Reddit Embraces Web3, Apple NFT Drama & FedCoin | Roundup

Transcript

welcome back everyone uh to another weekly Roundup of Empire yet again we're joined by our main man Garrett who is the brains behind this operation uh Jason is nowhere to be found which is okay because you know anyways Garrett is as I said he puts these incredibly detailed notes uh he has his eye and pulse on the market and all developments in crypto so Garrett welcome back yeah thank you glad to be back on the show I think I'm hanging up the cleats at least for a little bit after after today uh but yeah excited to be here you know one thing Sonny I want to tell you because you always comment on this or you have a few times in the last few shows I I realize I'm not the guy that goes through YouTube comments I'm not I'm not ready for it uh yeah no sometimes when I

first read YouTube comments I was like okay hey well tough crowd uh but then you realize uh certain people have a tendency to just post and they skew negative so anyways we'll keep doing this and if you have comments please post them on YouTube we are listening and reading them yeah we want them just the first show maybe not that time but I will look at your comments so please do you're doing great Eric it comes from me and everyone disagrees then you know you're wrong and I don't say that often so a lot to cover this week uh there's been some interesting developments a lot on nft lands um Rumblings about an FTX stable coin um just the interesting developments in the market we try to shy away from talking too much about the markets but

interesting to pay attention this uh brief rally that we are seeing uh across crypto that started yesterday a lot of liquidations happening on FTX I mean it was like I think the number one record day in terms of liquidations most of these people had short positions and then there was this particular entity that accumulated like 500 millions of each purp in like and matter a span of an hour or two which is absolutely crazy um and so we talked about this before you know is crypto gonna is a leading indicator in terms of risk in the market um and it was definitely interesting obviously hard to extrapolate from one data point we'll see if this is just another you know bear Market brief Rally or sustained but anyways a lot to cover

Garrett uh you want to kick it off yeah definitely I think East went up about 15 the other day and it's it's funny I'm with some of the analysts in the office and the uh the energy really comes alive when uh you see it ripping so it's been fun but uh what I do want to talk on is just the tech stocks and one I'm I'm interested Santi do you mess around with tech stocks like meta snap et cetera do you get involved not individually as of late and first I mean first since forever I like didn't play in the market it was purely private liquids and just that was my game uh now I'm recently kind of dipped into certain strategies um of like going along the s p and NASDAQ um trying to like cover my entry point

there um but uh you know obviously a lot of these companies make a big components of the underlying indices so uh yeah it's been pretty interesting to observe Twitter talk about hey you thought like you know your [ __ ] goings down 80 90 well no different from a lot of the tech stocks out there forget it I mean the nasdaq's been getting crushed a lot of these names have been getting crushed below like their IPO levels like Facebook is now to single digits or was uh briefly today um and and I mean obviously text Tech earnings season really kicked off this week I believe and so a lot of eyes were on that um and yeah Facebook's down 20 I think

over the last 24 hours I mean a 49 uh decrease in Revenue year over year and I think a lot of that was expected they still missed their earnings but um it's pretty big shock and we talked about Facebook a little bit last week when we were talking about I think we went to one like their lever play and then also touched on VR and Oculus and it's interesting because I you see a lot of pushback one it's like Zuckerberg you need to cut down your staff and you also probably need to cut back on this meta uh metaverse spin which a lot of people thought was a little bit too early and just like buying into it I was I was listening to a podcast the other day with lucky Palmer who's the creator of oculus which was bought by Facebook I'm not sure which year that was

um but it's pretty interesting he said you know really this is a bet by Facebook saying today when you have Google Microsoft and Apple like they're in position to win with the mobile and also just like the Computing platform that we have today uh but Facebook wants to make a play there but they don't really have an entry point but they're making a bet that you're going to have immersive Computing which is just AR and VR it's going to take center stage in the future and that's why they made this bet knowing it's going to be long term and and I thought one more interesting point from that is that lucky said a lot of people say this was not a successful investment and one it's long term right but he said his payout was based over four years and then to hit certain goals

and Milestones on sales and he said instead of four it only took two so Facebook actually did better I should say meta than they even predicted at that time so anyways they're taking a big beating but um I I'm still really I'm a fan of Facebook uh not with all their decisions but I think they're pushing the space forward so I'm excited to watch yeah I'm not as much of a fan because I stopped using the product I can't remember the last time I eat Facebook Facebook it's absolute garbage it's worse than Times Square like I'd rather be in Times Square surrounded by all the tourists and like hot dog stands and all the chaos then open my face it's like I don't know what went wrong but I think it's nonetheless Facebook I will give Credence to and credit because they've been early in predicting a lot of

friends we talked about some last episode they were early in acquiring Instagram everyone mostly everyone was [ __ ] on them so how can they pay a billion dollars for like a photo filter app and lo and behold here we are in many ways Instagram is really what surriving a lot of the ad like marketing um dollars and you know I will there in many ways been sort of like um overcoming this innovative's dilemma now it's too early to tell I mean I think a lot of people are very critical especially in Bear markets right people lose patience and and they're overly critical and in Bull markets they are very like laissez-faire and and you know um and so again like I think it must be really hard as a company public

companies CEO and I've talked to a number of them because you're being pulled in a million directions in many ways this is like a crypto founder like managing Discord right um where the community wants to find a number of things to be fair AR VR I mean it's it's all an attention economy and it's increasingly hard to get users attention Tick Tock isn't a phenomenal job with younger cohorts um Instagram stories as well just the constant real of like short content keeps you engaged um and so but it's it's very hard I think it's becoming incrementally hard for these companies to stay relevant and capture that attention because people are want just jumping everywhere right uh at least in the Western World right

it's not like you have like a 10 cent kind of app the WeChat kind of app sorry uh but yeah obviously they're spending a lot of capital they're really what seems to be betting uh the farm on it um and we'll see I mean yeah foreign you probably saw this from the all-time highs I mean meta's down 72 percent which is which is quite the hit uh it's down before like even past where they hit the crash and during covid um and then snaps down 88 which is even lower I want to jump to Twitter really quick and then we'll get on crypto um but a lot of CT crypto Twitter uh kind of dominates the space so it's very relevant and it does look like at least what I've seen Elon might be taking over and I'm curious do you find that bullish or bearish for Twitter as a company

um I'm cautiously optimistic I think there's gonna be a lot of changes I think it's it's wanna our opinion equipped in crypto is different because to me crypto like Twitter is like my lifeblood it's definitely a place where I spend most of my time on it's so important from an information standpoint from a community standpoint as and I do kind of ascribe to elon's musk's view which is it is kind of the Town Square Town Hall and against her like I agree with that do I agree that one you know is he gonna have like a outside influence on information and all that I don't know I mean a lot of people are critical of like when Jeff Bezos bought like the Washington Post

and like a lot of these like you know Tech Moguls or just Moguls in General trying to like buy their way into and control the narrative I kind of don't believe that as much I think it's just that's coming from a bit of a skeptical camp but look there's a media changes I saw a great video of him walking into Twitter's headquarters yesterday or the day before with like a sinking uh he's been very vocal around the working from home and cutting staff and I have a lot of folks and friends over the years that have worked and gone through Twitter at some point and I I think it's a well-known fact in the valley that it's a pretty bloated organization um and so look I'm just really excited for a while it's felt like Twitter's

been underappreciated the potential it has to really kind of be more relevant for other cohorts other than crypto like if you if you can establish the level of attention and retention and engagement that you see in crypto Twitter for other Pockets like because that's I think the potential of Twitter being worth way more than the current value paid 44 billion or so um and hopefully we've got some of the changes we've been advocating for like like really addressing the bot problem it's become it's back it's become very bad as of late it's funny because I didn't really see it happening in the last like six months ago and all of a sudden I think what it kind of coincided when Elon was like during the acquisition that he brought attention to this and then all

of a sudden I think someone was just like Bots became a thing like very very visible 100 um so yeah what are your thoughts on that um I mean I think it's interesting at least I mean I think the more entertainment we have in society the better obviously if it comes out to be good for everyone at the end of the day but I gotta say it's entertaining I you know I think Elon at one point said he was going to cut 75 of jobs which I think he's always gonna exaggerate things and then pull it back right like you kind of set the anchor bring it back stir up some some dust and see what happens and I saw this tweet that I I personally thought was funny but it says Elon tells Twitter employees they can work from home just not for Twitter and

that that is something that that Elon would say and he just makes a lot of news and I mean look I I like work from home I see the benefits of being in the office but anyways I just think it's fascinating I think that Elon is a media company himself and got on your your comment of monetizing Twitter and what they can do better as a company also heard this person talking about how people build businesses on YouTube you don't see that so much on Twitter and maybe part of that is that it's not as visual based so maybe it's harder to grow an audience it's one of the biggest accounts for like 500 000 but it is a spot where you could see people maybe dedicate like their life to building a business on Twitter which you see to some degree but even to Greater from

there and I thought that's pretty interesting so anyways we don't we don't need to talk about tech stocks anymore but the last thing I'll say is uh it's somewhat relevant because I think crypto is kind of it's it's a Town Square for crypto right he put out a very interesting post today uh Elon did uh addressing kind of marketers and how he wanted to approach Twitter and how they manage kind of marketing and and like like Brands advertised like advertisement in general um and it wasn't it wasn't to say that like all ads are going to be gone but it said look ads can be relevant but we need to be careful like more mindful the criteria needs to be higher of you know the kind of ads that are being served and you know it's in many ways it's kind

of refreshing to see that because I think like historically I I don't agree with everything that Elon has done or said particularly around his comments were like Doge and just like felt to me that it was just I don't know it was he has a he carries so much weight and it's important to like if you carry that amount of weight to be really mindful of what you say and but to be fair I do think that he's someone who especially Humanity forward in a very meaningful way across a number of companies um and he's he's not afraid to make Bowl bets and in this case he'll be really interesting to see how he manages a social network because he has he's the richest guy in the world and he could tell you know he could for all intents and purposes do this as a social

experiment and do things differently than other companies that have the pressure of you know earnings next quarter and Rod to really try to maximize profit um a lot of times I think you have to maximize like compromise near-term profitability for long-term payout and that goes back to exactly what you were talking about of uh of Facebook and their bed on the metaverse and AR and VR and so it really takes that kind of like leadership that you see probably in Zuckerberg and mosque and a few other personalities to just uh you know do what they want and tell everyone else to with all due

respect to [ __ ] off and uh you know sometimes it works out other times it doesn't but I think the biggest Innovations have come out when when that happens and so I'm excited to see whatever the outcome of that is yeah yeah definitely and I probably shouldn't talk about my personal life on here but uh real story I I did have a date last night believe it or not I'm single and uh bringing up talking about Dogecoin I somehow crypto came up she asked what I do and it always takes a second I try to say I work in media I work in finance and entrepreneurialism and then eventually I can work around answer and be like no I work in crypto immediately leave or did she like tap you on the tap you on the show and says are you doing okay Garrett that's what I

thought was gonna happen but but but but no she actually was like you know what I think crypto is going to be here to stay this is very very smart girl works at Google um and her first point was I think the you know Elon and Twitter thing and Doge you know and Elon being with Doge I think you know has a chance to really sit around I'm like oh please don't associate with me with Doge but I was like it is fine that's wife material right there that's why from there are you going on another date there uh you know what I did text her this morning I haven't heard back so I will I guess I guess you were at the 24-hour rule or you know what it what are we supposed to wait I don't know what the role of Santi I just I just tried to go

for it but I mean you're talking to the wrong person you know okay apple nfts apple nfts done with Garrett stating life um so we actually talked about this on the podcast about a month ago Apple officially announced that nfts can be sold through the app store list in their App Store I think they're already doing this but they just made an official announcement they're going to be subject to the same in-app purchase fee which is 30 if the app or the developer is making more than a million and it's 50 if you're making less than a million but essentially if you're somebody like openc if you have an app you're gonna get charged 30 on all of your sales which essentially is just going to come out of the seller's pocket so they're gonna make less money um but then I think it was this last

week they updated uh their roles again essentially saying that another role that they have in nfts is that these nfts cannot be used to unlock new or like featured content or like level up essentially it's like hey you have an ft if you buy it then you can level up and unlock like a better part of this app they're trying to say like no if you want to do that you need to make another cell so they can get their 30 um this is there's a lot of controversy here you see it on both sides I think part of it is look at least nfts are going to be on the App Store because it is probably the best way to get an nft into somebody's hands um we're all we're on mobile apps right the 30 fee is is pretty steep I mean this happens to SAS

startups all the time it's interesting with Kindle for example you probably have a Kindle app that I use all the time if you go to the Kindle app and try to find a book and you want to buy it you can't actually buy it exactly and you can't even have links to where you can go by and that is the same with nft so it's not like a game because this is really probably going to hurt some of the game developers I mean it does allow them to sell nfts there but they can't even put like click this button go to my website and you can buy the nft like that's completely illegal so um kind of interesting one more point that maybe isn't but it did confuse me I'm like okay so if this is the case coinbase has an app but like you don't

see 30 uh fees on their transactions they come out of the clarification saying if we approve you as an exchange for crypto transfers you do not charge that fee but nfts in this case are not um uh considered for that so I'm just curious what do you think about this do you find it I mean Juan do you think this 30 fee crypto is maybe the best way to get that down I mean that's a big question but two I'm just curious what you think about this in general uh well before we get there like I'm curious if you know like if you want to buy like if you want to buy an nft like what does it actually mean to unlock well one like who's setting up the wallet like so if you're natively gonna buy an nft through the App Store Apple store or the app within your phone

like I guess like how is that flow going to work so that like say you open the openc app in your phone or whatever FDX or whatever app you're using metamask and you're buying an nft then like if it's like will that be possible then they just charge 30 on whatever happens on mobile or are they going to actually help you set up a wallet and and create the wallet for you and use face ID to like you know retrieve your wallet like social recovery like are they actually gonna the reason I'm asking is I would be really curious to understand if they're I'm going to really Venture into the wallet game

um because you remember the time when like Solana was announcing that the Solana phone a lot of it was because of the pains that you're seeing now and trying to like you know a lot of the Ring fencing that happens with apple and some of these platforms like not making it easy for developers yeah and it totally tweeted he was like this is just a Solana mobile ad campaign thanks for promoting so yeah yeah there we go yeah but I'd be really curious like look if apple is going to venture into the wallet game I mean they've been I I think it's fairly positive for the space to bring on you know the next you know couple million users uh almost immediately right um it's positive because it legitimizes the category well as soon as you're talking about something and you're

allowing it then it's it's very positive right uh if they weren't even acknowledging it then like they're just clamping down on it then you probably would have wondered what are they what do they know about the regulatory side of things around nfts that we don't but the fact that they're entertaining this I think is I read it as you know read between tea leaves it's fairly positive nfts is a category it's a huge money maker I mean openc has printed a ton of a ton of fees uh on volume and so yeah it's uh 30 is just uh it's a it's sort of like it's very high kind of stealing it's very high and so anyways the core ethos of crypto is like trying to remove the middle man uh and in many ways uh we are

here yet again but well you know what maybe Facebook's VR uh their field will play out and then we'll have a little bit more competition in space because right now you have Android but their app store and they just have adopted all these same roles so you have two competitors going back and forth and like I would have to think over time those fees go down just like we think in crypto um when you have these liquidity protocols like you know swap Etc like those fees might go to zero but you're gonna have other ways to monetize so I think yeah that's the Hope generally like yeah we can complain about 30 and yeah Apple's very difficult maybe they're going to get into antitrust issues because they are just really making it very hard from a competitive standpoint for a lot of these businesses and uh 30 seems very high but you know I

do think that uh it's very positive because now you have at least a way to sell nfts this is important for games it's important for nft artists and creators and curators and uh it is just crypto is becoming um you know more seamless to use and interact and enter this world and that's positive as soon as we remove friction it's positive so many people haven't really even tried or ventured into the space and sure not your keys not your you know not your money not your nfts yep I get it folks but it's still very very positive for the vast majority of users that have no interest or capability or sophistication

to manage their own keys if you have apple all of a sudden create a wallet for you and and secure that for you then most likely it's for a lot of users out there especially the ones that haven't even ventured into crypto that's still positive because they get the experience of benefits for this technology of this of nft ease of gaming and everything and sure you're relying on a custodian in many ways to manage your keys or social recovery system so it's like being your own custodian and managing your own keys I think we can all agree that it's fairly unrealistic given the current Solutions out there that it's going to be suitable for mainstream adoption uh we're gonna need better Solutions like Argent wallet which has social recovery

systems and all that uh natively secured like keys in your like the secure Enclave of your phone or whatever yeah it's sophisticated or not that's right that that to me feels yep like a win yeah 100 I'd use RJ myself and I and like you said I I don't know the actual tech details enough to say like this is as secure as something else but I do love the experience and like social recovery for anybody that doesn't know it's like instead of having to write down your private key or some phrase you can actually assign say three different friends or maybe you have three different Hardware devices or another metamask Etc and it's just a way to get like two out of three or three out of four and if you get those parties to approve your transaction you can recover your wallet set limits on like let's say

you have a limit you say I don't want to spend more than ten thousand dollars a day or one thousand five hundred whatever it might be unless I get permission from three out of four friends yeah that if you're a game then you most definitely want to go acquire users on mobile but keep most of the activity to browser desktops right yeah which I think is good where a lot of the games that I'm investing this is the flow that they're envisioning so but but mobile service is a good customer acquisition now if you kind of take the the get the what's the name of the guy who did the like free to own concept yeah borrow elements from that and so okay you want to charge us 30 fine give the user a free nft yep as a hook

and then have him claim it using and navigating and using his browser right and seven percent it's 30 on zero is zero folks so anyways uh there's a workaround around this which is use nfts as customer acquisition anytime you get a free thing souvenir or whatever it it like it it lights up your brain your heart or whatever and then it makes you incentivize it incentivizes you to go check out whatever the game is or whatever the thing you know is and so if you're a game give a free nft to drop it to the user or he claims it on mobile and then he goes to the browser to uh you know this is in the same way right does is this a Kindle flow too where you can buy a samp you can

right you can you can click on your mobile to get a sample of the book or the audiobook you can't buy it you have to go and there's no link but you have to then go to the browser and and and you know buy the actual thing that is that you just listen to the sample no different folks get a sample nft a teaser and then go on browser and then do everything that you want to do isn't that the flow that's the flow that's the flow 100 yeah it's all about reducing friction and and talking about reducing friction uh I want to just touch on the Reddit nft kind of phenomena that we've had this week so I think it's back in this July Reddit announced a collection of nfts that they were going to launch I think it was around 86 000 it's like an

avatar collection um which they don't actually call in FTS it's digital Collectibles which I have nothing wrong with Nifty Nifty could work nft no non-fungible token like no just like that that's never gonna work in the mainstream so anyways they they minted these on polygon POS which is kind of cool it's an ebm chain um they did not try to create their own or have something centralized um and then last week they actually revealed that they have onboarded over what they say is three million wallets and minted over 86 000 nfts now do you want to kind of caveat three million wallets amazing it's probably a little bit misleading I think it's actually like so what happens is I think when you have this flow it pops up on your Reddit and you click on it you're kind of like you know claim my avatar NFC and if you do that it mints

you a wallet but you actually have no idea that you actually have a wallet unless you want to interact with the wallet which they allow you to which is really cool and I think they have a couple thousand of those but um this Sunday there was a lot of Buzz around that after this announcement and daily volume on on trading these Surge from below 1 million to 2 million overnight this is like a huge spike in the chart in just 24 hours um and this was one a huge bike for polygon it got nfts on Reddit to have over 100 million dollar market cap which is to me absurd I mean one we're in a bear Market two this is just a company that's experimenting with nfts and and their founder I don't know his name but I know he's been embracing web 3. um I

think this is really interesting and it's Ohanian that's right yeah and this is kind of like Starbucks is now trying to get into the nft game they're not calling it nfts either but this is two big companies that's actually a half a few stats at the top Reddit is the fifth most visited website in the US it's more popular than Instagram Twitter and even um The Hub actually don't know what that is it has 430 million monthly active users and more than 1.5 billion registered users like I had no idea I always when I need an answer to the question especially around crypto I type it in then I put right at the end and I've learned to be a big Reddit user but I had no idea it was that big so this is really cool it's a special platform that's like from a discovery standpoint I mean that's

where I discovered the Bitcoin back in 2012. wow they are a Bitcoin channel uh that's where a lot of the conversation was happening and so yeah like we touched on this on the episode with uh Steven uh and uh Raul from uh arbitrum comes out Monday yeah folks should tune into that and because they we talked about the Reddit social point system and how that really folds into their strategy and and why they need it it's not that they need it it's just supplemental it's enhancing um and now that people have like it helps engagement not if you want to claim you can claim you don't have to claim and so it's I think that view and

the the key takeaway from the comment that these guys were saying was Reddit really has embraced nfts and a strategy in web3 because it is complementary it is enhancing what they're doing uh in a way that can improve a lot of the core metrics and particularly engagement in the platform and then invite once you have like these nfts then you know a Reddit user that is has a lot of reputation and a lot of credibility and social score or whatever then other brands can come in and invite those users to then say oh wow Garrett you're we see that you're like posting a ton on the health biohacking Channel well you

know in your and yeah we can validate that with your points and your badges and all your avatar that is changing based on your activity then we're going to invite you to like a retreat and we're going to send you a care package from I don't know you're like some sort of new protein bar company well like you know what I mean like yeah you start seeing the benefits for that um so yeah it's going to be really interesting um I think we it is going to show us a way of how big company and web 2 can like Embrace certain web3 elements maybe kind of reinvent itself maybe Twitter's also going in this direction now that elon's at the home but two really interesting

companies that I'm probably following um at three actually Facebook with the metaverse Reddit and and uh Twitter they're all moving in different ways and different strategies but uh yeah this is this is huge I think uh the last thing I'll say on this is it's pretty interesting uh the rebranding digital Collectibles and also the I was just on the phone with um this portfolio company of mine and you know we were talking about the potential to do stuff in the nft space and I said well why just stop with a profile picture like pfp you know if you're a particular app and it's a it attracts certain enthusiasm why not just build out the rest of the Avatar right not just the phase yeah but

like you know the clothes and you know all the different gear and all this stuff and you don't have to like sell it all it could be based on turned um earned stuff in the way of like not bot stuff which I think is really powerful I think if users can have a very clear way of earning Things based on certain activity that is like non-monetary it really incentivizes people it gamifies it in a very interesting way so I think we're going to start seeing a lot of other brands like Reddit really Embrace that strategy yeah me too I definitely agree with that it's it reminded me I think it was Sergey from Google and you talk about gamification and getting access over time and not that you have to pay for it and yeah I think with Sergey he said if I wasn't working at Google like what

would I want to do that could help society and one of it was like um help people get fit and say in shape and and be healthy and part of that he's like I would start a gym and gamify it where when you you basically come in they I don't know how this would work but they essentially give you some clothes whatever it is it doesn't look that great you only have access to a part of the gym and then essentially like as you come in they quickly iterate you up where you get like cooler gear you get access to bigger parts of the gym you get like protein shakes for free and the whole point is like people want things to be gamified and they do a lot of people actually would rather like work for something because you feel like you earned it instead of just right so I

think that's huge with nfts what Sweat Equity yeah Sweat Equity uh absolutely I mean that's that's a bigger picture here I'm not asking you to believe in Bitcoin fine I'm not asking you to believe in ethereum or Solana or anything like remove all of that all the project names end up fundamentally from like from a kind of like a mechanism standpoint evaluate that there are systems that are being created that are better for a coordination standpoint that have proven to the most challenging thing is to coordinate a certain activity especially when you don't have a top-down Authority reaching social consensus and coordinating that in a decentralized way like

is is extremely powerful it is one of the more important developments of Our Generation like because that unlocks so much potential to then do other really cool stuff and of course like Bitcoins try to do this for coordination of a consensus to then agree on a certain State and then that has like Sound Mod like properties of of a hard asset because it has a finite Supply we're applying that to money ethereum is abstracting that and saying and saying we're applying that to just general consensus and that can take on many different meanings nfts social gaming whatever defy but even beyond that like there have been like 10 years of this experiment

that has proven to be fairly successful what else can we apply it to it's it's a is a system that relies on programmed incentives to reach coordination and consensus in a more fluid way without without like trusting anyone and I'll say that again like what else can you apply that to well I don't know maybe you can incentivize people to lead a better life well how do you do that we talk about education and it's just like I was in model U.N it's so tiring people say we need to have a better educational system well yeah no [ __ ] Sherlock like well how do you go about in doing that well we should tax people more no like the the solution of that is always kind

of I think a private Enterprise because markets are more efficient than any top-down centralized organization like just look at what's happening in San Francisco the management of public funds is a disgrace not only in the US pretty much everywhere except like some Scandinavian countries in small countries like the Singapore but scaling that is proven to be very difficult for modern day nation states it is very hard like the U.S New York is very different than Arkansas or this is a tiny bit different I agree you know I mean like and so like coordinating that and reaching a consensus that appeases is very difficult I'm not like you know I'm not like bashing on Democracy it's just really hard but as soon as you have these and again

like these are this this is what these systems can really be applied towards you could create A system that has very predictable set of program rules that no one can change easily and that gives you the certainty the trust the confidence to to operate in that system that has rule of law governed by code enforced by social consensus that could be modified as we've seen with ethereum with the merge and upgrading which is a huge development purely because you can prove that such a distributed and decentralized system can morph and adapt which is so powerful and then take all of that as a case study and then say okay well let's actually reinvent Healthcare

and we had a great episode on Vibe Dao a log was talking about trying to do this for clinical trials and research which is another neglected area that has been historically you know governed by Pharma and Drug development is very difficult and there's so many incentives that are out of whack because it's better to invest in another dick pill than it is to invest in research for a rare disease even though you get of some incentives from the FDA and Healthcare organizations to go after you know emergency status and priority status for rare diseases but the money is in dick pills and people will as long as the money's there most people will continue to invest in the next dick bill which is a marginal Improvement and so anyways what I'm this

whole ramble and I'm I get pretty excited because I love it that's what I tell people now it's like I'm not asking you to believe in like Bitcoin replacing the dollar probably a dollar is going to continue to be the dollar for as long as we're probably alive but but this is what led me to invest in step in for instance because I talk to those guys and I said cut yes the first time I learned about crypto I was looking at I'm a runner and a cyclist and so I was you I use Strava a lot I'm like well I mean why can't you just give me like some sort of like I have all these points I have all this activity it felt to me like they're they are leaving a lot of value on the table so anyways I think a lot of the world's problems um can truly

and I say this meaningfully not like pie in the sky stuff like will be the way we operate the way we interact the way we change our habits is going to meaningfully radically change that we would interact with insurance in the healthcare system and education is going to meaningfully change because now we have systems that will make it easier for us and set it by the incentivize us just do the right thing the better thing I think everyone wants this improve it's just difficult sometimes you need a little nudge here and there quote Richard Taylor not a great book I always do a book recommendation this is and I'm doing it early Nudge by Richard thaler one of my favorite books of all time it is yeah I've read that book says the book as well it's it's amazing and that that wasn't Iran Santi that was really

really good and I think a big part of this is education that's one reason that we have this show and there are other podcasts out there because you have to look Beyond cryptos just speculation or just mean coins Etc and really get people to think about it in a way you just talked about and I actually haven't read the piece yet except probably the first three pages uh but Matt Levine from Bloomberg came out I think it was this week with uh maybe 60 000 uh word essay about crypto and it's like a Manifesto yeah it's huge have you seen that I got a few of the groups that I'm about Sir like Center rounds like this book yeah yeah yeah well it's really cool because Matt Levine is a great he's from Trad five essentially I think he was an fx Trader back in the day he's one of

the most well-known writers in the traffic space uh at Bloomberg and he usually just has an article or a newsletter that comes out every day and he does talk about crypto and I think he's actually kind of a fan but he's also you know pretty skeptical at the same time but he's been on podcast with the SPF et cetera anyways just the beginning that I read from it it's really really well thought out and I think it would connect with people really well and it's a huge educational piece that is on Bloomberg which is ginormous like when you go back to the last bear Market uh in 2000 2018 19 going into 20. like nothing was talked about you didn't see anything about crypto on the news if it was it was just like the industry's dead um and I don't know where this industry

is going to end up but it is so different this time when you see firms like Reddit and Starbucks and all these announcements and then you also see um just all these developments in the space that are happening anyways I think it's really exciting and it's completely different than the West years ago again I I don't know where it's going to go or how long a bear Market's Gonna Last but I think people are getting more educated on the space and that's a really big deal yeah absolutely and all right yeah should we what else is there to talk about I guess we have the FTX table coin we have a few other developments yeah but we can go quick through this I don't think we I don't think there's a ton we have to touch on but we'll just do it we'll do it for the

audience um yeah FTX SPF announce we didn't officially announce but supposedly he was in an interview uh that FTX is working on stablecoin and he hinted that announcement will come out soon uh there's already a lot of exchanges that do do this coinbase with usdc uh with circle you have Finance busd Gemini g-usd one comment gusd had 8.5 yield um if you just staked your Gemini um gusd which made no sense and now it's 5.9 so I'm really curious how these firms are like subsidizing their stable coins but um yeah I one thing is like SPF has made a ton of moves during the spare Market they acquired block five which I don't know the price up to 240 million but who knows it's like based on a payout system um Sam has now 7.6 of Robin Hood even

though FDX is supposedly not interested in actually um trying to acquire Robin Hood they could but um yeah I'm curious the stable coin Market is just kind of crazy and what I'm curious to you you see this like proliferation of stable coins and what what do you think the future state is and we don't have to draw on this for long but I had a friend ask me yesterday like he's like if we have a stable coin it's guaranteed to be fed coin and I'm just curious from what you know and what you think was this your date or was this not my date we didn't get enough to say that that was a fairly deep date if you'd like talk about that's day number two it's day number two um but well defense or do you see something like aggregating at a bank level where you

have something more like usdc that because you know today like money is essentially print AKA printed not really printed in quotes printed at Banks and do you see that being the future if a like stablecoin is adopted how do you how where do you see this going the market yeah I don't really have a precise answer here I mean there's a great um there's a good interview by uh recently I think it was this week that came out Augustine Garces which is at the IMF I think talking about Central Bank digital currencies and he was like wow these are great like because we can now a lot like program how people can spend the money or not spend the money and of course you can see a good way and a benefit of that with like Universal basic income and then you also see a bad way like in

China's social credit scoring system scoring system or basically Black Mirror yeah if you're like all of a sudden pissed off the state then you're like okay well you can't shop in any Supermarket good luck getting food like I don't know I mean it sounds yeah it's real it's real right and so I hope that I think I'm looking back to my PR prior rant I believe very much on private Enterprise and that being more efficient if you're like the like I guess if it doesn't really matter because like okay you can have effect going to Central Bank digital currency but at the end of the day if you're a usdc fully backed collateralized stablecoin one-on-one so there's like a dollar there that like

represents it it's just a digital receipt then that's you can still do monetary policy no problem right I mean it's it's it's like it's just like whatever it's just like a digital receipt that's in circulation right at the end of the day that dollar exists and so um a central bank like the you know or the FED would still like it because it increases the demand for dollars like imagine today now you see inflation and all these like like the FX Market is is in whack like this year you look at the Yen at an all-time low what's that 150 160. you look at the pound recently it went all the way to 107 like historical level low you look at the Euro went all the way to 96 cents 95 cents like 20-year lows for some of these currencies like if you're

a company or you're a normal consumer you have liabilities in dollar denominated debt or whatever like or you just want to store your wealth like stable coins are like us to nominated stable coins which is like by the way the most pervasive one is a fantastic vehicle and instrument like I mean it's it's great right you want to hold dollars now like none of this financial advice or any advice for that matter but you know you feel pretty comfortable still holding a dollar like now all of a sudden with stable coins whether it's a usdc or fed coin like you know it makes it all of a sudden like very easy for people now I think that like the FED coin is probably going to be used more for like the internal domestic economy like if you're if you're getting like you know during

covid you've got a relief check well maybe you're gonna get that not in usdc but you're gonna get a Fed coin right you're gonna pay your taxes maybe you're going to pay through the FED coin or whatever like or tax withholdings all these things domestic like domestic it's probably going to be a Fed coin International and for a lot of other things uscc yeah yeah I I agree with that for the most part it's gonna be really interesting I think if you're seeing like protocol specific stable coins popping up too um between like you have Ave you have frax um I think there's other there's plenty others working on as well and it's it's hard for me to see that working long term because it just is a terrible ux for any user unless a wallet can can completely abstract that which we know going forward just like reddit's

doing it's abstracting the nft um wallet like creation process completely but that's something that works and it's going to be brought there but that's I think it's probably going to aggregate around a few and I I do think you want choice we talked about this last week I think the biggest thing crypto is switching costs and just having the choice if you want to opt out of something which we talked about Twitter a little bit ago too and I said you could build a business there like a multi hundred million dollar business but you could get rugged off the platform right and that's something where crypto can come in and actually try to help solve that yeah well it's this idea of legal tender like I think like uscc might be deemed the legal tender if it's like approved within an approved list of stable coins

uh but if you have a like not a dollar denominator or like fully backed coin then you may not be a legal tender and so at the end of the day I always think stable coins and have dabble in a lot of these for better for worse including you know the early days of like base coin uh basis which got shut down uh it got like a lot and then like all those kind of other ESD dsds of the world I was an investment frax uh really like uh and you know obviously nawabi quite well and so look at the end of the day I didn't touch Tara um but I will say like look I think my conclusion early conclusion in stable

coins is that usability drives stability again usability will drive stability uh and I think we're long past this idea that like incentives uh and some sort of financial engineering can work your way through building confidence in a system without getting meaningful meaningful usage other than financial speculation and yield Farm leverage recursive yield farming like and so uh again if you're within an approved list of stable coins and it's a legal tender what does that mean well you're going to be able to pay for your flight you're going to be able to pay for your pizza you're going to be able to do everything that you do today with your Apple pay or your credit cards and debit cards I should say with uh usdc right and you kind of already see

that right you have like the FTX cards coming out you have uh you know a few other cards out there that uh coinbase does coinbase have a card like don't you guys as a card yes it's been promoting it for a long time they've been promoting it right and so at the end of the day like if you have if your card issuer and the network of banks supports uscc then that drives usability and that inherently builds stability and adoption for a stable coin and so I do agree with your point it's going to be a fairly concentrated maybe two or three uh coins out there um that uh that take the line share of the market and you already see that anyways today right yeah tether usdc and like for uh yeah busd to some extent and then yeah it might be up there somewhere as well

yeah when I talk to people when they ask about you know use case and crypto and there's there's quite a few but I think a lot of them are hard to make tangible for people and it is it's a you know it's a new field and there's a lot of innovation but what I always go to is stable coins and like a very quick story is I was living on a Australia for a while I went over there and one US dollar or one Australian dollar was 80 cents in the states and by the time I left wine Australian dollar was 60 cents yeah um so I or sorry I said that backwards but essentially it went from 0.8 to 0.6 against me so I lost that huge spread on my income that I made that was in an Australian bank and I wasn't trying to take on like the risk

of FX Rick's risk of Australian currency and I did but if I would have had uscc there's no way I just wouldn't put some of that into like my coinbase account and then when I left the country to come to the United States um I needed to empty that bank account and get the US well what happens is you get quoted and an exchange rate you got absolutely wrecked ran over ran over because you look it up on Google and it says one thing yeah it's and then they charge they charged me I think 25 and then on top of that look look I get this is some regulation that probably will enter crypto for five days my money was out of my Australian bank account not in my US bank account and no idea where I went so it's just a bad user experience

and I could have done that within 13 seconds on ethereum so it is a way more competitive quote yeah look I I think uh something like curve is amazing being able to trade like for like stable coins um and like being able to trade against FX the FX Market just pissed me the [ __ ] off I'm sorry but every time I go to a country and they're asking me to you always you always forget right you're always at the airport and be like oh [ __ ] I should probably get some yeah currency for the taxi or whatever and that's when they get you they always get you and you're like to me I kid you not this is I was thinking about building a better remittance system where you can send money cross-border using SMS and like ATMs local ATM network and then I

discovered Bitcoin I'm like this is what I need this is it yeah right whatever to this day every time I travel I always every time I pass by the FX currency converter stalls it's cringe and I remind myself I'm like you will go away in five years or ten years but the like that would be a success for this industry all those operators would go away to me that would be amazing because they they charge you an arm and a leg and it's such a it's such a rip-off and and there's no competition like you only go there because you walk by and you're like this is the only place I can do my FX and you like you if you're in Mexico you need pesos and you know if you leave that airport without

it you're done but if you like if everyone has a smartphone you know I think also you know like this is going to be like sound ridiculous but the idea of actually holding paper currencies whatever but like everyone has a smartphone you can use your app convert from dollars to pesos while you're in the airplane while you land you convert it you have internet boom you convert it then you pay you tap your phone done that's the flow like there should be no cash in New York City I've only been here for two months now but it's really big you go a lot of places and they only accept cash it's interesting I mean we kind of know why but you know what yeah um okay I'm I'm just gonna we only take cash at uh at block works now now that if you want to pay for your blockwork

subscription research by the way next week you're gonna get uh an inner look at a new podcast that is launching um and they're excited from the research guys I won't be here most likely and so you can only pay in cash yeah some of those some of those guys send us cash wads of cash to your office in in Manhattan or my address either way I'm pretty I'm pretty good with money I can handle it but yeah you got to tune in next week we'll drop it on the Twitter feed and everything but we do have um our research guys are dropping new podcast I've already heard the first episode it's awesome so you'll you'll have to tune in I'm gonna drop one little piece of alpha that may not be true Alpha but last week we were talking about modular blockchains and Celestia and um Chris bernitski who used to work

at ARC and he's been in the crypto space he's at I think placeholder he started placeholder and he he's written a few books I think he's one of the the first guys I started reading about when I got into crypto um he just had this this tweet yesterday about the svm which is the Solana virtual machine and then you know you have the ebm ethereum virtual machine and uh he's saying watch the space because you're seeing a lot of different protocols raise money that are just execution layers using the svm which I don't know all the technical details but it's more performant um in some ways at least than the evm it allows parallelization um so it's multi-thread instead of single threaded um but but the big point of it is they're able to innovate very quickly because when you saw the evm uh ethereum then you had Avalanche and all

these evm chains pop up like Phantom they were building building monolithic chains that did the execution you know the data availability and the consensus and also had to build up the security but you're seeing a lot of these svm new chains launch but they're just doing the execution and that allows you to spin up and innovate faster so one I just think it's interesting to watch the svm and it's really cool to see by breaking these down into modular pieces you can innovate faster we'll find out we'll find out in a few years um Santi anything else you want to talk about before we close thanks Auntie froze on me um if Santi comes back uh we may continue but we pretty much need to wrap this up anyway so Jason will be back next week

um he's gonna be back from his vacation and also his wedding so excited to have him back on maybe I'll join from time to time and everybody thanks for joining see you next time [Music]