Panel: Investing in Defi

Transcript

okay good morning good day survivors this is Sunday after all week long of conferences and today we have Workshop dedicated to fundraising in defi we will share some practical tips hopefully guys Builders it will be helpful for you let's start I'm Anna I'm head of BD at Co Telegraph accelerator and upcoming venture I'm looking for the startups I'm in the relationship with the developers and uh investors so guys briefly introduce yourself which company you're working for and why we have to listen for you for another 25 minutes go first my name is Dave Rodman I'm the managing partner of the Rodman

Law Group uh been practicing in web 3 since 2016 uh you should listen to me because one many of my clients have gotten successful funding and been had super successful launches and two I'll keep you out of jail my name is Alex I'm the co-founder and CEO of gains which is one of the first Dow VC and launchpads in the space we have deployed 35 million over six years we were early into Avalanche hash graph Quant blottopia which is a thousand X and many many other projects in the space and I've seen literally a thousand X my name is Michael Robinson I'm the chairman of ort Foundation ort is one of our portfolio companies

I'm also the co-founder partner at Avis leer and early stage web 3bc I've been in Bitcoin since 2015 I'm an macr Trends researcher and that's my superow thank you let's start with a general question defi how do you evaluate the key role and interest to this vertical in the whole field of Investments how sexy is the five investors I mean I personally think that defi is the sexiest thing that you can invest in I think it's the coolest part of our industry it's the thing that keeps me interested defi summer was one

of the most fun times in web 3 for me personally and professionally so I think the answer is very thank you I mean same defi is crypto right so for me probably half of the projects we invest in are NY and can you let specify it's interesting yes B2B b2c staking reaking wallets what exactly actually a bit more b2c I would say I mean B2B D5 is always a bit weird you know because it's like permission chains and uh you know it feels a bit more different uh there's people who talk to PWC and and all these big guys and they have good traction but uh maybe

because I come from you know 2017 and so on um I'm more sensitive to b2c def5 projects well I'm a bit of a contrarian I'm gonna say P2P right um major believer in Bitcoin and what it's done for the monetary you know system as far as Revolution so I'm a big believer in people and a currency for the people and access democra democratized access to uh you know just Finance in general so that's one of the reasons why I got into Bitcoin and I'm a bit disturbed by all the funds that's coming into the space

because it's taking us further away from the ideology of Bitcoin so building defi around the principles of Bitcoin love it and I I that's all I'm going to say for me perfect uh let's narrow down our questions it's not Financial advice but or legal advice or legal advice but what is the most opportunistic chain where do you see new unicorns will come we can see the sunrise of BTC layers taking reaking we can see salana fights with ethereum but where do you expect new unicorns in

defi I'm going to say you can say you can name chains you can can name vertical like account obstruction as a told you whatever I'm going to say base I mean I do believe con Bay is going to put to 150 million users on chain very soon and that's going to be very powerful what about t they just announce this ecosystem Innovations yeah very true as well um telegram for sure as well I'm going to say Bitcoin so I'm not sure if everyone's been following what's going on with the ordinals and um just yesterday we had a having event uh take a look at the runes and run Stones um I was uh early what uh inscriber so I was

eard dropped run Stones um which are trading pretty well at the moment the reason why I'm going Bitcoin is because it has the deepest liquidity it's been endorsed by uh Wall Street finally and I do see a lot of opportunities coming down the pike with this new token standard I believe Bitcoin is finally following in the footsteps of a mature eth uh or ethereum specifically so a lot of opportunity will be coming down the pike and I'm very bullish on what's being built there so sir do you have a new recent investment can you specify some names for us uh yes so I really like uh track track. network uh Benny the dev very active the ecosystem being

built out like uh um excessively a lot of the leading like Blue Chip ordinals uh have attached themselves to track and track is finally building defi on bitcoin um they are one of the leading decentralized indexers in the space and if you own track you're going to get eardrop tap and tap is going to be for the D5 protocol on layer one big Point thank you sorry no it's okay uh so my salon of clients would call and eth Maxi and have a lot of salana clients and I think that most of my net worth is in Bitcoin so I would honestly say and I represent the founder of near so I I I would say I'm pretty chaining Gnostic I

think that we're still I know it's very tra to say it I think we're still very early do I think that there's a new L1 coming out that's going to be the new unicorn or not probably not but maybe so I I think honestly I I don't have a I'm not I'm totally chain agnostic but apparently I'm also an eth maxi according to to people so we'll go with that not bad yeah thank you uh let's say you track so many decks so many new projects what is the key factors would make you say Shut Up And Take My Money that's a great question it's a combination of many things right but I'll give you one I like Simplicity you

know so many times on calls Founders are boring too complicated and they use words like you know random Forest algorithms and like it's like okay tell me in simple words what do you do and on the website as well right for me if I go on the website and I like the feel of it it's very good so there's a lot that just comes from intuition and how simple it is I think the space has lots of technical people who have trouble making their hard things they do build simple for the end users and so I think Simplicity as an investment thesis has uh good

potential thank you couldn't agree anymore um what I do like is the intuitive Tech right um also hidden technology you don't notice that you're using it right because it's so simple I always um use the analogy of like the internet right like we just connect to the internet with our cell phones we the average person doesn't know how the internet works but that's been able to scale out adoption so uh Simplicity and Community if you've got a rich Community that's very active behind you I'm I'm automatically interested um hidden Tech huge bonus and um utility so I'll take I'll take the contrarian point this time

uh nothing nothing will tell with nothing anybody can say will cause me to say Shut Up And Take My Money it's a relationship thing it's uh understanding the team it's an in-depth you know it's a long-term relationship and that's that's how I would get comfortable if I can add by the way I'm really a fan of if you want to raise funds tomorrow start by making friends today so the relationship thing it's built on trust you know so many times you invest in people not really in ideas because you trust them you know how consistent they are how creative they can be so I 100% also uh we have to qualify the team as well right um their backgrounds to make sure that they're capable of uh

delivering on what they claim to be building so um yeah also um is it a necessity in the space right so yeah those are a couple things that I look for thank you I want to narrow down more and give us some examples we've seen the scale of aan seen scale of multiple wallets what exactly example you can give us of defi dat bb or BDC and what are the key success reasons why this project became successful usable scalable I would say uh uh the intuitive nature typically uh Simplicity as well

um take a look at Unis swap right um I used to use Fork Delta back in the days it was one of the most complex dexes that you could ever use it took me a week to figure out how to use that then came Unis swap I mean I just connected my metamask to the interface and boom there it was so uh those are gamechanging because if we're trying to bring on mass adoption the average person needs to be able to intuitively assess and utilize that Tech yeah if I can add on to Mike's response we talk a lot about mainstream adoption education how can we convince you know the next billion people to come into

crypto and I think if we had more top ux guys in crypto that would help a lot so again s top us what ux ux yeah like user experience right um blast was very successful uh defy projects we didn't invest in in it but I was an user of the airdrop and I just loved how gamified and intuitive again the interface was have you participated in any by yourself in in what in any airdrop yeah yeah quite a few which one uh I mean some that you know were had very simple interfaces you just paste your address it's a claim and it's okay but you don't convert users like that right you need

to make people come back you have you play on the the game ball mind and you know there's a wheel to turn every week and you have numbers and you have leaderboards and you have things to do and it's all looking so nice and you know where to click so anyway it's just ux in way can I chime in uh with regards to airdrop one of the most successful just recently was runes run Stone basically distributed across 112,000 wallets right now one run Stone I mean the all-time high and this airdrop just took place a couple months ago 6K Roi BTC I I know I sound like a BTC Maxi at this moment I'm just very excited about

what's going on there but um you should see the have you got one yeah yeah several I got a couple so basically um you had to qualify by being like an early inscriber right so I guess you consider me an OG ordinals um and BRC 20 holder so just for doing that I was eard dropped two run stones for both my wallets and because I own runstone posst having the new Rune uh token standard for Bitcoin I got 8 169,000 dog to the Moon coin per run stone that I owe but I mean really the granddaddy of the mall Unis swap

like no one was expecting it no one saw it on the radar and then it just happened and all of a sudden we all had bags that I that was a joyful moment right like I don't I think we're always going to be chasing that now now people are engaging people are doing stuff and there's nothing wrong with that but like that sheer just like surprise in the morning like that was magical right and also I would like to point out that you got Bor up here and you asked about uh how successful I think there's a decent amount of luck because Bor invented the amm pool and they frankly just don't have market share and Unis swap does right time right place right people there there is some luck to this I think that's thing that's got to be

acknowledged we enjoy these benefits and uh incentiv as users but from investors perspective when we have a look at toomics what is a healthy incentiv part of entire economics that projects can spend on these type of air drops could you repeat the question yeah yeah I I didn't quite follow that yeah so as investors we always evaluate projects judging from their economics incentiv pool it's part of the toomics yeah but that that doesn't incentivize the investors frankly absolutely my question is according to investors perspective what did the Healy incentives percentage

of toomics I think it really depends on which investors you're talking to because there's many funds who all they care about is like Max Team to Max inside tokens and they could take a Max percentage of those inside tokens those are the not the investors that you want to work with but like on honestly even the good ones like as long as they' you've set like 30 to 50 I mean 50 is way too high in my opinion but 30% of your tokens to the Insiders like as far as I've seen it it does you know people are getting these tokens at investors are getting these tokens at such a low valuation that they don't really care to be honest with you it's a cynical take but it's the true one that's why I'm asking you do you have Alex do you have any other takeaways on heit economics

from Investor's perspective I think Size Matters a bit but um I think the way you do it matters more than how much you airdrop because there's been huge airdrops in dollar value that have been very successful right the token price has held up and there's been very small air drops that had a very bad impact on the token price so I think the percentage of the value doesn't matter uh I think it's how you can convert people right the goal of an airdrop is hey see we give you this free stuff maybe you can become a user right so it's just user acquisition tool and at the end of the day if you give people more they're not going to want to try your product more they're just going to want to dump more so um I think it's

more how you talk to them you have to find a way to get to people with emotions with something yeah it's just another form of advertising I think it's about utility of the tokens right um that's really going to set the tune or tone for the circulating Supply um because I like defi I typically go for like uh smaller circulating supplies but uh that really doesn't matter if there's no utility and then also if there's a large amount of coins in circulation uh for token metrics um if there's no utility once again what are we doing here right and we see that often in the crypto space um utility comes post like um launch of a project um or lack thereof and it's a

mad scramble um so basically the airdrops are typical of like just buying now the community is there and there's no utility what can they do right so um that typically has an expiration date so I think it's really about the utility that's going to define the uh token metrics we almost out of time so my last question will be dedicated to marketing from my perspective I made so many def5 projects bus by very proper builders who used to C to like to build what marketing advice would you

give to early stage defy startups what kind of marketing people they should looking for maybe you can name some marketing agencies that should rely on or maybe they should provide the best tech with the best incentiv mechanics inside and that's it well they should definitely work with marketers that listen to council because the amount of time and money that you will spend if your marketing team fights with Council of what you're saying to the public is not immaterial um so that's my only requirement and then as far as a recommendation goes Melo PR does a damn good job thank you so for marketing I'll have one very simple answer use more

memes get a chief meme officer you know one of the most powerful man in the world Elon Musk uses memes all the time and everyone loves him right well I don't know that second part is true but well you know if you're hated by half of the world you also loved by half of the world so um yeah use more memes I'm going to go with build useful Tech right um I think that's going to be a seamless organic adoption uh third-party marketing agencies um try to avoid them um you want a community to be engaged and involved based on the Simplicity of your Tech um and that should scale adoption uh and then I guess you know have a lot of

fun right make it fun for or we created this real cool masot sely right and when sely gets excited sely says cour cour cour cour cour right so we have fun great guys last question you spent your Sunday after all week long still here at the conference please share with our audience what kind of people you want to meet what kind of project you want to talk to what kind of partnership you want to take away from this event uh literally anyone who's serious about doing this the right way and following some very minimal guidelines to be legally defensible uh that's my

criteria thank you I want to meet passionate people you know we all work a lot and so if we meet people with good energy who have some fun I think you know all our lives are going to be much better well on the VC side I'm looking for innovators uh people that are also passionate um people that are not following the trend but actually building into what they believe is going to be the future um people that understand where we are in humanity and actually are trying to build a legacy and leave a lasting Legacy um but uh on the or side I would love to partner with uh deep in projects um AI as well we're building aent centralized AI uh it's

decentralized verifiable Cloud compute platform for AI applications so if you feel like you fit that uh category please connect guys you've heard our speakers no more questions you can find them during next at least one hour and thank you so much for sharing that useful insights let's take a off yeah let's do thank you to our wonderful moderator yes thank Youk you