say uscc before this I mean that's that's career risk in the same way but every Merchant wants instant settlement and now that Visa has has brought this up right lower cost lower risk cross-border U.S dollar delivery to merchants this is a huge unlocking across the industry what's most exciting here Jason is on the investing standpoint you have to go

to committee to convince your pm to allocate the assessor Clause when Visa rolls us out as a feature and gives you all the benefits it's a click of a button like it's a turning on kind of feature or might even just be enabled and this is what I tell people you know a lot of people ask me hey how do you see this technology evolving I'm like look most people don't really care or know how technology works in the back end not the internet don't even go further they don't even can't even draw a bike yeah you don't even know how an airplane I don't care about these things the apps that you have on your phone probably not going to change yeah um and most people might even not even know they're going to be using crypto rails but they're going to get a loan

faster their rate's going to be lower they're going to be approved much faster they won't have to fill forms over and over again all this Jazz right uh where you're a merchant you know the reason why most people don't accept when you go a merchand they declined your American Express is because American Express charges in more fee and so I think it's um it's one of those things where people just might go in and more you you could see American Express get into the game right very quickly Visa go serious here because they're going to be you know they're going to feel a disadvantage and so MasterCard and so on and so forth and that really you know goes the stable coin the percentage of stable coins I don't like the the sheer are going to

State one transactions like just goes up orders of magnitude but also the percentage that is on payments encompasses a much larger share which is diminished diminished right now yeah right uh and so that's really really exciting you know I think if you were to survey thousands of businesses you would tell them hey what if I told you that you could get your money not t plus something that is heavily negotiated if you're a small business versus medium versus large right and it's really a smaller medium they get crushed um they get their money not in three days they get their money in 20 days if they if you compress that like it is the probably the one of the biggest pain points of merchants is how quickly they get the money yeah and and so even particularly in e-commerce the the

number of transactions that get um uh rejected like false positives is fairly High right and and it's billions of dollars that get lost in in subscriptions that we had renewed because they're swiping credit cards don't work anymore that doesn't happen with stable coins and that's that's huge so um but I do think that it takes uh you know payments is what has been those categories that people get really excited when you first learn about crypto right but it doesn't happen because people don't like to spend their Bitcoin it's a volatile asset but a stablecoin is not and I think it's due for a huge huge Renaissance here of of uh payments as the largest category in crypto in the immediate terms yeah it's

funny so I found a shirt from the Bitcoin event uh Bitcoin conference 2013. and and the subtitle the conference was uh revolutionizing the revolutionizing the payments industry or something I'll find it I'll send it to you or maybe I'll post on Twitter or something yeah um yeah but I think it's one of those things you think think about the second order effects of this right you start with payments and then people could become conditioned to then investing and then and then gaming right but when you're transacting so easily in digital currency like it just becomes so habitual like every every day every day like you're disabled you're used to seeing uscc or whatever flavor packages whatever flavor of coin you have

um and it's gonna be a thing and and and and people get very quickly will adapt to this new normal um and and at that point I think it solves so many things so many issues right where people have been so critical of this industry we had to Rebecca and the regulatory plot talk about hey the biggest problem right now is most people just think that they don't take this industry seriously because they don't see a really good use case it's super small it doesn't compute uh it's all you know 24 7 365 casino but the reality is no and this is I think going to be the thing that that people wake up to and say I get it because you feel it and it's real and as a catalyst I think and as a narrative I think would be the most important thing and I'm so glad guys I

mean guys probably been one of those industry guys that has been around forever right uh and he's been he's been doing Gotham work in Visa uh you know there's been so much turnover in cycles of folks at different organizations that you know when crypto's popular they hire a bunch of a team and then they they come out with a bunch of announcements they don't amount to much um but guy's been at it for for such a long time and I think he it's super super impressive that uh on an organization is big and serious as Visa is truly doing good work and getting serious about utilizing this technology perhaps the second organization that I can think of to round up this thing is is lvmh as a as a luxury conglomerate appreciating the

benefits that that um this whole new generation and category like nfts enabled so two different two different big narratives and I mentioned this because we always talk about narratives right and I think these two things are um are the biggest things that I'm seeing right now yeah yeah um let me zoom out from this a little bit and just talk about Solana for a second so we've got Visa building on Solana you've got roon and maker thinking about building you know their kind of app chain on the svm or Fork of the svm I guess that's what you'd call it what are your kind of updated thoughts around Solana here from from like an allocation perspective um well from an allocation perspective

like I haven't deployed new dollars I guess um but that's not to say but I I am curious and actively looking to invest in projects that are building in Solana I mean I have a portfolio that is built on top of Solana um but um but yeah I mean I've been close with the the team Salon you know we've had been on uh we've had totally um and so they're they're super active on Twitter too and so I have good conversations and you know I could just tell that I like to see if they're active and you know actually like they are I respect them so much because I think they're the team the number one team out there that really Embraces criticism

and uses that to their advantage and and I I the god they encounters they've really gone through fire right and and it's been hardened and you know it's good to see vitalik and some other folks in the ethereum camp say hey look when FDX kind of went down they said hey this is kind of the Dow hack moment of this community and I think they're gonna hopefully come out stronger and I think you're seeing that now uh are they out of the woodwork you know I don't think any Community really is right if bear Market is always that's kind of conviction but um I'm I'm increasingly super positive on it and and I think I really like I really like how they've taken criticism and implemented upgrades like on the fee model Dynamic fee model for

instance makes total sense and I always Point people to that and saying tell me how that from being highly criticized to implementation and deployment like that that whole kind of uh loop was really nice to see and I think it really embodies the kind of thing that I like to see in teams that are building um so to cut it short my allocation I guess is is has gone up on a percentage basis because Solana is rallied right it went down away eight and then it's now what's sitting at what forget now 20-ish 19 maybe 20-ish yeah 20ish low 20s um so so that has increased the

percentage but I have deployed new dollars anyone listening out there you know build thinking of building on Solana or not just Solana but you know if that's your home then reach out because I'd love to sometimes you know what always happens here you say reach out you know what people do they reach out to me and they say oh really [Laughter] have you have you uh what's your what's your kind of allocation stance on it well the the meme would be like where are you finding any money man like you know

there's there's nothing no one else no one has money to deploy man where where are you finding these things out of the couch or the mattress like what oh your grandma like I was gonna give you some like you know spare change um because I heard a terrible stat on Venture just wants like the deployment in in crypto is not only not only crypto just as a whole like yes I mean that's a whole Topic in and of itself but it is uh it is it is tough out there you know a lot of Founders are really struggling to get funding um and uh it's always like this but you know it's it's real now when interest rates are gonna persist and stick at

five percent for a long time yeah and you know yeah it's tough and nlps are not getting distributions from you know all data vintage funds like yeah it's it's tough um even the best teams even the best projects uh not just in Solana are really struggling to uh put two and two and and and and you know raise small rounds I'm not talking five million I'm talking two million rounds now and that even that is is three million rounds is it's top even for the best Founders even for the best team so there's there's a very uh I think there's I don't know there's a very cautious Outlook and really people are just

hunkering down and saying look I don't know how things are going to shape out there's an election there's so much uncertainty and not a lot of deployment happening yeah yeah I'm too shampoo plug yeah let me ask you about pneumo Capital so it's less about Nima here what I'm wondering is more just about like well let me let me let me share the story so Nima capitals uh this single family office with a bunch of private and public Equity investing platforms they have a mandate to invest across a bunch of different things we've actually known them for many many years we block Works used to have a fun story we used to host family office dinners in New York that's like an unsung or an

untold story of block works is one of the the first real way that we figured out what sponsorships were where we had this big family office Network that we would build by like cold emailing and cold calling people and then we'd bring the family offices there and then companies like a bit go or uh do you remember Harbor they did like tokenizing real estate they would spend like 25k to like sponsor the dinner anyways Capital would come to those dinners so they got a grant uh from sin they got a sin Grant synapse from this from the Dow via the foundation um to to basically like build this new liquidity model I think it was uh to like increase code efficiency by you know 20 30 40 50 percent

um uh the in uh they received this grant in return for locking 40 million dollars of liquidity of sin so they were this long-term Capital Partner of the Dow but what happened I'm just pulling up my notes Here is they did not keep it locked um they allegedly sold more than nine million synapse tokens um and synapse Labs just posted on Twitter they acknowledge the sale and the liquidity removal in a post um saying that they're just investigating unusual activity on their wallets uh they didn't disclose the liquidity provider but I think it's become pretty clear things were done from a wallet I control exactly exactly okay guys

so anyway since so since then Nima capitals website has gone offline and they did not immediately respond to a request for comment um oh and their their account on X is locked so um yikes I would guess one of two things here not to spread fud but like I would assume so I've heard going around that there's if a fund is so maybe you can explain this to me if a fund has been around for five years you have to go through all these you have to jump you have to like file all these things maybe with the SEC or something and a lot of funds the like 20 the funds who are started in 2017 2018 they're now at their five-year Mark and when when they come to investigate you or just like look into your I truly

don't understand how this works so you can educate me like erase your investment advisor yeah something yeah once you hit a certain age I think it's more of an AUM thing less so of a like vintage but I may be wrong uh yeah but it's a pretty uh big overhaul to convert to a registered investment advisor um and and what you're saying is that they somehow wanted to avoid that I don't know either they're getting like look either they're getting looked at or they're or they just ran out or they messed up a bunch of trades in there you always get you you always get looked at not just crypto funds hedge funds you know yeah yeah do periodic inspections

you know if you if you have if you're managing outside people outside money especially if the bar is higher and they're going to be you know big inspection oh you know the other things the Wall Street Journal reported last month that a condo linked to Nima Capital was sold for 80 million bucks so actually I don't think this is probably not like some investigation it's probably just they have a huge liquidity crunch but maybe I mean probably I don't know I don't know enough or anything actually but it does beg the question of um how are these deals even being structured I mean what a handshake lockup well you could like uh there's I think all the smart contract that you know it really

enforces this without trust yeah you know like you know you this is the thing also with the Curve sales right I mean were those actually in smart contract or were they just like verbal agreements like you know we we this is again this is what I struggle with this industry man like there are ways to deploy things that minimize trust that avoid situations where trust is breached you can do that in a cost-effective manner and by the way it is so you can deploy smart contracts fairly easy standard why not do it like like what is the the the the the the

benefit of not doing that at this point and you know time time again we just learned that this happens right so anyways uh just a healthy reminder right if you're doing a some sort of transaction involves investing in lockup just do it like it's on chain like there's no ambiguity there's there's no risk like what am I missing what is this uh what is yeah what is the kickback for for basically breaking lock-up rules is it basically just reputation risk I mean like I don't know like the contract uh you have to look at the contract yeah but to reach a contract I'm not an expert in tort law but you just breached a contract and you can argue with a whole bunch of things like you okay like University you can

argue damages right I mean like if they all of a sudden like hold uh two three five percent of the log and they sell like the program will probably go back and say hey wait a minute like you sold that had a material impact on the price not only that but the signaling right because people can track your wallet it's like what's going on like you know all kinds of things right there was there was a good post from I believe it was Ari Paul a while back that talked about these things were like um the supplies lock but there's like Mark like OTC deaths that are allowing you to like trade that like there's a whole he really doesn't expose a uh some of the inner dealings of these transactions and

all surfaces but already Paul's great job people should go look at his tweet he's just a way better job of like really just exposing like hey sometimes like you gotta look at this stuff and a lot of it was going on in FDX is like Al meet and FTX and like they would like so anyways like it happens right and again you know it's one of those things where the industry Advocates transparency from first like your blockchains are transparent this industry is open source and then so many other things like I'm not making broad characterization because I think this happens everywhere right like to not even go into finance and how obscure these things are and like Globe financial crisis you know I don't even go there but we're talking about crypto and we always want to be super critical about

crypto because we can do better and we could sell police and we could like push people to do the right thing and it's one of those where you know you you could just structure things in a with a smart contract that's why you gotta log smart contracts and you just that's it people can whatever you're doing you can look at what's happening not just send your tokens to a market maker and pray to God that they're not sending it to an exchange just to cleanse wallets and you know being like come on like we know at this point if you haven't learned a lesson it's like yeah fool me once you know shame on you feel me twice became yeah me

um yeah because you know I uh so anyways it will be interesting to see what happens more more so I really love to understand what was the what was the intuition uh from the syn team who who voted on that proposal who decided on that how is that structured these are all kind of open questions that I have yeah anything else you would say no I think the last thing I think the last thing from this week was um you know now that there's excitement around this Bitcoin ETF the spot ether ETF oh yeah it's kind of gone off right there's this bid with uh I think it was Arc invest and 21 shares so yeah and 21 shares I think used to be a moon Honey's

thing Honey's awesome um and uh yeah and Kathy would you know Ark and best um they've obviously been Futures eth ETF filings I'm not sure if there have been spot ETF filings before um you know where they hold ether directly but this is it's cool to see definitely uh so what do you think how does this play out Bitcoin ETF gets proved First Imagine yeah imagine imagine I've never seen you smile so what I was just I was just meeting on the timeline and like be like just just see all the laser eyes be like whoa whoa what's going on you know like what happens

what happened to the remaining laser eyes and I know I will remind folks I'll remind folks that Jason's claim to fame said he convinced Tom Brady or he gave Tom Brady his laser eyes and he sent him a picture on Twitter and he post allegedly he changed his profile picture to I'm not objecting the fact that he did change his profile I think we all saw it all right another real story behind that that that uh I think you've said the real story before but you somehow failed to disclose your things so let's hear it got changed so I tweeted it like I

think he tweeted like a exploring Bitcoin or something because he had this deal with FTX and he's starting to tweet about crypto more and so I was like you what I just tweeted him like you won't change your eyes to laser eyes or something this is like hide in the market yeah 2021 I challenged him and actually made the photo for him so I made the I made his laser eyes for him and I tweeted it and it was like this yeah and uh and he and he changed it and I was losing my mind you know I'm a Boston sports fan Patriots fan girl oh you're a Pages Center God folks I'm leaving Empire Red Sox Celtics Patriots losing my mind I didn't do my proper daily uh someone who went to school in Boston God Jason how did I not where'd you go to school

be you but yeah I like bu anyways I get it I get a text from a friend a couple so I'm telling my whole family Tom Brady I'm getting text anyways a couple days later I get this uh I get this text from from a college friend I haven't I haven't talked to her and I haven't talked to her in years and uh she's also Boston sports fan turns out she was running the uh she was working she was working at like I don't know WME at the time or something I forget or Endeavor and she was running the social for Tom Brady at the time so she knew you and you hooked it up so it was confirmed all right all right folks we'll give Jason credit here not allegedly that is

as close as we get to the truth here anyways there's your there's your there's your social Alpha all right man I'll see you next week huh yeah yeah hopefully uh probably everyone's own progress but yeah it should be smooth sailing and really excited to go out there actually it's like 50 50 make it you see United United Central database shut down earlier this week and they halted all flights oh yeah yeah yeah and there was also an issue in the in in the UK and anyways I I buffered in a few days so I'll be out there if you are you know you know come out I'm gonna be speaking there about D5 uh Kyle and a few other folks I think

Kramer child are you on that panel ciao yeah about just Define general which oh actually before we go I just need to tell folks metamask the nine percent really took me off really really took me off because that's not something we're working towards I know the convenience but charging folks nine percent launched a cell feature yes yes where you can sell not into usdc but you can sell directly into PayPal or or uh or your bank account apparently it's almost immediate right like you you sell a token and they'll send you your funds to your PayPal account whatever but they charge you nine percent which is that true they charge nine percent did you test it because I don't know if that's I didn't test it I just saw someone I mean I saw this guy tweet about it if it's true or not I don't

know maybe I should be checking but you know it was I I I I had a very visceral reaction to to that nine percent look I get it it's is it all metamask fault no because they have to jump through hoops and it's a big part of the problem right that you're going through these traditional rails and messing both crypto and traditional rails how's the cost coinbase charges a lot of fees too there's a cost associated but boy nine percent it's not how we're gonna scale this industry this is not and there needs to be better solution so after that after that tweet a bunch of teams beamed a few others like reach or you know I'm being introduced to a few teams to try to solve this kind of pain point right this bottleneck where crypto meets uh traditional rails but hopefully

you can figure that out right so um yeah cool man good pod all right yeah we'll see you sir great great chatting as always thanks everyone for listening and uh we'll be next pod if you're not going to permissionless things are going to be at some point being made available and right the panels the videos on YouTube don't don't tell people that I want people to buy it yeah they want no they want to it will be available but I don't think like if not I'll take my camera yeah and then um those pirated films right there yeah you would have a guy like this yeah I'm gonna be that dude I'll be that dude

no no but we'll uh we'll be reporting so we're gonna come out some good content uh yeah I don't know what's going on there and and so yeah stay tuned for that cool cheers [Music] foreign [Music]