The Rollup TV: Friday, September 19th

Transcript

on YouTube. Uh give it just a second and we'll get that thing rolling up for you guys and we'll get our first guests in the show. Um and get it ready. So give us just another minute or two and we will roll this thing out. We're going to get the aerodrome and the syndicate team up first to talk about the state of metadexes. So that should that should be the first segment, guys. Pretty stoked. And we'll get them up in just a sec. We're just going to roll through on the on the actual front end just to get YouTube rolling and rolling. Uh guys, it's been a great week at the rollup TV. We've had amazing guests. I think the

highlight of this week uh was Jeremy Aair. The CEO of Circle came on and spoke for a good 35 minutes about their push into Hyperlid. It is a very trippy setup when the CEO of a massive public company to the tune of 30 billion dollar market cap um which unironically is somehow less than hyperlquid's FTV. don't ask me crypto tokens prices are not you know rooted to reality and um came on and just gave a pitch about why circle wants to get involved with hyperl which is just amazing paradigm shift around how these networks have been you know built thought about and executed on and so up next we've got um the CEO of air drrome Alex we've got the uh CEO of syndicate co-founder Will it should be a

great segment. Um, basically the concept that I want to understand in this segment is understanding metadexes. How this new form of launch is uh, you know, different from the traditional pool one, pool two model, what the exotic kind of uh, VE aerodynamics play, how sustainable this is, and just kind of like what we're thinking about when it comes to uh, community first launches in crypto. So, don't mean to make make them wait for too much longer in the back. just getting YouTube firing up. Should be just a sec. Uh, and then we will get them in the show. So, >> I think we're ready to go, guys. Bring them up. And >> here we go, >> guys. Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you on. Incredible

mainet launch, community oriented. I I think it kind of took a lot of people by surprise, uh, including us. And so, we're here to to provide some educational opportunities for our audience to better understand what happened here. Um, but first, happy Friday, guys. Welcome to the show. I think it's your first time on. Thanks for being here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks so much. Great to be here. >> Yeah, guys. Actually, just first real quick, first time on the show, first time meeting you. Quick intro, Alex, how did you find Aerum? How did you get involved in the base ecosystem? Will, what brought you into the deep technical realms of building L2s with very customized, high quality stacks? Um, and then let's just jump right into it after that, please.

Yeah, make it a quick intro. You know, uh like many people I think in DeFi, crypto, anything but a linear career journey. So, got involved in politics when I was a teenager. Went to work big tech for a period of time. Did some consulting. Uh you know, was locked in my house in a pandemic. Uh got pretty addicted and DeFi summer at all things DeFi like like so so many. uh quit my job, didn't have a plan, but uh met some other really smart people uh in a DAO on Phantom. Uh that DAO, I think, was sort of the genesis of Veladrome, which is the largest exchange on uh optimism and the broader super chain. Veladrome led to Aerome and Aerrome has led to today and being here.

>> Well, I'm glad somebody took Andre Cron's ideas and made them work actually in in practice long term. Thanks for being here, Alex. Will. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I got into decentralized tech in 2013. Um, I was doing mesh networking research one summer at the MIT Media Lab, found my way to Bitcoin in 2013. You couldn't I did some experiments, but I couldn't program it. Um, so I found Ethereum in 2014. I was like, whoa, you can program it. That's cool. Um, so I took my $10 Coinbase signup bonus and I put that into the Ethereum pre-sale. um if id put $100 in, I could have gotten a house in the pandemic in 2020 like Alex, but I did not. Um so, uh hindsight's 2020. Um and then, um from there, uh my co-founder Ian and I, we started Syndicate, uh baseline ideas we had all the way back in 2018, working together

at IDO. We knew that more communities needed to come on chain. We didn't know how at the time. We knew that it was inevitable though. Um we did some work in investment dows. Uh that led us to other types of onchain communities um like decrypt radio um FWB and Nike um and we were working with Nike at their scale hundreds of thousands of users everything broke um onchain offchain was fine everything offchain was great onchain uh gas was spiking to a dollar um and uh it was very very clear that existing chains could not handle what crypto needs for mainstream adoption. that brought us down the L2 and L3 rabbit hole. Um, we saw a lot of issues with their centralization, the way

they're unaccountable, the way they're in some cases basically like uh, you know, people paying credit card bills to, uh, AWS and if someone stops paying the credit card bills to the RAS provider, it all gets deleted. That's not the future of crypto we saw in 2013. That's not the future of crypto we wanted to make happen. So uh we built a stack that decentralizes these roll-ups, allows anyone to run sequencers, stores the data onchain rather than offchain. Um and to keep that community first, um approach uh in addition to the roll-ups being run community first, we wanted to run our token launch in a community first way too. And uh that's where Alex and I and our my co-founder and our team started jamming. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think um anyone

who uh heard about this beforehand didn't really understand like the gravitas of it. I I heard about it um you know kind of talking with Ian a little bit but then also uh was at base camp. I think Alex you might have been at base camp as well this past week and and maybe Willie you were there too and Jesse was talking about this on the show as one of the more innovative launch uh patterns that that could occur going through Aerodrome in this way and then boom it took off. I hear drum put out a tweet. LPS within this 4% price range are getting 85,000% APR.

>> So, >> dude, that is better than yams. >> Better than yams back in D5. >> Alex knows. >> Help us like wrap our head around this and maybe you could unpack how this works, why it makes things more community oriented and and generally some of the things that people some some misconceptions that might be at play here. >> Yeah. Um I'll set things up uh maybe at the uh top here. So you know air drums and metadex what a metadex essentially is right is a deex that combines the best of curve convex unis swap all into this single streamlined design and core to that design is a token that is maximally useful right so 100% of the revenue that the ducks produces gets

redistributed back to veer voters each week as incentives for their participation and this is a sort of economic IC tissue that is very very important, right? Because each week the voters distribute all the new tokens, the emissions to pools and they earn back all the revenue that the DEX produces as incentives for doing that critical function. So how does this intersect with the idea of a community launch, right? And why is this only possible on a metadex? Well, think about the journey that most projects have to go through um in leading up to a launch. they need to build liquidity somehow.

Um, and that usually means you have to allocate a certain percentage of your supply to a market maker, right? And uh, we know there are extremely predatory market making deals out there where now a project has given up a ton of their token supply to a market maker. They got liquidity on it. Uh, but you'll see in the charts what happens next, right? This is not necessarily giving it to the most aligned group. Um and what you also see is uh centralized exchanges coming to projects who want that distribution from a centralized exchange but they have to give up anywhere between five and 15% of their initial supply to that centralized exchange to access that distribution to their customers. And so what we've pioneered here with the community launch is really putting uh be

arrow voters right the core people at the center of our system the people of lock tokens who participate each week at the center of this process. So um the syndicate team instead of giving up 10 15% you know to a centralized exchange they gave uh 1% of their supply with no price yet to V arrow voters and V arrow voters were then able to take a week and say hey how much voting power should we direct to this you know what do we think this token is worth you know what is my incentive to vote for it and I'm sure will will talk about this but did some pretty incredible little due diligence, right, and pushed the team and gave amazing feedback, but they ended up directing, you know, uh, over a million

dollars worth of arrow missions to this pool. And in return, they got that initial 1% of the supply. Now, this means they were also the ones seating the initial liquidity pool because there was an infinite, you know, sort of APR and then somebody adds $1,000 and somebody else adds another $1,000 and then people start trading into it and the pool grows and is larger and so essentially the market made itself, right? And we've got millions in liquidity on this token. You know, I think it did close to $50 million in volume the first day. Um, it's on track to do well over a million dollars in fees in the in the next week. It's really unbelievable. But the one last thing about this that I think is so revolutionary is because Coinbase has

directly integrated Dexes like Aeradrome into their front end without will or anybody on the syndicate team needing to pay a centralized exchange. It was live to trade on Coinbase within one hour. 100 million users, right? So the market made itself um through this distribution of EE arrow voters um and they essentially got what is a listing right instant distribution to 100 million Coinbase users. So we've disrupted I think three major verticals right of how typically launches are done um the way in which values are extracted values extracted out of those launches all in this sort of fair permissionless way and I think it is something uh totally new I think it is something that can be uh

replicated and that is to the benefit not only to like the platform in in a drone right and veer voters earned, you know, close to $20 million worth of incentives in this one week, which made Arrow the top revenue producing product in crypto, period. More than Hyperlquid, uh, more than Pump. So, there's a benefit to our system, but there's also a benefit to projects and protocols because they had to give up actually far less than they would have through all these centralized and permissioned means.

>> That is absolutely insane, guys. Um, and when it comes to actually seeing this play out, when you're looking at the, you know, the metrics on chain, I mean, there is, as you said, there's $50 million yesterday. Um, right now there's, it looks like there's 6,000 holders. Um, the the only question that I'm a bit concerned about on the model, Alex, if I was to push back on whether this is really truly, you know, democratizing access or just really Wales getting wealthier is the two large LPS are 34% and 33% uh respectively of the pool. Meaning that the majority of the 875,000 arrow rewards over this week period um are going to two entities. When I

checked yesterday, it was one entity had about 95% or 98%. What do you have to say about the concentration of where the yields are are going to those in the pool? And I don't mean to pick on you. I'm just just curious. I mean the the thing that's uh I think important to note is that uh in aerodyome system the emissions only flow to the active tick of liquidity and so it is always a like intense competition uh to remain within that active tick. So when you might look at the like total pool composition as potentially very concentrated if you think about the price is moving and it's been very volatile. this is price discovery, right? And that rewards are shifting across that active tick. Um, I don't

think there's any one centralized party who's going to be able to like soak up everything with how fast things are moving. Um, and you know, the initial voters, you know, who went in and and provided that uh supply, you know, was probably one of the more fair and equitable sort of like distributions. But I think it's going to be fierce competition to stay in that active tick. And um you know it'll probably change moment to moment even while we're on this call as to who's able to like maintain that liquidity in the active tick and then people position on either side. And I mean it's a really really uh kind of fun dynamic. Um but it is one that ensures you know that that uh syndicate and whoever's willing to take on that risk um is able to get the most reward. >> Yeah. And this was a risk because this

was a token launch model that hadn't been tried before. There was things that could have gone wrong, will when you were kind of like but but it didn't overall. It was like, you know, this I I got the attention you got like you like uh Alex just said, you know, on 50 million in trading volume on pace to to do quite well in terms of volume and fees. So will, you know, this was a success, but there was plenty of things that could go wrong, which is the case anytime you're doing something novel and new and unique. When you were looking at the token launch models that that are out there, surveying market maker deals and all of these things, what were you trying to accomplish when you set out for a token launch? And ultimately, how how did this tick the

boxes and ultimately overcome those risks that that you were taking into account? >> Yeah, so it definitely was a risk. I mean, Arrow was the only token that launched like this beforehand. It was a very different market, very different dynamics. And uh, Alex, your your team is, you know, very upfront, very blunt. They were like, we've approached a lot of people about this. And they've all said no. And we're like, well, we are open to this. We are open to this kind of risk. And, um, we were like, we'll take the leap because this is who we are and this is how we do things. We don't want to play it safe. If you look at the traditional launch options, there's three major traditional launch options. One is the centralized exchange route and you know the large airdrop route that you know we're all very familiar

with. That's probably the most common one. So people give out a bunch of tokens to centralized exchanges um and those centralized exchanges give it to their top traders. So basically the traders are paying fees to centralized exchanges and they get paid back so to speak with project tokens that they can then you know like uh do as they wish with. Um but they're traders so we know what they do with them. Um and um uh then there's also a bunch of tokens given out in a widespread airrop sometimes if you know you happen to talk about them on social media or use them early. Um, and the issue with this launch strategy is that it's uh pretty inefficient and unaligned. So, I'll start with the inefficiency. So, if you do a massive airdrop to all your holders

at once, then anything you want to do later, you're stuck. Like, you've already given away all your tokens. you've already like used up all of all of that all of that flexibility on day one before you know how anything's going to play out. Um, and it it it sometimes goes to aligned holders and it sometimes doesn't. Um, so the initial community you're bootstrapping with is not necessarily the community that's going to be using your protocol and providing a lot of uh a lot of a lot of help and you know a lot of good to your protocol. Um the second option is auctions. There's a bunch of you know great bootstrapping options for that where the auctions are used to bootstrap the liquidity pools. Um that's common in a lot of memecoin launches for example

where they'll take a bunch of money and then they'll use that to seed the LP. Um but uh the issue with that is that you're collecting a bunch of money from people in cash. you're giving them tokens back, but um it can lead to worse market discovery um as a result um because um uh and because people are, you know, having to put up a bunch of cash and decide what to do with it. And also people are paying a bunch of cash and then that doesn't go to the project. So the project gets a bunch of inflated expectations without the corresponding capital which is not a great place to be either. Um the reason why we really like the aerodrome launch strategy is it's effectively a lock drop. I don't know if

people are familiar with lock drops but um think of them as uh airdrops with an opportunity cost. So the aerodyum holders took on an opportunity cost. They said I'm going to go I'm going to vote for send that has zero history. It's an empty pool and it is there is 1% of the send supply sitting there. So if I vote for it, I get 1% of send whatever that may turn out to be >> or >> which is an incredible amount by the way, will for a for a lock drop. That is that is generous, >> but but still much less than what you would give in the traditional route. Um >> air drop was maybe 67 or something. >> I've I've heard more. Um yeah. Um it varies. Um but um then uh they are taking an opportunity cost. So they're

choosing not to get guaranteed rewards from other pools. They're instead taking some opportunity cost um based on their belief in us. Um and then so we gave it 1% there and then that went to an incredibly aligned community. We have staking dynamics where you essentially predict which rollups will do well. Aerodrama has staking mechanics where you predict which pools will do well. It's very similar. It's a very aligned community that we want. Um and then we uh carved out 2% to projects and we aird dropped it to projects not to end users. The reason why is because we wanted projects to choose what communities within their holders mattered most to them. So banker for example um is giving their airdrop to the top 500 banker club

members because that's what really matters to them. Um, Clicker uh is which is which is uh which is um also like a great discovery platform. Um they are asking their community what they should do with it. Um we have a bunch of groups reaching out to us or we're reaching out to them and we're like hey you have this really cool thing you can do and you can choose the things that matter most to you. So that also gets us alignment. We airdrop to 100 plus aligned projects and then they choose the most aligned subset of their users. Um, and then there's, you know, we're a pragmatic team. There's still a time and a place for centralized exchanges and market makers, but they did not have to be the center of the universe in this launch. This wasn't some massive fight to get as many

tier ones as possible so that we could get, you know, the best results. This was, hey, look, we're doing something cool. We're doing something different. Um, you should understand that. And, uh, if you're up for that, great. And uh if you're not up for that, that's okay, too. Um and uh it totally totally changed our conversations. Um which helped quite a bit as well. >> Yeah. And but I I do just want to emphasize because you guys said, you know, a lot of things could have gone wrong. This has only ever been done once, right? When the ARO token itself launched, right? And let me tell you, in the syndicate DMs, in our DMs, major major funds, major market makers, you know, just whales participants, >> a lot of anxiety, right? Um I think I

think out out there in the community, I think there were some people who said, "This is awesome. I totally get it. I'm excited." And uh frankly, you know, we even got some messages as this is the dumbest thing you guys have ever done. and you're gonna get killed and why why would you ever do this, right? Um and so I do just want to like commend like Will, Ian, and the team on the conviction because obviously we had the conviction to launch this way way back when. Um, and we've talked about it with so many other people and some of them have even gotten pretty close to the launch line and were thinking that they were going to go in a more fair communityled uh launch like this and then at the last minute, you know, the market makers, the

VCs, the the whales and their ears peel them off. They give their tokens over to Binance. They get, you know, they do the typical games. Um, but I cannot tell you the number of times that these projects have come back to us. They have a great first 48 hours, a great first week, and then it all catches up with them, right? And >> wow. And um I like you know Will and Ian and the team you know took a leap of faith here um because I think they really believe this is the right way from the first principles and they believe that all of these other options have significant costs to them and I want to commend them for having that leap of faith because now they will be an inspiration I think for many many other projects and protocols to launch in a similar way. I can't tell you how much inbound interest we've gotten now

from projects and protocols because a lot of people are sick of being like extracted at what is usually should be the most exciting moment for your project right when the token is going live and now they have a better option >> and Alex I was just saying to Rob like yesterday or the day before you know we've been now in kind of a more optimistic bull phase like feeling like a bull market for I mean maybe it's been a couple months where it truly feels like wow things are exciting You know, it's been kind of hit or miss for the last two years with different periods, but the one period that we did that we did have in early 24 was the high FTV low float meta that people really got upset about and that that kind of phased out into 24 into early 25. But all it took was a little bit of Trump, you know, going out and saying,

you know, crime is legal and a little bit of bull market spirits. And I just watched in the last month four to five projects launch with less than 20% float at over one to two bill on all the centralized exchanges and do the whole dance and nobody said anything to them. >> So we've we we've done a little bit of a full circle here. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I mean I think the the best part about this is that it really is an everybody win kind of scenario, right? Um uh the project gets a great launch. uh they get to distribute their token to a lined group of participants. That aligned group of participants are the first ones in making the markets, bootstrapping the pool, all this sort of stuff. And you also still get that exchange listing distribution day one.

And by the way, there is one more element of this which is sure there are uh crime is legal like projects. they're going to go out there and max extract like you know >> of course >> always has been um >> but there is I think an increasing number of groups right as as we are getting on these uh legal and regulatory rails and I know this was top of mind for syndicate that they wanted to do it in one of the most compliant ways possible you know they are a pioneer on the Duna structure um they are betting on America and so it's very important for them to have a launch that was not only successful in all the typical ways crypto DeFi people will evaluate that but that uh regulators and uh the general legal world will look at as a very compliant launch which you know in

my opinion this is probably one of the most compliant ways to walk launch and so mirror those two things together and it is the best of both worlds and it's uh kind of uh better for everybody. Yeah, Alex, just uh one last thing for you and then Will I have a very similar question which is how does this uh new token launch model for a drrome impact the core business model one of the most profitable pro protocols top 12 I I I believe if you checked defi llama different sources we're clearly deeply in this return to fundamentals I am the creator of the revenue meta Robbie and I there's the silly tweet um but that is very clearly where we're at how does this new business uh vertical potentially impact Aerome's revenue and the arrow token and then kind of will

curious from from your perspective about some of the tokconomics looking forward for syndicate. >> Yeah. Um I mean if you want a sense for how it it impacts uh Aerjarm's revenue, you know, veer voters, right, who voted for this pool, right? And and um as Will said, there's an opportunity cost to that, right, who took on the risk of of doing this. Um the incentives that they got were something like 15 to 20x their their typical, right? And it propelled Aerodrome into being the single most profitable uh or highest revenue producing protocol in all of crypto and all of DeFi right over the past seven days. And if you think about that, there's clearly a business model out

there because projects are every day launching and giving away 15 20% of their supplies to centralized exchanges and market makers. And if we say we've got a better model, right, and this is the type of outcome it creates for participants and for them. Um, I think it is a whole new utility for the VE Arrow token. Um, I think it's a whole new way to incentivize participation on the platform and ensure that those contributing the most uh to the platform are are being rewarded. And um this is just one and I think there's a much bigger pie for error drone to capture. And again this is not something you can replicate with the unis swap. This is not something you can replicate with any

other model. This is core to the metadex only can be done on the metadex and especially with the base dex integration can only be done on base right now. >> Yeah and I mean from our perspective what results is huge. So, Syndicate is a network of roll-ups and app chains. They use Syndicate to sequence their transactions. Um, and they use Syndicate to get all of these superpowers that make their roll-up decentralized, community-owned, govern fees can be governed by the community and our staking mechanics. We have a built-in community that already understands it because they have been so deep in the weeds of Air Game Theory. The Discord and Aerome, the Air Discord is one of my favorite Discords. It's wild. like go there. If you're not there, you're

missing out. Seriously. Um also go to our discord, too. Um but uh yeah. Um the the the air discord, they like go through all the game theory. Like people are like, "Oh, should I vote for send? Every other pool has more rewards. Should I vote for that pool and use that to acquire send?" Like all of these all of these wild mechanics. Um and now that's our community of holders, too. So we want people to be analyzing the roll-ups on the platform. um that uh we'll have more information on in the coming weeks. We want people to be able to uh go really deep into the mechanics of which roll-ups will succeed and we get to bootstrap it with one of the most um like uh thoughtful like game theoretically like oriented um like mechanism designoriented communities in

crypto. So uh it's very meaningfully changed our network for the better um because it's ensured that the holder base is one who really understands us deeply and our mechanics um which are lovingly cribed from a drrome in a number of ways um and uh and and now they understand us too. And will just one last thing for you. What is the uh state of So I saw the syndicate chain was using INDA had special like customized kind of like execution setup as well as just a different way of processing data all just optimized around like basically high throughput speed just kind of like what what we would call at the roll up like this nextgen purpose-built type of chain. um just quick kind of TLDDR on the syndicate chain if you will just have a

couple minutes and then on just the state of the actual network you know you know who's building or who's looking to build you know with you guys >> absolutely um yeah so Cynica chain I mean mainet is live um we have uh apps going live that we built um because we care about using our own tech uh if it's if we like it um we know developers will like it if we hate it we know developers will hate it so we work really hard to create a great experience for them. Um, and then, uh, customers will be going live who, um, will be announced soon. Um, they're a great group of people. Um, I don't want to say more, uh, but, uh, but yeah, keep an eye out for the next few weeks. Um and um from there essentially what syndicate chain offers it is as we say an arbitum orbit rollup

built with DA that essentially supercharges these roll-ups with customizability, decentralization and the throughput. Um so you can customize any environment you'd like for your chain. So we're talking with potential per dexes that could hit massive massive scale because they can inherit all the properties of a roll-up while customizing how they themselves operate and going beyond the scale of the EVM. Um we're talking with uh groups that want to customize uh the logic for their game to maybe inject offchain data or inject random data or add all of these details that are enforced by the sequencer. We're talking with groups that are thinking thoughtfully about

fees and they want the fees to be in the hands of users. And overall our goal with syndicate chain is to really um bring forward this vision of roll-up decentralization without compromising rollup scalability. Right now you have two choices. You can choose a very scalable very centralized rollup or a not so scalable um decentralized chain like Ethereum mainet. We want to give you the best of both worlds. Um, and uh, that's what that's what Syndicate Chain is built to do. >> Incredible guys. Thanks so much for coming on. Th this, you know, all materialized. You guys have been working on it behind the scenes. Uh, and it all came together over the last week. Um, I I really do hope that this inspires a new form of token launch. Um, Aerome has

a competitive advantage because of the partnership with Coinbase. You get the immediate listing. uh but ultimately this is a way out of the high FDV low float uh that we saw persist over you know half of this uh and last year. So congrats guys on a great launch. Uh we hope to see you again sometime and and uh talking about the next one to uh to do these lock drop um in the in the industry. Guys, congrats. >> Thanks so much. >> Alex, if there's more coming, you got to keep us in the loop, man. >> We'll keep you in the loop. the community is is hungry for these now, guys. Thank you so much. >> Thanks, guys. We'll see you next time.

>> Thanks, Will. >> Awesome. Wow. What a what a what a just wow. I mean, just what >> innovative that is just that's the crypto ideology at in practice. That's what we want to see. We want to see experimentation. We want to see innovation. These guys were able to bring the best of both worlds >> and and really bring it to the entire community. They chose to do something that didn't just benefit themselves and a select group of people. They chose to spread the wealth that that's decentralized. >> Yeah. I mean, we should have disclosed prior, but we we were also a recipient of the syndicate airdrop just from helping them, you know, being contributors and that type of thing. So, we're stoked to see them go live. Um, and it's just great. You know, I saw

them send to other medias, other Dows across the Ethereum ecosystem, other types of um community organizations. So, it was fantastic to be a part of that at the rollup and just, you know, learn from what what these guys are trying to do. Uh, and l luckily for us, we've got another really cool app product to talk about. Next, we've got Amirk Kumar. Um, who has they've been building a special app behind the scenes at Alt Layer. It's using the British spelling, you know, so I would pronounce I'd pronounce it as rumor instead of the American way. Rumor. We're gonna get them up and uh we're gonna talk all things uh what they've been building at Altair. So Emmerit, good good to see you, man.

>> Good to see you there. Thank you for Thank you for bringing me. Oh, by the way, on this British thing, it's not because I live in London. It's just because the domain was taken. >> Classic. >> So the you Americans have taken all the all the domains, man. We have >> Yeah, we're just hoarders over here. >> We had to pick something and we felt, okay, fine. We like the name, so why not pick a British one to >> There you go. satisfy. >> It's worldwide is what it is >> and it's apply something that we're just going to continue to see as web 3 builds into its app layer. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, Amar, let's set the stage a bit, man. Um, we're in this world of social media, right? We're in this world where you know Robbie and I had uh Frank Chapar on formerly at block or at the block now at GSR talking a lot

about this evolution of personal brands of media of distrust in institutions the shift towards you know influencers smaller media brands like the rollup like others and just kind of like this general trend at large and then you kind of extrapolate that and and bring it directly into the cryptoverse and what we've seen is the rise of infoi we've seen this this idea of mind share around attention this idea of uh monetizing attention and basically this a ever so uh um you know a a more focused approach on information on on information ahead of others that has always been the edge that has always the alpha in all markets and really in life but truly that in crypto has become more and more of a focus and so we've got now this crypto Twitter is like the square the time

square the town square a lot of stuff happens zingers get thrown by rumors are posted posted takes or are had and then on shows like this, right? And so that's kind of the context of the era that we are living in. And then you kind of can throw in AI agents are in there. They're coming in no no idea what their intentions are, who's trained them, what their models are, what garbage they're spewing, or if they're on on top. You see AI XPTt sometimes has great takes, great rumors that come out to be true, has information, and sometimes is talking out of his butt. And so this is kind of like the context for where we're at. maybe you can paint the picture for us as to what this idea behind building a new app around rumors is kind of what what the uh original thought process was

and kind of the story behind it now that kind of have the stage here. >> Yeah, of course. Thank thanks for this. So, let me give you some context behind this. So, there was a I watched a podcast or some sort of clip of a podcast from someone from ACZ and they were talking about this idea of beef of the day. So um if you look at crypto trader and of course even beyond there's always some drama happening on a daily basis like someone getting fired or someone getting getting uh rugging rug pulling someone else and so on. So there's always something interesting happening in the space and the idea is like you want to have a platform where those things can be discussed. So basically instead of having the headlines of the day or whatever you have the beef of the day where someone is fighting someone is trying to defend

themselves and so on. the other angle. So this was kind of the origin of this idea which is like okay if people talk about beef for the day like how do you present that in a in a crypto context and again crypto has no shortage of drama right and there's always this old wisdom that comes out and say hey you know when there's drama there's always something that you can do about it right so for example one is people often say hey um you know buy the rumor and sell the news right um and everyone says it right oh you know why are you buying now it's too late right you know it's it's already priced in you know but the problem is like when people say about this say say these things like hey you know you should buy the rumor by the time you actually s see the rumor on

Twitter it's already too late right because there are all sorts of parties out there uh you know people like Andy and Robbie who are you know traveling around in conference and so on they hear all sorts of things right of course they cannot go out talk about publicly for you know ethical reasons and whatnot but of course there all sorts of information that are floating around in the wild and by the time someone picks it up and is bold enough or anonymous enough to actually go out talk about it says publicly it's too late because people have already taken positions on that. So the problem is like yes people talk about this rumor by the rumor but how do I find this rumor like how do I get this and this is why again this infoi ability for different people to actually come out and share that news sometimes you know you know with their name behind it

but sometimes even anonymously is actually very powerful. So the first point is like okay we want people to give have this insight or information that is you know otherwise not available as a normal user. You have to wait until some influencer comes out and say hey here's this coffee zilla like you know um you know podcast or video that you can check and then you take a position on whatever underlying asset is being discussed there or you actually someone is brave enough to come out and say it publicly out loud. So that's for the first point. The second point is like and by the way you can see that time and again where like say if you look at for example even in the classical world where you have this um you know rumor that hey you know earnings are going to be great the earnings is going to come out in you know 5 days time and people

take positions on that and by the time earning comes out or when the earning comes out even if it's actually great the price tanks. So there's always this behavior that people want to buy this rumor, buy this hype, buy this expectation and when the actual news comes out, it's down only after that and so so that's one behavior that we've seen which is like people actually want to buy the rumor. So the question is like how do you get the rumor? How do you find that rumor easily? That's the first point. The second point is sometimes not just rumor sometimes actually a fact. What I mean by this is like let's say someone knew about if you're by the way if you're in Dubai token 249 you would have heard rumors about movement drama way before it was covered by media outlets uh on Twitter or or coin desk and so on

>> and so there are all sorts of alpha uh which can help traders to take long or short position depending on you know whatever the news is and that's again by the time it actually hits Twitter you it's too late right people have already taken positions and so on and the idea was for us to build a platform where you can get this information in a much more streamlined manner. You don't have to scroll around 10,000 posts to get someone some content that you can trade against. So this was the platform. Saudi is like we will take and basically scrape information from different sources but also allow people like for example you know there are people who come to your show and they share something but unless someone goes and watches this in entire entirety they will won't get the idea that okay should I take a long or short or whatever for

example the news around you did quite a few pasta podcast with for example the IP founders and so on there will also the relevant information that could be extracted from this so for us the idea is like we go and find that content out there through AI tools and we deliver to the end users or if the end users go and find themselves and post it out and then there's a monetization angle where if uh people come and use your information to trade then you know you will get paid essentially through what so that's the high level idea of what we're trying to achieve with Ruba >> I I think this is a convergence of several um metas narratives whatever you want to call them like there there's multiple phenomenons that are happening in parallel and they're converging around this combination of info finance, entertainment finance, prediction

markets and ultimately it's a better form of truth seeking because it's hyper financialized and that might be controversial but because you know hyperfinancialization you can see both ways but ultimately we're applying capitalist principles to the idea of information and truth and and uh doing this I think extracts things that were not there before. prediction markets extracts outcomes and potential realities that were not there and assigns them, you know, this probability of happening. The information that you're talking about extracts that into a market and then assesses a probability of look it, do you think this is believable? Do you think this is factual? How do you want to uh trade this market based on this information?

There's also a couple other things that I just want to throw out there because I think we're just kind of seeing the rumblings of this entire new burgeoning industry and I can really vividly picture the way these things will connect in the future. Um th those two one of them is Yik Yak. If you remember this is an anonymous uh communication application that was popular when Andy and I were you know in in high school and college still around today. Reached a peak of 10 million users. I was just playing golf with the founder and the these guys are now building on crypto rails and they're letting you earn based on you know it's still you post an anonymous message if it does well you will earn some USDC. There's another app too that I think is going to potentially integrate with rumor or yik yak or both and just put together this really

impressive ecosystem which is two cents.money. I like this because it essentially again it's anonymous but it assigns your net worth. So you don't know who the person is but there's some ZKTLS mechanism that will verify oh this person's worth $10 million or this person you know you might have this elaborate thing that you think is going to do well but their net worth is $100. So how believable is it? And I think if you put some of these things together, you can start you can remain anonymous but be verifiable in certain ways and you can start to build a more robust persona around this person without actually knowing who they are, their identity. And you can start to have a deeper insight into what their perspective is, where they're coming

from, and whether or not you should take this thing as truth or a believable rumor in your case. And so just to say that I think you guys have really approached this from a unique angle and I think pairing this with some some of the other things that are burgeoning in info finance, we're going to see an entire new asset class created. It's no longer that we just have price discovery on stocks, equities, crypto as a new asset class. We're going to see an entire new asset class on rumors, predictions, information in general. And I think this is going to this is an an asset class that is just be being born now and it's native to crypto rails >> indeed. So if you think about it today on Twitter, you go to Twitter and you post some content and if your content

does well and by the way it's not just for Twitter, YouTube, elsewhere you actually make money from that from the engagement because you're driving value back to Twitter, right? In the same way, let's say if I have some information, I have dug some information out of I don't know ether scan or something that something is fishy going on. Why would I not monetize this? Right? And the way to monetize, look, I'm here putting it and if it's big and if it's true, if you believe that what I'm saying is true, then you know, you're trading against or trading with my information and you should bring me back some value back, right? And this basically the idea of, you know, what we're trying to achieve where you will share something and if there's enough people believing in that thing and enough people use that information to trade, then you would get

paid essentially through trading volume or some percentage of trading volume. For example, >> there's another Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. >> So one thing that I also like to highlight is like there are two aspects to it. One is like of course sharing content. But again the question is like how believable believable that is and that comes to the fact that do people actually think there's enough material evidence in different shape and form that makes this rumor true or false and then you bet against that or bet with that. Right? So for example if I say hey I don't know um CZ is going to launch another I don't know stable coin whatever right? If I have sufficient enough evidence to to to show that then probably will I actually believe that okay this is a legit thing and then I I would take that information I actually bet I don't know maybe BNB go

long B&B or whatever right so so it also depends on the crowd that is going behind that specific rumor and that's also brings the social element into it's not just about you tweeting out or you saying out but they also have to be people behind it that believe that or that have some faith that this rumor could be true or false. Yep, definitely. And I've tried the rumor app and on the app, what you guys have allowed basically is people to discuss within like a discussion room about that rumor. And so maybe that's how you can get real discussion about the legitimacy behind this. And then you can think about like reputation scores on the platform as well. And then you've got like people's reputation with, you know, attached to to their message. and you can build this kind of community around um yeah just essentially making profit together but

ultimately like having the ability to sift through nonsense together and separate the noise from the signal and then have a financial benefit on the platform from that as you guys have integrated hyperlid for per you know outside of the platform on a poly market on a calion or whatever it is you know there's those types of options too >> so one thing is also that it's also essential potential is useful for people outside of trader community. So imagine let's say I'm a journalist let's say you know let's say Andy or Robbie and I want to see okay what's interesting going on what should what's worth covering and then you would go to the rumor platform you would see let's say five different rumors being floating around of course they might be completely rumors they might not be true but that gives you some sort of information of what interesting article you could write. So

for example let's say you see some interesting news then you go and contact your sources and say hey is this really true is there enough evidence for me to go and cover an article or put an article around this. So it's not just about traders, but it also can be useful just as a general information for other community members who are involved in that ecosystem to to to grow as well. >> Yeah. And it's kind of like an alpha meter like as you have a rumor that becomes more and more believable, it goes from this kind of amorphous thing that might or may not be true and as it gets more and more true kind of cements itself as alpha. >> Exactly. Exactly. This is the whole thing one of the investors said to us. It's like we should rename it to big if true kind of app. >> I like that. essentially. Yeah. So you

you are basically betting on on the creator in some way and saying okay if this rumor is true this this creator will actually earn money or you know we'll have some reputation behind it if it becomes true. >> Yeah. So >> yeah go ahead. Well, that that was the other thing I was going to mention earlier that this is another angle to the creator capital markets where you guys and and you know pump fun has done this, Zora has done this and and you are now doing this with rumor has brought down the barrier of entry for creators before you know how how Andy I don't remember how how many subscribers or views we had to get before we got monetized on YouTube but you have to reach a critical mass.

>> This is granular for each post. So you can and then there's microtransactions and so this is much more scalable and it's a lot more um bootstrappable I guess you could say because it's a lower barrier to entry and then there's also peer-to-peer dynamics we've seen kick rumble Twitch all of these guys they're taking massive cuts for themselves and so that's why Pump Fund that's why Zora that's why you guys are in a position to win because you're passing more of these rewards back to the creators >> indeed and by the way it's we we haven't done so right now integration is mostly on hyper liquor so if you let's say for example believe that okay this rumor is going to pump BNB or BDC you go and take position hyper liquid but you could imagine variants of this where you say okay is this rumor true and then you can create prediction market for that as

well so there there are different opportunities for people to actually go and build interesting things just by using the data that's being provided on that platform as well >> yeah I'm curious how you uh plan to kind of think about getting the you know first 100 thousand first hundred or first thousand users to be active what kind incentives do you think are necessary for these new platforms? You know, let's just say there's Kali and Poly market on the prediction market side and then there's so many smaller variations of prediction markets that are coming out um that are kind of like looking at the pie trying to analyze where their gap is. Rumor is a bit different than a traditional prediction market. Still looking at a similar, you know, broad market in terms of the segment uh of of people in terms of

demographics. How do you kind of see your wedge? what is the wedge that you guys are are going to you know carve out for rumor and how do you see the types of users end up playing out >> yeah so the first so there's all sorts of information so I'm not saying that the information that's there on rumor cannot be found elsewhere you will actually go and if you go and search for Twitter you probably will find it the question is how fast can you find it >> right because that that actually dictates how much you know P&L you will get if you if you take that action at the right time because time is actually quite sensitive here and so one thing that we want to make sure is that the data that you get is really really fresh so that you actually come here for data

and then stick here for trading. That's the angle. So data is the hook. We bring you in because you find it's kind of like coin market cap or coin gecko. You go there to see data and then for even for example MetaMask you go on Metamas to manage your assets and while you're there you might also swap your assets. So the idea is like for us the hook is the data. We want people to see the freshest thing possible the in the fastest way possible. So before or even ideally before it even hits crypto Twitter it has to be on the on the on the platform. That's kind of the main angle. And once you have this then you basically get hooked up because you want to see the data what's coming up and then once you are hooked up with the data because you're seeing interesting

things coming up then you'd go oh now this is interesting. Maybe given given depending on what your interests are maybe certain things may not be interesting to you. So you could say I I don't have any position B&B. I don't want to take any position BNB. I only want to focus on hyperlquid. But if something interesting comes out of the hyperlquid you want to go and bet on that. Right? And so the idea is like we want to be the fastest possible source of information that is not available on crypto twitter quite yet. It will be available in like an hour or so but we want to give you as quickly as possible those early rumors these early whispers that you see and hear among certain circles and friends we want to bring that up as quickly as possible.

>> And so what is the incentive for creators to bring their information to rumor before it lands on Twitter? >> Yeah. So the angle is like if you let's say prepare let's say you post a rumor around certain asset and if people actually go and use that group to actually trade then any volume that comes from that >> go back to the creator >> go back to the creator >> creator capital markets. >> Exactly. Exactly. So you are actually incentivized to post interesting things that will drive volume trading volume through hyper liquid. >> Easy. I mean it makes makes so much sense. And so ultimately this is a game of like look if you post your alpha on Twitter people are going to use it.

>> You get nothing. You get nothing. >> You get nothing right if people use it. If you post it on rumor you're going to get trading volume if people use it. >> And I believe points going on as well. >> Yeah. Yeah. So there there also some other things behind the scenes but like the main angle is like okay we want you to generate revenue and again points also comes back to you know your um and referrals and everything kind of comes back to volume as well because we want to generate revenue and that revenue goes back to people who are actually driving that revenue which is creators essentially. >> Yeah. This also feels like overheard big if true right overheard right like I go to KBW >> exactly >> token will be at refundamentals like overheard at refundamentals.

>> Yeah. you know this alpha >> and you always hear this is true like you know when I was a token I at least heard five different things u you know and by I don't travel too much but like whenever I travel you always hear something right >> yeah of course >> of course you're going to talk about it publicly because you know we are sensible human being I suppose but many people are open to doing that you know at least anonymously so why not >> yeah that's the case >> yeah and so just switching gears to re fundamentals I'm curious like what are you most excited about what do you think you might overhear maybe we'll use this as kind of a breeding ground for some rumors. >> Uh I I would say that there's still a lot of interesting things happening in the in the um AI world. So that's still

interesting. Um of course things have heated up recently with um you know Binance versus Hyperlquid I suppose is if that's the right way of of spinning it. So we have to see how that plays out. Um and again there are all sorts of rumors going around that as well. So hopefully we'll see some of those things come out in public. Um and then so yeah idea is like we want to push um rumors and of course once and by the way many of these rumors actually come out when you see people right you know talk face to face and this is where you know you you feel more confident to share publicly you know in front of in front of your friends. So I think hopefully >> you hopefully we'll see this over coffee or drinks or you know beer that people will see at in Singapore

>> and more more generally you guys have hosted a few of these Ref fundamentals events at some different conferences. What was the inspiration behind RE Fundamentals? It's like, you know, we talked about it before. It's like, you know, crypto's re-entering its fundamental era because we're building for real people, real consumer behavior. We're not just building this the the 30th, you know, uh, L2 anymore, right? >> Well, I don't know. Justin Sun and CZ are indeed building the next perex just as we speak with buybacks. >> I mean, per Dexes have a fundamental uh, value proposition adoption here in this space. And if you think even if you think about PBEX right at least it was not like the PBEXes were not there. Dy dydx was there but still someone Jeff was brave enough to come back and say you I'm going to build a better better

pubex and actually it was indeed better. It was not just saying we're going to build it. It was actually much better and so we have seen that you know there was there have been cycles where you see very interesting things happen like D5 things like you know a you know unis swap you know a lot of interesting things happen and this is another cycle where you are seeing interesting things happen like morpho people could you could say that okay you know the lending market is already done there's nothing interesting that you could do and then here comes comes uh you know morpho you could have said that oiler was dead like you know after some of the hacks that happened with them and yet they have revived themselves same for for example fluid which is the kind of instab again you could say oh if they were dead you know nothing would happen to them and

yet there's a revival of some of the things and so you can actually see that there's still demand for projects and companies uh and ideas that people want to use and not just sake of writing white papers and so on so those those days are definitely changing and that's why we are talking about refundamentals and bringing back to building for the users not for ourselves >> I also think YQ is just a fan of the return to fundamentals all caps tweet that I would put out once a month and then uh we actually had like the syndicate guys on yes or earlier and I I remember in Denver they put this tweet on the TV. Everyone was talking about different tweets that they uh you know you know you just tweeted that a month ago so you know come talk about it and they and and they told me that that this was the one and so I went on stage and I

think I basically explained what we're just talking about here where it's like you know we're we're kind of entering this practical era of the space and uh it's really just returning to a lot of the and I've been calling it unsexy stuff unsexy use cases payments you know remittances crossber stuff store value uh basic all you DeFi usage um you know score you know having a protection against the devaluation of the dollar self- custody decentralization these things all of that is like coming back and it's kind of boring and unsexy but it's really really important and it's taken us way longer than I think a lot of us thought and then on the other hand like all of the all of the kind of maturation of the industry from a regulatory perspective is really allowing us to do so and so yeah it's just really a return of

fundamentals >> the fact that today is It's it's it's a fact that you know by the way this is something that you know people understand the trady space or you know web two space where you say you know UI sells right or UX actually sells in the sense that even if you just repackage something in a in a very user friendly way it actually sells and think about like you know Slack or or Discord you could always argue that there's no real difference between Slack and you know I don't know Telegram or whatever you could always do something but actually the UI that in a certain context actually makes sense. So what you can do with Slack you cannot do with Discord. Imagine running your internal team on on on on discord is going to be messy and painful and you know it will suck while if you use Slack for internal

communication is actually great. And this is what you're seeing you know you said unsexy or I call it boring where people are building things that are mostly packaging but actually people want that people want those kind of repackaged stuff because they feel like it's actually helping in many ways. For example, hyperlid builder course. Now people are building different kinds of interfaces for that, right? So there people building, you know, mobile phone app for that connects to hyperlquid. You could say, okay, why would I fund this as a VC? It's it's just boring. Anyone can build this over weekend. Why would I bother investing in it? And yet there is a demand for people going to those platforms and using that. So I would say there's a return to building things that people actually want and people actually you would use rather than or here's

another infra for the sake of you know raising $50 million. >> Yep. And I mean I I had Paul from Panta on on Monday or or Wednesday I think and it's getting to be too much AR. It's five days a week. I I'm I'm losing track of days here man. And you know he's just mentioning how look they're focused on more series A rounds. they're they're doing less very early seed infra stuff. You know, uh funding has gotten constricted a bit even though like the market's doing better and um you know, rates are coming down slowly. But it's there's just these forces at play which is like the regulatory improvement is causing people to like for lack of a better term man up and build something real. The the the VC uh kind of market is where it is for a reason for a

similar reason. the token market. We just had the Aerajome guys on prior to this. They just did a whole new brand new token launch without a centralized exchange. You launch it directly on base on aerome. It goes directly to Coinbase. So you don't even need a Coinbase listing. You don't need a Binance listing because from day one you're on Coinbase already as a result of being on base yada yada. So like there's just people are pushing the agenda and forcing and hyperl is a big one. forcing others to, you know, either operate how they're going to, you know, operate or, you know, suffer. And so, we'll we'll see how this plays out. It'll be a really interesting couple years ahead.

And, um, yeah, I would love to have you on in after Token after all that. I'm sure you'll see Rob out there. And would like to do a demo of the app and see if we can get this thing rolling. >> I will see you there, Emirate. Looking forward to it. >> See you. See you. >> All righty. >> All right. We'll see you in Singapore. And uh thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Robbie. >> Okay, sir. >> See you next time. >> Much love. >> Peace out. >> Rob, you get fired up on those uh prediction marketesque app type ideas, huh? I think uh you know we were talking about this with Faro like the um the asset class right now is it it's you know you you asked what I

thought was somewhat of a silly question because it's like how do you predict what a TAM is? It's like it it's saw I saw someone's tweet today. It was uh with reference to a VC. is like the TAM of a founder who wants to take over the world is not the initial niche. Actually, the TAM is the entire world. Like that's prediction markets right now because you could look at the current span of what prediction markets are covering and say, okay, well, it's the TAM of sports gambling, right? All sports gambling is going to be prediction markets. or it's some percentage of sports gambling plus crypto because there's a lot of crypto volume that's happening there. But we don't think about the things that currently aren't financialized. They

don't have price discovery. You cannot speculate on them. But with prediction markets and only prediction markets can you speculate on the the set of things that are in this asset class that are that currently does not exist but with prediction markets exists. and we have it. It is a net new asset class. And so with that being said, the TAM is really like it's the existing market share of assets that currently exist plus the asset class of things that are going to exist with this technology. And I think our imagination can only go I mean you can really just like think about all of the potential assets. It's really it's really infinite and and it really so >> like a a really big asset valuate like

market size. >> So the tweet is one of the best VC I know said this to me recently. I don't care how much about market size or I don't care much about market size. If the founder wants to conquer the world, the true size of the market is that of the entire world, not the initial niche they try to go after. And Chia Wang says,"I think about this often and I'm in complete agreement." Kevin Simbach of Deli responded said, 'I generally agree. I like to see a founder who wants to conquer a niche or an overlooked market segment, which by definition is relatively small, and if they're successful, it makes it expanding into larger markets much easier.

>> So that's the tweet. And so I I also agree with that because you could speculate on what you think new assets are going to be. You can think about like what founders are going, what niche they're yet to find and speculate on that. >> And I think prediction markets are something of a good founder where it's like >> the imagination, >> it's a shelling point for imagination. >> Like you can create a market around anything. And so just like a a good founder has a lot of imagination. They can go out, they can find a niche, they can adapt, pivot, and ultimately find a market that, you know, will will get them product market fit and a successful business. Prediction markets are the same, man. They're a shelling point for imagination.

>> Yeah. Interesting. >> Can't really put a price on that. >> Interesting. Should we uh have a quick look at some of the uh markets that are live today on Kelshi? Let's see what's going on here. Um, so cool. What we got? Ooh, the top one that I see is government shutdown on October 1st, 2025. 54% chance. Wow. 137,000 traded on that. Will Trump expand the H-1B program? 14%. D. When will a new EP When will a new episode of uh Jimmy Kimmel Live be released? He got suspended for a bad joke. Is that right? >> I think it was a Charlie Kirk comment.

>> Oh, got it. I didn't see that. I am so far removed from American pop culture on a day-to-day basis. It is just my day-to-day is like, "All right, we're running the rollup like 12 hours of the day and then it's like a workout and then it's like anything that has to do with human connection. There's just not much time in there for uh for uh you know, scrolling around like what's going on in pop culture." But may maybe I'm missing out on some stuff. No, no, no. It sounds bullish. Keep doing what you're doing. >> So, New York M mayor election, which is kind of impactful for a lot of crypto. It's looking like they are gonna elect M Donnie based on Kelshi's information.

86% Mom Donnie. Um, >> that's insane. >> That is crazy, right? >> What's your take on Mom Donnie? Uh, I would not have voted for him, I don't think. And I would not live in New York City either way to take the taxes. Uh, Florida's by far the best to live, but New York is amazing for several months, so that's going to be my setup. I don't think it's going to affect me really. I don't think it's going to affect that many people. >> No, I I just mean like the uh emergence of socialism. >> Oh, I just think it's classic like uh Trump is going to just go full capitalistic mode. My prediction is the next US president is more of a of a like a yeah like a more of a socialist type of leaning uh person because I think we've we're going to swing way too hard

to one side as a result of uh of of this current presidency. So um guys, we have about half of the Ethereum Foundation's research team in the back. uh enough brains to conquer like three jurisdictional uh situations at once while, you know, maybe having a couple beers. So, we're going to roll into Tim, Dankrat, and Josh, all of the Ethereum Foundation. Um, Ethereum is in a very pivotal moment in its existence. Uh, if you've been watching our show, you know that we've been covering Ethereum since about late 2019. Rob and I having first discovered around 2016. And since then, the entire the entire trajectory of the asset, of the network, of the community has shifted, changed, grown, and improved. And so, we've got some of the leaders in

the back now, and we're going to bring them up to talk about Ethereum entering its institutional and practical era, what that means for the protocol, for the network from a technical perspective, some of the updates from the EF, uh, as well as just generally catching up with these guys. So, guys, welcome, welcome to the show, and, um, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, thanks. >> Awesome guys. Yeah. Um, you know, Ethereum is such an expansive and and vast organization. Um, earlier we were talking about prediction markets kind of as the shelling point for imagination. I think Ethereum is also shelling point for intellectual capital as well as financial capital and several other things. A lot of that rolls up into you guys. Um, you know, I've seen you guys

on all core dev and hosting AMAs and going to conferences, doing all these things. And so, you guys have really been shepherds for the entire ecosystem. We were kind of talking about before you guys hopped on like what what is this episode going to mean the roll up and for Ethereum and we kind of came to like this like state of the nation, if you will, like the state of the network. Uh, maybe you guys could just kind of give each of your pieces. You each have a very, you know, unique role within the organization. catch us up. What's what have you guys been up to and and generally the state of the nation from each of your perspectives? Um Tim, maybe we can start with you and Denrad and Josh, we'll go down the line. >> Sure. Um well, yeah, first of all, thanks for having us on. Um I can start maybe from the perspective of like the

L1 protocol because that's what I spend my time on. Um, I think we're entering like a pretty exciting time where we've figured out a lot of the path towards how to scale Ethereum. Um, at least at like a high, you know, architectural level. And there's like a really broad shared appetite towards just addressing every single bottleneck that's preventing us from scaling Ethereum, uh, both on a layer one and layer two front. Um, and you know, I won't get too much into the weeds, but I think we've just had all this R&D happening in say the past five years on things like ZK, things like uh sharding and, you know, blobs for layer 2s that kind of felt impossible to ever ship in production uh, you know, a few years ago, but just has seen this massive exponential

progress where we're now at a point where um, after a couple orders of magnitudes improvements on many different fronts, we can start kind of bringing these things to production. So yeah, it's a really exciting time. We're we're just kind of on this cusp of uh being able to scale Ethereum to a you know larger and larger user base um and doing so in a way that doesn't compromise on the core properties of the network. So the reason why this is hard is just um you have to do it in a way that maintains all these uh properties around you know censorship resistance, decentralization that we value um and yeah we're kind of on the edge of that. So, at least for the protocol, that's I think where we're at.

>> Awesome. Josh, welcome to the show as well. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. Big fan. Um, I guess for context, so we have the three strategic initiatives at the F as you and your listeners probably know, scale L1, scale blob, improve UX. I sit on the improve UX side of things. Um, not sure where to start. I I guess what I would say is that I think like Tim mentioned the path to scaling L1 and scaling blobs is definitely becoming much more clear. There's a pretty legible path um to significantly scaling uh L1 and to scaling blobs. Um I can't say that is exactly the same case for improving UX and solving interop but it is becoming much more

clear which is making me more optimistic. I don't think I'd say the same thing maybe 6 months ago. So yes, like the picture is a bit fuzzier, but it's becoming significantly more clear and I expect it to become even more clear in the coming months. Um, and we yeah, just a couple of weeks ago, we uh, Barnaby and myself released an update on the approved UX track. Encourage your listeners, anyone to to go check it out. There's more information there on the road map to to improving UX and to unifying Ethereum. Um, it's clear that it's a top priority both for us and for the ecosystem. Happy to share more about that. Um but yes, it's also an exciting and challenging time in terms of uh unifying Ethereum. >> And Dan, welcome to it. Thank you for for joining. >> Thank you for having me.

Yeah. Um I think like I sit uh between all the chairs here at the moment. like I uh I kind of like um yeah started thinking about like be after being sort of like the I don't know like ivory tower researcher at the EF uh for a few years I started thinking about a lot more practical stuff and like since last year like um have been active on pushing everything towards like yeah making sure that uh Ethereum is ready for the real world. I think like it's like a pretty big moment for crypto, right? Like all the eyes are on us because like uh for 10 years we had the excuse, oh, you won't let us do what we want to do, so we can't do it. Well,

now we can do it. So like we actually have to show what it is, what we can do. And um I think yeah, like it's a it's a great moment. It's uh it's interesting because like things are definitely different, I think, from how many cryptonatives have imagined them to be, but they're still very very exciting I think and there's like a lot of things happening and I think like yeah I mean Ethereum uh does really need to like yeah like uh make sure it stays in the game and like get things right right now. I think like it it's it's like things move much much faster than they have moved for a long time and like um it's uh it's kind of like how I think about like yeah like trying to make sure that we get things right and

>> awesome >> do the right things like scaling one was one of the big things that we really needed to change and like finally we've started doing it >> I agree it just took Max Resnik leaving to Salana in anger with a hell of a hell of a >> he has played his role as well. >> Well, gentlemen, thank you for joining us. >> I mean, he's he's >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he had the right idea. Um, and it's unfortunate that, you know, he took his talents to Salana, but at the end of the day, I think we can move firmly on as we are. And guys, we are entering Ethereum's institutional and practical era more than ever. And what I mean by that, you know, from a holistic perspective is cryptos entering this this era where uh regulatory clarity with a mix of returning to

fundamentals, investors wanting to invest into uh real sustainable long-term assets, institutional capital with longer time preferences, creating a new dynamic in the market. In in light of this, we're moving deeper into what I consider like deep value territory, which I think may be a roaring kitty term if I'm not mistaken. So, we're moving away from some, you know, fugazi decentralization, doing Dows or doing different types of structures for the sake of them. Now, there's anything wrong with Dows. They're still amazing structures, but we had to do these things in the past. We had overemphasis on this idealism and tribalism instead of product application user experience onboarding and really into real albeit sometimes unsexy categories of move moving the entire world's finances on chain. It's extremely bullish

development for the space as a whole equally so for Ethereum the number two crypto asset the number one smart contract platform. I'm curious guys from each of you to kick off in this new practical era understanding this context what is the vision for Ethereum in this era from a tech perspective let's kind of start to understand what we want Ethereum to be and kind of align on that and then we can hammer in on how we get there um so Dankrad I'll start with you and then let's go down the line guys let's have some fun today >> yeah um well many things I think Like one of the things we realized is like uh we need to refocus on Ethereum the chain it's come a little bit short

in the last few years was all like all about L2s and everything uh which are great like they were great great Ethereum innovation but like I think like uh Ethereum L1 still has a huge role to play in this uh in this world and like it's one of the things um that we should focus on and then uh yeah like we have the other two areas I think like like uh Josh will tell more about the UX part, but I think like um on the scale one and uh and blocks part like we're at this great point in time. We're actually in a way like yeah like uh I don't even want to call myself a researcher anymore because like actually the research is kind of like figured out more or less. There's no deep academic research here

to be done. It's like execution now and like um uh we we just really need to do it. we get need to get our heads down and like get the work done. >> So Josh picking up on that when you're when you're thinking about UX for the institutional era more practical era how has that shift occurred putting the research aside now putting putting your execution hat on you know what where give us a before and after picture of uh you know where we were and where we're getting to. Yeah, I guess and I would maybe just start by saying one thing maybe to correct some FUD like to me at least speaking from my own personal point of view. Um I I don't think I've ever really been more optimistic on the

future of L2s and their role their critical role in the Ethereum ecosystem. And I think often times some of this renewed emphasis on scaling the L1 gets sort of misconstrued as you know moving away from the importance of L2s and just want to again like to me genuinely I am like I don't see a future um I don't see us getting to where we want to be without L2s playing a huge role here. I do think like what that means it may look a bit different from what it has meant historically perhaps to your question. I think to me the way that I view sort of the multi-chain world that we are that we that we're now in, it hasn't been that long that we've been in this sort of true multi-chain world, but we're clearly there now and likely to continue to stay in. To me, I I guess I

view L1 having two sort of main value drivers, let's say. One is its role as the most secure, permissionless, neutral, trust and security hub. sort of the trust route and I think number two I would say is as a strong liquidity hub and I think this is where some of the the path this these three strategic initiatives are you know coming from is to it helps to reinforce um this liquidity hub and that doesn't mean that um yes like like there there's the world that we're going to it there's a world where L1 needs to maintain its role as as a as a liquidity hub um and I think both of these things

are actually going to the question of this is maybe a bit of a of a tangent but I'll stop here in terms of like why would someone who's building a chain want to become part of the Ethereum ecosystem why would they want to be an L2 versus an L1 to me I think again my personal take is that it's it's these two value drivers it's both on the security trustless permissionless side tapping into the most decentralized secure validator set um and then also tapping into Ethereum as a liquidity hub and I think clearly there's a lot of work to do in terms of strengthening liquidity hub and strengthening the interrupt which actually allows this liquidity hub to operate as a liquidity hub. Um so yeah, maybe I'll stop there. Appreciate it. Yeah, Tim, from your perspective, what is this uh what is the institutional era of Ethereum look like

from a tech perspective? Um and you know, what are some of those core components that are non-negotiables that we're working towards? Yeah, one thing that's kind of funny with this is um there's some ways in which the institutions are almost the It's so true, isn't it? It's funny how uh institutions have a really really

really important focus on privacy, something that we talked to Justin Drake about uh earlier in the week, which is going to be a big part of the of the upcoming Athereum L1 road map. and then yeah this credible neutrality at at the base layer and Tim I think this this kind of brings a a good followup back to you with regards to Ethereum's role in the macro landscape and so I think all of us can agree Ethereum's now be become a macro asset I mean it's very clear if just if you look at pure uh economics on the market cap side of things it's up there in with some of the biggest equities and other kind of hard assets in the world and also is now playing a a big role in DeFi in consumer across these L2s and the EVM in these upcoming payment chains that have been announced

uh which is a whole topic to get into as well. But when you're thinking about from money perspective, from compute with AI and kind of this realm uh and coordination, how do how does the Ethereum Foundation view Ethereum and ETH the asset within the broader lens of the macro global landscape? >> I can give you my view. I don't know that I would call this the Ethereum Foundation consensus. Tim, Josh, anything to add there, guys? I think that's a that was a good answer.

>> I don't have anything to add to that. >> Dra, anything on your side about Ethereum's global macro position? >> You as an asset or as like the chain? I think they are very different. >> Yeah, I think Tim spoke a lot about the chain. I think uh either or >> right I mean I think like the asset is the much harder one. So I I don't really want to talk about it at the moment, but I think like the chain is uh um yeah, I mean it's it's in a very interesting position because like it is like we we're at this like as you mentioned earlier at this point where global adoption is probably like about to happen and Ethereum has like a lot of sort of like activity like trading, DeFi, everything from the

crypto markets and that doesn't automatically translate into like being successful in this next step. It's like a good starting point, but I think like we have to now successfully adapt that to like what the real world assets need and so on because like it's it's like kind of like uh it's a little bit like a crossing the chasm moment, right? Like where like you have all this early adoption in the crypto world and now comes the rest of the world and like this is going to be very quick. like this is going to be very sudden like it's going to be like nothing and then everything and like um yeah it's kind of like I I do think that the Ethereum chain has some unique advantages in terms of the trust it has in terms of like the major maturity of the EVM

technology but it also has some unique challenges in terms of like our past refusal to scale it which will make things a bit harder and um like being slower on like slot times and finality than other chains. Like those will be seen as disadvantages by some and I think we'll have to like make a very credible road map how we're going to improve on all of these to get to like yeah acceptable times for global markets. >> Yeah, thank you for that Drad. There there's a really important balance to strike here. So I'd like to pass this over to Josh because you know we've kind of heard from Tim describes this economic zone of really flexible and it's something of of real agility. You can you can be nimble and kind of test

these things out almost experimentally. Uh prediction markets reaching the scale it's not possible anywhere else for example. And then you know Dankra the flip side of that is that some of these it are really really important and crucial economic pieces to a global macro landscape. The crossover here is 30-year mortgages, making sure that institutional capital is resilient for the long haul. So, Josh, kind of difficult position to put you in. Like, how do you balance uh these two worlds? One of like really experimental financial um imagination and and the other of the triedand-true practical fundamental economics and finance that has lasted 100 years and will last a hundred more. How do you build a UX on Ethereum for both of these worlds?

>> Yeah, that that is a tough one. I don't know that I'll have the best answer, but what I would say is that ultimately we need to lean into Ethereum strength. We need to lean into L1 as the global source of truth and we need to fix the things that are currently bottlenecking that preventing that from happening. And one of these, of course, is L1 finality time. There's a really powerful set of mechanisms that we can improve in I I think the not too distant future to make big strides on finality time of the L1 at least in many different sort of user flows. Um, and we can talk more about sort of like

what are the actual things we can do there. I I don't know how deep you we want to get into right now. Um, but that's one thing I'm really excited about is just this general sort of set of things that we can do to make the L1 faster. On the L2 side, there's been a lot of momentum here as well in terms of getting rid of the 7-day windows. And that's something that I think actually we need to do no matter what. Um, and so I think to me it's it's maybe less about like yeah, like it's not going to be the most insightful answer perhaps, but finding the things that we know with high degree of confidence we must do no matter what. It's kind of like there's a lot of low hanging fruit. So, there's a lot of things that we need that we know we need to do. Um, and these are things

that are not a surprise. Many people in the community have been talking about this for quite a while. U, but I think now we're finally sort of understanding the design space and the infrastructure and ZK is here and all these kinds of things that are making this much easier to do now. Um, and just uh for whatever reason, we're sort of like finally getting to this rallying point now. Uh, so I think yeah, speeding up uh L2 withdrawal time, speeding up L1 slot time, finality time. um strengthening things like intents, making sure that intents based uh bridging is not just sort of more available, but is more secure and more trustless. There's a lot that I guess I could say about all these things, but I think it all goes back to like how do you make Ethereum feel like a cohesive platform again instead of um yeah, a bunch of silos.

>> Yeah. And and I think Josh on that point um when it comes to L2s specifically you know Dankrad mentioned the focus being very very strong on L2s previously last couple years kind of tides are shifting towards the L1 but from I think from a technology and a vision perspective the endgame still remains in scaling via L2s. How do you kind of balance the uh focus back to the L1 within the foundation uh with your perspective of okay let's build a a um cohesive not fragmented L2 environment and kind of continue on this road map because we think it's you know what's going to be the best for Ethereum >> right I guess I don't know that I would necessarily frame it as L2s are the

mechanism for scaling Ethereum I think there's depends on how you frame there's many mechanisms and there's many different types of ways that we need to scale and we need to provide u sort of unique capability enhance the capability of what Ethereum can do. L2s are one path to and a critical valuable path to enhancing the capabilities of Ethereum. Um, but there's a lot we need to do on both sides. And I think it's it's one of those things, you know, on the one hand, sort of like the conventional wisdom is that you have to focus. If you try to do too many things, then you're you're going to do none of the things well, which yeah, I think is is there there's truth in that. I think in this case, for better or for worse, we're trying to do something incredibly ambitious. We have to do ambitious things. We have to do both things. We have to scale the L1,

increase its role both as like I mentioned earlier as the trust security hub um and as a liquidity hub. And then we also have to um strengthen and power L2s to provide not just sort of mini Ethereums but to offer unique differentiated services on top which the good news from my perspective at least is um most if not all of the L2s already doing this offering actually really compelling differentiated services on top. In some ways it's still day one but I think there's a lot of um yeah a lot I'm I'm more and more excited by what's happening on the L2 side. I'm not sure if I'm answering your question, but this is like and then interrupt kind of goes into both of these. Yeah.

>> Yep. Tim, you have anything to add there? >> Yeah, maybe one quick thing to add is that um the way we build Ethereum, I think does allow us to do these things in parallel. You know, we have this separation between consensus layer team, execution teams, and L2 teams. And you already start to see this Awesome.

And you mentioned this uh modular organizational pattern. You have the consensus team. You have multiple teams and and all of these teams are able to divide and conquer. This is the the nature of specialization as teams grow bigger. I I'm curious right that that provides a lot of benefit on one hand but on the other hand there is a coordination effort that is required across all of these teams to make sure no one's step on stepping on each other's toes you're not doing double work and and you have things that do cohesively integrate with one another and so Dankrod to you I'm curious do you see this coordinate coordination as an issue does it pose a risk to the development of Ethereum or do you see is there any other risks that are a little bit more pressing in your to the future that we described at the onset of this

conversation. >> Oh, I mean there are many risks. I think coordination, yes, like so there's a there there is an extra challenge in Ethereum like having this multi-client architecture with with additionally the client teams being external. So like there's no direct command authority or anything like that. So essentially like there are all these developers out there who try to together come to a consensus on what to build next and we're trying to like really like uh direct this and give them like the best inputs and try to like give them direction but it's uh it's definitely like yeah there are many different opinions and like even if like yeah I mean obviously like everyone is working with the best in intentions like

we all know that design by comedy comes with certain problems and so on, right? So, like this is kind of like really I I think it's one of the biggest risks for Ethereum for sure because like we we simply currently don't have the ability to like ship features with the same like uh kind of coherence and direction as like someone who builds this as a company and like I think like we need to do our best to do it anyway. Like I think like we're working very hard on this and we have seen like definitely a number of improvements. I think like uh we need to do a lot more. I think like right now it is getting to um a point like where yeah we we need to like push even stronger than we have so far to

like get this faster and get get into like the best direction. And Josh, I think you wanted to chime in there on Tim's point uh as well, kind of along the similar train of thought with regards to uh the multiple pieces happening at once and as kind of Dank Dank has described here. >> Yeah, I guess I was just going to add that um yeah, I agree with Tim and and I think that we can do many things. We haven't always been as successful as we would like. I think our muscles are are getting stronger there both on the coordination side and just on pure execution side. Um and I think the answer is that there is no other like path forward like the p the path forward to this ambitious thing is to do both. And the on the plus side I think like

the coordination is both um yeah a challenge and an opportunity. It's sort of like our unique strength and the challenge that we have to overcome. Um the good news again is that like it's not yes like the the EF plays a role on coordination on shephering on on doing these things. Um but there are many other important players outside of the EF that also have a huge role to play here. And so I think that's one thing that allows us to to do these things. we have whether it's wallets, app layer, um L2 teams, um any of the ZKBM teams. There's a lot of talented people in the Ethereum ecosystem that are going to play a big role. >> Josh, I'd love to double click on that because, you know, you brought up ZK a couple times. We're big fans of ZK, too.

This is part of the uh the research that the casino has funded and and now we've made a lot of discoveries. And so when we're thinking about the endgame and we're thinking about how L2s are going to coordinate with L1 to to bring a lot of these teams and a lot of these use cases together, how is ZK going to help us accomplish this? And how does ZK change UX for the better? Thinking out, you know, in kind of the near to medium term. >> Yeah, I I think there's a lot of um maybe only sort of like like mediuminformed optimism around ZK or maybe like hopeful thinking that ZK is going to come in and solve all of our problems. I'm partially in this camp of like I'm really I'm really like uh I'm the maybe in this panel at least sort of the least qualified person to give a super informed opinion on on like I

don't come from a cryptography background or ZK background. You know Justin Donard others will give you a much more informed opinion here and maybe Donard will give you the more sober opinion. >> Yeah, they will get Donrad right to come in after you. Um, but yes, I I think I don't think I would add much apart from like the progress that we've seen has clearly surpassed what most thought would be possible a year ago. And that I think there's a lot of um even like the most sober sort of perspective would say that there's a lot of opportunity for um this technology to help both on the scaling side and on the interop side. >> Awesome. Dan, uh could you maybe fill in fill in the gaps here? give us uh you know clear clear up some of the misconceptions that we all have around ZK.

>> Yeah. I mean I think like Yeah. Yeah. ZK is clearly really cool, right? Like it like it solves like a lot of the big Ethereum problems which are like we want to build a verifiable chain like anyone in the world can quickly see that um that it's correct um without like having to have super big notes. Now like I think the qualifier here and that's where we have to be careful because like there's some some people think oh like it's going to solve everything and it doesn't solve everything right like for example if you want to have like a fast chain while you still need to have nodes that are fast enough not everyone now needs to run these nodes but like fundamentally the engineering challenge is still there like it doesn't go away with ZK and like similarly like I think

like in a funny way like right ZK solves a problem for Ethereum that Solana doesn't even have because like we want this verifiable chain and they just like say well we just have like these big notes and that's fine like some people can verify it maybe not everyone fine right like so like yes it's amazing that we have this and we can build this but in terms of product like it doesn't give us that much it gives us extra security gives us extra values but it doesn't make Ethereum faster than like other chains or like yeah that that that's what you have to consider. So, it's an amazing technology that gives us this verifiability. That's how I would say it.

>> Got it. Okay. Um >> Tim, I think you're back. By the way, you had a small uh push out, but I think you're all good here. Sorry about that. Uh Rob, please. >> Yeah. I I mean, Tim, now that you're back, maybe we could get your perspective on this because, you know, we we've seen a lot of very valuable contributions come out of the cryptography world. Um, and when you're when you're thinking about instilling this into the protocol or instilling this just into the community in general, we don't want to get, you know, ahead of ourselves, but it is a coordination thing that we're trying to solve here. So, I I guess just from your perspective at the higher level, kind of looking at at the teams in general, how are you trying to solve this coordination problem?

>> I mean, I guess that's my day job. Um, so I end up spending a lot of time talking to people and trying to figure out like what are the main bottlenecks or disagreements. Um, and how to focus the community's attention on the right things at the right time. I think one of the biggest challenges with this coordination is for protocol researchers and core devs, you know, they're they're paid full-time to work on the protocol. So it's, you know, it's easy for me to ping like Dunkraat or to ping me a client dev and be like, can you look at this thing and their job is to do this. Um, the thing that's that's harder is for, you know, the Ethereum community as a whole, right? Like the unis swap team, the optimism team, any team building on Ethereum, right? Their job is to build

their product, to build what they're working on, and not to like, you know, work on their protocol full-time. And I think this is like one of maybe the trickiest coordination challenges is like okay what is the right way to get all of their perspectives to understand from our users what do they want and then to translate that in a way that you know researchers and core developers understand because as Donrad was saying like we're not a company right if if this was if Ethereum was a company then you could imagine there's you know some chief product officer they go and you know or CEO goes talks to a bunch of users and then decides what we're going to build and you know if you don't want to work on this you're fired. We have to effectively convince everyone and and so I think this is like a something that we

just need to get better at and we've seen like some improvements. Um, one small thing we've done, you know, for this coming uh, hard fork is I I came up with this idea of like headliners where like the forks tend to have one, you know, really important feature in it. And so, historically, we would go to people and we'd be like, here are like 20 proposals. Which ones do you think? Now, we tried to like streamline it. So, it's like, okay, here are like the most important proposals. What should we actually do? Right? Like, of the like big potential items, which one should you should you focus on? And I think we've seen like some decent engagement there. Um but I think we have to go like far beyond that. Like I I kind of think of this as like step zero. Um and we

effectively need to recreate what like a product organization does but in this decentralized context where we don't ultimately have just someone who can uh unilaterally make the call. Um because at the end of the day too, you know, even if the cordet and the researchers are convinced, the way Ethereum works is people still have to upgrade their nodes, right? Like the entire community, all the stakers still have to accept this. Um so, so it has to be more open, more participatory. Um but also be so in a way that doesn't end up being just captured by committee thinking and and extremely slow. So that's a challenge. Tim, do you I this is maybe a question from left field, but you know, we we've had a lot of players that, you know, are kind of in the traditional financial

space. Now, they're entering, you know, this world, right? The the world of Ethereum. They're um building a lot of capital uh and potentially influencing the network. Have you seen any of these, you know, recent recent newcomers to the to the ecosystem try to kind of sway the the direction of the Ethereum priorities using some of the ETH that they've built up in these treasuries or or do you anticipate that as a potential risk or something that you're going to have to navigate as you as you think about the cohesiveness across the organization? we haven't seen it directly and you know it's it's been helpful to understand what the concerns are like for you know one practical one that comes up a lot um that's like a very tr concern is um the withdrawal and activation cue for

staking and whether you want to have staking ETFs or not I think Vitalik was literally tweeting about this today um and so this is something like I don't know like every time you speak to these ETF providers they will bring this up as a concern um so you know they haven't like tried to some malicious takeover of the network to like, you know, force this. As I as to the extent I'm aware, they haven't even, you know, the easiest thing they could do is just like pay researchers to focus on this problem and solve it for them. And I don't think they've they've even done this yet. Um, but I think like look, this is this is like a healthy thing because ultimately it all happens in public, right? like if they come and they're a stakeholder in the network and they you know they feel

that like faster exits from from the validator set would be beneficial. Um there's reasons today why we have such a delay. we can analyze those reasons and be like okay is the trade-off we're making correct right like should we you know rethink how the exit Q works to to you know satisfy those needs and again obviously without compromising Ethereum's core properties like you could imagine some very bad versions of these designs that let you know these ETFs enter and exit at will but then we kind of compromise the security of proof of stake and then the chain kind of becomes far less valuable because it loses its security um so yeah I I don't think we've seen anything like malicious or bad so far and I think it is actually extremely good for those preferences to be like voiced. It's for people to understand them and to to think through

the trade-off space of like, okay, how can we design the protocol in a way that's useful for them and um also sustainable. >> Yeah. Yeah. I and I think this builds on Ethereum's neutrality in general. It it's sort of like okay, how do you maintain neutrality but also take a consensus of opinions and and incorporate them into the protocol? And so to your point, you're taking a very research driven approach, right? like what these guys could do is they could pay some researchers and you know we always want to make sure that we have objective research but if we focus you know on on one particular area of research that's the place where we could see progress and so Ethereum has its objectives you're focusing you know on on these three pillars scale L1 scale blobs improve UX and there's other sort of auxiliary areas of research that could matter more or less to some of

these organizations >> yeah and I think also the it's worth noting on these three pillars like they didn't come out of thin right? They come out of talking with the community and understanding what people want and Tomas who you know leads the foundation now uh effectively that was the first thing he did when he took the job. He spent like a month or two talking to everyone at the EF, everyone in the ecosystem, people outside of crypto, people who hate Ethereum and to try and distill like, okay, what the people want out of Ethereum because ultimately, again, as I said, it's like the community has to adopt it, right? Like if the community doesn't want to scale at all, um, you know, they they just won't run the software or if we came up with these crazy like road map items that everyone hated, um, they just wouldn't ship. And

we've seen this in the history of Ethereum, right? like when there are things even though they're like welldeveloped and whatnot that the community just doesn't want we haven't shipped those on chain. Um so so I think like yeah you we have these priorities now but it's it's worth like they are they are the result of like at least trying to to to sample the community and what they want and we can we can keep that getting better at that process. >> Yeah. I think um I think that kind of brings us to a a good question here and a good kind of thought around what the priorities are in this era and Dankard I think I want to bring this to you from the protocol perspective right we're thinking about Ethereum's maturation right and you know we we've just talked about the coordination amongst the different teams as well as the

priorities in the lens of this kind of institutional context and in this kind of maturation phase you know what are the core priorities right obviously we have the three pillars, but what would you say are the non-negotiables going forward into this era? You know, and I asked Justin this and I'm super curious to see how how his answer aligns with with yours. Um, you know, what does Ethereum need to focus on in the immediate term uh to basically uh get us to where we need to be? What matters most has to be clear, right?

or so it doesn't mean we're like saying oh yeah like let's give up on everything else we're just becoming like whatever other fast chain now right like Ethereum does it differently in the way that like we're not we don't compromise on the values I mean okay there there will always have to be compromises we made but they are a very different nature right for example we are not giving up on verifiability like like anyone in the world should easily be able to verify the chain. Um but what a compromise that we probably are willing to take is like okay there might be some nodes required that compute these proofs and they are a bit bigger. I think that's fine because it's a very different nature. you only need one of the like you're not like need don't need thousands of these right

like and uh yeah I mean on censorship resistance right like we are like um exploring new ways to get this right in the past it was like okay like we are censorship resistance because everyone can run a node with a validator at home well I mean maybe this doesn't have to be the way forever right like there are worlds in which like we manage to like have much smaller nodes like even in give the inclusion guarantees but without being Ethereum validators and it might be a better trade-off because right now this economic mix of like providing the security and providing the censorship resistance is like kind of a little bit it feels under tension right because like you have institutional staking versus home stakers and stuff like that

so I think like we're willing to like make these compromises and I think but but on the other hand like We are really keeping these core properties verifiability, censorship resistance, everything's open source and so on, right? And extremely high security like the quality of uh like the EVM and generally like Ethereum node software is very high. Um, so like these we will not change like we will do everything to keep this but we need now really to focus on Ethereum as a product at the same time. And I think that's like the part that was a little bit like uh not as much of focus in the past. We thought oh these properties they are our product. Well they're not the product right? Like they are properties of your product that you need

need to keep. They make it more valuable. But we need to make sure that like what you do on the chain that that is really good like that you can actually generate the value by like doing that. And I think like on a lot of these domains like Ethereum has a lot to offer and like we now need to add all the things that it doesn't offer at the highest level yet. I'd be remiss to not ask this uh as as a followup to that which is you have kind of laid out kind of where you see the most important uh priorities laying and you did not mention anything about blobs or danksharting. It's your first time on the show I must ask about danksharting. What is the status of danksharting and why is that important to Ethereum?

>> Right. Right. I mean dening is like is a big meme, right? Like I mean it's it's funny because I was just the guy who like put it all together in the end. Something that I guess had been worked on before and I have made many important contributions but it was several people on this and um like the the main thing like I mean so like many people associated with data sharing. So the idea that you only put uh like scale the data availability layer and leave it to rollups to actually use it for execution. This actually was already done in the past, right? That pivot had been done several years ago. this this this uh kind of like the the the news with Dang Sharding was more more of like all putting into like a simple road map that we could actually execute and like

that we're now on and that we are like now several years in like we have shipped um the first uh um big milestone actually the first two kind of like we started we shipped like 4844 we shipped blocks and now blobs and now we have scaled them a little bit and now very soon we'll uh ship the next milestone which introduced data resampling and introduces a scalable data availability layer and allows us to ship a lot more blocks over the next year or so. >> Appreciate that. Um guys, so more open-ended here to close us off. We got five 10 minutes left or maybe closer to five. um when you're thinking about uh Ethereum's neutrality as being something that we've talked about several times on the show so far with regards to this practical era and even I started off you know framing this as ideologies and

tribalism is kind of uh being a bit more put into the background in favor of of um real product market fit real usage of products applications uh businesses onchain over kind of you know which DA layer you choose or what chain you're building on or how you're thinking about you know uh what what kind of sequence or architecture that you're going to use all these things are important and they need to be you know well thought through but the entire space I think is entering this this kind of practical uh frame of thought now with regards to Ethereum what's kind of ironic is that a lot of these other ecosystems are being and have become much more politicized and become much more of a hierarchical kind of setup uh where they operate more as a than like Ethereum does in this

neutrality. So, I'm curious as you guys have gone through the shift with with Tomas being uh the new director of the EF and just generally the the reformation of of the order, do you guys truly think that Ethereum's neutrality will survive long term as other ecosystems push on a competitive basis uh with a more politicized uh kind of setup? And if so, kind of how do you guys see the future of Ethereum's neutrality, which I think we can agree is the most important or one of the most important aspects of the of the protocol itself. Uh why don't we start with you Josh and go down the line and guys, let's end us off here. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I I think what makes me optimistic that we can preserve it is that the value and

importance of neutrality of security of the permissionless nature of the network I think will only grow in terms of how clear that this how the the clarity and importance of it is only growing. You're seeing other chains mention the importance of permissionless. I think this is something that as the number of chains scale and grow, it'll become more and more clear that this is um not just a nice to have but a a sort of non-negotiable and that Ethereum is uniquely positioned at least today to to maintain its role as this permissionless hub. Um those are the things that make me optimistic and I think yes both like Tomas Shawei um many others at the EF have done a have done a terrific job at sort of making sure that we continue to not just preserve those but to

strengthen those properties of of the of the chain. >> Awesome Tim. Yeah, I guess my view there would be that neutrality is is something that compounds in a way like you kind of need it at the start and it's it's very hard to add after because if you start with something neutral, you know, you you get into this this frame of mind of like you have to compromise and get the consensus to improve the the chain and this is what Ethereum has done and over time there's just more and more people with different opinions, different viewpoints and whatnot that need to agree ultimately to improve this thing and and you know that process kind of biases towards neutrality because if we push an upgrade that like the EF wants and the entire world hates then it won't happen and if

you know whatever TRFI tries to push something that the community hates it won't happen either. So I I think Ethereum just effectively is I don't know it's almost like this path dependent thing where we we started with this maybe higher cost and we still pay higher coordination cost to maintain this neutrality but as more people come as there's more stakeholders involved you you almost get it by default to the extent that you're able to keep those those people in. So um yeah I I I'm pretty excited about that. Like I think it's more a question of like okay, how do we channel this energy rather than can we fundamentally lose this because I think we're at a spot where we we've built the checks and balances and now we we just need to like um execute.

>> Awesome. Dan Krab, anything to add on neutrality? Yeah, I mean I think like like I I do think uh Ethereum has has it like it's like a very important component like this uh geographic neutrality and not like being depend one on company. I uh um I think like there are many ways in which you can improve things that actually don't compromise on this like I think like for example Tim spoke of checks and balances and I think like we have the most important checks check check and balance in place which is the Ethereum like community that runs nodes and like um is like makes an

independent decision to make an upgrade and so even if like there's like a process that like say is directed in some way. Um there there's always this kind of like last resort of like well if you really disagree then like we can stop at that point. And so I do think that like we can play more with the balance between those two. And I'm I I would like to like do that more to like be like well like the actual process of like deciding on the upgrades can actually have like much stronger direction and doesn't have to be like the super neutral. I think of it maybe a little bit like like like a state or something, right? has different organs where the executive is very centralized

and uh it's acceptable because you do have other parts of the state that act as a check on that and I think like long term we should try to move move more in that direction and I think we'll be stronger. >> Are you a Donald Trump fan as well? Is that what we're hearing? >> No certainly not >> guys real quick. I know we're running out of time but Dev Connect coming up in about a month and a half. What are we most excited for? >> Tacos for me. >> Tacos and BA uh anyone? Ethereum World Fair. I don't know. I'm pretty stoked for Dev Connect.

I've never been to Argentina. >> Yeah, I think just having everybody in Buenos areas having all the application builders. I think that's Yeah, that'll be great. and okay, >> I think yeah, the week being centered around like stuff that's built on Ethereum and how we grow the community, I think will be will be super cool. Um, and yeah, it'll be I think it it'll be unique in terms of the scale. Um, and also Argentina being somewhere where just crypto is used extensively already and there's like a really strong appetite by, you know, people there to like integrate this into their lives or, you know, share how they've already doing this or how they're already doing this. Um, yeah, that's that's super exciting.

>> I agree. I think it's awesome to have these types of conferences in places where you really see the real material use of the technology for a greater good, economic, social, etc. Josh, Tim, Dankrat, appreciate your time. Three-headed beast at the EF doing great work. We we really appreciate it. Deep down from the Ethereum community as ETH holders, as longtime users, as part of the social layer, thank you for your time. look forward to hanging out in Argentina if you'll be there and uh happy to have you guys on whenever you like to give updates periodically. I think that the community really enjoys it. So, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us.

>> Thank you guys. We'll see you next time. >> Bye-bye. Alrighty, Rob. What a session, >> dude. I think we're aligned. >> You think we're aligned? >> I think we got a EF alignment here. Got to scoot my chair back in after that wide shot. That was a fun fun conversation. I mean those those guys are just they're just so smart and have a lot of really intelligent things to say and I mean Ethereum is just going in a really strong direction. I mean let me remind everybody that 6 to 8 months ago the sentiment around ETH the token was absolutely terrible and as of you know recent it's been very very positive but that is just on the price and that is what the sentiment usually does you know in response to the price but the

shipping hasn't stopped and won't stop regardless of the price but I think now we're in a much better spot with the vision the agenda the roadmap the technical uh architecture you know required to get there So yes, it's uh definitely had quite a bit of you know ups and downs there for through the bare market I think with regards to the broader macro environment regards to FTX Celsius lending like Genesis that affected everyone and then also some of the roadmap things but >> guys maybe we're not out of the woods yet but it certainly feels like it. >> One thing I'll say is that you know these guys could have bent the knee to the alt L1 and that entire thesis. Um, and you even hear them, you know, it's it's on their minds like they're

thinking about how these other other L1s have a more centralized governance structure. They are able to coordinate around decisions a little bit more easily because it's more centralized. >> And you know, that's a blessing and a curse for for Ethereum. They are very committed to their neutrality. That is their superpower. They've already done the hard work of staying decentralized and um neutral in the beginning. And you heard Tim say that now this neutrality is compounding and I think now you know it's been tried before but not well executed as well executed as Ethereum. >> There is not another neutral L1 out there. >> Well, you made a good point like you start you if you start in a hierarchal fashion it's really tough to get out of that. >> Yeah. And so maybe it was maybe it was a

disadvantage for Ethereum to start in the way that they did. But you know at the end of the day hopefully it ends up being a strong power law return where over the next 5 to 10 years these decisions and I think they're already being recognized as such but these decisions end up being recognized in a in a very positive way uh due to the types of people coming on chain. Up next guys, we've got Dan Ellitzer, investor at Naent uh a good friend of um Ellie from Starknet. I met him at his dinner in New York. First time on the show. I love when people say longtime listener, first- time caller. It's just it makes my day. Hopefully Dan will say the same. Dan, welcome to the show, man.

>> Hey, thanks man again. Yeah, absolutely. Longtime listener, first- time caller. So, thanks for having me on. Feel like feel like we're a radio we're a radio show back. We got a soundboard. >> Hey, retro is in, man. >> Betty popping on the screen. >> Welcome to the show. First time, Dan. >> Welcome to the show. >> Yeah, man. So, Rob and I, you well, it's not my first time meeting with you, but Rob's with first time on the show. Quick intro about yourself, what your specialties are investing, how you got here a bit, and kind of what you're what you're up to at Nason. >> Sure thing. Well, uh, I got into crypto back in 2013. I started the MIT Bitcoin Club, uh, as a grad student there. Uh, we did an airdrop in the fall of 2014 along with my my colleague Jeremy Rubin. Um, we, uh, gave $100 in Bitcoin to all

the undergrads at MIT and, uh, tried to see what we could do to bootstrap the ecosystem there. So, uh, I interned at Circle, uh, that summer right before they they launched. uh and then spent five years at the design firm IDO uh where I was the kind of blockchain subject matter expert. We worked with Croup and NASDAQ and Fidelity and all these guys back in 2015 trying to figure out what blockchains were good for beyond Bitcoin. Um and we ended up deciding to raise a an early stage cryptofocused venture fund IDO Collab Ventures uh at the beginning of 2018 and uh was doing that for a few years and then in 2020 started Nason. Uh so Nent I also uh have continued doing this early stage crypto venture uh particularly around DeFi and anything finance related

but we we don't really have anything cryptoreated that's fully off limits. Uh but we also have a liquid portion to our fund as well. Um, and uh, we've got a fantastic team that we're very active both on and offchain trying to use the uh, the tools that we're investing in because we believe this is the future of finance. Um, and so if we believe it's the future, it would be pretty silly to just write checks and sit back and not actually uh, be using the thing ourselves. >> Yeah, I mean, we can go on and on about VCs not having any onchain experience, but we're not going to get there. Dan, let's talk about some of the happenings this week. one base network token came out. >> Yeah.

>> Uh announced and we had Frank Shapar on yesterday talking about it, talking about >> how he thinks about as a Coinbase bull the split between coin the equity and base the token. Um curious you know Robbie came out and said look I think it's going to be the highest valuation uh L2 token out there. Um obviously people are excited about it. question to you is is can base avoid becoming just another kind of L2 token without any kind of real product market fit or like flows or kind of revenues you know we've seen a lot of the governance tokens kind of per se in the previous regime when they were launched uh as a result of that um you know or is there a real path for that to be a sustainable uh you know long-term thing that actually brings value to Coinbase doesn't dilute Coinbase shareholders how do you think

about this >> a lot of questions questions wrapped up in there. I mean, I think you know, ever since they they announced space in the first place and they said no plans for network token, I think all of us who are paying attention was like really really you think Brian Armstrong doesn't want to have a stock called coin and a coin called base. Like come on, it's just it's too obvious. Uh so, you know, I've been expecting to see this in some form for a long time. I'm glad they're publicly admitting that they're considering it and working on it internally, but to be honest, we really have no idea what it's going to look like. Um, I think, you know, uh, a friend of mine, Kia Mosieri, put out a tweet the other day proposing this kind of like aerodrome inspired model that they could use. I think that would be

very cool to see something like that. I hope that whatever they choose, they do something a little bit differently than what we've seen before. That said, like this is a very big thing to take a shot on. Uh if I had to guess, uh you know, it's already a big leap for a publicly traded company to go and like issue their own network token. So, I don't know how much they're going to be the first mover on any kind of new economic structure with the token. And I still think there's a good chance we're we're years away from actually seeing anything launched. Uh, I I think Coinbase is very good at sitting there and following and staying up on what's going on in the ecosystem and then finding the right

partners to work with, the right models to copy. Uh, you know, they were the first one, well, I guess arguably there's BSC, right? But they they were the first exchange to do their own L2 and really kind of push that uh in in recent years. And they learned from what other people did and then they chose optimism to to work with them and build on the OP stack. They weren't going to go build it all from the ground up, right? They didn't uh do their own lending protocol inhouse. They partnered with Morpho. So, I think they're going to take the best of what's out there uh for the token model as well. And maybe they'll partner with someone. I know they're very close with Aerodrome when you had Syndicate uh uh and Aerodrome on earlier to talk about how that worked.

So, maybe maybe they will kind of copy that and work with some known partners in the base ecosystem. But again, I think we're still a ways out from seeing anything definitive and ready to go live. >> That would be insane if Coinbase does the same token launch model, this lock drop model that Syndicate did on Aerodrome. If they did that for the base token, >> all bets are off. I mean, I don't know, Dan, if you saw Dan's probably right. I mean, Dan's got something to >> Yeah. Well, look, look, I mean, look, I I don't have any inside information on on Coinbase. I I I've got a lot of friends there. As far as I know, none of them are even involved in the conversations around around a potential token. Um, but, you know, I'm I'm friends with the Syndicate guys. We were

early investors in Syndicate as well. Talked to them about that. I thought it was really cool, very community aligned. Um, I I definitely encourage them in that direction to to do something. They came up with the whole model themselves, but the idea of building something and doing a distribution that was community aligned was something that we we had conversations about that it's been part of their ethos from day one, even above and beyond most of the teams in the space. Uh, and so I'm just thrilled that they they came up with something and found such great partners to do something that really has just been part of the idea from day one because I don't know how many people were following Syndicate early on, but their initial thing they were going to market with was these capital syndicates, uh, ways that people could pull money together and

collectively invest in things early on. And so it just would have felt like such a huge miss if they launched a token and not had this broad community participation opportunity. You know what's crazy is he uh the the syndicate um founder and the airdrop founder both said that it's actually the opposite of what you know you saying or what you're saying here Dan which is that a lot of the VCs investors market makers and centralized exchanges of the teams that have approached aerrome to do a similar model have all pushed back so hard that the founders have copped out in the last second of doing this model. Well, I I've like I've known I've known Ian uh for for over a decade and Will about the same the same amount of time. So, you know, we're we're we're more friends than than professional

relations at this point. Um and we just, you know, we talk about it's like what would be the coolest thing to do, right? And like ultimately if if Syndicate doesn't work out as a project, the tokens go into zero or close to it, right? Uh for for all these tokens, that's how it is. So take the big shot. Do what you're going to be proud of and trust that if you do something that's not stupid and you execute on building out the product and building out the community and building out the protocol and continuing to advance the technology that there's going to be a way that it's going to flow back into the token. even if that's not what the initial plan was, it it just it would be pretty hard to be successful on the project side and not

be able to have a way where that's reflected in the token over the long term. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I think that the model was it was very very interesting. It really reading the I think I read a blog about it felt like I was reading a DeFi summer Andre Cronier Medium article. >> Are we going to talk about Andre and and his and his new stuff? I don't know how much of it's public yet, but man, that is I'm getting excited. >> Yeah. So, I did see him I did see him tweet about it. Um, so it's definitely publicish. Um, yeah. What's the what's the state of affairs? What can you share?

>> I I I got I got to be careful, but I what what I will say is um you know, having talked to to Andre a little bit about this. I mean, it it's pulling together a number of ideas uh and different pieces of DeFi and and and merging them together in an incredibly capital efficient way. Uh that, you know, he's talked about some of these ideas for a while and it kind of feels like it's finally all pulling together. Uh but it's Andre, so he's not just coming up with a really cool protocol, he also has like groundbreaking new ways of actually doing the token mechanism and stuff around that. Um, and uh, what what I I think he's he's made public, and again, I don't want to spill anything that's not supposed to be spilled yet. Um, but the what they're doing on the private side and what's going to be available on the public side

is exactly the same. Um, and and so, you know, it it's really nice that everybody uh, who wants to participate will be able to participate on the same terms. There's not like special lower prices that like VCs or insiders are going to get here. Th this uh is I think built on one of the principles that he was describing last time he was on the show, which is this idea of uncolateralized lending, but actually building out an onchain credit score using a lot of the same math and and actuarial science and principles that are currently in practice on real like credit scores using credit bureaus that are happening offchain. And what he's doing as far as I can undertail understand from what he has said about this flying tulip thing. >> Flying tulip. Yeah.

>> Yeah. It's like it's like leveraged LPS. And so if you're able to get leverage from offchain, it is under collolateralized. This is kind of the golden goose that has yet to be unlocked on chain. >> Again, he's pulling in so many different things. Maybe there is an under like an uncolateralized portion to this, but that's not >> that's not the core thing. Yeah, that's not the core thing of of of what's going on here. There's there's potential ways to maybe enable that down the road, but that's not what you're gonna see as the focus on day one. >> Yeah. >> Dan, I'm curious what you think about uh Athena's kind of stable coin as a service model that they brought to Mega E, right? Like again, maybe ETH is has had the experience to watch all these other teams kind of launch their own L2 tokens, see what's happen, see how the

market reacts, you know, learn from the sequencer stuff, learn from how to generate revenue. Then you got Athena kind of comes in and says, "Okay, why don't we just create a native stable coin on like Mega E's native stablecoin?" >> What is your reaction to this Athena stablecoin as a service uh product and why do you think Mega E thought this was a great idea? Well, first of all, I'm I'm uh very biased as as an early investor in Athena, like Nason participated in the in the both the the seed and the series A and uh you know, we we've been pretty involved there. Um I I think that it it makes sense that chains would go this way, right? And I think another project we're not invested, but are our friends with the M0 folks and right they saw this uh coming a ways uh ways

previously. So I think the idea of wanting kind of branded stable coins aligned with your ecosystem sharing the economics it makes sense and what but if you're going to do that you need to have the backend liquidity there and Athena has built out fantastic infrastructure around like USDTB um to enable that. Uh it's so it makes sense that they would partner with them uh to do this and have that that backing liquidity. Uh I think you know ultimately that's not as interesting to me as as USD in terms of like what it ultimately enables. You know maybe this allows for uh some partial shifting there based on governance on mega ETH in the future. Uh I don't know if you guys also read uh Athena's proposal for hyperlquid and stuff that they put out

there and great as I think you know guy is incredibly c classy and he put out there afterwards like this is what we're executing. They were trying to get the the ticker that everybody was going for, but like, okay, they didn't get the ticker. Native markets got it. Great. Native markets team are awesome. Um, but now they're just going to go compete and they're going to do the same thing they said they were going to do. And again, starting with something where you just have the Treasury's backing, but with the ability to think about, hey, do we want to as people get more comfortable shift into some carry trade essentially backing on this and increase the yield over time as confidence grows, as volumes grow, I think that makes a ton of sense. And there's no other team out there that's positioned to be able to do anything even close to that. So, the

Treasury thing, great starting point. Uh but I think we should all think of it as a starting point because that's going to be commoditized pretty quickly. >> Yeah. I mean I think uh the other cool thing was that um not only do we have all these people going for the hyperlquid ticker, we had all the all the uh community uh you know on Twitter just speaking their mind. They're going after Agora. They were you know trolling Jeremy Aair. We had Jeremy on the show on Tuesday. He's telling me that they're St is publicly buying a hype because they have to um you know disclose and they want to be a validator and and so you got like all of this activity happening around hyperl USD stablecoin

but like the whole thing with mega kind of went under the radar because this thing blew up right after but but but it feels to me that mega eth may be one of the first L2s with the stablecoin model with Athena that actually has a really sustainable you know stablecoinbased business model outside of just sequencing fees that can maybe go back to the mega ETH token or whatever it is. Um that yeah, I mean it just shows like okay the the industry is now taking the next order of thought forward to building an onchain business and I don't know it's just I think Athena could scale this model to basically any new chain and I think that's really exciting.

>> They could I think we're going to see a lot of interest in like power struggles though, right? Everyone's realized that like, hey, being able to to make money on the float is a freaking great B business. Look at what Tether has been able to do with like a 100 employees or whatever, right? It's just it's it's an amazing amazing business. And so, if you've got a lot of dollars sitting there on your chain, >> yeah, makes ton of sense to go do that. And we've seen, you know, Salana is talking about trying to like band together applications and go do that and do a share. But I think the question is how much of that is going to be able to stay at the chain level? how many applications are going to be native to one generalized chain whether it's an L1 or L2 versus they're going to multihome on different chains or they're going to

have their own app chain. So how much in the long run is hyper I is is not hyper is is mega ETH going to have a you know a dozen two dozen hundred different applications all with a relatively similar amount of stable coins sitting there who are going to want to use that or are the largest ones going to start negotiating their own economics to internalize the float on the tokens that are being used in their application. Yeah. >> Right. So I I I think I think the game is far from over this. we've we've we're so far from establishing what's the dominant model or strategy here. Um, and so I think you just got to look and see see who do you want to work with, who's going to be here long term, who's going to be able to move fast, but also knows

how to do the important things on compliance and institutional integrations. And I think that the Athena team has really proven that they know how to do that because there's nobody else who has worked with big institutions, enabled these partnerships, and grown at the unbelievable speed that they have, right? They just crossed what is it 14 billion today or yesterday? Like that's just nuts. And that's in about a year and a half that they got they got there. That's wild. >> Yeah, it is. I I mean just tremendous growth. Uh, congrats on on that investment. Andy and I didn't didn't get that one. We >> Yeah, that's like the one that we fumbled the most. I feel like in the bear. We had every other good one. I feel like >> I You're not You're not alone. I've talked to a lot of investors who I

respect who just didn't see it. I think one of the reasons like we did is we'd actually made a bet on another team that was trying a similar model on chain a couple years earlier and it just hadn't worked. And so we'd already been like spent a lot of time thinking about this and we we it clicked for us that the centralized exchange piece could be the unlock. But I know a lot of really smart people just like >> there were a lot of reasons to doubt it. There were a lot of reasons to doubt it and >> the team is executed incredibly well. >> 14 billion. Tether's 170 billion. Circle is about 75 billion. Then the list kind of goes down from there. We just had Arc Tempo announcements. We got Google L1. We we we know Plasma mainet is coming I think next Thursday uh 8:00 PM Eastern or something like like that. And we know

Stable is also uh in the running. >> Yeah, >> I think Plasma is probably category leader. I'm biased. Our fund did do that one. So we're we're excited about that. Um but it's they're going to be first to market. They they were kind of like the first to create this idea or at least do it publicly. Dan, have you guys participated in any of these deals? Um what is your take on this on this entire happening? >> We we participated in stable um and uh so you know I I think we're looking at this I think we uh probably on the liquid side we've probably been been uh playing around with some plasma stuff as well. Um so you know I'm excited to see what this looks like. I think there's a distinction maybe between um folks like

Plasma and Stable who are taking I think a little bit more like cryptonative DGEN thing like they're absolutely going for institutional integrations and plays as well but they're able to run I think a little bit more of the yield farming playbook and stuff that we've we've seen and has been established. I wouldn't expect to see as much of that from ARC and tempo although you know who who knows. Um, and I think a lot of it is going to be like, okay, what is the dominant or relevant strategy at this point? Is it building up the cryptonative capital? Are you able to go straight to the more, you know, established institutions who have a lot of existing business and customers they could potentially pull on or do you need to bootstrap it first on the crypto

side? I don't know. We're going to we're going to find out very fast. Ultimately, you're going to need to have large institutions and customers coming in. The question is, what's the fastest path to actually getting them to do it for real usage? Not just marketing, not just like, hey, we want to put out a press release together and say we're partnering on this, but who's actually going to move core business functionality and customers on chain? >> Yeah, D, I I have a bit more of a general question. I think it spans both the previous topic with respect to Athena's uh stable coin on Mega ETH and also the stable chains. We're seeing this pattern of verticalization and yeah, you know, Hyperlquid with the the native stable coin, Mega ETH with now their native stable coin and and the same is coming from the the you know

more traditional business models that are also now incorporating their own chain with the stable chains. It used to be you know decentralization kumbaya we all we you know we want to build an open platform permission list everyone can build now it's like okay maybe it's more practical like we want these core business functions we want to own them and we want to monetize them how do you think about this uh this phase shift for is it an ideological one and and what are the knock-on effects I think you know we kind of see it just from an from an observational perspective but do you have Do you have an edge on this? An angle like what what's your take on why this is happening and and what could result from this happening? >> Yeah, I mean I think it there are

advantages you get from from doing some tight integrations, right? I I wrote something back in I think it was 2020 uh about this idea of kind of like almost like prime brokerage protocols where you were going to start to pull together DEX and lending and derivatives and like everything to be in one place tightly integrated for the most capital efficiency. So it makes sense to me like you're going to start pulling together uh some of these seemingly disperate parts of the stack and wanting to like eat each other's lunch. Um uh there's that certainly is a great way to get margin now. Uh and then we are seeing some other teams say explicitly like we don't want to do that and still pursuing and doing very well. A prime example of this would be Morpho, right? They've

stayed very in their lane even within lending saying we're just doing this base level protocol and they haven't tried to move up the stack. Uh they haven't tried to move further down the stack on a chain side, right? they're they're just saying like here here's we're going to do and that's worked incredibly well for them in terms of attracting some real premier partners uh because they they are able to see by the the track record that has been developed that these guys are just staying in their lane and so that credible neutrality um and their commitment to where they want to play has worked out very well for them. Um, but I I do think it is it's very tempting, right, to go and just say, "Oh, I see these margins our partners are getting we're big.

We're just going to go eat those." So, I don't think we've seen the end of that. But when everybody starts going full vertical, the question is like, well, okay, well, what's the differentiation going to be? Is it is it brand? Is it just customer experience? And everyone's going headtohead with everybody like maybe. I think what is exciting to me even if some of these these teams start splintering off more with their own chains uh and stuff is that at least they're chains right if we look at what's happened in traditional financial services where everyone's like trying to to in-house like and you've got your banking and you've got your you know your brokerage and your credit like trying to keep you all in their one ecosystem. it's really hard to move between them. You kind of get locked in. Once you get these these uh companies

and these projects, everybody doing stuff on chain, it really lowers the barriers to being able to move between them. It's that that I think forces them to stay a lot more customer focused and it allows them to essentially upgrade and integrate new products and services and things at a much faster rate. So, I think it is just a net win for consumers to have the financial world be moving onchain. Uh, because we're we're all going to be better off as a result. >> That makes a ton of sense. And I and I realize we're running out of time, but you you actually wrote uh someone on your team wrote this crypto air tag moment uh on your me and Peter. Yeah. >> That's awesome. And that highlights what

you're talking about with ZKTLS. We've also talked to a couple projects that are using ZKTLS to almost vampire attacks and web 2 protocols. >> Yeah. >> You know, they they'll they'll make partnerships with like airlines. Delta wants JetBlue's customers, right? If you can prove that you're a JetBlue loyalty member, Delta is going to offer you and it's no longer a walled garden. I can imagine this for finance. And right now, maybe it's a little bit still too closed off. Maybe it's not with ZKTLS, but between some of these different banking uh uh lines. Um once these things are onchain, it makes things so much easier and ZKTLS becomes that much more powerful. So maybe just to close us off, could you just you know after looking into this vertical that is just just emerging but seems to be really

powerful, what were some takeaways or breakthroughs that you had while doing that research? >> Yeah, so the the ZKTLS or web proof stuff, right? And I want to use web proofs because it's broader, right? ZKTLS is is a specific way of doing things, but like ZK email and stuff is also really interesting. But the core there is when you think about what we've been doing in crypto so far, we like the verifiability, right? And and the proofs that you're able to generate, those come because it's onchain and we can publicly verify anything that occurred on chain. What web proofs are about are being able to prove stuff, prove data from offchain, right? any digital data, you can prove the source that it came from. You can't prove it's true, right? You

need you need chain link or other oracle services if you want to like kind of get to truth from a variety of different places. But if you want to be able to say, "Yeah, that service says this thing is true about me or about the world, I can prove that even if they don't want me to be able to. As long as I can digitally access the data from that service, I can bring it on chain and prove to everybody else that yeah, they said this, can't take it back." Right? And so that idea of like you don't have to ask for permission first. That's the huge unlock here, right? Permissionlessness as a default for all data. That's the huge unlock from web proofs in CKTLS.

>> Yeah. Sounds scary though, Dan. Like sounds like my data is just going to go wherever. But at least >> No, it's it's you, right? It's like the data that you share with somebody else, right? They can have >> permission to share. Yeah, but it's not like your data is all public. It's just if that data is shared, the the integrity of that data can also be proven, >> be verified. Yeah. >> Right. So, it's not just like, oh, here's post a screenshot. It's like, >> okay, that could be that could be edited, right? Everything now comes down to digital signatures because we know images can be edited so easily nowadays.

Now, we can actually prove, right? Like in math, we trust. >> Yep. Yeah. I was talking to the earn OS guys who who are trying to do this as well at and talking to them at base camp and they're basically making offers uh to to everyday people. They don't even know they're reason using crypto, but you know, Amazon will put up a bid for $10 to give you access to your, you know, Shopify account, for example, right? And so they've kind of built out this entire marketplace where they'll just pay you, right? So when we have these permission popups on our phone, you know, we'll press yes, we'll give them our data for 10 bucks or something like that. Real people are using that.

So So Andy, you still have access. You have, you know, the ability to say no, I don't want to give up that data, but you can also say yes and get paid for it. >> Yeah. And Dan, real quick, just to close us out, like what is the what is the the then what of that? Like, okay, so I I get that the permissionless sharing and verification of basically like removing the walls from different apps and silos on the internet and in the banking system is the thesis that that just then drives an unparalleled amount of of commerce and activity that was that was previously kind of burdened by the system.

>> Absolutely. I think one of the the the things that we've gotten incredibly good at over the last decade in crypto is incentives. And we've been able to provide direct financial incentives off data that we can verify onchain. What we're now able to do with this technology is provide direct financial incentives off any data, even off-chain data. Right? you want to reward somebody for listening to a song uh or or watching a show or viewing an ad or you know making a purchase, you can now do that, right?

And and that ability to have essentially permissionless financial incentives I think is going to be a huge unlock. We're going to see these vampire attacks. We're going to see new forms of like verifiable advertising with with things like NOS and others. Like I'm I'm super excited about that because we've gotten very good at the incentive games. >> Yeah. >> Great. Let's let's let's take them everywhere and not just play in our own little sandbox. The sandbox is now anything digital and everything is becoming digital. >> Bang. Nent VC absolutely dialed. Dan Ellitzer, have a great weekend. We appreciate your time. It's been a

marathon of of a day for us on the stream. Probably wrap it up here and uh >> Thanks, guys. Impressed with the endurance. What way to >> Yeah, appreciate it, Dan. >> Always a pleasure, man. See you soon. >> Thanks. >> See you next time. >> See you, buddy. >> Next time. >> All righty. All right, Rob. What a sesh, man. Have a great weekend, bud. Go get some uh have a good flight to Korea, bud. Don't uh make sure you you take one uh like a sleeping pill or something, bud. >> All right, buddy. You just keep you just keep asking these core EF uh representatives who their political affiliations are with.

>> All right, buddy. I will do that. Let's see how they do. See see how they take that one. >> Have a good weekend. We'll see you in Korea later.