The Rollup TV: LIVE From Permissionless June 25th

Transcript

[Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat.

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[Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. N. Ah, [Applause] [Music] think about Ethernet.

GM two weeks before that happened. We went to war, achieved world peace all while I was gone. Yeah, feels good. It feels good. Feels good to be back in New York, too. It is blisteringly hot.

I think it's going to get up to 96 or 99. It feels like 102. My headband. No, but I uh I did bring something that you have as well. The sun is out in New York City. It's summer in the city, brother. Sure. Yeah.

M team. I mean, what can you say? He came over to the to the tent a little bit earlier today. Uh he is the youth in crypto and I think as his face has matured a little bit, everyone has seemingly gotten older, but we have this new fresh crop of young talent and M team is just this just the star of that of the young talent. Mhm. marathon the full marathon. We're going

to stay hydrated. We're going to stay within ourselves and we're going to talk to some brilliant people. I'm going to hope to sort of a uh a fire inside of us like something that we got back. We were talking about this the other day. It's not coming out of nowhere. Oh yeah. Like you remember 2020 2021 when we started DeFi Slate now the roll up. Oh yeah. It it was like we were learning something new every single day. Fulfillment to not only learn ourselves but also to pass along that information and sort of translate these very esoteric topics into things that people were not only absorbing and understanding but also then making transactions and making financial decisions as a result of it. And it it

was a really strong sense of fulfillment to pass that knowledge on. Since then, it feels like we've gotten forks of forks. Everything is a copycat of one another. And so there's no net new knowledge. I'm hoping that today and and this entire conference changes the true. Yeah. with you. Well, we're we're gonna open this up talking about our select partner in just one sec. I will be back here with you in in a sec, Rob. Yeah. For now, you timeline.

Let's I think also Permissionless Day one was an incredible experience. We had uh several speakers here inside. Dennis Rodman was inside doing a Q&A with Yano. Um, also shout out Yano for just putting on an incredible event. It It's amazing to see Block Works' success. They've been uh building in the space just as we have they've go as big as possible. Um, there's been an incredible team behind us. Julie from the Blockworks team. Uh there's there's so many people that um go and put this show on behind the

scenes that you really you really get an understanding of how deep this goes and how many people are instrumental to this process. This is all about bringing crypto and blockchain mainstream and crossing the chasm. And so again, Dennis Rodman was here yesterday doing a Q&A with Yano. uh uh he was uh he was full in good spirits uh doing doing what he does. AI is a strong presence. Some of one AI is a strong presence here not only in sponsors but also in speakers and and attendees. Um we also have uh strong crossovers as you can imagine.

Acoins are a presence here. It almost feels like this secular where there's uh advantages and progressions that are happening in pockets. So you don't see this broad landscape of expansionary monetary policy everything going up at once. like now again feels like you can sort of and outperform by an order of magnitude and this is where the men really separate from the boys in a certain sense that you are able to get this dispersion. I think this is happening in both the crypto market and the general stock market.

What we're the ability to pick winners is more important because again you're trying and so I think we're run that occurred in pockets. The pockets that we're seeing it now, we're seeing it in institutional adoption. And it's like, okay, well,

we're all in it. We've been in it for years. Who's going to buy our bags? Well, you look around and you see bankers, you see institutions, you see law firms, you see social media companies launching stable coins, you see LLMs and and generational AI platforms that are battling for market share. These are the companies that are going to come into the industry and they're going to take what we've built and that's going to continue to adopt this technology. And so we're going to continue to see this over and over and over again. Um we're we're just

continuing to see things that make so much sense in the market. We're going to continue to see them become more and more adopted. One great example of this is AI. And so we've been talking with projects. There's chat bots and LLMs that are launching executiondriven LLMs, fully self-custodial. You can custody your own assets and the AI can execute transactions with your permission but on your behalf. They're doing this with 300 assets across several chains. This is something that's going to continue to proliferate. And what we're seeing is that some infrastructure providers, we were talking with an infrastructure provider yesterday that was very focused on orchestration and they're going and

they're launching their own app. And so again, they're launching things that are built upon their own infrastructure, but they're going and being the change that they want to see in the world. They're not relying on an outside company to come in and build the app on top of their tech. They're going to just build the app themselves because they know their tech the best. And so we're seeing this progression from labs, companies, and infrastructure providers. There was an onslaught of infrastructure. Why do we need another L2? Why do we need another piece of infrastructure? Where are the apps? Well, it wasn't new builders that came in and built the apps. It was the teams that built the infrastructure that have a very intimate understanding of the infrastructure.

They know how to harness the power of that infrastructure the best. They said, "Okay, we did it. We don't need more infrastructure. We built the infra. Now we're going to go and we're going to build the app on top of it. I agree. And we have a infrastructure builder, application builder first up, M team. Before we get into that, we got to shout out EtherFi, the title sponsor of the rollup TV live at permission list. I'm a user of the of the EtherFi card on my the physical cards are coming in one to two weeks live. It is the best crypto card I've used non-custodial. I'm borrowing against my Ethereum, using that capital to spend on subways, on food here in the city. Thoroughly enjoying it. We have a special link at the bottom of our stream. You will get

5% back on your first $1,000 spent uh if you use our link that is in the bottom of the stream, guys. Help us out. How about free 50 bucks? It's an amazing product. Uh and it's align with further ado, let's get M Team on and bring him up. M team is from Spire. Uh a a yapper of many uh desents the man on Twitter with a Kaido score of a million M team. H how how you doing man? I'm doing great Andy. Thanks for having me. How's the city treating you so far?

It's nice. It's nice. I just got here a couple hours ago. Took a train up from Maryland. Um looks great. It's a little bit hot outside but I like it. Enjoy the weather. Yeah, man. So, absolutely. Everybody wants to know when eat's going to 10K. So, I never do price predictions, but I did I did call the bottom. It was pretty good. I said ETH under 2K was a discount. I'm not sure like how much of a discount it was. Um, but when I look at the next like year, two years for ETH, what I see is on Kaito, which is an E,

you know, a lot of Ethereum giving in interest share referring to Ethereum and at least um in my experience mind share tends to either precede a price increase or uh come right after a price increase and obviously we haven't had that for ETH yet um and so I'm definitely looking to next year or so for some you know some some buying so MT I was at a dinner yesterday with with quite a few uh VCs in the industry and they sort of were discussing kind of like the early crop which is you know when when Andy and I came in and has since matured now we've gotten older you're part of kind of this

fresh new crop this this crypto youth if you will and the the uh notion approach from this generation is like don't believe in anything like anything can go what one which way or the other and so you see this and they were talking about it from a uh trader perspective they sell you know 3x 4x on these meme coins when in reality sometimes it goes 50 20 50x and so but they've been trained don't believe because it could all come crashing down at any moment. You've taken a very fundamentally a a very different approach. You've chosen to believe in ETH. So I'm curious what drew you to ETH and why do you have so much conviction in Ethereum? Yeah. So I mean

it's it's not even about the tech for me. For some people it is. I know it is. Um I I think I've been more convinced by like Tuli or other people on Twitter than a lot of my a lot of my companions in the ETH land. Um for me it was the community. I I met Justin Drake who's like the first like bigname person that I met in crypto and he he took me from zero to one. I got on research calls and I gave some presentations. cuz I got hired um started a company and so a person like that Justin who works at the Ethereum foundation a rep you know major representative of Ethereum uh is really giving me a chance right uh that that's what motivated me that's what got that first kind of like into Ethereum and

then from there I just met so many cool people um Brad for example Brad he's at mega he's sold on Ethereum I'm sold on bread it's just the community for me yeah dude I mean you guys have been going back and forth on on Twitter for a while and just kind of incredibly

neutral base roll up based on the They're good. But what it's telling me based on that I like Katana, right? Yeah. kind of VM blending they call it. Uh

really great team. I think the the pitch for them is that like general purpose but with a major differentiator which is that we have interoperability between multiple different VMs and that narrative I mean it caught my attention. I think they've been doing a good job of getting application developers on board as well. Nice. We invested in Fluent as well. And so I think this is again part of this multi- this multi-dimensional vision which is also aligned with the modular vision of all of these separate sort of uh blobs if you will of state but expressive VMs all of these different unique differentiators that make these different pieces of infrastructure special so that ultimately there's purpose-built applications that can be built as a result of these and I think app chains

are an important part of that as well and and this is also on the path of Ethereum's future. You have a debate later today with Are you me?

you know, in the way here. Yeah. No, I mean, I think I I do agree. Okay. I I love their line, which is like if you're auction doesn't happen onchain, it's going to happen offchain or excuse me, the other way around. If it doesn't happen offchain, it's going to happen onchain. And I think that's what we see, right? Tons of spam. Um, I will admit I sent like 30,000 transaction on blast a couple weeks ago because I was testing some active address spammer botast on blast because the transaction fees are super cheap. Yeah. Um, it's a dead chain. That's why. Yeah. Uh, and I tell you the the amount of spam that I can see in the met pool when I'm doing something like that or if I'm just searching through block explorers, it's crazy. It's crazy. And I think the something that people often don't

realize is that it's not just the TPS of like your centralized sequencer. It's also all of the infrastructure around it. I think Mega has done a great job talking about this, but like your RPCs, your indexers, all of these have to keep up with all these spam transactions. And so we can't just like cross out all the transactions that revert or do nothing. We have to keep track of these cuz they're going to get put in a dashboard or whatever. And so it it slows everyone down. The the hot path is not always the chain. Sometimes it's some of these uh these other service providers as well. I I wanted to ask you about the solo stakers because it seems that you know the the EF and Ethereum community in general has been really really fixated on keeping these node requirements for

solo stakers very low in order to stake some ETH on a Raspberry Pi, right? And and that is bottlenecking the performance the block times block like so many things about the performance of ETH um which causes it to be slow and expensive. Right. Agreed. And fundamentally, if we want ETH to be cheap and fast, we we have to get like get rid of this obsession around uh node requirements being low so that everyone can be a home solo staker. Are you solo I'll be honest, I'm not solo staking ether, right? So, I don't have a very strong like connection to low node requirements. Are you solo staking? Do you think this is an important function for Ethereum? I'm not solo staking at

the moment. Uh I attempted to set up a rocket pool node like a week ago but got busy with something else. I'm gonna finish it when I get home from the conference. Um my my take on this I think we got to back up and start from really first principles here. Okay. So to will tell you your node requirements can be whatever you want right as long as you can put it in a data center and it's not more expensive than the revenue you'll get from running that validator. It's fine because asset issuers will be able to run those validators. Yeah. Now the place I think tool is coming from is that a lot of onchain applications that he's thinking about are tokens that have issuers, right? That have people who can do exchanges with onchain versus off-chain representations of an asset.

And so that thesis I think is demonstrated pretty pretty well in Salana, right? They're looking at some of this um this real world asset stuff. They're going big on stable coins and trading. And for stable coins, you have a issuer that is, you know, probably circle or tether. it's very easy to get a hold of them and it's easy to think about that mental model on Ethereum. We have this idea that we don't want to have any dependence on anyone offchain. That means there's no issuer and if there's no issuer then you need some some notion of whoever is uh whoever the this onchain state is important to needs to be able to verify the network. That's called running a node. It's not a validator. The uh the tricky thing here is if we have a um if we have a light

node set up like Celestia, then we can get a lot of the way down the line there on on just getting, you know, on your phone. I have a Celestia light node on my phone. Yeah. If we have a um something that's a little more beefy, you can put on a Raspberry Pi. That's a good step. Um but then we have to back up and say what's what's really slowing us down here? Like what what part of this is slowing us down? I think to a large part in Ethereum, it's not solo stakers, it's not solo validators, it's the proposing duties that those validators are doing. And so if you have a poor internet connection or you have a lot of latency, um, or you just go down because your internet goes out or your electricity goes out, then you're slowing down Ethereum quite a bit. And I

mean, I'll I'll mention we have like a million validators on Ethereum. That's way too many for the kind of scale we want to achieve. We have to hone that down. Um, and so I say all this to kind of get at the point that the the validator question is one of um, who is running the node and why do they need to run the node? If it's an issuer, they have billions of dollars on chain. They don't need to worry about, you know, these these node costs. If there's no issuer and you need to make sure that you have your your self-custodial tokens in your account, then maybe you do need to run node. We have to we have to balance that. Um, the one thing that I absolutely have to mention or Justin will kill me is that anything I say about eliminating solo validators and

solo proposers on Ethereum today is temporary because we have a plan with the beam chain for what Justin calls feather staking. So, this is a this is a Google Pixel smartwatch. In in 5 years, I'm going to be able to run Ethereum validator on this smartwatch. Yeah, just a mobile data connection. Is that because the smartwatch hardware will get better and more performant or is that because Ethereum will become lighter to run on a piece of hardware later to verify? Yeah. So, we have ZK with ZK. Exactly. So, I'm looking at teams like SP1. This is risk zero. Um ZK Singh had this huge announcement the other day.

I'm super excited about that. Airbender is awesome. Um and yeah, all these things combined, we can get into native rollups. We can get into snarkifying the layer one. Got it. We can package all of Ethereum, all of the native ropes, all the base rollups into one tiny proof that takes a millisecond to verify. Put it right on here. M team, thank you for for joining us today. Quick segment. Great. Good luck on your uh debate with Dan. Wishing you the best there. And uh we'll see you soon. Enjoy the city and uh you know, stay stay nice and dry out here today. Stay stay cool, stay hydrated. All right. Appreciate that.

Exactly. Cheers, man. Thanks for coming. What's your thoughts there, Rob? Fresh. Don't forget your backpack empty. Yeah, right here. It's all right. Everything's live. We're getting all of this. Well, we'll see you. Get good luck at the debate. Um, fresh young crop. I mean, just super smart. Absolut. I mean, just it makes me I'm excited for the future not only of Ethereum, but also this industry in general that we have a young generation that's not obsessed with memecoins. This guy's building an and you know we invested in in in in M team and he's doing phenomenal. He's high agency.

That's what you want to see in a founder, right? And and he's going and taking it upon himself to research, dig super deep, become more well-versed than someone who has a Harvard MBA in Dan Robinson and can go toe-to-toe. That's going to be an interesting debate. I kind of wish we we were going to watch that one, but I'm sure all of this is recorded as as is our show, right? So, anyone who wants to check that out, come back and watch this. Check us out. Come back and watch that. Right. It's it's it's a great day out here. It's a great it's a great day to be uh in the industry. Up next, we got Constantine from Black from Block Damon. I think he's here in the building. Uh let's get him up here. Get him on the show. Um and uh bring him up. Um let's let's do it.

Uh so, Coning is building block Damon. They are like he's a CEO. Uh they they've been working quite a bit on uh the the regulatory side, uh Genius Act, everything in between. Hey guys, cut scene. Good to have you, man. How's it going? It's good. Yeah. Staying staying cool out here. Yeah. I mean guys, yeah, they got your you got the whole model thing going, which I like with the with the shades. Yeah. Well, we'll take them off for this. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah. Staying cool. Staying hydrated. Yeah, man. So, you you have a fireside today with Yano. Yeah. Are you ready for that?

Oh, I already had it. Oh, you did? I just before this. What was the uh what was the key takeaways there? Uh basically, Yanosh uh he said that we're the best and ever. And uh no, I mean we talked a lot about uh one the challenge of crypto founders to navigate um in crypto markets that are so volatile because there's always the next juicy thing investors see. And so we were talking about our shared experience when everybody was like, "Hey, you need to build an L2 and oh, you need to launch a token and oh, now it's like circle IPO is like you need to go public like you know, like there's this um constant sort of um which is by design in crypto. We have the tokenization and volatility to

attract developers to build things which people sometimes forget like we need that tokconomics because otherwise this doesn't work in open source networks." And so, but it does create more pressure to be a little u you know off the shoot from the hip of course. Um and because specifically investors uh traditionally they like the traditional SAS model where you can do discounted cash flows with like oh 7% growth of bum bum you know like that makes capital providers very comfortable and in crypto obviously you're operating like this and so I think there's this disconnect a little bit with how LPs and venture capital assign value projections and liquidity to uh crypto assets and then Um and then

the nervousness that that very right you know rightfully creates right which is like hey man like why is revenue down 60%. It's like well Ethereum fell 60% in a month you know like and so it's just like trying to make them understand that I mean and they do understand it it's just not fun to understand you know what I mean and I mean in addition to that we we've had this regulatory landscape in the states that has been very really really tough and recently you've been kind of uh writing some thoughts about that and just kind of commenting on it. I'm curious like uh now that the genius bill is has gone through the Senate um you know how does that help block Damon um how does this better regulatory environment help what you're doing and I'm curious who you think outside of block dam as well is like a some of the

larger beneficiaries of this positive regulation yeah for sure I mean first off I think the Genius Act in itself right like like it's as as a as a bill that is going to get turned into law uh around something that's inherently cryptoreated and native to some extent um is massive, right? And so uh because what it does for us is is the the stable coins and stable tokens like the you know they're interesting um they're obviously the most uh uh uh going back to what I said because they don't have uh volatility. they bring a financial side to the existing capital markets that they can understand and so it's

like crypto but it's not as crazy more more familiar that's right and so I think um so to me it's an on-ramp really for institutional investment and what it means is that people get exposure to cryptonnative assets it means that lawmakers get comfortable with cryptonative assets and then the idea is that you know ultimately more regulation gets built on top of it that basically ally, you know, figures out how to um borrow and lend against crypto assets in uh an open decentralized 24/7 way, right? And so it's basically the DeFi stuff. It's um the earn and yield stuff around staking and and and also network and transaction fees. And so clarity

around licensing uh where this revenue gets aggregated. One of the big things you know we've made um we try to tell the current administration is that for example uh the structure of architecture and understanding where money is made in crypto is really important for lawmakers because most of the money gets made in transaction fees network generated fees basically as well as staking you know and so but these fees were basically pushed into offshore entities that don't reside in the US right and so um and so how do you actually get those back right like and and that needs some market structure alignment because there's no incentive to bring them back and so we're always trying and and you know the selfish case here is like well if you stake stake with a US native company so

at least the yield revenue rolls up into the US right and so now the reason why that's a little mischievous on our part is we're the only US doicile staking company uh because I mean not by like because we couldn't escape but but you know we had to stop our consumer staking efforts in 23 um all of all my competitors in the staking world are non US entities at this point, but they sell heavily into the US market, right? And so you're kind of like uh but for me as a US company, it's a lot more expensive to exist. I need audited financials. I need a lot of I need a lot of things to survive. I had to find lots of different banks because we got unbanked and like and so the cost of business is higher and um that has created a world where

all this infrastructure and network fees were pushed out of the US and it will need a lot more to bring that back in than uh guidance around how to uh enable a Robin Hood or Coinbase or whoever PayPal to sell you Bitcoin and earn yield. The lawmakers need to understand that underneath it is where a lot of them aggregate a lot of the volume and revenue goes and that needs to sit on nodes and infrastructure that uh is owned by US entities. So taxes roll up here basically right like and so um that's an interesting challenge.

So, so given that Block Damon is a US doiciled staking company, I take it that you're in uh position to capitalize on an opportunity that I I think everyone's kind of like looking from the outside looking in and that is uh staking the ETH in these ETFs, right? So, we've got gotten so so much inflows through these ETFs, but right now none of that is deployed on chain. None of it is productive capital. It's all just sitting there. It's actually a problem by the way, but we'll talk about it.

Yeah. And so I'm curious how how would you solve that problem, right? Especially as like Cardano is going to go on ETFs, Salana is uh I think Avalanche is going to get approved, Sweet might get approved, all these proof ofstake networks. Do you anticipate that the capital sitting in these ETFs will become productive capital and will contribute to to network security and therefore earn staking rewards? Is that a future you see for ETH in these ETFs? Well, what I would say is it's a future I would like to see first and foremost. I think what we've seen actually one of the reasons why I think actually a lot of metrics in crypto are actually not that great right now, ironically, is because most of the external capital flows into ETFs that

remains offchain, right? And so basically there's this disconnect of like there's a lot of volume moving into ETH and Bitcoin, but it it it gets funneled into ETFs that basically sit side chains, right? Like they sit beside the chain. Uh they don't really are active in in the network. And so um now we've created that reality in the US because there wasn't really any guidance. And so uh we want all that money to be onchain, right? And so the the uh and that's part of that actually legal framework that people need to understand and that lawmakers need to understand um so that we in incentivize and provide mechanisms for those ETFs to actually also stake assets for example and so that happens. I think the um

question there is obviously again it goes down to law right like so the way the lawmakers think about reserve requirements of these ETFs right it's like often staking has an unbonding period and so there's like you know so they're going to be like you can't problem right and so it's just like you can stake a certain percentage and then how does that work and so a lot of it is education um but uh it's obviously not a technical issue um it's a pure regulatory issue and I think the other way to counter it is to also really work on launching and continuing to explain DeFi and self-custody to people, right?

Which is actually um another thing I guess I'm struggling with, right? Like as a company, we're all about self-custody and basically DeFi. And I I can tell you why, but like the the uh but the reality is when you talk to investors and and I love Coinbase, but they're like, "Oh, we just put our stuff on Coinbase Prime, you know, and that's it." like you know like it's safe there and we can do anything and it might cost us 20% a year. Um but you know like and so what I'm saying is like if if if you have these um uh basically off-chain custodians that are cryptonative but basically sort of take everything and lock it into an ecosystem of like we run it on a staking provider that our

investor might own and a wallet company that we own but it stays sort of closed loop. um we're moving away from you, every individual should control their own crypto and it should go via networks and onchain and and so there's this inherent conflict currently with the value generation. And so for us like we built these self-custody wallets for example for institutions right now for private equity and family offices so they can stake and do DeFi. Um, and it's really hard to sell that, you know, because they're like, ah, we don't want to, like, we'd rather go to a centralized entity, but then you're kind of like, you know, if you're playing that game, crypto is not winning because the benefit of crypto obviously only becomes true in a self-custody

decentralized way. Otherwise, existing systems will be better, right? And so, there is this sort of push and the way we do it is by building tools and making it a lot more easier and cheaper for people to have self custody. So our institutional self-custody wallet for example um that sits cloud hosted costs probably 10% of any of the current big wallet provider solution. So we're kind of trying to get it that way to kind of show like you can have self- custody. It just needs to be a lot more cheaper and more efficient than sort of you know using a large scale uh integrated custodian and and but building that tech is actually really complicated. Yeah.

Yeah. you're fighting this trend of like uh this verticalized stack of you know exchange uh wallet L2 um etc and just kind of like these you know Coinbase track in all these are trying to just like verticalize and just own everything from from top to bottom. Yeah. Which they should you know I I mean from like they should as companies right like so I don't want to like I love both Coinbase and Kraken. They're both customers. We work with both of them. I think they've done such an enormous crypto. So, you know, it's not a dig at them like they're doing something because they're smart and they need to make money. Those are venturebacked entities. Venturebacked entities have a

fiduciary responsibility to extract as much money as they can. And so, that's what what they're doing, you know. Maybe you could tell the story to help illustrate Block Damon. How do you work with Coinbase and Kraken? what is the service that you provide to them and and sort of tell that customer success story so that any other financial institutions that are looking from the outside looking to get in they can sort of recreate some of the some similar success. Yeah, I think I mean so Block Demon obviously started as a full node business and so uh like Bitcoin and Ethodes were the first thing we sold in 2017 really um and that's still a core of our business. I think we're pretty much the only existing full node service

provider uh across protocols. So uh you have API companies Alchemy and Fura and stuff like that work on ETH for example, but selling actual full nodes is uh uh very difficult and and not high margin. And so uh but we sell those to those type of companies still and so there's just certain infrastructure where they want secondary uh security uh sometimes also it's um just a matter of cost for them uh because it is a little commodified right and so um we've been um at different stages customers they were customers of different of our products um I always say that our stack basically allows every institutions to become Kraken or Coinbase right like and

so basically um we sell you the underlying technology to build and use run wallets to run transactions to earn yield. Um and so that's basically what you can do with our products and um they they do that partly as well. It's really a uh I think a commercial decision on their part is like how much of this do we want to fully own in terms of tech, right? And so I think the a lot of the decisions that they've made is to do more of this over time themselves. Um because they see that there's a lot of value there, right? And uh but it's actually uh a pretty complex thing to do at scale.

Yeah. And and so given that you guys are doing essentially full nodes as a service, right? Um the equivalent in the trady world me if I'm wrong is like the end point at which you can submit these transactions and you know we everyone knows the story that you know you you pay in the in the Connecticut data center you know if you're in the server rack closer to New York you get lower latency and so you can frontr run and algorithmically trade better than anyone else in the server room that's behind you and and is it similar in that sense that you know if you have this endpoint and you have essentially this endpoint as a service that you guys are providing. You're not trusting Alchemy.

You're not trusting infura. You don't have a public endpoint that gets bogged down. So you can offer lower latency and there's a lot of variance too with MEV. You can protect against it. You can sort of loop in these different things. That's that that's correct. I mean that's one use case. U I think MEV is a really interesting subject as well in general, but like the um

to get right but it's really important right like so um I think we need to be really honest uh with everyone how these networks function how they're monetizing how how I look at lifetime fee generation of one ETH and how much can I get off that, right? Like it's a very different way to think about it, but that's a way to conceptualize it, right? Like, so I'm not looking at what's the market price of ETH as a sort of indicator of success. What I'm trying to build is products that capture as much of the lifetime fee generation of that token, which is why we have transaction nodes, staking, wallets, like it's basically a little bucket under each different feed

generation event. And so I kind of feel like um that's been a driver of our strategy and I really want that strategy to succeed, right? But it like we have to work hard for it. And so I think that's the risk is that um we're not smart enough and good enough in explaining the upside of thinking that way and protecting companies like us who are severely constrained again uh in but what because we operate in the US like I do have to run real sock and ISO compliance and financial compliance and audit things like I can't compete with you know five smart kits in a garage in uh with an offshore entity uh when it comes to staking you know like our staking needs to have insurance. We need five failovers. If I want to run a

high-risisk BIS, I'm offshore. I run one node. I don't have a backup. I tell people if it goes wrong, sue me. I don't care. But I can offer really cheap rates, right? Like, and so it's really educating also the entities that own us as consumers to not just go for the cheapest option, but go for the one that actually protects the interests of the market the most. Yeah. Because the solution you mentioned with five kids in a garage that only works for so long until the node goes down, something happens, all of a sudden you're suing who like that that becomes a reality for people. I I wanted to dig into the wallet stack a little bit more because you mentioned AI and that was a question that I wanted to ask about as you're bringing a little bit more light onto that subject and it's becoming a bigger

part of the business. You know, we've seen AI come into the wallet stack every it's sort of intuitive. I'm gonna type and maybe not even have an idea of what I want to do. The AI will tell me what I should do and then I'll say, "Okay, go and do it for me." How are you incorporating AI into your wallet stack? Yeah. Um, I mean, exactly kind of. Well, I don't want I mean, I always like talking about stuff also. Uh, but but because I don't believe in like, you know, ideas are one, you know, dime a dozen like, uh, it's building it is is really hard. But I think one of the issues with wallets and the general user experience in crypto is that it's just still really poor. And I think AI can abstract a lot of that away. So for me, the biggest pro crypto use case for AI

outside of like transaction fine-tuning, me stuff and network architect like there's a lot of stuff there and general coding stuff. It's actually um I think AI agents uh are re are going to revolutionize the user experience of crypto because um you can just basically use word prompts to do complicated things and have an AI system figure out like I don't need to do the like what's the like you know like even if I go to Coinbase and or Kraken and I want to send bit like bitcoin somewhere I have to pick it like which you want to do it on lightning you want to do it on this you want to do it on this like how how do I either know like you know like and and specifically How does my mom know? Um and and so but there's benefits to having that

segmentation there for different transactions. So you need to provide it. And so but ideally what people want is like I want the most efficient way to get from A to B. And I would like for you to tell me what that is, right? And so I think that's a great AI tool for example. Yeah. I still think we're just several several years off of that though. Like maybe a year or two. Uh I agree. I mean that's like what I struggle with is like also like you know I kind of feel I see it all really clearly. It's just like how do you get there? AI is not good enough yet. That's right. And I wouldn't trust it. And then also I was kind of you know one of the things I was thinking about running as a fun experiment is um can we get an AI a

money transmitter license? Meaning like you know like can an an AI get licensed? You know what I mean? like kind of because that's the other thing then you know it's like like what if it's an AI that's actually the owner of the transaction right and so um and so that's a fun game like you know can we just like can an AI submit an application for a money transmitter license right like and so um and so those are kind of fun games to play you know Constantine man we appreciate your time today um what what do you have on the rest of schedule I'm going to talk at NASDAQ talk about the same stuff you Everybody wants to hear about Circle and IPOs and uh and so we'll talk about that and you know dinners with folks and uh

it's a very very busy week. So beautiful. Yeah, it's been it's been uh very active. NASDAQ hit alltime highs today. So it's a good day to speak. It's also fun like because actually the irony is that uh now people are trying to get their AL tokens into stocks. Yeah, I know right. Like it's a it's a which is an interesting sort of development, right? Yeah. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for sir. Great to see you guys having and wish you the best. Enjoy the rest of the conference. You guys, too, huh? Best of luck. Thank you. Awesome. All right, man. Up next, we've got uh we've got Austin from Relayer. Um we'll bring him up to talk about some of the latest uh DeFi work that he's doing, he's seeing, etc. Um but yeah, man. I mean, I think I

think those staked ETH ETFs are coming sooner than we thought. I think so, too. I think so, too. We got to take a quick moment to tell the audience that they need to sign up for the EtherFi cash card. You need to sign up actually too, Rob. I do. I do. I'm still I'm still looking forward to getting my card and using it on this New York subway. I have it right here on my phone. It is the I wish you guys could see it. Is the Ether cash card. It matches the colors for Let's get Austin up here next. Yeah, Austin's coming up now. the man, the myth behind the traffic of the city.

Traffic of the city nuke them girl good. He's got the real VIP band on. I got it all now. Been smiling today cuz cuz uh syrup is up 20%. 64 cents this morning. Guys on fire. Yeah, it's it's kind of surreal how the market is figuring it out all at once. Uh what what is the market figuring out for anyone who's still revenue meta? Still on the sidelines. So one revenue meta but obviously there's a lot of protocols generating revenue 61 cents now um but yeah it's um so they they had a very different protocol early on they were an over an undercolateralized lender um they lend to market makers uh trading firms and during 200 uh 2021 2022

they were lending to folks like Celsius and BlockFi and trading firms and that didn't go well right yeah yeah so they rebuilt the protocol focused on overcolateralized lending still on KYC permission borrowers but then what they built out is instead of requiring KYC lenders opening that up creating a receipt token that's syrup USDC that can be used in DeFi used in Pendle and their growth has just been exponential so they went from essentially back from nothing to 2 and a half billion of TVL now like 20 million of revenue of uh per per year run rate.

And uh I'm not going to make you say it, but I'll say it. $5 target 2026 and and end end of the year. Not financial advice. And I had a good call about this the other day. Um yeah, these are of course all my opinions, not the opinions of the fund, not financial advice. I'll caveat with that. Um but I think these are not opinions of the roll. These are Yeah, I think the opportunity is huge. I I ran an analysis the other day that if you apply the same multiple that a is trading at and just for context, maple has grown 10x in the last year. A has had flat revenue over the last year.

Syrup would be at 88 cents. So syrup would be about 50% higher just if it was trading at the multiple of a slower growth protocol. Yeah. So what's the next uh what's the next big winner then? what what what is the market sleeping on on the liquid side right now? Yes. What's the what's the trend that you'll see that'll develop because obviously Hyperliquid's got you know it's a 30 40 50 bill now right or or you know or sorry I think it's around like 12 or something like that. Uh depends on on circulating FTV and then you got uler syrup. So what's what's the next one?

So, I think we're going to see a lot more activity around borrow lends, dexes, and stable coins like we've seen, but that to really start to accelerate as we're getting more stable coin regulation, as we're seeing more traditional firms get more comfortable using onchain products. So, you know, Maple is a perfect example of that of trading firms, hedge funds, market makers, but also miners, corporate treasuries, all of these traditional sorts of companies that have Bitcoin and other assets on their balance sheet to borrow against it uh and bring that yield on chain. So, you know, one one asset that I think has incredible distribution that the market isn't quite on top of is Aeradrome. Interesting. Yeah, if you

look at base, it's pretty much other than Hyperliquid and Salana, the main place where activity is happening on chain. Uh, and you know, there there's a couple, you know, other ecosystem. Avalanche has some interesting things that are happening there as well on the social side and otherwise. Um, but if you look at base, they have this incredible distribution through Coinbase and now they're plugging in DeFi in the back end so that you can as a Coinbase user borrow from Morpho and use, you know, essentially access onchain capital and yields. And they're doing the same thing where now it's not like, well, when is it going to be a Coinbase listing? It's trade everything directly on chain directly from your account. Um, and the Arrow team is killer. So, I I

think they're really well positioned. There's a there there's a bit of a conversation going around that a lot of these L1 tokens are forever topped. They're trying to cut down their their staking rewards. Uh you know, proof of stake in terms of economic security has been kind of uh getting it's getting a bit uh abandoned per se due to overinflation and just down only charts. You look at things like Aptos, like Near um like SU some of these like larger L1s that have been around for a while. What do you think is the future of these L1 uh uh chains? Like are these things uh investable at a at a you know fair market valuation? What's your thoughts on the more like infra landscape versus like the DeFi application landscape?

Yeah. So, chains are really interesting and just like execution layers broadly because these are really like series A to series C companies that went live at multi-billion dollar valuations and had lots of potential and were valued really highly because of that potential and everyone comparing them to Ethereum and then comparing them to Salana and there was interesting tech but like no one was really using them in a major way and things that people aren't using shouldn't be worth billions of dollars and I think like the market is finally adjusting to that. Um, but if you do have usage and you have a lot of activity happening on the chain, like I don't think there's any reason why we shouldn't see networks be worth hundreds of billions of dollars and more. Um, you

know, I think Ethereum has proven that and they're they're through coming through an interesting transition because so much of the value capture has gone to L2s. Yeah. um data availability is not monetizing in quite the way you know they would have expected they have some monetization from settlement. So you know while Ethereum still has the most TVL and a meaningful amount of trading volume so like surpassed that um it it kind of has a little bit of a legacy valuation. It gets inflows from ETFs and other assets, but that's a trickier one where the valuation is probably ahead of the fundamentals at least on a revenue basis if you don't subscribe to, you know, store of value. And I think, you

know, maybe a contrarian opinion, probably not anymore, but Bitcoin is probably the only store of value, monetary premium asset. Yeah. So, so what metrics are you looking at aside from store value, but what metrics are you looking at on a fundamental basis to indicate revenue? You mentioned trading volume is is an easier one to measure. Yeah. But what what are some of those metrics that you're looking at to indicate, okay, this is a network that has staying power and and is probably either undervalued or overvalued according to the fundamentals. What are those fundamental metrics that you're looking at? Yeah. So the the kind of closest to the surface is just revenue. So how much revenue is going to token holders that are validating the network through like

delegated proof of stake or or whatever mechanism ends up driving value to those token holders. Then a layer below that is what are the indicators of future revenue. So what is trading volume? What is you know obviously you're looking at the growth of all these metrics. trading volume and its growth. TVL, which I I generally look at as a little bit more of a lagging indicator because it it takes time for people to, you know, unwind to collateralize, borrow, and move it to another chain. And that that ends up being a little slower, but often stickier. Like I think that's the perfect example with Ethereum. It's been really really sticky the TVL that they have. Um, and then users for a long time

had been a metric, but that's so gameable. I think it's more of a more looking at applications that are solving real problems and have real users and usage over a sustained period of time. And and that's something that it's I mean you can measure quantitatively, but I think that's worth measuring more like not confusing the forest for the trees and seeing like all right well people are using Jupiter a ton and it's an incredible application what's the revenue all right maybe that's a little bit weighted towards a per product that is harder to defend you know you can look at hyperlquid and what sort of

activity is being generated there and that seems really really sticky you know Camino seems to be running away with um permissionless borrow lend on Salana um you know I think you can look at you know stable coins and that same realm. Like Pendle right now has a decent amount of trading volume, not a ton of revenue, but it essentially owns the category of stripping yields and then incentivizing points to to um bootstrap TVL. So it's kind of like what what are the you know S tier category one applications on a given execution environment. So today's show and tomorrow's is is is powered by a good close friend of ours, EtherFi. We did their uh one of their early rounds

several like a year and a half ago. They've launched their cash card. They're doing buybacks. I saw you retweet DCF God's post today. Yeah. What's your what's the take there? Do you have a cash card yet? Yeah, so I do have a cash card. Also, I think I invested at the same time as you guys. That was my very first venture investment in the fund in Ether Series A. Yeah. Uh I should have mentioned them before, so thank thanks for bringing it up. They are a top five team that I've ever worked with in terms of their ability to have a big vision and execute on it in crypto.

They had been building for a really long time, saw the opportunity in liquid restaking, built out the best product in liquid restaking, quickly captured that market. But, you know, as we all know, restaking hasn't generated a ton of revenue. there hasn't yet there hasn't yet been a ton of demand. So what have they done? They realize like all right we have all of these users we have $6 billion of TVL. Now that we've acquired all these customers let's create more products for them that are useful and increase stickiness. So they built out their um etherfy liquid products which is you know if you have e what can you do with it on chain? How do you earn additional

yields? And you know, instead of just getting the 4% yield from staking or restaking ETH, can you get 16%. And what can you do and make that just one click? And then they're like, "All right, well, if people have all of this ETH that's deployed in the protocol, instead of a debit card, which doesn't ever really work that well, what if we can plug into Borrow Lens, collateralize the position they have there, allow them to borrow against that position, and now actually have a credit card, not a debit card. And then the credit card have, you know, functionality like, you know, these are generally crypto users first.

So, free tickets to conferences, all these sort of really cool crypto perks. And now they're doing a couple hundred,000 of volume a day. Hockey stick growth numbers. It's insane. Every product they launch has hockey stick growth. You got to take a chance. Sign up for the cash card link below. $50 back on your first $1,000 spent. Who else is giving you that cash back? No one is. Yeah, it's a it's an incredible product. Austin knows. It's an incredible product. Um I'll quote Arthur Hayes, the AMX of crypto. Yeah. Yeah. We actually had Arthur and Mike on the pod some some time ago. BTC was trading at 74. Arthur was like the bottom. Arthur was like all in, man. Let's go.

Yeah. It was good stuff. Yeah. That's the That's the very different thing about this market where in prior cycles you'd see these really large draw downs in Bitcoin like with other alts. Yeah. And Bitcoin this this time around has just been impervious. It has flows from ETFs. Sailor is aping like $350 million like over the last 3 days or something. Yeah, it's like he's got another 300 to buy. Like Sailor's taking a break. Pomp is steadf I got to ask you, what's one thing that you are very very bullish about that that that we haven't covered? Yeah. And what's one thing that you're fearful of or or bearish on? Yeah. So it went from contrarian to consensus to

somewhat contrarian. Again, I'm incredibly bullish on Salana and the Salana ecosystem. I think Hyperlid has taken a lot of the attention and it's definitely entered the competitive set for decentralized NASDAQ. But as far as global scalable execution layer and a composable smart contracting network, there's nothing in Salana's league right now. Obviously, I'm including Ethereum there because Ethereum has a lot of activity, but it's not scalable at that level. Yeah. And Hyperlid has pretty much everything left to prove for the HyperVM. They've built an incredible product with PEPS, but as far as the broader execution layer, most of that activity is just farming right now.

Yeah. Um, so I I think people are sleeping on Salana and once we get an ETF that goes live and you know, we're seeing a lot of stable coin activity happening there. Memecoins have been very resilient. You know, people like to speculate in crypto. I don't think that's going anywhere anywhere. So on that note, Pump Fund launches their token sometimes. Are you going to do that? 4 billion valuation, right? It's like what what they're raising at. Maybe they do a full bill, maybe they do a little bit less. What's your take on Pump Fund, but also how does Pump Fund's token launch affect Soul Soul and Solana? Yeah. And and the ecosystem there. Yeah. Yeah. So, is it is it going to be like a a airdrop like

wealth ad or like a or like more of like a constricting effect, right? Yeah. So I I think we can use the Trump and Melania token launches as parallels for what might happen because those were really big events where it was clearly was sucked out of the broader ecosystem to buy those assets and at that time most alts and there was a lot of AI alts at the time on Salana got absolutely crushed. Assets moved out capital moved out of there went into those meme meme coins. Um, we saw some minor outflows from Salana, but really Salana benefited pretty tremendously at the time. Like if you remember, Salana was 170, pumped to 290

in the next couple days. Oh, I know. Yeah. So, people are like, "All right, Trump is launching a token here. This means more activity. This is bullish." And also there's with pum fun there's going to be this massive wealth generation event for all the people that were in the trenches for a long time and get air dropped this token. So if if you look at that as a parallel, a lot of Salana, DeFi, things like radium which is somewhat competitive to pump, Jupiter and others have seen capital outflows already and I think that has been frontun as people have look to put capital aside to participate. Some of the fundamental assets that are trading at

lower multiples have actually done pretty all right. So on the liquid staking side, Marinade and Cloud have done well. Jetto has done well. A lot of that is also people looking forward to the ETF launch. Camino has stabilized and done pretty well since um you know the last couple weeks or so. So I think most of the liquidity moving out of alts has probably already happened and I think it's beneficial for Salana as this wealth generation event more attention. Um so I actually think it's a positive. It's going to be huge. Austin, thank you for joining us today, man. I uh I I'm glad that we got to do this in person rather than virtual. Have a great conference. It's going to be It's hot here for sure. Um I'm glad there's all the fans set up here and everything. You

can feel it all around his hair. We're just flowing. We're flow. Yeah, man. Cheers, man. Yeah, it's great to be here coming on, man. And pleasure to meet you, man. Likewise. Pleasure. Cheers. Thanks. So, are you buying Pump or are you selling Pump? No, I think I think um the CT take is uh is the wrong take. I think pump is going to pump on the pump. Okay. Yeah. Up next, we got our guy Ellie. Good to see you. Good to see you. Good to see you. Thank you so much. Recovered from the dinner last night. How was it? It was fun. We were we were going back and forth with uh Hib and Ken from a a Bitcoin company building on Starkware.

Bunch of good faces there. Xverse. That was Xverse, right? Of course. He's coming on tomorrow. I I believe so. Excited for that. Um let's talk about the foray of Starkware into Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, come on. All I I think you're getting a little bit of push back from the Ethereum people, huh? Um I'm not even sure about that. Like uh I would say that um you know, part of the Ethereum community is happy with that. Part of it maybe is unhappy with that. But uh certainly I think well okay I'll start like it is very much in our vision to go there. You know I started my journey into crypto in 2013 at the Bitcoin conference and when I presented

there I basically said look guys uh you know with this ZK stuff um we can do things better and scale Bitcoin and offer it privacy. That's how I you know co-founded Zcash. That's why Starkore exists. It's for these things. So for me, it's been a 12 year old dream to bring this stuff onto Bitcoin. So, you know, and anyone who understands that must be a supporter. And those among Ethereum folks who understand it are supporters. Yeah, man. And we're closer than ever, right, with the Covenants coming. I mean, that that core developer there last night, I'm I'm I'm blinking on his name. Jeremy Rubin. Jeremy Rubin.

you mentioned that that we're like almost a month away from covenants on Bitcoin which has been the the big thing for OPCAT for all these upgrades. Yeah. So I I'm not well it will be a weaker form of covenants because right now a lot of the excitement is about this upgrade called soft fork that is called CTV and CSFS which together first of all help lightning really greatly and all kinds of protocols similar to lightning which is really great because uh those are the best kinds of uh you know privacy preserving uh cheap payments uh without uh overloading bitcoin and I'm a big supporter of them uh so that's very exciting. I'm also very excited just to see that the core developers and proto developers

are amazing news um in terms of topic maybe it shouldn't be. Why in in your view is privacy so important and why has it been such an integral part of your journey through Zcash, Ethereum and and now ultimately Bitcoin? So privacy for all of us is extremely important.

Like I do my almost all my consumption um day-to-day consumption using uh the metal card uh by Argent. I'll show it to you. Yeah, you guys should also get it. It's free for you know everyone can get one now. So this uh beauty is like a you know a credit card by um Argin Mastercard. It's beauty. Yeah. Today's stream is is is sponsored by Ether. We are promoting their cash card there to competitors. Okay. They competitor is non-custodial usage of crypto on chain. Yeah. Yes. It's we're not using centralized exchange cards. Right. So in terms of privacy like uh I don't want everyone to see all my transactions, right? So you need that. The problem with privacy is really a matter of UX.

The Zay technology to provide it exists there, but it's uh pretty hard in terms of the UX experience and hopefully we'll solve that as well. Got it. So part of Starkware's new idea here is vision of it. Um, you know, let's get up to speed about the latest developments of where you guys are at with bringing native Bitcoin on onto Starkware, uh, integrations with different yield products and really like what you're seeing the demand for, uh, coin fi, if you will, is, who's using it, why, what do they want to do? Uh, let's just get all caught up here. Yeah.

So, I would say that there are broadly well maybe three um two main use cases and one kind of funky use case. So the funky use case there are all of these bitcoin um indexer based assets like runes bc20s you know all kinds of meme coins and stuff like that you know doggo to the moon and others um and there for that we have uh a runes bridge that was built by Jeremy Rubin's team char already exists and you know people are just uh bridging over to starknet getting better UX it's uh we also used the bridge in the other direction so we minted For the very first time, you can now have USDC in runes form which you can access on, you

know, Odin.fun and on uh Magic Eden and traded with respect to the other runes. So, a little bit of, you know, wild uh you know, more speculative um DEN kind of stuff. That's the funky but uh you know, less institutional side. Then the big word is yield. people are, you know, you have Bitcoin, it's this amazing asset, but most of its value is unleashed. Sorry, it's leashed right now. And on Starknet, we want to help unleash that value to put it into use. So, for instance, you want to borrow stables against your Bitcoin without leaving custody of that. You want to do it safely. That's one thing we're going to offer on Starknet. We would like to secure Starknet with Bitcoin, right? To have the set of operators include

Bitcoiners. So you're going to have yield both for BT sticking uh on starknet and you will generate yield while you're doing defy you know borrowing participating in purpose exchanges and stuff like that on starknet and what are some of those ecosystem projects that that you're particularly excited about that are you know helping to pioneer some of this movement so I'm very excited about well there are three different sectors that are thriving on starknet and each one of them has probably the most innovative you know kind of uh stuff on there we don't have that much usage but I think Bitcoin will help unlock that. So one sector is of course DeFi. You know the very best AMM out there hands down is called it Kubo. It's now also on

Ethereum but it's you know home base is on starknet. Um Moody's great. Did a podcast with him co-founder of unis swap v3 and was the original in inventor of concentrated liquidity as far as I know and and now correct me if I'm wrong there's a lot of crosschain volume that's also happening through a kubo and and aubo of course started on starknet. Huh? Yeah. So, so uh we have like amazing DeFi protocols like Aubo. We have Pay Masters uh that abstract all the fees away. Then we have uh things like lending protocols like Vzu um over the next two weeks extended which is uh Revolute backed and you know XR revolute

folks. Per exchange is coming onto starknet that's uh you know big news. It's going to be added to the existing per including uh layer Aira and um uh Remisex and then um that's the DeFi sector. Another amazing sector is the consumer app sector where we have things like focus tree which is an app that you know kids and teenagers and university students use to focus. They don't even know that it's on Starknet but already has an integrated wallet. You know 500,000 uh monthly active users on it. Just amazing. And then you have uh you know just yesterday uh Argent which was a you know still is a wallet rebranded into ready and is now opening a neo bank which again is based on stark net. So we

have the consumer app sector. Finally we have the gaming uh which is uh you know centered here in Brooklyn with the amazing amazing cartridge team games like Eternum uh Loots Realm and all kinds of others fun stuff. It's awesome. I'm I'm curious from the consumer apps perspective, you know, there's a thriving ecosystem here. Is there an app that you sort of have in the back of your mind and maybe if you weren't so busy you would build it yourself, but you'd like to see get built using all of the existing in that you've put forth through privacy, through Starkware and Starknet. Is there an app that you'd like someone to come out and maybe if someone doesn't you build it yourself?

Call to action here. Well, first of all, I'm extremely bullish on the two existing consumer apps. Um, uh, so ready, which is a neo bank, but in which, um, you know, you truly own your assets in a way, you know, you don't get a call from your bank. You can just, uh, in a, you know, in five minutes on board, you have your checking and saving accounts. You're going to have, you know, transfers. You have an iBA. It's a amazing product. And you, you know, you have your credit card. I just showed it. all of that stuff. That's amazing. Um, I also really like these just consumer apps where, you know, you truly own your reputation. So, focus tree is one example. You know, something we need

people to own more of their reputation as opposed to rely on credit ranking um, you know, agencies and the way is bring more of your life onto the blockchain and then you can attest. You're the only one attesting truly to your, you know, uh, reputation. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. That's one powerful application of ZK proofs that I love. I love to talk about because it's so intuitive. You know, we go to a bar, we need to show our ID, prove that we're 21 years old here in the States. Well, why does my ID need my address and all of these other things?

And and especially when, you know, social security numbers are involved in all these things when I can just do a ZK proof. I can prove that the thing is true without giving up the real information. was filling out something with my social security number yesterday and it was I it I still have that feeling when I input it in where it it there needs to be a better way and there is a better way and I think you've p you've done a lot of work with ZK and Starkware and Starknet as proponents of the privacy elements we talk a lot about the succinctness of ZK proofs and the scalability that it it it does involve and and not so much about the privacy elements that are just as important.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. So, yeah, Ziki can do a lot uh in terms of privacy and also scalability. Yeah. Coming back to the Bitcoin uh side. Yeah. Yeah. So, there's this so obviously there's these Bitcoin treasury companies and we had we had the question last night about what people are bearish on and several people said the blow up of these treasury companies ironically. So, you know, he's bullish on them. Either way though, there's what's been happening is that these companies have basically been like effectively far like harnessing retail with a a price of this equity that's higher than the nav of the holdings of Bitcoin and then retail has been buying the stock and kind of been

been allowing them to refinance debt, buy more. But that's basically going to slow down over the next six months as you know that there's more and more of these uh and people get a little bit more you know smarter and sophisticated. One thing that those companies are then going to try to do and already trying to do is returning to finding yield as a way to provide a differentiated offering to their investors and to main that kind of like yield on that Bitcoin. Yes. Exactly. So there there's a lot of competition for who's going to be able to get that kind of Bitcoin. How is how is Starknet how are you guys going to go and and focus your institutional efforts with some of these companies to get to be the yield provider for some of those uh treasury companies right so so of

course people will be able to stake bitcoin and get yield the main differentiator for startnet there is that we are you know the biggest in terms of the ecosystem number of real applications that people are already using right at the end of the day right you want the network to offer intrinsic value to users, right? If if it's just about farming some token with, you know, a promise that someday something will happen, it's okay, but it, you know, it doesn't uh doesn't really cut it. And we've seen some of these, you know, schemes recently, and they don't do too well. Start has a thriving ecosystem of visionary builders building from games to consumer apps, DI, payment systems, things

need. doing something that is part of value to end users. That's I think the biggest differentiator. We also pride ourselves for being like I mean I invented co-invented Zcash ZK star technology we have others are implemented uh implementing we invented them so like

you know it's just like you don't you don't go wrong with Stararket and like it's and and safety matters a lot when you think about Bitcoin or you know your digital assets. So that's another differentiator for us. Yeah. are are you speaking with maybe it's not Micro Strategy or those sorts of Bitcoin treasury companies, but maybe it's miners, maybe it's centralized exchanges, these these large pools of Bitcoin. What are some of the use cases that they're trying to do? Maybe generally it's yield, but what what maybe more specifically are you hearing from these companies? Okay, I'm hearing the yield word a lot, but I think they all understand that yield just in the sense of farming or you know some points reward or something is not what you

want. Many of them are looking for they understand I mean they look at the Ethereum ecosystem right it's amazing the DeFi there it is offering real use cases you know borrowing against your assets investing them you know doing all kinds of things they're saying hm you know we should have something like that somewhere that it's more natively connected to Bitcoin and I think there's a list of Bitcoin L2s I think were pretty well positioned to be you know the best the first the safest u so I think those are some of the discussions we're having with uh you know these uh you know whales uh mining pools um institutionals. Yeah. And they don't want to sell either, right? They want to borrow against. Yeah. They want to borrow against they want to put it to

use. They want to unleash Bitcoin's value. They want to unleash the Yes. That that may answer the question from earlier about like what is the potential application here? Well, it's like a Bitcoin backed stable coin. You see every all the movements happening. you're right that these institutions don't want to sell their Bitcoin, but they want to unleash the capital and so therefore, but they likely just want to use USC or USCT, but then they don't get Bitcoin exposure. And so if you already have Bitcoin exposure and you want to try to from collateralizing Bitcoin, I've heard it called the best collateral in the world, and I I think that's the case. It would make sense a natural, you know, progression of that would be then

collateralize the Bitcoin and unlock stable coin off of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you just borrow USDC or USDT against it. Like that's what people would want to do more than anything. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And whether that's done natively or intrinsically with the Bitcoin, you could do it in a money market. You can do it a variety of different ways. Yeah, I I think that may I think we may see one of those maybe on Starknet here coming up soon as more Bitcoin liquidity comes into Stark. Yeah. Yeah. What's on the what's on the horizon, Elliot? Covenants, you know, some small uh you know changes, not the big one maybe that you guys had been pushing for. I I know you've been a big advocate. What's the next three months like for Starknet? Um you know, Bitcoin

looks like it could go to alltime highs here pretty shortly. Yeah, the mania could continue. How are you going to capitalize? Um, okay. We're going to continue building uh this uh home for good applications and you know just yesterday uh ready announced their neo bank which is on starknet. That's amazing news. Uh over the next two weeks extended which is an x revolute uh team uh is launching their pers exchange on starknet. You know, I think it's has a chance of getting h giving hyperl with decent uh run for its money. Huh. Yeah.

Run for it money and something that is gentral and hopefully also, you know, better trading experience. Uh that's like over the next two weeks. Later on through the summer, we are going to be starting first of all a lot of integrations with on and off ramps. Um you know, some big names. I don't want to announce them till they're ready, but like some of the, you know, blue chip kind of uh stable providers and on and off ramps are going to be launching on starknet hopefully very soon. Um then we're going to have a BTC which is basically getting you know um getting extra STR for uh putting uh Bitcoin liquidity protocols D5 that we

mentioned and then later on in the fall we're going to have uh BTC staking. Uh that's what roughly the three months ahead look. Awesome. And and looking a bit further out um how what what do you think about the sustainability of Bitcoin the asset the security budget is is part of the vision darknet to generate some fees for the Bitcoin? I hope so. Yeah. Well, I mean for that for that well it really depends on Bitcoin like and I don't want to decide for Bitcoin right there argue strongly that you do not want to put any more activity you know the anti what's it called the filter boys you know don't put anything don't give us any fees Bitcoin should be for very little payments and the fact

that the memp pool is often very empty they're saying it's a it's a feature it's not a bug okay small blockers yeah exactly I I think they're wrong but you know I'll respect you know bitcoin is bigger than my own thoughts um in that case value will acrue in other ways to the L2s like bit like starknet which is fine I think the better way is for bitcoin actually to further unleash its value and allow you know things like um L2s to also keep part of their state on bitcoin which requires things like cat and yeah So I mean there's also another interesting thing. There's a lot of

discussion of postquantum security. Yes, ZK Starks are postquantum secure. Um you can have signature schemes. You can basically make all of Bitcoin very postquantum secure if you use Starks. I had discussions with uh many important core developers about these things. I know that Adam Beck uh Luke Dash Jr. there are a bunch of others are actually very favorable for um the use of let's say things like ziki starks for postquantum security even if they don't necessarily want to see more bloating of the blocks and we can live with that as well kind of a completely separate question and thought here if if you were running the EF right now uh what would you do with with regards to the relationship

between the L1 and the L2 and and kind of how does that shape your view of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin L2s. I would do something I suggested them a long time ago, but I don't think it's going to happen. I think they need to have more of a capitalist economic point of view, which basically says if folks are building infrastructure that's actually great, they should benefit from it. they should also pay us meaning we should enshrine payments you know some sort of taxation on the L2s that will flow to the L1 so that everyone is happy and enshrine that in a way that makes both of these things sustainable this is a very common mean you know time-t tested for like this whole thing of by

just saying everything is just fully open source kumbaya and like uh we don't care is not good and we tried to convince you know the EF many years ago that um you know to go down this route in which uh you think also about like um value acrruel and incentives in both directions um but that's what I would advise. Yeah. And I mean that was somewhat attempted with like just using Ethereum L1 for data availability but it was kind of not exactly that didn't really pan out. No. What do you mean?

They went like with the blobs. The whole thing is oh we'll make this cheaper cheaper cheaper cheaper. We'll just make it cheap. We're not going to charge anything for this. We're going to make it much easier for you, but due to competitive pressures, right? What? Due to just like other competitive pressures. Not really. No, I don't know why. I think I I don't think it was a good like kumbaya thing. I don't know. I I don't think it was a good choice. I think if I was them, I would say, "Oh, it's really great that actually the fees are going high. It's pushing things out to um L2s, but it's also charging very hefty fees. It's creating more efficiency and uh actually bringing in um money to the um to the L1. And they could even go a step further, you know, require that if you in order to be an

L1, sorry, an L2, you're sort of expected to, you know, do some issuance towards Ethereum. And it could also work in the other way around. They could send uh a portion of the fees acrewed on the L1 to some of the L2s or the applications. I would think in those terms. Yeah. Um, so like very back and forth rather than this kind of like Yeah. And I want to say more than that. So on Starknet, we had right now we basically drove the fees to pretty much zero. So there's no fees really coming in because we wanted all the you know as much traction to be on it. But we had it when the fees were high initially. We had a de application develop.

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like consensus in Miami like waitens in Miami. Yeah. Next year, May 5th, 7th. Dude, on a beach south of France. Yeah, at Token where we saw we saw Tristan Thompson walking like the big NBA player walking in uh in the in the hotel in the Marina Bay.

We having a beer with Luke. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. I remember. I remember. Yeah. In fact, the police officer when I when I get here, when I got here was like, "How many times were you here?" Because you're like in Denver and then in New York again last year. Yeah. Come here often. And it's good to be back when it's really hot. Like you can't think. We just had to go down in the stream a little bit, guys. Uh we we had to switch switch computers. Yeah, it's hot. Out here. Computers overheated a little bit, but you know what? We're staying cool. We're staying hydrated. We are. We are. Got fans left and right. We got a lot of water here. We're keeping up.

It's summer in the city. What What more could you ask for? That's what I'm saying. Jack, get us caught up to speed, man. Um, you know, last October, November, uh, we were, like I said, in in Singapore. Uh, what's been going on with Route Scan? What have you guys been building? What's been the focus? Uh, and just kind of h how are you seeing things? So um so for for the past you know six eight nine months we were actually focused on uh trying to understand trying to write reduce the noise from the chaos. thing is we found that like when we when we want to choose because exposure chains and so we were trying to

understand like what are the possible you know clients first state of the market report and it's a 60 long pages uh 60 pages long PDF that tells the story of what

developers are choosing onchain and it's it's not about the TPS, it's not like A16Z. It's not about the TPS and the awareness. It's about not user awareness, about developer awareness like which developers are choosing the OP stack, which ones are are choosing the arbit orbit stack and so on and so forth. And so we actually found that there's a lot of noise. for example, like 4,000 uh chains are live in some sense, but only around 2,000 2,000 are like with a live RPC or like a live explorer. So, you can already sense that like 50% of the chains like are just left over. Yeah. No Yeah. And then we have like a strong strong, you know,

exposure from Polka Dot, for example, and Cosmos. There's a lot of other ones from Polka Dot and Cosmos. and also Avalanche is growing. And so we want to be able to have like a good business intelligence overview of what's happening across across the across the ecosystem in the in the industry. And so that's what we're doing. That's what we did like with releasing the states of the state of the market report every 3 months. Q1 Q2 is uh is going to is out for like is out like until I don't know one month or something. And I'm just going around in conferences and talking about what we did uh for here for this because you know we cannot tell you much right now but we

have deep conversations with outside Etheidium and outside EVM because there's a lot of things going on outside uh outside the EVM and uh the Ethereum consensus layer you know uh not everyone is building a classic consensus layer based on Ethereum not but they're maybe using EVM as execution layer for example a lot of Cosmos chains 18 Cosmos chains are using EVM in some sort but they're also using Cosmos SDK and tenderment for their consensus so you can see that there's a change in how like how some consensus protocols have different flexib ability manif. And so that's what we're

like a stealth launch that we made. We actually launched the first our first West End Explorer. Like what is West End? West End is the test net explorer of Polka Dot for EVM. So we're branching there. We're also branching into Cosmos uh with more and more explorer for Cosmos EDM chains and hopefully something more. And and so so yeah, this is what we're doing, but we're also every every month we're also like asking ourselves like should we make blocks uh should we make routes can open source?

How is the community going to benefit from it uh routes scan being open source? And I just had a conversation right now with OP like 30 minutes ago and because they were like we want to subsidize and make sustainable um you know funding for open source projects. So like okay when do we want to do this? Actually we can't. You know why we can't? Because ether because it's not a favorable competition. Yeah. Ether scan is not open source. No. with block explorers going forward. It I

think going to the URL of a block explorer, whether it's ether scan, route scan, is probably a thing of the past. Like, you know, in order to confirm I received a transaction, normally I get like I'm sent a link and then I go to the link and I see, okay, that's my address. I can see that I received the money, stables, ETH, whatever. But and you mentioned AI and I'm curious how this loops in because I'm curious how do you think we're going to incorporate a you're going to incorporate AI into route scan and what do you think the future is? How do you think we will interface with block explorers into the future? Yeah. So the first thing is the context. So we we we take for granted that everything that is on Etherscan is

the truth. That is not true. Right? When we were when we were actually um you know only building AVA scan back two three years ago, we actually uh had a whole Google docs just of bugs that had this snow trace had. They have a lot of bug explorers have a lot of bugs because because you need to process millions of data every hour depend or billions depending on the type of you know the TPS you have on the chain. But for example, for Ethereum that has 22 transactions per second on average 2022 means you have at least 10 times that information because you need to of course to trace everything that is happening in the transaction and so you need to update the state of the smart contract and then the other and so on

and so it's a lot of documents. It's billions and billions of documents every month. And so that is the first thing like on the on the contextual layer like you don't know if that is the truth until you have another thing that you can look at and that's what we what we what we do like if you go to scan on blast on on on avalanche on any other chain that we also support you can get a second opinion from us and so if both of us say the same thing then that is okay and you cannot do that with the node you cannot do that just by reading the note because there are some things that are like abst racted away like how do you know like you need to read in the lines to understand how much of the token is updated in the new contract state you

know and it's really hard so you can just look at the explorer and then you need to compare the explorers a good a good amount is like two three explorers per chain so that anyone has at least one more than one point of view almost like a consensus mechanism correct it is a consensus mechanism yes um and so ethers can just one because as much as we have and Etheum Explorer as much as Blossk is offering Ethereum Explorer Eascan is the most used one. It has more than 15 million users. Yeah. And it's not good. Yeah. And so Yes. So this is what we're doing like we are trying to augment the functions of the block explorers in more ways than than we actually thought it would because we

have made a partnership with Drum on base. Okay. And we were like just thinking like we were just desperate to say like I'm I'm honest like what do you guys want to set up this default uh and default explorer for base and and we're like we would like a unified view of what's happening on on our DAP right and but but it's it's going to be simplified and so we built a special extensions a special extension of route scan meaning that now if you go swap some tokens on ba on base on adrome and you have the link for the explorer that link will not bring you to an explorer it will bring you to a special page that is called a receipt page. That page is literally what's happened like you swapped 10 tokens for 15 tokens at this time and

you can just share that and it's and we support any kind of action like uh new liquidity, adding liquidity, removing liquidity voting government whatever. We support everything and it's just easier. Yeah. Know that that this huge transaction details page. I've noticed that trend as well is like same thing on MetaMask. Now, if you make a swap and you click the you go to your activity on MetaMask, you'll notice that it brings you to a a MetaMask block explorer. It doesn't bring you use MetaMask. So, it brings you to a MetaMask block explorer, right? And so, I think what you're what you're getting at is that there's purpose-built explorers now.

Applications are starting to own more of their stack. They don't want you to leave the application. Yes, I do use MetaMask by the way. I haven't I haven't migrated yet. Rabby's the endame for now. And so this is the direction, right? And so I take it that Aerodrome is essentially building through you guys. They license your technology. Now they have their own in-house block experience. Correct. Right. And so this is part of their application. And I think what Yeah. Go ahead. And then Yeah. No, the AI is the next step. Okay. So take us through the AI now. Yeah. So um we're starting with Avalanche. Okay.

We got uh we got funding from for for from Avalanche to do this and we actually have a lock in for for a few months to test the application before going to other chains. And the thing is what can we do to because we have we have a mission. Our mission is to stay in its scan feature set like do what it does because that's what the community wants but also we want to go further and like just spreading around as much as we can and how can we do that we can actually brand new pages and new features like extensions. So Rascan extension is for example the receipt for addum or the AI agent for snow trace.

What's an AI agent? Basically it tells you like you have just a search bar and you can just ask him whatever you want about any chain that's on avalanche and it will tell you interesting facts about patterns related to I don't know addresses that are doing transactions on multiple chains. This is something that nobody has because everyone is everyone is kind of doing AI agents but all all everyone is also doing AI agents for single chains and then you need to compare the data at a second step. we are aggregating in a single step. And so what we can do is now on avalanche and you know later in other chains you can actually um ask the uh bot or the a specific page that we will build uh the

actually the alpha is going out in two weeks. So uh there we go. We have some alpha breaking news. Yes. And and so yeah, you will be able to simply ask it and maybe you can try to learn um how mo most farmers are doing like what the foundation is doing and a lot of a lot of stuff like that that can help you make more informed decisions. Just you not need to be a developer to learn all this stuff. You can just ask and you will get answered. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious h how your experience has been working with like uh different RAS providers, Calera, Conduit, Alt layer, others. What's that experience been like? So, uh some RAS providers are harder than others, but we have we will

the contract is not yet signed, but we have a really really good announcement to make for the first deep partnership with Aras that we have and it's going to include some tokens. Okay. So, we're going to start to develop a long-term partnership with some RAS providers. And I cannot say anything because we have not yet announced it, but it's not yet finalized. Yeah. But we're starting to see more and more RAS providers that want to showcase all the chains that they're that they're on. Yeah. And the chains that they, you know, they they they build because ma mainly I think the RAS providers are just like a first step. It's just like I don't know just like pump fun of chains you know you

when you graduate your chain you don't need the pump fun liquidity like for the token you don't need the pump fun liquidity because you're going to radium uh you know like the chain don't need the rest provider when it graduates on I don't know for a TVL that's beyond some point or something you you just do your own but the rest provider has helped you within test net and the first minute months y so that's what we want to do we want actually do like an explorer of the pump fun chains. I don't know how to say that. Yeah. Yeah. One last one for you here. When you've been looking at this multi-chain landscape over the last couple years, it's really grown and then it's now it feels like it's kind of coming and kind of like getting a bit more uh like constricted into a couple

winners or a set of winners. What what's your view from like the business side on this like multi-chain landscape on this like amount of chains? has your thesis or ideas you know shifted uh from your perspective? So we actually got more requests for custom VMs than EVMs basically because the EVMs are basically only using Boscout in most many senses in most cases and also we have um the other chains that are either using us with little effort like okay let's let's choose you and whatever or we have just difficult conversations with like small chains that don't have money or don't

want to be involved with a with a like a more graduated let's say partner um infra provider like us. Um so what I can say is yes there's more custom VMs coming on especially around the ZK stuff and there's also a lot of chains focused on stable coins. So we have um we have plasma that's the first chain that's we are the official explorer for plasma. Um, we are also going to be on another stable coin focused tether chain and we're there's also going to be a couple of others I believe in the future. We we're going to we're talking to Paulo with this because we we actually want to do a token explorer and this is the other thing. So if you have a lot of

chains that just facilitate specific token in different use cases or different markets or different technologies then what prevents you to do a tether scan because it's essentially a ledger, right? And so if you have a ledger of all the accounts that hold Tether on the day Yeah. Really ledger is just an account and a balance, right? And so you can have all these accounts that exist on a on a chain or you can have all these accounts if there's enough of them. You would do so one that just holds these tokens, right? I think Tether is one that reaches product market fit. I mean, look at Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin doesn't have any chains, but it has its own block explorer and it's all one asset, right?

So any Bitcoin block explores essentially what you're talking about. Yes. You could replicate that for for Tether and maybe for Circle and USDC. Yes. And maybe for other stuff and and then that and that could span across any of the chains that that that asset is on. Correct. Yeah. Token Explorers. So how do you index all of the information when it when it's Tether but it's occurring from a different chain. Do you tap into Tether? Is there an indexing problem? No. No. We we our indexers are already designed to do this. So our index are basically designed to segment everything in different ways. So it's uh it's not a work. It's not work for us. We we just need to of course we have some designs for tetherscan. We already did this.

We're just waiting for the chains to come live to actually build a unified explorer for that. But we we already have tether scan. If you go to tether.browscan.io, we probably have a demo explorer right live already. There you go, Jack. Man, we appreciate your time. I think there's one more thing we have we have to ask Jeff and it's something that you know you may not feel comfortable talking about but you're one of the few pre-token companies as a pre-token company what is your approach to a token is it in your purview how are you thinking about this it is so you were talking about revenue meta and thing is revenue meta is the endgame because this is the endgame for businesses you know in general so the TVL was just a proxy and all all the stuff was users was it was a proxy. We

have more than 200,000 users when it comes to bare market and more than 1 million users in the bull markets. Uh we have 25 clients that pay for more than 100 chains on our platform and we have more and more API users and we're building extensions across many different products and we're building a business intelligence division. We're building a forensics team that works with compliance with compliance units across the world. Okay, enough said. The token is just that's it. The token is just uh you know the thing the thing to say this is all it all works together you know if you know and and yes it is

coming. Okay news if you use rout TM you use rout scan yes it will be best for you. There you go route scan. Absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on. Very much looking forward to it. Yes, I'll do it. Stay cool. Stay hydrated. Take a water if you like. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It's okay. Cheers. See you next time. Token announcement on the rollup TV. Yep. We may see more. There may be more token announcements as we go throughout the week. I think we've got we've we've got Patrick coming up.

$50 cash back. That's basically like buy 10 Ubers in New York, get one free. 10 Ubers will cost you a thousand bucks around here. I made that mistake coming here the last few days, actually. So, how much did I run you? uh more than I'd like to share, but definitely in the couple hundred. Then I was like, "Oh, I'm not from here. I'm from Cal I'm in California." So I was like, "Oh, it turns out there's a subway that I can take for $2." And so that was we we may get an underground tunnel subway going from LA to New York here pretty soon. I think it's going to be easier to build than anything in San

Francisco is these days. The city was just elected socialist yesterday. Unfortunately, not related to commonware but he is the co-er. I don't even know what Commonware is, but I'm excited to learn. I know it's technically cool and I'm very excited about it. So, jump back. What is CommonWare? Welcome to LTV. Yeah. Well, thank you for the invite. I've I'm I've been a fan of the show. Love the interviews you guys do with different founders in the space and have found it pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I mean long and short of it, um I'm on the internet all day long, just like you guys are. And I found that very, very rarely am I actually using crypto for

the things that I frequently engage with. Um we believe that that's a systemic problem with how these stacks are constructed these days. And we think over the next decade, stacks are going to look a lot different. Um and so Commonwe is based on this idea that over the next decade, the best apps will verticalize. So they'll change much more than just what's going on the execution layer or like a tweak here or there. they're going to maniacally specialize what they're doing into every layer of the stack itself. And so right now, I mean, not a lot of stacks, if any, are really built for this sort of deeper customization. You hear people, you say customization and people think forks, and then you think people think reliability issues and you think all sorts of crazy hell to deal with. And so we're building something from the ground

up for for this world. So stacks like like chain stacks, like rollup stacks. Exactly. Yeah. Who are you targeting with with verticalization? Yeah. So right now I mean the focus is on uh what we think are like the best apps. So I think the best example would be like a far caster or like a hyperlquid type where you want to introduce something very unique for the customers that are actually using your product. Um but your hands are tied right like I mean we we work with a lot of great engineers and if you told some engineer like yeah you can optimize it up to this point and then like oh we don't touch beneath that. It's like that's just not a thing that great engineers will stop with. And so what they do is fork it. they make all these roundabout changes and we just

think that the era of that is is coming to an end. And I mean it's not to say that it wasn't a good idea when it was right when a lot of these original stacks came out like all there was was Bitcoin and Ethereum like and everyone had to build everything from scratch and so the idea that like oh we could stay ahead of where most chains were with an operating system like abstraction to build stuff was probably good and it kept everyone on the same direction to actually build products. But I think over the last 18 months, a lot of people would say we've started to run up against the edges of those stacks and we need something more powerful. So, and so the alternative view here is probably modularity in some regard. It's like it's like divide and conquer, sort of split up all these parts and then

specialize. And it's kind of the idea of trade. You do what you do best. You know, Patrick, you do what you do best. I'll do what I do best. We all trade with one another. I'll use your piece. I'll use, you know, we kind of combine all the best pieces to to put together the best stack. But so what what what is what like what part of that is not true? And how is an integrated stack better than sort of this Frankenstein conglomerate of all the best pieces. It's not fluid. It's not seamless. It's not integrated. I mean, I think the way we think about it is it comes there's like an X and a Y axis where one side is just like how much does it cost for the average person to interact and how many people can you support at that price.

Okay, I think that's really the guiding metric for most applications outside of what we'll just call customization. Uh we believe that like a verticalized stack as long as it has sufficient security which ends up being the challenge can win on both of those metrics. You'll just hit a different frontier. The question is like how many people actually need that today? And you know I think if you're starting a company from scratch like you shouldn't be targeting like going competing in the next six months because you just need more more time to try and build an advantage somehow. So we think we're still probably 12 months away from what we think is going to become like a pretty common pattern for people. But the biggest counterpoint in my opinion is more that um like some of the stuff I was on a panel yesterday with Alex from

Fastlane and like a lot of the stuff they're doing to make a general purpose execution feel more appsp specific. The question to me is if that gets so good that you don't really need to to go customized so deep. And so I think in the short term a lot of teams will prefer that just because it's so much less complicated. But we think there's this inevitable maturation and evolution where we know what we're doing is a longer term approach to the problem and um we're preparing for what we think are going to be this next era of apps that really don't feel like crypto apps but they're they're secured and verifiable in the way we'd all want. Yeah. Yeah. So there's been like a natural evolution of like these of of these stacks, right? We have

you mentioned these L1s and you know kind of what happened from like the the inception of RAS if you will to like where we are now and where we're going like who is you know like what like tell us the story from your perspective as to why you wanted to yeah what you are. Yeah. So I think it makes sense to share a little context too. So like uh basically when I when I first came into crypto I I worked at Coinbase on the crypto engineering team there working on integrating new chains to Coinbase. So I got to talk to a bunch of great teams long time ago when we're all still figuring things out. So like I led the integration for Polka Dot for Cosmos like oversaw the integration for Salana like had a lot of fun talking all these different teams understanding how we

could get it to work on Coinbase. Worked on an interface there called Rosetta which was this open standard for reading and writing to blockchains and trying to abstract the problem away. Um after that I was the head of engineering at Avalanche for the last three and a half years before I started CommonWware. And what became clear to me is like um the EVM is a great enabler. Same with the Calos SDK. It helps you get from off the ground so fast these days whether it's a RAS or whatever. The problem is as soon as you're off the ground, now what? You're completely undifferiated from anybody else. And the problem and you see this on the execution layer too. If you have a great DeFi protocol, you introduce something new, it's no more than six months until everyone has the

same idea, right? So, how can you build compounding innovation like compounding advantage to actually have a lasting business if everyone's competing on the exact same plane? It's great for users, you know, I guess, in that you get every your product that you're using gets the same features as everyone else within some period of time, but from actually like continuing to sustain development and paid community and keep it all aligned, very difficult to do. Um, and so I think the way I equate it to is like what if the only business you could make was a white labelled version of what everyone else had, right? like what great businesses do you know that like got their win or like their lead based on that? I don't know any at least in modern internet. And so I think early

it's just a I mean it's like early on it's like you saw this with a lot of the early tech stuff. It was like basically a very thin shell over an Oracle database. That's how like the early internet worked. Then I can assure you now as few people as possible want to have a thin shell or Oracle database. Um and it's just this process of competition. you need to be able to have enough differentiation to have a compounding advantage and if you don't it's just this constant cycle of creative destruction. So, um we think that there's just going to be this next phase of our growth and there's not a lot of tools for that next phase of growth other than like ripping apart what currently exists which we just don't think it's going to be the right path. But then wouldn't like any of

these other current stack providers like especially like like the ones that are coming up um uh that are more focused on like high throughput or customizations or even just like like the current RAS couldn't they just implement with what you're like what you've already built open source into their own set of of distribution of customers etc and just like like you would just be doing them a favor for bringing all this cool tech onto the market in o open source fashion there you have all the distribution all the brand and then like how does wouldn't that render your business strategy like a bit so what I'll respond to you is like that's exactly the goal actually okay so the goal for common wear and the name commonwear is to commoditize performance okay I think

what became really frustrating to me and the motivation for a lot of what commonwear is about was in the space we have a lot of people that um really love to claim ideas as their own and like as soon as you even touch someone else's idea it's like what the hell you like it's my I invented And like it's crazy, but like I mean most users are like I don't understand what this is. And so but if you're an app developer, you you end up having to pick a community before you even get into the technology these days. And to me that like that's just a real reason why the space is being held back on like a lot of the innovation. I think that actually matters to users.

And so what if you had a bunch of state-of-the-art stuff that was just completely open, no licenses, no ecosystem. It just was MIT Apache 2. You can use it however you want to. That's common. The business of commonware is on building infrastructure that augments what's available in the open source. So the way that the business works is it's code design. So it's infrastructure codees with open-source software. So it's not like running for you. It is adding pieces and features that you you can't really do in a decentralized way that you need to cross the chasm between having it a centralized protocol and then what an application is. So the question is like could other providers like try to compete with us on the infrastructure side? Yeah, we totally

our our bet though is that they're going to be focused on EVM. They're going to be focused on the stuff their customers actively want. Yeah. And it will give us enough time to build out more of that infrastructure and then start offering at a price that they just can't compete with. Yeah. And couldn't you also just build your own like dog food your own stack and build something sick with it and like use that as the example for the market? So there's a this is a big conversation we've had is like early on was like does it make sense for us to be like the first one that uses it because you have to be careful there right otherwise you can run this like Apple problem where it's like if people start to think that we're going to pick off like any ideas that are good and then

build on your own kind of undermines a lot of so I think you can really do that as long as you're one of the first handful that are live. Um, fortunately though, we found a lot of great partners that are using Commonware to launch their own applications and networks where we don't feel like it's necessary for us to do that anymore. So, we're focused fully on getting Conware library rock solid and then um getting the infrastructure stood up. So, so you mentioned kind of at the top of this that when you're using the internet and we all are, you know, on a on a daily basis, you don't see crypto as a significant piece of that. And now bringing this into kind of what you just mentioned about, you know, some of these ideas that anyone could build, you know,

you you could build them yourself, but almost inspiring others to do this with common wear. Where do you see gaps right now in the internet where crypto could and blockchain could be implemented and and could really improve a lot of of that performance? And also, you know, what what are those things? And and could you describe them in such a way that would inspire anyone, you know, to go build them, give people a head start before you guys start building them yourself? Yeah, I mean, I I think the someone actually brought this analogy up to me a few weeks ago. I thought was incredible. His his name is Tomas at Theory Ventures, who um they're not investors in us, but we were it was an interesting conversation. And his idea or basically claim was like the problem

right now is like read and write to web 3 is like a thousandx more expensive than read and write to a traditional backend that an application would use. Over time that's going to compress and at some point it's going to get so close to the cost of reading and writing to a traditional backend that the advantage of having like a unified state is going to outweigh whatever that additional cost is. M our view is that yeah no people are not building on crypto it's way more expensive and you have to pay gas for every time you write state so until we get that price down to something where it's even tolerable like I'm not shocked um and so I think stable coins are starting to really push that

cuz the traditional alternative is actually more expensive now than like the web three alternative finally like I mean you can see the excitement is so tangible so the closer we can get more things to the price of web 2 but with way better trade-offs, we we expect the same sort of excitement to happen. This feels like the Ethereum world computer vision like not just stable coins being more efficiently put on chain versus traditional financial infrastructure, but any data that you're pushing to a database, right? You're going to write it to this database. Well, if the marginal cost of writing that to a blockchain becomes so

compressed and you get all the benefits of it being on a unified piece of state, you would just push it to the blockchain, anything that you would write to a database. Do you think blockchains will replace database? I'm not sure it gets to the same price. Like there's so many tricks you can take with databases that if you want to replicate state globally, it's tough. I think ZK may get us really close actually because like you just need one real or a handful of big computers and it gets really close. Yeah, especially if you don't have to replicate all the data and use like kind of a DA plus ZK. I think it makes more sense with the trade-offs of crypto for many different types of businesses where you can return a lot more to users and just be global day one. Okay. And so, uh, we we believe in

that world and we believe the trade-offs of blockchain on their own are well worth an additional cost. We just think that additional cost right now is way too high to be practical for many different applications. And once we have more interactions on chain, I think that opens the door to a lot more really cool stuff on the internet. And I'm more of an internet nerd than I am like a libertarian, I guess. And I just think that we can build really crazy internet systems and more blockchain based. Tell us your craziest internet story. Yeah. Or like some you were doing on on the forums back in the day or something.

So, I saw this um this isn't my craziest, but I did see this the other day, and I think no one sees this stuff, and I think it's just crazy. Is so there's this app that's trending right now on the app store, which is basically a social network, but you're the only real person. Everyone else is an AI. It's your own world. So, that's it. Social network app. and you basically can just become famous in your little on your own like AI enabled like social internet world. Now, what I think is going to happen as the world gets more and more competitive is that fulfillment for people is going to become a lot tougher for a lot a lot of

people that just didn't go to great schools, don't have the resources to like compete on like some of these basises that people, you know, if you grew up in Silicon Valley and you're a son of some of these like tech oligarchs, right? You have no wants. you have the best education you could possibly have and like from day one you're born till like the day you go to your first job like you're trained for this. Yeah. A lot of people that are like working a nineto-ive and they're like this kind of sucks. Like you 9 to 5, you go home, what do you do? It's not there's not a lot going on. I think that we're gonna see this like stratification of just thousands of virtual worlds tuned to basically your level of difficulty of like how much fun versus challenge you want to have in like a

virtual world and then you can have any job like you can do anything and like you can train and get better where there's still fulfillment. Like if I jump in an F1 car I'd be wrecked like close. But if you like, but if I was like in a virtual world where like it wasn't just the driving simulator, like the whole world of becoming an F1 driver, that would be so addicting. Wow. What is this app called? So this is not the whole that that app is I think a turn into what it will become. And that app I don't know. I think it's called like social that's a social network video game. You're in your own world. I think it goes a lot further. But yeah, so crypto I don't know how it fits into any of that but like that's on terms of

the internet and what I think will happen. I think you may have virtual worlds where people are at similar difficulties where they can interact but who knows. Yeah. I mean we could imagine a world that's so immersive that you're going through the entire process of of becoming an F1 driver. You have 2K play my 2K go to high school go to college. Yeah. Exactly. And there is I mean in-game currencies. Yeah. But it it almost becomes more than a game because I mean it becomes real for your life. It's kind of like Ready Player World, but instead of like a a shared world, there's like infinite worlds up and down based on the difficulty you want to play at. That's crazy. Yeah. Patrick Madden, what's uh what's

coming up for you guys at Commonwear? What teams are you working with? Who's been helping you out? What's on the road map? Yeah. So we we raised uh 9 million from Han and Dragonfly a few months ago and so well actually I guess it's a little 6 months ago or so. It's been a it's more than that. Um we now have uh we're bandwidth constrained. So we have signed partners um more than we can handle at the moment which is really exciting. Can't share any of that yet. That'll come. Uh but yesterday we we did have a big release which was uh I didn't time it for this but it it ended up coming out that way. Um called Minimmit.

Um, and it's a new type of consensus uh that we think achieves as fast uh of blocks as you can have in a in a 20% Byzantine tolerance setting. What that means is that we can have on a globally distributed network block times around like 120 to 130 milliseconds. On a regionbased network, you could have sub 50 millisecond block times. Now, why that's cool, imagine you have like a a rollup network or something like that and you wanted instead of having to run like a couple hundred millisecond or even a second block time, you could. It's all about getting closer to what that user feeling of interaction is, which is about 200 millisecond. Yeah.

So, anytime we can break that, it's crazy. And so, uh, it's open, totally open source, available for anyone to use. And uh we've we're really excited about pushing that forward into more hands of application developers and how they can use that to make experiences that feel just like web two that people are used to. Um yeah. So just to reiterate this is part of the open library that you were talking about that is core to commonware. It's not part of the business infrastructure as a service development that you guys offer. And and it's a great question cuz the nuance the nuance there is if there's something that makes sense to run in a decentralized way. We always push it open. Yeah. It's only stuff where like let's say for example Cloudflare open

sourced their CDN. Most people would have no idea what to do with that. They don't have a CD where they can do anything with it. Um so we think about it the same way where it's like if if we should not be running it, it's totally open for anyone to use however they want to. If it's something where we think it's better served centralized and then maybe using cryptography to provide some sort of safety asurances, that's when it goes into more of the Xaware side. Yeah, makes a ton of sense. I used to be a decentralization maxi every decentralized everything. But then you see that's not that's not feasible. It's not practical. And so it takes some more balance. We think like consensus driven security and pushing that to all your interactions is a really important thing. And right now no one does that.

So like if you go to infur right it's like infur is your source of truth and there's been some great work in the Ethereum community around like Helios that A16Z has worked on and some of the ZK teams are working on consensus like client proofs that would make that much better. Um but we think that will be non-negotiable in like 12 to 18 months. Um which is great for all users cuz like you have to trust no infrastructure provider anymore. It's just about what the chain finalizes and that's your source of truth. Um the problem is if that finalization is slow, your balances are going to be out of date. It's going to be difficult to interact with that level of security.

And so having chains that can move that quick and finalize that fast is going to be really important to actually having a safe and fast user experience. Yeah. So yeah, we'll see. It's early on. It's a big bet. Definitely a startup. So that was the goal. Well, congrats on on the raise and on the announcement yesterday. I appreciate your time and uh looking forward to like uh you know syncing up 6 months from now seeing where you guys are at. Yeah, it'll be uh I think we'll have some stuff people can really play with by then from us or or our partners. So yeah, it should be fun. Thanks for having Thanks, guys. Cheers, man. Thanks for coming on. All right, R. We got we got 12:45. A little hungry over here. We got our next set of speakers coming in

in 1 hour or so just after the break. Uh we have got uh it looks like William from Botanics Sytory story guy Jeff Jeff from Hemi Jeff Garzik and Teroon looking at getting them up. So I think we'll take a break now. Yeah and come back for lunch. All right let's hit it. Stand by. We'll be right back. Stand by. little velcro. You got a little hold on when you lift up and you shake hands.

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100%. Of course. right now. Here is oven. Yeah, man. Didn't expect that in New York. So, so Peak, tell us a little bit about Peak. Uh, how did you get started and uh what is what is your story? Yeah. So the story goes back all the way to 2017 already. Back then was early Ethereum days in Berlin. Lots of meets meetups and there was also IOTA

around. I don't know if you guys are familiar like long long time ago. Yes. The DAG. Exactly. Directed as graph. Who needs blockchains? We have DAGs. Exactly. Distributed ledger technology. That's right. Enterprise chains. I use a two-dimensional blockchain. We can have a three-dimensional DAG web brother. So the the tech didn't work as promised yet the the vision of the machine economy was something that really captivated us and I mean back then there was just Ethereum so you couldn't really build anything scalable on Ethereum right way too expensive and slow so we then went on to see okay what are real problems and business cases we can build when we apply IoT to blockchain and then went on to work with the likes of Audi and the

Folkswagen group on things like a decentralized charging platform that was in 2019. Yeah. And charging for like electric cars. Yes. Yes. Yes. And that that was the first kind of deepen concept we worked on because one of the Audi managers said um there must be a way how my car is paying the charging station of my father-in-law peer-to-peer and crypto cuz he always gave him cash after charging at his house. And that was the first time we thought about, okay, we could crowdsource private infrastructure like charging stations and make them accessible and share them with people. So, so what the the grandfather uses cash and he pays the grandson to charge his car. What could

you just So, no, that was the um the Audi manager. Okay. um whenever with his wife visiting her dad basically paid his father-in-law in cash when whenever he charged at his home like a very German thing to do like you charge you charge at your relatives home you just give them cash for the 5 and he thought there must be a way how this happens in a digital way right where like the car is paying the charging station in crypto for example and that's where he thought like can we not just use blockchain so my car can pay the charging station peer-to-peer.

Exly. Okay. So, there's no need for a credit card swipe. My car is going to pay the charger. Exactly. And and that was the first deepen concept we we worked on kind of. And in 2021, we realized charging is one use case. If you think about the the smart city of the future, you have drones, you have cars, you have humanoids, you have sensors, we have all our AI agents. They all need to be able to offer goods and services and transact with each other seamlessly. So you need that open economic infrastructure if you want. So like an open economic free market for machines. And that's where the vision for peak came from where we said okay

we're going to build a dedicated layer 1 blockchain for the machine economy where standards for the machine such as identity time access control trust and accountability are part of the runtime of the blockchain itself. So they are part of the blockchain and they are not on the smart contract level and that makes it more standardized and secure and trustworthy and yeah that's kind of where we're coming from. And then 2022 the uh deepen was coined which was amazing cuz we've been building a layer 1 for deepen all the time with a bigger vision of the machine economy but it really helped us of course to like gain a lot of traction a lot of getting a lot of deepens uh on chain and yeah but

working so maybe you could sort of connect some of the dots because IoT the internet of things was sort of a big concept maybe 2017 2018 it was like I'm going to connect my air conditioning to my garage sensor so that when my garage goes up, the AC turns on, I walk into my house, right, all these things are sort of synchronous and aware of one another. And then IoT maybe got overshadowed by blockchain for a little bit. So what has been the prog is that still the vision? What is the been the progression of IoT since 2017? chargers and cars and these things are becoming a lot more prolific, but you can use a credit card. Like why is it so important that the machines themselves

talk to one another? Yeah. So I think this is really where the first generation of IoT was very basic based to some centralized server which then says okay open the garage or do something. So it's really about data collection and ba like very basic IoT and what we're heading to now is with AI and robotics really taking off that machines like are not just dump IoT devices which you know send and transmit data but become actual economic agents as well. Um Tesla just started uh robo taxi services as well in Austin 2 days

ago. So we have now real revenue generating autonomous machines, right? And that Tesla is doing a right um like picking someone up like Whimo. Like Whimo. Exactly. And then can pay a charging station peer-to-peer. Um you have a lot of deepens that generate like crowdsource data which is then going to be used by humanoids to navigate through the real world kind of knowing what's going on in which part of the city. And that's something where and now now now all those I all this IoT data becomes open accessible tradable data is one thing energy is another thing connectivity and really thinking about it as

an infrastructure an open economic infrastructure where machines can openly transact cuz on web two a machine is just existing in one closed system right like on web two machines are not free economic agents. Mhm. Because they are behind that closed wall basically. Okay. And and so my understanding I'm I haven't been in one of these robo taxis. I'm curious. Maybe they launch them in New York. We'll take them sometime soon. The experience right now is not one of blockchainbased economic system. But I can imagine where a humanoid goes into a store and has

some spending capabilities. So what is the what is the consumerfacing change in perception from a Whimo or a robo taxi or humanoid that is an economic agent? It's it's generating some revenue. What's the change from going to the from the current system to one that enables peak open decentralized economic systems between these machines? What is the change viewable to the consumer? I think actually on the consumer side it's it's it's going to be very much abstracted away. So I think all of us going to have we going to have our own agents and we just tell the agent, hey, I want to I want to go to this place and I want to

pick up a coffee on the way. And then the agent goes and and finds the cheap or the best coffee, finds the best ride to get there, and is going to do the the booking in the background. And a lot of that is going to be in in peer-to-peer transactions because even though the robo cafe or like the coffee shop or the car is owned maybe by a big centralized company, the the the like the economic transaction will happen more and more peer-to-peer because they will be independent of one big platform, right?

Like everyone will be offering their goods and services no matter if the machines are owned by a big company or by an individual. And then you have that peer-to-peer transaction. And you also need to make sure that you can trust the actors. Yeah. That are transacting and acting, right? You need reputation on chain. You need accountability. And this is kind of the the infrastructure we're building. Yeah. So, I'm curious like outside of uh of Peak, but within this broader um you know, kind of area of work, what who are some of the of of the teams that you think are most compelling to look at for investors and for uh people who are want to be inspired by new ideas? Like which teams are are tackling what challenges that are like interesting in this in this category outside of Peak? Obviously, what you

guys doing is great. Um you know, who else is doing great work? So, we have a lot of projects building the ecosystem, right? um deep deepens some of them but there are also of course projects outside of the ecosystem we're collaborating with. I think Geonet is always a great example where they really created a better service with Deepen than existing in in a centralized way. So they they outperformed their their um centralized competitors. Uh and that location data is also crucial for robotics being able to navigate the real world. um 375 AI um building a network of really mapping the real

world in real time so that you you know what is happening in New York for example in every corner and and and that just enables also um autonomous cars, machines and and so many other things to take place because you need an accurate representation of the real world in real Um those are like some examples. Yeah. Like another interesting um concept now emerging is machine tokenization where like one is the one is the um one one is the building the

infrastructure side of things and the other part is owning those revenue generating machines and owning a small share in it. So you have a new asset class coming on chain. Mhm. And you can build for example Yeah. you have a new form of collateral. Mhm. Um and like really make revenue generating machines liquid. Revenue generating machines liquid. And so, you know, one announcement that I think is going to tie in here, and I'm curious about your perspective on it is Uber recently announced that they were considering launching a stable coin and and I think this was mostly to bring down their cost of settlement, financial transactions as they're paying their drivers, right?

Because they're essentially a money transmitter. You know, the riders pay Uber and then Uber pays the driver. And so theoretically making those transactions peer-to-peer is a lot more efficient. What what's your perspective first on on you know the way that Uber could incorporate a more direct economic transfer of value? Yeah. So I think I mean Uber has built the dominant platform for booking um car rides and what I think will happen is that they eventually open up that for example your agent will be able to book an Uber ride without you

having to have an Uber account. So like they they they still have the fleet. They make sure it's secure. They make sure you can like trust the drivers and there's some rating, but like the the booking process will also be possible to be done in a in a more in a more peer-to-peer way. And of course, like in a there's there's a if we manage to solve trust on scale. There's even a a world where you can have car sharing without needing Uber in the middle as a as a company facilitating that, right? But that requires a lot of trust, a very wellthoughtout trust system that can make sure that you know nothing happens and and like you can really trust the car, you go in and and and go for the

ride. So when you you're building out this business, where are you at your in your stage of development? Do you have a proof of concept and a prototype? And generally, are you are you starting to see adoption? Where where are you guys in the cycle now? So the the layer one is is launched. There are more than 60 teams building on chain. There are more than 5 million machines, devices, sensors already on chain with their onchain identity. And uh just two weeks ago uh two weeks ago we announced the first machine economy free zone in the world in the United Arab Emirates. Okay.

Where we're going to do like large scale smart city deployments of that deepen infrastructure uh working on regulatory frameworks such as machine tokenization. So yeah, it's it sounds futuristic, but it's happening actually already. Yeah, these guys are building entirely new cities and they've got the funding to do it. You mentioned machine tokenization earlier and I'm curious for anyone who may not realize what that means. What is machine tokenization? Yeah. So you have imagine a robo cafe. You see them at some airports now. For example, San Francisco there's one. So you have an autonomous machine that is generating revenue by itself by making coffee and selling that coffee and those costs cost around 100 200k and now the robot itself. Yeah,

there was there was a conference I think it might have been East Denver. They had again this this you know coffee machine. It was a robot arm and it would pump the syrup and it would drop the beans. It was all entirely autonomous and it would make you your coffee. Exactly. Okay. So, so one of those machines costs about 200,000 or so. Exactly. And now you can crowdfund the capital. So people can invest into it like you can crowdfund it in a fractional ownership of it. Fractional ownership and then the revenue or profits are streamed on chain. They're programmable and you can actually for the first time own a share in a revenue generating machine which is a new asset class basically and an innovation in capital formation as well.

I can see this in Whimo and and some of these autonomous robo taxis too where what if you know there was um a company that would produce the hardware but then basically offer like a franchise model you know maybe it costs 5000,000 to put one of the these driverless taxis on the road. We crowdfund it, right? We each put in, you know, 25K, we split it. And then you're saying that the payments get automatically streamed to both of us, whether it's coffee, whether it's rides, all of this would occur on chain.

Exactly. And then you have a asset which has a earning history on chain which you can use as collateral then as well. So you go to borrowing and lending protocol, you put your um yeah your fractional ownership and then the loan could even repay itself from the from the yield that the asset is generating. So you create like a hyper efficient liquid onchain market around those those assets. It's incredible. It's incredible. And would that require some like us to put up the capital or for the the people buying coffee, would that require them to pay in crypto or no? You would just have some offramp. or on ramp that would take that into a stable coin. Fascinating.

Yeah, Leonard, thank you so much for joining, man. It's been a pleasure. I think the machine economy is still sort of theoretical to a lot of people, but with driverless cars, with more of these coffee machines coming online, we're only going to see more and more of these machines participating in the machine economy. So, great job building the network. Thanks a lot for having me. Catch them again soon. Sounds great. Thank you. See you next time. See you next time. Cheers. Cheers. Yeah. See you next time. It's fascinating. We keep it rolling out here. The machine economy, it doesn't die. It just lives on. I think uh waving to our friends. What's up? What's up?

Uh I think we're good. Let's get Let's get uh Villim up here. We're going to talk about spider chains and Botanics. It is live stream. Yeah, we're live right now. [Music] Man, enjoying uh Yeah, man. Enjoying the furnace. New York. Quite hot here. Yeah, we got a heat wave. Yeah. Yeah. When uh where where you from originally?

Belgium. But I live in uh right here in New York. Right here in New York. Oh, in Manhattan. Awesome, man. So, this We didn't have any spring this uh year. No, we went straight from winter to summer. Yeah. Yeah, man. Well, you are um another builder in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Um man, I mean, welcome to the show. First off, you know, this permissionless is sort of uh sort of at like the top layer of a lot of these ecosystems. It's not traditionally ETH conference. It's got a Bitcoin track in here. And so there's sort of a melting pot of a lot of different groups. When you're approaching kind of like the the modern state of crypto and blockchain and you kind of look at all of these ecosystems, why do you choose to continue to build on Bitcoin? Like the

first one that was ever here, you haven't you haven't gotten strayed or distracted by any of the other ecosystems or shiny new toys. You've continued to stay and build on Bitcoin. Why why is that? Yeah, absolutely. Um, does the camera up by now? Let me make sure I uh I look into the camera. Um, I think that's a really good question and I actually see these two worlds. The Tratire world getting very popular these days, ETFs, Bitcoin treasury companies and then you see the onchain world typically on Ethereum on Solana on Ethereum layer 2 and Bitcoin as the big asset sits right there in the middle.

And so you can see the two worlds and they're slowly converging and um I've always been a bit big believer in in Bitcoin just because um I believe the world needs a decentralized currency. It is so important. So I ideologically want Bitcoin as fast as possible to become the next world reserve currency. But then again you have all these applications you have a huge amount of product market fit. So much value being created in the onchain economy. Um, but a lot of Bitcoiners don't want to do that ideologically. And so, um, what I see is basically in the Trefy world, all these Bitcoiners are doing the Trefy stuff because they can't do it on Bitcoin, but they want to do it on Bitcoin. Yeah. One big example that I

keep using is um, borrowing dollars against your state, against your Bitcoin, right? You can do it with centralized companies. There's a bunch of centralized companies. The interest rate you pay with Aladdin and now you have Strike and others coming there is 12%. Right. Right. These are tens of billions of dollars of volume. Right. And they pay 12% interest rate. Do exactly the same thing, same loan to value ratio. Um do it on A and you pay 3%. Right? That's a 4x difference. Yeah, but the only reason a lot of those Bitcoiners do that is because they want to they want to make Bitcoin ideologically the next world reserve currency. And so they've always feel a

little bit icky doing that on Ethereum, right? Even though I know a lot of Bitcoin maxis that borrow stable coins on a because they want to buy a house, right? But if they could do it on Bitcoin, that is the game changer. And so that's why I believe Bitcoin layer 2 solve this massive gap in the middle between this onchain world in Ethereum and Solana and the Trefire world. So I've never believed in the in the story that a lot of um uh more crypto people say is Bitcoiners don't want to do anything except for huddle. I think that's the that's the biggest misconception in the world. All the Bitcoiners want to do is make more Bitcoin and they are as den as anyone else. but they want to do it on Bitcoin

and that's the game changer here and so you can ask yourself like we've been building now for two years actually I was at the forefront I was think I think we were the first Bitcoin L2 when I was first fundraising there was no one else we've been building on on Bitcoin for 2 years it's really hard to actually build on Bitcoin if you're not launching an optimistic roll up on Ethereum actually building on Bitcoin is hard and we've been able to convince Chain Link GMX and a few others and that's exactly what they see if you are an Ethereum application. What you're looking for is net new users, right? Like it's the same user base in the world of crypto that turns around. Where are the net new users? They're on Bitcoin, right? Right.

They want to do this stuff. They want to have self-custody on chain, but they kind of don't want to do it on Ethereum. Um, and so they see that. And so any application in Ethereum is like, damn, that actually might be the case. And so they're all coming over. And so I think your your point about Bitcoiners not just wanting to hold, but they believe in Bitcoin as a store of value. And I think a lot of times they almost shoot themselves in the foot by just holding when in reality the mindset that you describe is is stack sats. Make your Bitcoin productive so that you earn more and do that through interest, generate some yield, make it a productive asset so that you can earn more Bitcoin

without giving up any of the security. uh benefits that a a stable secure Bitcoin gives you. And so I think the push back has been look we don't want to use Bitcoin in a because it's wrapped. We want native Bitcoin. We want intrinsic Bitcoin on the Bitcoin network. And so when you're building a Bitcoin L2 and you're thinking, okay, the people that own Bitcoin, they believe in it. They think it's a store of value. Let's earn them more Bitcoin, give them Bitcoin yield. How do you how do you make sure that you're giving the Bitcoiners real Bitcoin? How how do you make sure that you're giving them real Bitcoin yield so that you know they don't have to they don't have to worry

about the security or stability of the mechanism? Uh they they can hold and earn exactly what they know and love and that's that's Bitcoin a as they know it. Absolutely. I I think that's uh that's a great question. Um, and as always, we as Botanics do something different. Okay, a lot of people have been thinking about Bitcoin yield. Um, let's offer Bitcoin yield and let's do that in a token that of course always goes down in price, right? So, like you you hold Bitcoin, but we're going to pay you some fugazi memecoin in yield, right? So you think you're earning 150% on your Bitcoin, but it's not like your Bitcoin is earning

you more Bitcoin. Your Bitcoin is earning you some fugazi coin. Absolutely. Okay. Um so we don't do that. Okay. So we offer Bitcoin yield. Um but it's in Bitcoin. It's actually in Bitcoin. Okay. Um and that's a game changer. Um, and how we do that. And it's very interesting because I see this paradigm where all Ethereum layer 2s just get 100% of the gas fees. Why is that the case? I I I think that's very weird. No. And nobody seemed to have challenged that. They're saying Ethereum L2s get 100% of the gas fees. They don't give any back to Ethereum L1. Yeah. They pay for the data. Right. Right. But Ethereum DA, they've made it so abundant that it's so it's so affordable. for L2s

they hardly pay anything back to the Ethereum L1. Exactly. Um so we as Botanics how we fund the Bitcoin yield is 50% of all the gas fees in Bitcoin of course um actually acrew back to the stakers. Oh so the native gas token is Bitcoin is Bitcoin. Okay. And so for like as an L2 it's usually the sequencer right? If it's the L1, it's the proposers. But you have this network that's acrewing gas fees and it's all of the is it the stakers? Yeah. On Botanics acrew Bitcoin and there's a revenue sharing model that that redistributes the Bitcoin gas fees back to the Bitcoin

holders in Exactly. Okay. So, in essence, it's a mechanism that is up only in Bitcoin. Okay. The yields might not be 150%. But if it's 5%. That is sustainable. It's Bitcoin only and you know it's going to going to be there, right? And so that's a that's a game changer. Um and I actually think having Bitcoin as a gas fee is way more important than you think. Like earlier you said like oh a bitcoiner might not want to use a cuz it's rep Bitcoin. I think the the biggest issue um that the Bitcoiners would have is that it's on Ethereum and they have to pay Ethereum gas fees and and they're typically more um against that. Um, but for them seeing and it's it's a psychology thing, right?

For them seeing Bitcoin on their on their phone, on their computer screen, and they're paying in Bitcoin. They absolutely love that. Like the Lightning Network is actually massively increasing in the adoption even though the user experience is really bad. But these Bitcoiners, they just want to use Bitcoin. And it's actually mostly in the emerging markets where there's a lot of circular economies being built. Like if you go to El Salvador, there's a huge amount of communities in Africa where people are starting to pay to to each other with Bitcoin. They are educating themselves of Bitcoin, but it's typically Bitcoin only, which is very interesting. And and there's another thing that's happening in those regional demographics that is very fascinating and it's the adoption of stable coins.

And this is intuitively tied to Bitcoin the asset. I see I I tend to think that we will see a Bitcoinbacked stable coin that takes charge and takes hold in some of these regional demographics. And so right now most of the US dollar stable coins are denominated with US dollar reserves. But I think as Bitcoin continues to proliferate, we're going to end up seeing a Bitcoinbacked stable coin that again has the same regional foothold in some of those areas that you talk about. And and this is a massive market because Bitcoin is correct me if I'm wrong here, but Bitcoin is the the most pristine collateral. Yeah. And and so I'm curious from your perspective, Bitcoin the asset.

Go ahead if you Yeah. Well, actually want to touch up on that about a Bitcoin backed stable coin going back to our yield model. So now you have a token we call it STBTC that is yield acrewing in bitcoin automatically with the gas fees bitcoin. Yeah exactly right. Um what if you actually can st your bitcoin and you have a bitcoinbacked stable coin where actually it's staked bitcoin increasing yields right this is a new defy paradigm that we've not seen. So people have always asked me like how how in the world would ever Bitcoin defi pick up if you have exactly the same things on Ethereum. But this is a new paradigm and this is definitely for the for the DeFi power users here. This token

representation of inherently yielding Bitcoin opens so many different possibilities, right? You can start leveraging that. You can start using that in different vault programs. And I'm a protocol guy, but I see the teams building on us like their uh their wires are like immediately like, "Holy now I have Bitcoin yield in a token form that I can immediately redeem back to Bitcoin." Yeah. Instantly, and it's just that Bitcoin. So, there's no other mechanics. That opens a lot of DeFi possibilities. Yeah. I I think, you know, we we see a lot of inflows through ETFs. I we were having this conversation earlier. I think we're going to see all of the Bitcoin in those ETFs or a good chunk of it become productive and become yield bearing and soon potentially we

will even have structured products in traditional markets that will bear yield and and we will have a yield bearing Bitcoin in one of these structured products that also has an on-ramp to the traditional financial world. So I'm I'm curious from your perspective, Bitcoin the asset, right? Where do you think we go from here? Like I was I was at dinner with a few VCs last night and it's like, you know, there's sort of this sentiment, maybe it's on Twitter and it's it's it's kind of in the community that like there's really no one else left to buy. Everyone who knows about Bitcoin has already bought Bitcoin. Who who is left? But we see these Bitcoin treasury companies. We see more corporate treasuries become

Bitcoin. We we see more institutional adoption. nation states, El Salvador, maybe there's a Bitcoin reserve, maybe it comes from different states in the US or abroad. Who do you think is the next net new buyer of Bitcoin? Yeah, I mean, you can break it down in different demographics, right? I think when you say a lot of users who have wanted to buy Bitcoin, um, they've already done that. I don't think that's true. It's still a growing base. Every new cycle there's new entrance um, and either they buy Bitcoin, they buy tokens. uh but it keeps increasing because every new cycle bitcoin keeps increasing. So you have the the customer user base but then of course you have the governments right the governments have been thinking about this for a long time. Initially they

were like oh we can launch our own uh um token right or we can launch a digital euro as as Europe is doing right now. Um and those governments are looking at it like more and more um governments in the world and countries get banned from the financial system get banned from Swift. I'm quite sure those countries are now trading either over stable coins but they probably see the value of Bitcoin already. So for governments it makes a lot of sense. There's a lot of like um research papers coming out that all the countries that have gold, you might want to get a piece in Bitcoin. And that is playing out as we speak. They're slow moving, but they'll dip their toes. Um, besides that, I think a lot of the

companies, I think that makes so much sense. Um, and actually think a lot of retail today is coming into the cycle with these Bitcoin Treasury companies. Um, unfortunately, they're not on chain. Um, I see a lot of retail buying these companies. These prices, if you look at the charts, the Bitcoin treasury companies are insane. They're wild. Multiples over net asset value. It's incredible. So I think um those people are not new retail users and unfortunately they're buying stocks of Bitcoin treasury companies this cycle. Um but is this where absolutely not. In my world vision 30 years from now I actually see Bitcoin as money. Now it's a store of value with this Bitcoin layer 2 on chain that can become a medium of exchange that is slowly starting to

happen and then uh 30 years from now it's money. And so as we sort of extend out one having two h havingings from now there's a couple of challenges that Bitcoin may face. One of them is postquantum security. Maybe you have some thoughts on that. I I'm more curious especially from the perspective of someone building a Bitcoin L2. How will we continue to incentivize security in the network once the block reward has has having came down to an extent where it's almost it's almost negligible? Yeah. Um, that's an interesting one because so yeah, I'll touch on the quantum later on the block

reward because that's been a talking point I think not in Bitcoin. It's not a talking point in Bitcoin because I don't think any Bitcoiner is worried about that actually. Um, but it's a very big talking point uh outside of Bitcoin. Um, and personally I'm not too worried about the block reward either. Like all these mining companies, they know exactly, they have modeled out very detailed in those spreadsheets. Okay, what if there's no block reward? and and it's it's built in the protocol. They know four years from now it's gone half, right? Um and then you have a lot of free energy in the world. 60% of all the energy is wasted. And so even with a very small block reward, if you have free energy, it still makes a lot of sense to mine. And once you've bought

the hardware, it's all about your cost of energy. So I don't think that's a problem in the next 10 years. Um maybe by the year 2100, but that's like really really far away. Now that said, I do see the transaction fees massively increasing the more Bitcoin layer 2 come online, the more those transaction fees uh will increase. Um and we've s seen the ordinals that was uh creating transaction fees for a while, but those things will keep on happening. So I'm not too worried about the block reward actually um because all these mining companies know exactly that the fees are low. They're not betting their company that four years from now suddenly in fees are massively going to increase.

They know exactly what where the network is self-correcting. The difficulty will come down. It will become easier to mine blocks. There will be a a higher probability of mining. You know, even if it is a smaller reward, you have a higher probability of earning that reward plus the transaction fees. And if you know it's zero, then maybe the transaction fees are more important. But like you said, maybe for the next 75 years, we we should be okay. That's my opinion. And I think we can figure out adoption on the base layer in the next 30 years, so to speak. And if not, there's already proposals within the Bitcoin ecosystem of things you could do um to basically solve that. Um but it's

way too early for that. It's not an issue. As far as uh covenants or or is there no like uh there's things even with quantum, there's a happy debate going on. Um, should we actually let the quantum people eventually steal the Bitcoin um that can be accessible or are we actually going to lock them and set a date like maybe 4 years from now everyone who hasn't moved their old Bitcoin will be unspendable? Right. Right. And so that is at this moment I think the winning camp. Um, and you could use that maybe to fund uh the block rewards further or like there there's a bunch of different options there. It's just not really a big issue at the moment cuz

it's so far away. Um, yeah. So, so inside of these Bitcoin circles, what are some of the more pressing conversations around today? You mentioned quantum's far off, block far off. What are some of the more pressing conversations inside of the Bitcoin community? I would say quantum is definitely a hot topic. Oh, it's right now it's not far far enough away. Yeah, there are definitely more and more people researching it because it is or it might be an issue at some point. Um, now people always think it will come faster than it actually is cuz quantum has been talked about for 40 years. Now AI was been talked about for 60 years and then it goes very fast suddenly, right? Um, so that's definitely a hot

topic. I mean lately in Bitcoin over the last 3 4 weeks was a very contentious change they did. Um, Bitcoin Core basically changed some of the mempool rules and a lot of Bitcoiners didn't like that and so um, a new competing Bitcoin core has gained quite a lot of adoption. It's called Bitcoin mods. Um, they have like 13% of the visible notes in the network. Um, so that's probably the biggest talking point at the moment. um is this contentious upgrade um of the memple only not of the consensus that has led to a lot of Bitcoiners disagreeing with Bitcoin core. Um yeah and could you unpack maybe break that down like what are some of these changes and how do they affect the end result of

Bitcoin? Yeah. So it's not consensus changes. It's a memple only. And in the mele your node would typically reject any OP return data it's called that is larger than 80 bytes. Okay. Now there's a way you could actually besides the manpool directly ask a miner to mine a block with a bigger data string. Right? So you could go around it. And so now they removed that 80 byt limit um from the meool policy. Um, and that has created a lot of push back because a lot of Bitcoiners are against spamming spamming Bitcoin with data and ordinals, etc. And so now they're running a separate version that still has that meoom policy. I'm curious as as we kind of wrap up, there's a whole list of

Bitcoin L2s these days, several. Some of them are really Ethereum L2s. They say that they're Bitcoin L2s. when you're looking at all the Bitcoin L2s or claim they're L2s out there, what are some of the ones that you think are doing something well and then what are the ones that aren't doing so well? Maybe you could say something nice about some of them and which ones do you think, you know, won't be here in a year or two? Yeah. Well, I I love that question because uh actually over the last two years because I was one of the first ones and actually my preede deck um I got on calls with David from Babylon and uh and Alexe from Bob actually was then interlay um and so he he started a few weeks later. So he

started Bob Babylon came out with their Bitcoin staking. After that I've saw a bunch of hundreds of Bitcoin layer 2 raising money. And so at this point I've I've kind of seen it all. Um what I find the most interesting that in Bitcoin land most people haven't heard of any of the names that are more popular in um in Ethereum so to speak. Um and so it's a it's a very yeah different world I would say. Um, that said, I think we've seen a lot of Bitcoin layer 2s that are not Bitcoin layer 2s last year come out because they could just ship an E and optimism roll up in a week, right? With RAS, the companies that are actually building on Bitcoin like for example, we

botanics like we're only connected to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a difficult beast to build on, right? like um you cannot for example build a native rollup on Bitcoin because you cannot verify the proofs because you don't have those covenants right um and so that takes a long time building something net new and I think over the next few months those teams are going to come online they've been building for a year for 2 years those are legit uh Bitcoin layer 2 and they're doing the right things um and you can actually follow the bats of the Ethereum applications like chain link uh is uh deploying on us. We've got GMX um deploying on us. Um so uh yeah, those are high signals, I would say. Yeah,

absolutely. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. It's a pleasure to chat. Bitcoin, it's one of the few uh we're calling this a secular bull run. The bull runs happening in pockets. It's not everything going up at once. Bitcoin's doing well. Stable coins doing well. They're sort of pockets. So, thank you so much for coming on. One last thing I would say like if you want to bat on altcoins knowing what's happening um in a broader market, you might want to look at um altcoins and tokens that are connected to Bitcoin that are slowly coming up that might have some value. Might give some alpha out there. Oh man, come on. You got to drop drop some names. Uh well, we have a bunch of native teams building on top of us that will do their uh their uh token air drops very very soon. Um when I say very

very soon, I say very very soon. So what what are some of these the native applications in the ecosystem? Yeah, we've got some uh bitcoin backstable coins actually interestfree bitcoin backstable coin um where you can borrow against yielding bitcoin. Um we've got some two dexes. So that that was palladium the bitcoin backed stable coin. We've got arch and bitsy which are two native dexes uh following very interesting models. Um, and we've got Art Tura, which is a perb deck. Um, so, uh, yeah. Awesome. Very interesting. Great. Well, good shout out. Pleasure for coming on. Thank you so much. And, uh, we'll see you next time. By this time next year, Bitcoin price prediction. You want to give a price prediction? What are we? Uh, we're 107

today. Um, uh, probably 100K. 100? Yeah, I think we're going to go down. No, no. I think we'll peak uh between now and next year. And we'll be on the road down. And we'll be on back on the road down. Okay. We'll see. This time next year, we'll see you again soon. This time in 5 years. Yeah. 500,000. 500,000 in 5 years. Yeah. Okay. That's good. That's good. That'll work. Thank you, sir. We'll see you next time. Thank you. See you. Love it.

Bitcoin. It's continuing to fly. It's one of the things that are is holding up. So many Bitcoin L2s today. We had uh Ellie Ben Sassan, the inventor of ZK Snarks come on earlier, obviously affiliated with Starknet, doing a great job. That's one of the uh well that's one of the uh the few Bitcoin L2s that is sticking around. They're doing two years uh they'll be they'll be online very very soon.

We will uh see more and more Bitcoin L2s as well. Hemi, everyone around here is walking around. They have Hemi on their uh on their lanyards and it's because uh Hemi is really making a strong push into the ecosystem. They're going to be launching very very soon. Um and so it's very very exciting to see all of these all of these companies make a very strong push into the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem. There's plenty of Bitcoin value to go around. I think when Ethereum launched, it was so it it was so much capital that had to be unleashed. And I think Bitcoin is now in its era. Well, where it is going to start, we're going to see Bitcoin rehypothecated to the max. Right. Right

now, all of this capital is locked up. Even in the traditional financial ecosystem, we're only starting to scratch the surface of rehypothecation. Remember, as these things get more and more tightly wound, that is when we're reaching the top of these cycles. But and and and part of the evidence for that is if you look at last cycle, you saw three arrows capital, FTX, Alama, this whole conglomerate there, they all started to rehypothecate one another. all of them were invested in one another and it really really tightly wound the uh the flywheel such to an extent where it started to splinter and fracture and so what ended up happening is the entire thing collapsed. Well, right now Bitcoin

is spread out so so much that we've got such a long way to go. We can really wind this flywheel until we even get close to something like we saw over in the Ethereum world. And so this is continuing to happen. We're going to see this on the Bitcoin side. And Bitcoin L2, they're coming in because they realize that the most the number one way to rehypothecate these cryptocurrencies and and especially Bitcoin is through DeFi. These L2s are coming in, they're launching DeFi applications and they are coming in in order to provide leverage and provide functions to rehypothecate the the uh market value of Bitcoin. So, we're going to continue to see that more

and more. And uh Bitcoin is in a prime position for that. Let's see what else we have. Let's see what else we have here coming up next. Let's see. We've got G from Athena Labs. Stable coins are another thing that's coming in through the secular bull market. And so we're continuing to see this more and more things are occurring in pockets and uh some of the most exciting things out here stable coins, Bitcoin, obviously AI was having a conversation with Shere Rom from IE Layer just a few minutes ago. They

announced IEN Cloud recently. They're also starting to incubate a project and starting to to roll out a project called Fibbe Score. This is a very very cool memecoin incentivization mechanism where they'll essentially score your vibes. They're going to assess the sentiment that you put into the community and if you're talking positively about something and you have, you know, positive commentary. They're going to incentivize you for doing that. They're going to incentivize you for uh putting those memes out there, putting those vibes out there, and going to end up incentivizing you to continue talking about that. loud was uh was one that tried to do this. They didn't do as good

of a job. I have confidence in Sheree Ram and the Ian layer team uh to execute on this quite well. They also announced redistribution. Redistribution is I believe one of the final steps in slashing where these teams will get slashed and and that recently went live itself. But now once those teams get slashed, it's like, okay, well, where does that stake go? The stake gets slashed and now it's possible for them to redistribute those staked assets, those slashed assets back to the community, back to token holders, back to validators. And this is sort of the completing step of what I layer staking mechanism was uh was was sort of touted

to be. I think one of the most exciting mechanisms here at play is that of course IGEN layer 12 billion in TVL it's this massive stockpile of value and it's earning yields earning some IGEN tokens earning some APY there but what I'm starting to see is like okay now that we have all of this capital let's turn it into productive capital let's take this 12 billion in capital and start to measure capital velocity again how quickly can we turn over this capital so that it's moving through the EOS ecosystem and it's being rehypothecated and redistributed on an ever ever uh evolving basis. I think this is what's really going to drive revenue because

it's going to make it's going to make revenue flywheel into the direction of those that are best positioned for capital allocation. And so now because you see capital just sitting there those it's almost like a rich get-richer mechanism. you're not rewarding those that are effectively allocating capital. And so what we're starting to see is that people will get incentivized for picking winners and losers, for properly allocating capital. It's no longer that you can just have capital and you earn a lot from that. You're going to have to do something with that capital. Maybe there's some risk-free rate of return and you can still do quite well just at baseline having some capital, but it's

going to become increasingly important to position that capital and allocate it effectively so that you're maximizing your earnings as a result because of this capital velocity because it's moving so quickly. It's going to become such a such a focus in order to retain those earnings. And so this is something that I expect layer to to capitalize on because they have so many options for allocation throughout all of their ass. Poly market is also doing some very cool things on ien layer. Uma and the optimistic oracle is doing some very cool things in conjunction with poly market and iigen layer. So that's another ecosystem that

I'm particularly excited about in addition to the the bitcoin ecosystem, the stablecoin ecosystem. These are all things that are doing quite well and I'm going to continue to bet on these things because these are what these are what's driving the secular bull market. This bull market is occurring in pockets. When we get some some eased monetary policy, I think we can all expect things will rise in unison once they start cutting rates. You can look at the Fed balance sheet. Once that stops declining and starts to rise again, that's when they're starting to inject liquidity back into the system and ultimately that

liquidity is is what these coins are priced in. And so when we inflate the supply of dollars, everything priced in dollars, including altcoins as well as Bitcoin is going is going to uh rise relative to the inflating supply of dollars. That's a given. But in this in this in between state, it it's it's a really really interesting time because we're going to continue to see opportunities to separate from the pack. The pack right now is just that baseline. It's like, okay, well, right now we have we have things that are going up, things that are going down, but on average everything is sort of fluctuating around equilibrium. We haven't seen a whole lot

in the movement of even take Bitcoin for example. It's been pretty steady around that 100 110 90 between 90 and 110 really. We haven't seen it kind of move out of that range. And so that is sort of a a proxy for the rest of the ecosystem. We've seen some new launches do quite quite well. Those are rising. Those are sectors that are doing quite well. New coin, good coin, shiny thing is good. But we've also seen things that have started to taper off. And so again, on average, this industry and and and this market has been relatively stagnant, but it provides an opportunity where if you're allocating, if you're if you're really

doing your research and you're allocating with a thesis, you can start to rise in in this market because there's such a wide dispersion. Things are happening, but they just they're happening both positive and negative, and they're really evening out. they're averaging out. And so as we continue to move in the direction with new launches, adoption of technology, institutional adoption, and easing monetary policy, the factors and the ingredients are really here for a prime market. It's just going to be about in the meantime starting to find the separation and and those that distinguish from the pack as dispersion continues to happen. And then

ultimately you're going to to start to find and and typically what happens is if you can be well researched now and find those well-placed opportunities, double down on the winners because those are the ones that run the most when everything starts to rise in unison. And so I think that is the mindset going forward. This is the investment thesis at least on Andy and I's fund. We're going to be we're going to be announcing some some interesting things on the fund side very very soon. We're going to be announcing uh uh some some things that are going to uh start to shake up the corporate structure that we have here at the rollup. So I'm very very excited about

that. Uh it's been it's been a work in progress for sure. Uh it's been a team effort. We've got a team on site here. Uh in addition to Andy and I. Andy should be back here soon. I think he's doing a panel. Uh we're going to have uh we have four uh four team members here. Shout out to Brick. Shout out to uh Marcelo. Shout out to Kevin and Brendan. These guys are helping us out behind the scenes. And we've also got a team back at home uh that is helping us out on on all of the production, all of the great clips you guys are seeing, all of the copy. These guys are just wizards when it comes to this stuff. Couldn't do it without them. Give them all the credit in the world.

And so the team is exceedingly important out here. It's hot. Stay hydrated. And so the media company is doing big things. We're seeing more and more happening on the fund side as well. We like to think about the the the market and in a couple different ways. One of those dimensions and lens that we see it through is this pendulum that swings from return on labor to return on capital. And so capital being the fund, labor being the the day-to-day business that you see us working and grinding on. And there's a

lot that happens here behind the scenes. We're going to continue to grind on both these directions. But just keep in mind that pendulum swings with the market and we always try to keep a long-term perspective when it does come to these things. I think we've got Guy from Athena here visiting us very, very soon. And so as we as we continue to swing that pendulum, we're going to continue to stay focused, stay directed on our market. Now, the other thing uh that's important to mention is a shout out to our partners and our sponsors. We see countless projects come through the ecosystem. Some of them come and go. A lot of our partners have been with us for several months, and I think it's

important to shout them out. You heard from Route Scan earlier today. We've also got Risk Zero, we've got Starknet, we've got uh Vertex, we've got Mantle. Uh and of course, last but certainly not least, is our title sponsor for Permission List, EtherFi. You guys saw the cash card, EtherFi launched. We're running a promotion right now. $50 back on your first 1,000. That's a 5% cash back. No, no other credit card or debit card is offering that at all. That is a 5% cash back on your first thousand dollars. Literally, you can just just get money back for free and it's perfect. It does everything that you would want a debit card to do,

especially if you have some capital that that sits on chain and you don't want to really be responsible for moving that into a custodian through an off-ramp into a fiat account. If you want to just have that entire process handled for you, all you have to do get your EtherFi cash card. I think we have a ref link going. Might be somewhere in the show notes. It might be somewhere in the comments. Grab that ref link. Get yourself a cash card. You can sign up today. Make sure you get your friend one. You can get your company one. We have all of these exciting offers that Ether It's an incredible feeling being out

here at Permichelus in the mix. We're shaking hands. We're we're making moves and and you know, it's really an interesting time because the energy in the room these days is a sense of maturity. We're not this young nent industry that we once were full of cipher punks and anarchists, right? We almost wanted to revolutionize the financial ecosystem. Bitcoin is the next global reserve currency and that very well may happen. But you've heard from us th it this was always going to be a peaceful revolution, one that takes time. This wasn't going to happen overnight. It wasn't going to be an overthrow. Look, the US dollar is being inflated away one money printer at a time. This does not happen overnight.

And even in the case of hyperinflation, you don't just blink and then what? Next thing you know, we we we've got our purchasing power inflated away. Even during COVID, the years 209, 2020, 2021, you're starting to hear that with the national debt. But in reality, the national debt is where it is because they printed so many dollars. And not only did that increase the national debt, it also inflated away our purchasing power. It's the same reason people are having trouble buying homes. you see many many people are starting to have trouble um h making savings having things uh everyone is working everyone's living a paycheck to paycheck and this is a very difficult thing to be faced

with and so what we're seeing these days is that in purchasing power is being inflated away that is where Bitcoin comes in and you heard it from from uh William you heard it from Ellie you're going to hear it from Jeff Garzik later today these are the guys that are building the Bitcoin ecosystem because they saw the force through the trees. They saw Bitcoin as the global reserve currency from the very beginning. This is the way the world is moving. This is the direction that we're headed and we're not slowing down. We're only increasing. It's going to be very interesting. I think we're seeing some things play out in the macro macro world and it's you can't ignore what's happening in in macro because ultimately this is the global liquidity

landscape and Bitcoin is becoming more and more ingrained into the global liquidity landscape. And so this is only continuing to proliferate and it's important that we continue to to get a grasp of Bitcoin and the global liquidity landscape as well as the inst institutional landscape of stable coins, payment processors, software companies, every company that's using the cloud, a database, blockchain based databases, Ethereum, the world computer you heard from uh who did you hear from earlier that was speaking about how oh I I believe it was Patrick O'Grady from

Commonwe the marginal cost of web 3 versus web 2 become compressed and as we compress the the cost between these services more and more you'll start to see well even if it's a marginal cost increase the value of a blockchain of a unified state, something that has everything in one place and you can make it programmable and you can make it productive and it has the capacity to own your assets and custody your assets on your behalf.

The value of web 3 far and exceeds the value of web 2. And if you can get all of these benefits, including the verifiability and the productivity of web 3, and you can put that into a mechanism that only has a small, very thin marginal cost beyond the web 2 alternative, you're going to start to see it's a no-brainer to to to switch and pivot into the web 3 uh vendor of these services. And I think this is what we're going to continue to see. Again, this does not happen overnight. This takes everyone at this conference is is hand-tohand combat with these institutions with these providers and

and they're going about it and they're making uh they're making these deals so that we're bringing more and more of these companies into the fold onchain and ultimately this is the work that's happening at permissionless. believe our next guest coming up very soon is Guy from Athena. Let's uh let's see where he is. We should should have him should have him coming in very very soon.

Let's go to standby here for a moment as we uh wait for our next guest. We're going to be right back. We'll see you guys very, very soon. Don't go anywhere. Remember, Ether Fine. [Music] Hey. Hey. Hey.

Heat. Heat. [Music] Hey. Hey. Hey.

[Music] [Music] Heat. Hey, Heat.

[Music] Hey. Hey. Hey.

[Music] [Music]

down. [Music] Hey Yeah. [Music] Heat. [Music] Hey.

[Music] [Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] I can only talk. I know, man. You doing

great, man. You look like a president. here. One, one of these is fine. Should I tell my team to be ready to to clip and re repost? Yeah, they they they can repost the live link now. It's

pinned on our Twitter and um and especially since you know you're they they should retweet the live stream now and then we'll send any clips of the segment. One sec. Um yeah, you guys on? Yeah. H Oh, here's Tan. What's up? Yeah, we'll you don't mind? No, we'll we I think we actually have a fourth mic, but you can come in whenever. Um, sure. It's just out the rollup, right?

Yeah. Or it's at the rollup co. Oh, yeah. Are we have a spice? Three. Okay. All right. So, we'll we'll just keep it we'll keep it somewhat quick. Yeah. Are we good? All right. We are we are back live from Premier List. We've got our buddy James here, founder of Mode. We're going to we're going to talk about the Mode comeback story. It's all around AI. And so, James, welcome to the show, buddy.

Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be here IRL. Absolutely, man. We're uh we're coming at you live. What do you what do you think about this uh besides the heat? What do you what do you think about the conference so far? Very cool conference. Cool people. Yeah, good vibes in general. Love New York. Love the city. Uh yeah, it's great. No complaints. Yeah, they always do a good job guys. They do. Okay, so tell us about uh tell us about the mode comeback story and everything that's happening with uh DeFi AI. Yeah, for sure. So, you know, the mode journey's been uh it's been fun. It's been interesting. It's been challenging. Um, I think the last few months uh really like helped us kind of refine like what we're trying to

achieve and what we want AI to do for our users that no one else can do, right? So we launched the mode trade uh per deck with borderly and we started to see people trade and people use yeah different applications across mode and we started to build out all these tools uh these AI tools and we've really started to like bring them together. So now you have like modes AI terminal just one simple product and you have mode trade. Okay. And with in the AI terminal you can yeah do things like go long on ETH, go long on FC coin. Um you can now like use mode terminal to analyze your positions by doing things like taking a

screenshot, putting that position into the terminal, getting to analyze it. Um and you can also do this with like yeah you could take a p a screenshot of your position on Binance buy bit. So like the mode terminal is kind of becoming like a wider AI product and the big differentiator is that we have a lot of this uh predictive data like forecasting data um that comes from the synth subnet and that's all plugged in. So you can do things uh like take a position um maybe you opened a long position on Bitcoin and you can start to like add that and get analysis on that and also understand like the probability that position will

be in profit or loss over the next 24 hours. Okay. Um using the data from synth. So it's like we've been building all these different tools and now we're kind of bringing them all together. Um, and mode is really becoming more of like an app chain focused on uh the per decks and all this AI tooling around it. Yeah. Okay. And so I think the most intuitive thing here is an AI chatbot that allows transactions to be made on a user's behalf. Yeah. Exactly. And it sounds like something like this is already live. You can go long on ETH and Bitcoin and Fartcoin and do some of these things. It's kind of the next piece of like Okay.

I I I want to do more on chain, but I also want to be recom I want recommendations on what I should not not just what I can do, but what I should do. Yeah, I think we can't say recommendations because like we're not giving like financial advice, but you can query the synth subnet, which is giving like predictive analysis and essentially volatility forecasts. So saying, you know, if you're going long on Bitcoin and you have a low risk tolerance, here's some ideas where you could put a stop loss, right? Things like that. It's helping people think more probabilistically about how they're trading. And it's that like intelligence piece um that's kind of key cuz people say to us, how are you going to compete

with Hyperlid on the per stacks? You're never going to have as much liquidity. you're never going to um have like the same like trading engine, right? Like we're not we're competing on having these like tools and yeah, the synth uh kind of data layer is extremely powerful. We have like uh roughly $2 million per year being paid out in rewards to the miners. Okay. So, the data is crazy high quality. Um and it's yeah, really useful for people to use to try and rethink um how they trade. Yeah.

Okay. Awesome. I I'm fascinated because I I think it makes sense, right? We can basically we can use that data. We can't call it recommendation, but we can use that data however we want to use that data. I you know what what where this ends up going. We had a guy earlier talking about, you know, can an AI get like a money transmitter license in order to do some of these things? Can an AI become like a like a certified financial adviser to actually make those recommendations? is probably smarter than a lot of financial advisers. And so it's it it's going to be really really cool to see how the regulatory landscape in AI starts to move, but also in crypto and then these things obviously are going to intersect quite a bit. Yeah.

What what are you personally excited about? Maybe it's something on mode, maybe it's somewhere like else, but you know, when you're coming coming at this industry, what what keeps you coming back? What are you most excited about? I think like the way the way I look at crypto evolving um is very much through like a series of very specialized agents or not crypto I just mean all of finance right and even like how we manage our personal lives like you're going to have a legal agent which does all your legal stuff you're going to have maybe like a yeah an agent which looks after um maybe it's like scheduling certain things you're going to have like like a gold whoop band. I'm going to have a fitness agent which is

giving me much smarter recommendations than I get in the Whoop app. And we're going to have financial agents. We're going to have crypto agents which are very specialized. They are custom to how you as a user want them to be. They're custom to your risk tolerance. And they will go and they will uh yeah manage your assets for you on chain or even like yeah potentially offchain within you know your uh your savings accounts. And like you as a human are going to be managing all these different agents and your ability to grow will be about how good you are at managing all these agents and like directing them in the way you want to direct them. Right? If you want to take a lot of risk, you're probably going to get a lot of crypto agents that like run high-risisk

strategies, right? Um if you don't want a lot of risk, you might have like very simple agents, you know, just do like very basic things like, you know, keep your money in like tea bills and a bit of Bitcoin maybe. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. I we're entering the discoverability era for some of these agents because they're becoming a lot more specialized. Right now, there's a handful of big LLMs. Yeah. Billions of weights and we're going to slowly dial those in until they become more and more specialized. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. James, thank you so much for coming on, man. We appreciate you coming on. We'll see you around the conference and uh enjoy New York. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Cheers, buddy. Thank you. We'll see you again soon. Amazing. Yeah, for sure. Cheers. And uh I think coming up next um Yeah, feel free. Yeah, dude. Thank you. Uh coming up next, we've got uh Jeff Garzic, but we've also got Tun Chitra in the building. And so we're going to get Andy back in here. We're going to start to go full throttle once again. And so we've got we've got a full afternoon slate coming up. very very soon.

And so, uh, stay tuned. We've got more Bitcoin content. Terrone, if you haven't seen Tun before, Tun's the man, the colorful personality to say the least. He's going to be coming in hot with lots of takes. Very, very smart dude. Um, on AI, quantum security. There's so many interesting things that are happening these days. And so I think uh I think Jeff is coming in coming in first. There he is. Let's help the man of the hour. How's it going? How's it going? Got a broken right hand so I have to shake with my left. Yeah. Did that that just happen? Two months ago, so I I just took the cast off. Okay. Okay. I had a buddy

that just had rotator cuff on and sometimes he's got this the cast, sometimes he doesn't. So I I understand. Well, we're going to we're going to do our best to heal you through the power of conversation and education. Awesome. I I already gave kudos to Phil. Everyone here looks like they work for Hemi. I'm just going to hold up your You guys haven't seen this already. It is incredible. We're back. We're back. Welcome back, brother. Everybody works at Hemi at Commission. Everyone works at Hemi. And we're It worked out great. We're We're the lanyard dudes now. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be on every lanyard at every conference from now on. Jeff, how you holding up in the in the heat today? I'm a I'm a southern redneck. I I love being,

you know, my my wife and kids, not so much, but you know, no biggie for me. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, man. Well, um, we had a lot of progress going on on Bitcoin side of things. And one question that I was talking to uh a couple of these, you know, Bitcoin Fi type of companies in this realm is in the Bitcoin treasury company world, there's been this rise of these treasury companies, right? And we kind of spoke about this on the last stream. Now that the copycat game is like started to play out quite a bit, what these treasury companies are starting to do instead of kind of harvesting the extra nav off of retail that's kind of slowing down. They're actually now trying to come and get yield on their Bitcoin as a way to

basically have a differentiated offering uh and basically earn more. We're ready. We're ready. So, so, so how are you guys positioned for the institutional wave at Hemi? Yeah, that I mean institutional in general is uh fully aligned with Bitcoin. Just stepping back a bit as you guys know, you know, sovereign wealth funds adding Bitcoin, corporate treasuries adding Bitcoin. um you know finally catching up to where retail has been for the past 15 years. So the you know the world is ready for Bitcoin now including Bitcoin treasury companies, regulated ETFs, all that stuff. And fundamentally the experience of holding Bitcoin in a cold

storage inside a mountain behind armed guards guarded by bit a ring of Bitcoin maxis is just not as exciting as it used to be. And you want to like make your Bitcoin go farther. You want to ear you want to continually stack sats while you're on the beach. Yes. You know, and that's fundamentally what DeFi does. That's fundamentally what him does in Bitcoin DeFi. We're uh positioning ourselves as kind of the chain for Bitcoin DeFi. We got uh over 1 billion in TVL right now. A lot of that is uh you know we thought it was 80 going to be 80% Bitcoin 20% like Ethereum. We're seeing like 90% BTC you know 10% other

in terms of interest. Everybody wants to you know earn not like points juiced yield but real yield on your Bitcoin yield like denominated in BTC. Right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's fundamentally the search right now. And I think Hemi is kind of that search destination. There are a number of ways to do it. And all of those are kind of emerging. Lending market is the the easiest, the most passive that just got to drop your BTC here. But that's not as exciting cuz it's like five bips or 10 bips or something like that. It is, you know, you're not even getting 1%. the uh BTC collateral USD borrow train. That is one good way that people are earning

yield and because they don't want to sell, right? That's right. Yeah. Essentially micro strategy on chain. It is. It is. It really is. Staking isn't getting that much interest. It's the It's the actual borrowing against that is getting the interest. Well, it's it's both. It's uh I'm trying to slice it by points or no points. Correct. Okay. Gotcha. It's like staking is there, but it's uh like the uh uh the bodybuilder at the gym. They're juicing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right.

You know, if you're a real, you know, Bitcoin hodler, you want real yield, not juice yield. Like I I'll take free sats all day long. Yeah. But you don't want some shitcoin, basically, is what you're saying. got to like look past the points to when the points burn off, is it a real product at the end of the day, right? And that's the key question. Yeah. And and so I think on our show we've talked a lot about um your path to let you're a legend in the industry, but I'm I'm absolute a legend. As Andy said, absolute legend. I'm a humble monk. I'm a humble Bitcoin monk.

And so, God, give me the graces to find a Bitcoin faucet. Just one more. One more, Jeff. Bitcoin faucets. Those those are legendary, too, from back in the day. So, so I don't have another 15,000 Bitcoin to give away, man. Oh, man. Wing drop the BTC. You just turn on the faucet of Bitcoin right in the middle of this table. Okay. So looking forward a little bit, what do what do you see as some of the next milestones for Bitcoin and the next milestones for Hemi? Maybe those overlap a little bit, but taking a little bit more of a forward-looking approach here. Um, I'll go controversial first, which is uh

I don't know that there are other milestones for Bitcoin. I think it's kind of it's it's where it's at. Yeah, it's uh in network engineering we use the word backbone. That's like the core network of the core network that everybody connects to and through. And uh Bitcoin's the backbone of crypto bitcoin here's a milestone for you going to become the backbone for tradi. Oh. So there's uh there's that. But Bitcoin the protocol I don't see it upgrading. I'm pessimistic on Opcat um on even minor upgrades really cuz there there plenty of hardcore folks still out there just wanting it to you know never get touched important some of

the the memory from back in the day basically uh the philosophy of Bitcoin is if you touch it there's a lot of politicking and BS involved in upgrading and what if we just like didn't want all that we could just not upgrade Yeah. And so that's that's a choice. That's one governor's choice is ungoverned. Um milestones uh for Bitcoin in the broader world, I think we're hitting those this year which are just amazing. Like I already mentioned, sovereign wealth funds, corporates, you know, public companies that their purpose is Bitcoin treasury. Yeah. You know, 15 years ago, I never imagined any of those. And now it's like world acceptance. I thought

the world would crush us. I thought it was like, you know, the world would be like Bitcoin's the enemy and it must die. And there's still some of those strains, half of them, right, for the Financial Times that are on uh you know, the anti- nocoiner, anti- Bitcoin war path, but it's it's acceptance. That's huge. So, we're like freaking hitting the milestone today. Uh Hemi, you know, we're we're leaning into it. you know, we're going to we got a bunch of tech upgrades like the Petra upgrade, Bit VM Vaults V2 coming and uh a number of things that make, you know, stuff that's mostly decentralized fully decentralized. You know, at the end of the day, it's about decentralization,

payment freedom, you know, self sovereignty, and how does he lean into those same strengths that Bitcoin does while avoiding like the centralization of optimism? Yeah. Yeah. No, Jeff, but I I I got one push back for you. I had a dinner with Jeremy Rubin uh and some of the other kind of OG folks in in the Bitcoin space last night, and uh we did a round of bullish and bearish, and he was bullish on a small amount of covenants getting passed and integrated into Bitcoin Core in the next month, but you say that it's actually not going to happen and that there's not going to be many upgrades. Who's telling the truth here? Well, you're asking the wrong question, okay? I want to put money on

Poly Market to answer this question. I want to put money behind my opinion. Okay? Is I want to bet that there is not going to be a any covenants in the next 60 days. I'll even be generous. I'll go past 30 days. Wow. I'll put money. I'll put uh You should make this market right now, man. 0.1 Bitcoin behind my words. Colin Colin Jeremy, if you're out there, the the onus is on you to respond here, man. Yeah. and call on Shane from Poly Market to put that market up, right? Yeah. I I let let's see, right? Because um ultimately I think what we're hearing is that a lot of people want these things. It's just unlikely to happen.

Yeah. It's just the process of change. It's like, you know, I want utopia to happen, but how to get there is the whole, you know, difficulty. And and to your point about, you know, kind of the way that the world has accepted this, it it certainly didn't happen overnight, but you know, you kind of had this this this feeling that the world was going to crush it and it was no longer going to reach this status. And so, you know, one one thing that I'm curious about maybe on your macro your macro outlook here is like sovereign wealth funds have traditionally used gold, physical gold in order to sort of solidify their their treasury, their wealth fund, right now they're turning to Bitcoin. Do you think this is going to just continue? We're

just going to continue to move away from gold. what and generally like how do you think Bitcoin becomes more and more ingrained into the traditional financial system? I I think gold's the uh the gateway drug. I think it's not less gold, but it's more gold and more Bitcoin. Okay. Is the entire world is looking at what China is doing with US treasuries. They're not buying anymore. Japan, not buy any more US treasuries. The US is going to have to drink its own piss in terms of buying its own treasuries. They call that quantitative easing. And so, yeah, nobody wants to buy them. Fundamentally, the hard monies are getting picked up already. I don't

have to make a prediction. They're buying gold. They're buying 5K. You heard it here first. That's right. So, we're going to continue to lean into hard money in every country in the world, every sovereign, all of the, you know, hedge fundies that are like a, you know, all-encompassing hedge fund type of stuff. Um, the but I'll make a further point. It's not about crypto, the asset class. Bitcoin is a one of one. I know that's kind of Bitcoin maxi and I'm famous for being a Bitcoin pragmatist. Yeah. But Bitcoin as an economic instrument, Bitcoin the token is a one of one. Meaning that you can't just create an index fund of crypto.

Yeah. And expect to have any kind of performance profile like Bitcoin itself, right? Every single crypto is different like Filecoin, which I I love storage. I came from a data storage background, Linux kernel, and so I've been following Filecoin. I love the FIL token. I don't hold any just for the record, but uh it makes rational sense this token for this decentralized resource. Very clear. It's not they're not printing tokens just for no purpose. It's clear utility, but it's radically different from BTC. It has a totally different purpose, totally different profile, totally different user set, totally different economics.

Why would you put that in an index with BTC? So there's just, you know, so many cryptos, but they're different. You can't just say, "This thing's a token. It belongs in a fund with this random pile of other tokens." And so, uh, my, you know, my favorite anecdote illustrates the point. Recently, the Trump administration, the White House, they were going to do a, uh, you know, a sovereign crypto fund. Announcement number one, we're going to do XRP. XRP, but he got fooled on that actually. But he got ripped. They down. Yeah, dude.

Yeah, they had to. And you know, announcement number two, which stuck, was sovereign Bitcoin fun. And so the logic behind that, there was a lot of back and forth, a lot of inside baseball, but Bitcoin's the only one that's made it so far. Everything else, to use Trafi language, is an emerging market. Yep. And I think to your point, Bitcoin is more like gold than it is like ETH or Filecoin or Cardano or Ripple. Like the it it's hard money and then there's everything else. Yeah, this is a very this is a take that uh stems from 5% interest rates. Y give it give it 2% interest rates and we're gonna have Jeff's on the show talking about how Hemicoin is going to change the world. Jeff Jeff hair token, right?

Yeah. Jeff, what's up with that? You you have your own meme in the Hemi community or something. Um the Hemi community created a hair meme coin based on CTO Max Sanchez's hair which is like completely amazing. Yes, it is. And uh I created Maxcoin just to mock Max and like test some ERC20 contracts and stuff. I'm not into the let's create 60,000 meme coins a day Salana circus, but sometimes it's fun to poke the community. I have a sense of humor and I like to poke. I'm curious about some of your some of your more exotic takes when it comes to even just things that are that are outside this purview. For instance, AI. I I see you tweeting about it sometimes. I I think

you know you bring in a perspective that is one that you know isn't kind of uh diluted by a lot of the buzzwordy things that we hear a lot today. And so I'm curious like what are some of your more exotic AI takes? What do you what do you think is going to like just something something you know that you think is going to happen that might people not might not be expecting over the next few years? I'll I'll say that uh humans are going to be here for a long time. every my my contrarian take is like everyone else consensus is like AI is going to take over the world. There's going to be no jobs for anybody anymore. That's totally wrong. That's totally wrong. And you guys are going to be the king of the

world. Here's why is AI has no taste. AI is always trained on what came before and not has that creative spark of what needs to come next. They're always, even when they're trying to predict the next word, which is how LLMs work, they're predicting based on the past. And so what humans can bring to the table is taste and curation, you know, and unpredictability, you know, that spark of genius. And so, for example, to to give you an example, I uh I love LLM. I use LLMs a lot. I love Dungeons and Dragons and I play Dungeons and Dragons games a lot. Well, I had it uh write a D

and D game module for me, but I'm the one at the at the steering wheel saying, "Okay, not this monster, but that monster. Okay, make, you know, this this plot a little bit bigger." You're fundamentally, you know, I think we're all going to become editors, and we have AI as like our junior interns. And so, I think that's the future pattern, but humans are going to stay on top. Yeah, it's good news. Have you uh have you done much uh vibe coding? I have. I have. I uh vibe coded an entire C compiler and then threw it away.

Wasn't good enough. I vibe coded an entire C compiler with a broken hand and throw it away. Wow. So, that was a lot of fun. You uh you know, my pro tip for any developers listening is get your AI to always comment code. Tell your AI, it's weird that you have to say this. Tell your AI produce high quality code. Yeah. It won't. Yeah. Seriously. And then tell it to organize periodically. So like periodically reorganize all the stuff that you've done to like clean it up and stuff like that cuz you don't have hallucinations when you're vibe coding or AI doesn't. I hope you don't. Uh but the uh the anti version of

hallucinations are it'll go off on tangents and like in your like wallet module it'll drop like a gambling module and you're like this is the wallet module. It's not supposed to have gambling in it. But it's trying to please you and you're like I want a thing that does wallets and gambling and it's it's answering the question. It's doing the thing. Yeah. Jeff, one last one for you. What are you bullish and excited about right now? Probably the answer is going to be Hemi. Um what are you bearish or cautious about? Yeah, clear clearly Hemi. We've got uh so much going on behind the scenes. It's about to roll out week after week, month after month. Um we're we're going to be the number one side chain today, tomorrow,

uh next century. My my grandkids are going to be uh building on Hemi. Um bearish or cautious about fearful? I think uh I always go for the macro is that uh 2017 cost of digital asset creation was zero net result flood of tokens lots of supply versus demand today flood of blockchains lots of L2s but Darwin's trial by fire is going to melt away all of those and then the quality gems will remain after that forged fire. though. I think it's uh whatever you see a ton of, you're going to see like one or two of

in 5 years. So, I'm I'm bearish on an over supply. Yep. We see a lot of LLMs these days. Yep. Yep. Yep. Look for your supply. Yeah, ju just just had a really good panel about how to how to think about monetizing block space and it it that that power law is is happening in real time as fees trend towards zero but a select few uh execution environments change they retain a lot of value they get to charge fees and they get to have a better flywheel a real business so Jeff thank you for joining us man thanks for having me on it's been a pleasure it's always fun yeah many time yeah yeah don't forget your uh your your lanyard there. Yeah, the security is pretty

intense. They asked me if I worked for Emmy. I said, "Yep, I do." And they let me right in there. So, you're doing something right, Jeff. I got to give you a raise then. There we go. Appreciate that. Thank you, gentlemen. See you again soon. Speak soon. All right, man. We got Tun coming up next. Yeah, Jeff is always great. Brings a a sense of of patriarchy uh of uh Just like just a funny guy. Just a a funny guy. A little bit a sense of maturity to the to the scene. Calling Teroon in the building. Up next, we got Teroon.

Tun and Jeff. I got a question for him straight off. Similar person. Yes. Same vibe, dude. Same vibe. Yeah. Um Yeah. You're going to start this one off. Yeah. This guy I'm gonna I'm gonna pull up one of his tweets. He's he's been going hard. What's up, man? What's up, man? Good to see you. We are not talking about crypto today. Great. What are you talking about? I'm talking about your tweet here that keeps coming up that I'm really enjoying. Which one? It is your daily drivers and how they keep changing. I I got to find the most recent one just to get a Yeah, I haven't updated in a couple of weeks. Yeah, I please update more often because I I've slowly switched off of Claude as a result of seeing your daily drivers.

Let's get a a live update if you Yeah, I'll give you a live update. Yeah. Yeah, live update. So So wait, hold on. about a month ago. Daily driver 03. Is that still the daily driver? Yeah, for the most part. I although the problem is actually I keep hitting the limit my usage limit. So I would say it's a daily driver until the usage limit and then I just go to Gemini. Okay. Analysis Gemini 2.5 Pro kind of coming back to in between 03 and Gemini. Um just seeing differences in like the in like the Yeah. So like Okay. So for for 03 it's like very good at abstract math stuff and like you know there's like some paper that I maybe I read and I'm like I kind of remember the

conclusion and I'm like hey can you reproduce the argument and it will be able to do that but if you ask it to do very precise things like write me code to do X it will make a lot of errors and I think the reason it makes a lot of errors is actually a kind of funny reason. So like it uses a lot of like shortcut handwavy things where it's like hey maybe in some piece of code they called some variable like Andycoin. Yeah. And it will be like oh Andycoin well the ticker was Acoin so I'm going to call everything Acoin and then it like forgets that it renamed something and then it'll go back to using Andycoins. And and I think Gemini and Claude are much better about this.

They're like very consistent. They don't forget that they're so stuff like that. So it's like yeah if it's something where I I can figure I'm the one who's figuring out whether it's supposed to be the same or if it's something where it's like it's a piece of code and this software won't run because they like forgot they renamed the variable. Those are the difference but but probably those two I think and that happens after like multiple prompts like 10 prompts later you it's like it's forgotten what it Yeah. And Gemini is really good at like you give it something and it runs for a long time. It's the best. Claude is actually very good at tiny tasks. Anything long, it starts messing up, but it it's not because it has no memory. It seems like it's it remembers things well, but it just like has a computation. It's like

it's built around small programming task and you ask it some complicated math thing and it gets lost. I I like Claude though for the the way that the human feel is to it as has typing to it. It feels like I can't remember what what her name is. the woman who's like their uh head of UX is this like philosophy professor. Yeah. It gives you like this like very like so all right research you've got o3 and 2.5 pro. Yeah. Same still that combination that combo is like the best for so for any sort of like mathematical research deep level thinking. Yeah. For like programming Claude and Gemini not really 03 cuz it makes like all these little dumb mistakes. Yeah. It's like it's kind of like the smartass in class where it's

like the person who like never studies for the test and still gets an A but like the teacher hates them whereas like Claude is like the goodie two shoes who's not really that smart but like memorizes and tries to do every extra credit possible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then Gemini is actually the smart one but then like sometimes loses confidence in itself. That's like if I were to anthropomorphize them. All right. Uh your search engine 03. 03. Yeah. So 03 actually that's just for like searching for so rather than than using Google just pop into 03 here. Let me let me will you let's look at like the other thing is I think the chat GBT app is actually good. Yeah. Whereas like the Gemini app and Deepseek app and

stuff are kind of shitty. The mobile experience like they'll get stuck or like they clearly didn't spend time trying to make them like consumer products. Yeah. Yeah. And so like I end up asking like you know for instance I asked something about like who what who are the sets of wholesale lenders in uh in traditional finance because I've been thinking about like these people who are syndicating RWAS are any of these people doing it yet you know as like a is it really here yet? And so like you know I got I got a good like list of list of like the top 10 mortgage lenders United penny mac.

So we're still early. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're still early. Exactly. But if you search that on Google it would be it would be hell or the other thing I realized is the Google AI assistant. You know when you that stuff is like cached results. It's not actually running a live model and those results are often times stale. So like some news event happens it will not get it. Whereas I think you know open and Google in particular cloud a little bit although it messes up the web search are very good at like going and like searching for going and searching online for like oh like did something new happen. And I think that's where they they've improved so much it's like impossible to not use both of them. Yep. Um, you've got uh coding for new code 2.5 Pro. I think I

think Yeah, I think that that one is actually Cloud 4. Cloud 4 is a competitor there because you've got uh Cloud 4 for debugging. I think Cloud Cloud 4 has gotten better at at new code. I actually often times I'll like I have some idea, I write some pseudo code, I give it to 03, I'm like, "What's missing? Like how would you write this? Describe it to another language model." Yeah. And then I take what it desc doesn't do any of the like homework but just comes in for the final. Yeah. Like it clearly understands what it's doing.

It just like makes no effort to do the basic boring thing. It makes careless mistakes. Yeah. Yeah. So So tell us more about that. So, do you like are you taking one like uh answer from a one LLM and then telling it like make this ready for a different one and doing that a lot to like I don't know like double check your worth or it's sometimes double-checking. Um B it's actually often times because a yes one of them is better at like being like one of them is being like Claude is very good at like finding little tiny errors and like working until the piece of code works. 03 will be like ah so easy just do this and then it doesn't run and you're like it doesn't run and

then it's like ah okay I'll change one thing and you know what I mean it's like very lazy smartass. Yeah it's like I would call it the smart that's hilarious. Uh so I think a lot of children if you treat these like people it's like oh okay the other thing another tweet I wrote about this which is like actually I think all LMS made me realize is everyone is just going to learn to become a manager cuz like this is like managing a team of people. Yeah. Like I know which task one is good at. I know which one I should be like distributing. I I have to like tell them oh like you sucked and this other model produced a better thing. Why can't you be better? And then it'll sometimes give me a better answer. Yeah. Yeah, it is kind of crazy. It is like you're just

kind of a manager. If you talk derogatory to the to the LLM, sometimes they actually perform better. Yeah. Although some of them like Claude is is is the sensitive one and you say you up and it'll suddenly get all defensive and I'm like all right. Do you but and so you're already starting to use another LLM as the manager of of one. Well, you're starting to kind of pass work between them, but you we don't have the interoperability amongst these models to the extent where they can manage one another. Yes. So you kind of do. So like if you use cursor, cursor actually basically every time you write a message keeps track of all the context embedded for all the models it supports.

So it's like you ask a question and it tries to be able to send it to 03 claude whatever so that you can move between the models more seamlessly. Now it's not perfect. Yeah. But it actually gets you like 80% of the way there. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's why you're seeing this like Silicon Valley VC Twitter trend of like everyone talking about who's going to own memory. And when they talk about memory, they mean exactly this problem of like how do you build this interop? I'm kind of of the mindset that the application owns the interop. It's a little bit like DeFi where like the application owns the order flow. I kind of feel like the application owns the order flow in the context that the user is sending. Yes.

which especially if if you're using multiple models, it feels like each individual model's individual value is like decreasing over time, but the value of like whoever owns the context that the user is propagating through as you're chatting with them, that is the thing that's most valuable and like the cursors of the world own that not the open AIS, right? So like yeah. So so so if if there could be a tool let's say cursor that would have access to all all of your usage across different LLMs that tool would be the most would be I think in some ways that's more valuable now a weird exception because their consumer app which is the the mobile app and front end is so much more popular in terms of users than like every other LLM that

they own a bunch of context but they own a bunch of context that's actually cons like retail consumer whereas is like Anthropic owns like US government usage and like Google owns a actually a lot of programmer usage now. Yeah. Google owns a lot of search which also could provide a lot of context but maybe not so much as I I don't what where do you think the Google search versus open AI prompt on a consumer basis stacks up? Yeah, it's a really good question. Gemini. Have you guys ever used the interface, the web interface for Gemini that like is like not as like it's not a thing about like the answer you're getting that's not as nice? It's like the UX sucks. It's slow

sometimes like or it like Okay, this happens in almost every language interface where like one out of every 50 uh prompts I give I have to go retry because it got stuck or like it started sampling tokens and then it stopped and whatever. And like obviously that is like the biggest UX hurdle I think for a lot of people is that idea that oh it stopped. Oh it must not be working. I'm not going to keep using it. Yeah. Yeah. Jam the stop button and then sometimes it just kind of like sh doesn't stop or whatever. Google's is actually the worst UX for that. Like they actually sometimes it has the fastest token production on Gemini Flash but then like the the number of times it just like not doesn't respond is like way higher. Yeah. So that's why I prefer the API usage or cursor usage because

all these other apps actually do a lot of like retry logic or like if you're writing your own code that's using open API, you can add your own retry logic. So I do think like this is where I'm saying I actually the apps that own the order flow will like be able to differentiate and like own a lot which is also I I think one of the reasons I'm pretty nebulous on most crypto AI things right now. SE was extreme extremely bearish at dinner last night. It was like, dude, two or three years like this is just AI is not good enough. Yeah. And also just like the security stuff is is actually much worse than I think people give it credit for. Like Yeah. I I think there are really cool examples like Freysa um whereas like

people who are like trying to build LLM security via these crypto contests, which I think is like that's an awesome way. Yeah. But they're nowhere near ready. like I you're someone is going to lose money and hopefully not a lot but it's like it's going to be non-trivial. Have you invested in any like crypto AAI things? Yeah. So we invested in noose um and exo and basically I think edge usage of AI is going to be really important. So in the exo case like I already see this myself like I bought a new Mac and I run 14 billion 14 billion parameter quantized models on my local machine now and like I was not doing I could not do that before like I think I think people underrate the Apple silicon for personal

use yes stuff I has gotten a lot better and so I think people who are using that for like edge compute I think there's going to be a market for that where like they don't they need to run local models and they're unwilling to outsource, but they own a bunch of computers locally and they can use this stuff. So, that's one place where I actually think crypto is useful. Like the value capture for that is not clear, but at least it's like I I I can see it myself. Yeah. Um and the other for is like I I do really think news and prime intellect. I think a lot of the RL stuff is more conducive to crypto. Now, are they going to make and again there's no real obvious value

capture. Sorry, the reinforcement learning uh training. So, like what Deep Seek does what all of the the Yeah, that was the last one that we had for you with the fine tuning the modern the modern Yeah. Yeah. So, so for open source models pretty much Deep Seek Quen 3 I spent a bunch of time trying to fine-tune 54 which is the Microsoft model. Yeah. Uh did not work. Also, it was just like just a little too big for for my local GPU. So, main point is like I kind of think the there is a market for these fine-tuned models. I just don't know if like the cost of fine-tuning is ever going to be, you know, the amount you make from

making someone a custom model is ever going to be more than how much you paid to fine-tune it. And like that's the part where the economics are not clear. But Nen and and uh and Prime Intellect have been kind of focusing on two different directions with N kind of going the we're making an RL SDK so it's easy for you to fine-tune distributed and then Prime Intellect being like rent an H100 for a dollar which is I mean I I use that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So that gives you like a like access to a a piece of hardware in in the cloud for a dollar and then a dollar an hour.

a dollar an hour and then you get like this maxed out GPU that you can just ab you can do whatever you want and so that you can use you can run fine tetuning you can run these experiments and like yeah that is I was initially doing this because I was like I want to understand how the algorithms are working I also want to understand the open source ecosystem cuz like I used to be a GPU programmer in 2015 2016 so I've written I wrote a lot of CUDA code a long time ago and I'm I was like what has happened in the last 10 years and it's gotten so much easier it's like insane how much easier it to go from 0 to one. Yeah. So, I think there is clearly something in open source AI that will stick. Now, does it need crypto or

not? That's like where I'm like maybe like I mean the thing we need is like the lazy man's onchain assistant or like like the lazy man's portfolio manager. It's like the type me a strategy that's going to make me at 30% with little risk over the next two years and like execute it for me on my behalf, rebalance for me, all that kind of stuff. I just think like we're not quite there yet, but And this is a tiny shell, but like we launched a rebalancing USDC product across chain. So like you put in your and it'll it'll deposit on base arbitum wherever that uh different yield is. And I think once the crypto side, especially in the vault side solidifies security-wise and like people are really

confident in that, then I think the AI side taking advantage of this type of stuff is easy. But I think right now the crypto side is like still not like it's not there for like the APIs and endpoints and the security model is not there for AI stuff yet. And so it is definitely early, right? I I I I think there will be a version of the world where crypto and AI interact more, but I'm not I'm not like holding my breath thinking it'll happen tomorrow. I think you just have to be in both markets. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm curious about I mean the H100 stuff I I find pretty pretty fascinating. So like you would you would basically rent this thing for an hour. You would run some like super intense fine-tuning algorithm while you have this thing live pull it down to your local machine and then you're you're good to go. Yeah. I'm I have to I got it's like it's like someone someone will So one investment we made uh in 2022 which is ironically they started as a crypto company and then pivoted Yeah. with together uh AI which is like a they host models for you. So you have a custom fine tuned model they'll make they're like versel for model hosting. So like you have some model where you fine-tuned it. They will host it and generate it and stand up

endpoints and geo distribute it and do all like almost like a a node as a service provider. They're like an inference node as a service provider. Okay. Um, and there's a ton of people who are doing this and that that market has grown. Like coreweave, I guess, is the biggest, but there's like a ton of people who are in this market. And so it's in that case they're hosting it for you. So it's not local, but you can still fine-tune it yourself. Yes. So you fine-tune it and then they make it so that like say you have a website that has a chatbot and your chatbot is like fine-tuned on the rollup episodes, right? So that like people can ask questions about it. Yeah. Well, maybe you every week or every five weeks you have to re-update it with the new episodes data and you refine it. Well,

there's this whole workflow. It's almost like machine learning pipelines of like okay new data came in okay re-update the model okay redeploy the model so that the website is using the latest one and that whole continuous pipeline process you know in in in trading and in data science that has been always come under the umbrella of like machine learning pipelines in AI the pipelines are kind of different um mainly because like some of the data as I retrain the model some of the data is actually all this RL stuff where I'm fine-tuning how I ask prompts. I'm saying I I ask sequences of prompts. And so there's a whole world of that stuff and there'll be developer tools and and things like that. Now, there was a while, especially in 2022, like pre-Luna. Yeah. Where there were a

lot of people working in AI and they saw crypto go up like crazy and they're like, "Oh, you know what? Maybe we can do this stuff decentralized." And uh a lot of those companies were amazing investments, but because they didn't stay in crypto. Yeah. uh the the number of people who pivoted at that time like including coreweave actually was a very large and like those pe that cohort did really well. So that's sort of like how I've I've kind of been paying attention. Yeah. But like I I really do think there is there will be a world in which they're interacting.

We're just not there yet. So last thing for you. What are you bullish on broadly? you know, category, idea, sector in the markets, uh, or outside and then what are you bearish or fearful about? I think an interesting thing is what I would say is and and I say this from the perspective of both an investor at robot and working at and running gauntlet is we're kind of seeing I would call I would say this that we're at peak staking yield. Like I think staking yields have actually been kind of like going down quite a bit and if you've seen a bunch of the announcements like near and celestia etc. Yeah. about reducing inflation. I think we're kind of at the point that actually staking as

a business model may have hit we may have already passed peak revenue. So I'm actually bearish staking revenue like businesses built around staking revenue because I actually and and this also sort of includes LSTs and protocol and validators and yeah I think there will be consolidation in that market because as the rewards go down like there's there's not as much revenue for them. Um, so that's what I'm bearish, but I'm bullish. All that capital has to go somewhere and the number one place is people want stable coin yield right now and every fintech wants to like get on chain right now. Yep. I think that's where we're going to see increases. And the main problem there is actually the demand side. Like where are you getting the borrowers? And I think I'm very

bullish on people who are bringing stable coin demand of off-chain companies onchain. like taking companies that are borrowing from a bank and they're like, "Look, we'll lend to you in stable coin. We'll we'll do all the off-ramp, whatever. We'll act as a company that holds the crypto risk for you and but we act as sort of centralized lender, but you can see what we're doing." I think you're going to see a lot of these like hybrid things come online because the rate spreads between onchain stable coin uh borrow rates and off-chain is still big enough. Yeah. And all of this capital that is leaving staking has to go somewhere.

That's so that's my bull and bear. They're very related though. Yeah, they're very related. Yeah. Yeah. T, thanks for your time, man. I I I appreciate it. I uh I wanted to go through that daily driver because I've just been tracking it. No, no, no. It's You got the live real. Yeah. Yeah. Seriously, we'll have to update it real time. Yeah. Always a pleasure, man. Thanks. Thank you. See you. See you. All righty. Um, got a couple more going. Um, jig jag. You know what I'm saying? It's the name of the game, dude.

All right. Um, we got a couple things coming up next. We're We're going to get uh SY up next. Okay. Rob's been here solo on a bender. Dude, I was I was ripping here for a little while. I'm going to go uh I'm going to go find Guy, I think. Actually, I think I had seen Guy walking around. I'm going to leave Rob here for a sec. Be right back with our next guest. And he pops out here for a minute. Gone for another minute. We've got Guy from uh from Athena coming here very very soon. Uh Sy from uh from Story.

There's the Terrun. Tun such a smart guy. And we've got uh we've got Kane from Interex. We're gonna see if we can get Kane up here as well. Fascinating times. Intersection of AI, stable coins, and Bitcoin is really where we're seeing the market focus. AI, stable coins, and Bitcoin. And so, uh, so that's where we're going to focus. guy from uh Athena maybe up next. He is um All right, we're going to get bread guy up here and he's jigging and jagging.

Couldn't find a guy. Got someone even better. All right, got a little bit of a impromptu call with roll up boys. Yo, GM guys dive into these sometimes. Just happens to be sometimes. All right, buddy. We're getting bread guys set up here today. How you doing, Bre? Good. Good. You guys just been grinding through some of these? Rolling. Yeah. Keep it rolling. Grab clips. Yeah, just clip factory out here. I'm saying Chief K at Mega E. Go for it. Did I listen to the the pod with you and uh Yano the other day? Oh Charb, what did you think of it? It was good. I

thought it was really insightful. Did Did you think that? Uh so what I'm battling with is like this house of brand strategy versus just going all in on the roll up and just like just trying to make it the thing the thing all the way. It's hard to push back against cuz they're having so much success with the house of brand stuff. Yeah, I saw your tweet. It was like it was like your uh podcast list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They spam me. I like it's Yeah. my entire feed was them uh yeah pushing me but like yeah it's like it's hard to argue with the success that they're seeing. It's just you wonder if it's going to carry to the next leg and like continue to grow like what's it ultimately the best play. Um yeah, it's tough to say, but I mean one thing's for

sure is like I'm just going to keep grinding growing my account. You'll probably do the same. I mean there's so much upside for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um dude, why do you think ICO Beast is crushing it so hard right now? His his engagement is ridiculous. Like I'm starting to like reply guy the guy just to be like all right I got to do this guy's like loop here. Yeah. He's Yeah. So his thing is that he's he's one he's smart. Like you can't just like do that stuff, right? He's really insightful. He's he's got some depth of knowledge. He's terminally online. He's like he's in every conversation which is impressive. Like and he's got all these like historical references.

He's been in he's been in the game for a while. Like we talked he's been here since 2017 and stuff. So he's got a lot of context. He's insightful. And then he plays the speculative game. Like you and I don't talk tickers like same level, right? So it's like if you look at smart smart followers, smart engagement like ours is actually probably a little higher than his because it's more like a a layer deeper, right? Surface level. He's talking about tickers. He's talking about money-making opportunities. He'll flaunt some of that. And it's like, yeah, he just plays that game. But that's what gets the people going though. Yeah. They love it. You got Yeah, you got to. But why don't we Is for you is like a moral thing. You just don't do it. No, cuz I suck at it and I like it's not it's not intellectually

appealing to me, right? I posted the hype ticker at 45. Oh boy. And you don't want to be that, dude. But the thing is I limited it out a little bit like like clipped of it and like I posted it and it was just like ah dude that was literally the top. Yeah. Yeah. I've Yes. You I have the rule instituted on myself too. If you're taking pictures, if you're want to post, it's like probably clip out 10%. Like this is likely a top. Yeah. What's like Do you have like an exit strategy when it comes to like personal brand or is it just like continuing to like just share and do the thing? uh an exit strategy for personal brand. Uh I saw Defi Ignis like his tweet from whatever go he's like I'm going to turn myself into an AI agent and then just like let that run at the

end my life whenever I want to just like tap out. Like maybe that's the end goal. It gets good enough that he could sell his account too. Yeah. Like he's not like we can't sell our accounts easily. Yeah. Um, yeah. Like you saw the I don't know if you saw the ghost writing like thing that just popped off on on the timeline. Everyone's cuz like founders ghost write like and like same with like a lot of influencers like that and like it doesn't resonate authentically with a lot of people. So like if you were to be found out to be a ghost writer and you were previously someone perceived as like a educational resource probably feel a little cheap, right? Like you're like ah man I thought you were the guy and like I meet up with you here and I realize that you can't even hold the

conversation that I thought we were holding. Like oh damn, okay. I was talking to a bot, right? like that sucks. Yeah. Um so like yeah, there's a that was a wave that popped off recently. Uh I would advise people against that. I don't have an exit strategy, but maybe like if I'm going to tap out, maybe that's the way to go like. Yeah. What's the what's the latest with Mega Mafia? What's the I I've seen Euphoria uh demo which is which I saw like in November and like knew about it and now it's just on the timeline. That's actually a reminder to me and I was talking to them about it too cuz like even over the last like month and a half it's that same like clip basically. It's just like same clip. Yeah. It's like man like girl in the background like what

the You can just run it back like cuz there's different people on different days and different times and it's just like that's always surprising to me and I'm sure you guys too like I already saw this. Why is everyone excited? It's like it's a different group of people. Yeah. Anyways, yeah. Surprising that thing's been running. Uh but yeah, Mega Mafia 1, they're ready. They're gearing up for mainet which is we're trying to do it in the next few months, right? We're We're Come on, give us a bit more than that. Yeah. I can't I can't can't give any dates and dates have been chosen internally. Uh public mainet achieved internally. Yeah. Yeah. Uh yeah. So I mean we have that uh but we're actually kicking off Mafia 2. We just chose our our 15 teams. We're going to go Copenhagen uh August. So we'll be

there for the month of August learning about them, teaching them about what it means to like build on Omega or be Omega. Yeah. Uh and then try to bring them to market as fast as possible. But like Well, there was like seven or eight in cohort one. Is it 15? Yeah, it's about the same, but like people roll in and out. So, it's like, you know, 15 don't ultimately make it to the finish line and it's not always the original 15 that that finished. So, yeah. Yeah. What were some of your favorites from cohort one? Uh, there's a there's so two. One is hop protocol which is a like a deepen play. It's a a team that's running a a decentralized VPN network and they use like the latency of Megath is used to uh switch between nodes to keep it like their actual access anonymous, right? So

anyone can spin up a node, but like I have I have one side of the information on my node, you have the other side, and someone hops twice to get to like the actual internet. And do you pay to use the node? You would. Well, so like the node runners make money, but yes, the users would pay and then that would like run to the node runners and kind of it's like it's DPN E. So there's that one. And then another one that's kind of consumey is we actually have the number one uh Magic the Gathering player and the number one Hearthstone player working together to create a new card game. really cool. Yeah, it's I guess I don't know if you guys play the ballotro is like a poker slash like TCG that was created. It's really popular. Uh but they're it's a ballotro like game that

they have that's spun up. It's pretty fun. A lot of people are liking it. Yeah. Very cool. I gauge success by other card nerds getting sniped by it. So they keep getting excited which like okay I I assume this is actually like good because the nerds are liking it. And then as far as actual ecosystem apps, I mean what GTE just raised 15 million I think from Paradigm Cap is is finishing. They're almost I think they're ready to go. Mainet I get the sense that a lot of like Euphoria is out there. There's couple others for sure that are ready. Yeah, those are more of the traditional trading ones. Another one is like uh Avon which is doing like a cloud-based lending. So it's like you can actually start getting like market discovery on or onchain price discovery on lending rates. So like it's a little

interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Uh but yeah, they're they're all popping off and they're they're showing other teams are showing interest in investing our app in our applications which is exciting for us because you know obviously that's sentiment growth that's you know bullishness directionally on the chain ecosystem itself. So so what's your take on the club wars man? So uh the I think the argument is generally like uh there's like four there's four ways to to to kind of do it like you can do a club on a really high throughput L1 with shared state with different apps on it. Y you can do a CLB on a really high throughput L1 single app chain L1 hyperlquid. You could do a specialized L2 app chain clo single sequencer or that I guess you could just do a CLB on

a very very fast high throughput chain like Mega E. Um you're probably you might be biased but which of those four is is is the answer? Is there an answer? No, you know I mean as we've seen with everything in this industry there is no answer, right? Like it's going to be a spectrum. It's always a spectrum. And then we get in a debate about like what part of the spectrum is the best part. So it's like obviously there are properties that are advantageous in high capacity composable um low latency systems. Obviously Megie does a lot of that stuff. So like I'm bullish on that. I think that's directionally the right decision. uh it's just a matter of you know like what properties can you get and at what point is the RR on or what is the return on investment of like building out these these additional

properties sacrificing stuff like the centralization whatever to like get 20 milliseconds faster on on latency now again I I think that like our specific design is going to enable some stuff that is that is unique to the market and can beat stuff even like a hyperlid I think you know hyperlids there's no way that any app on mega eat's going to do 12k tape TPS, dude. 12 12k. Yeah, dude. I mean, we're we're aiming higher than that, man. Like, yeah, if you're if you think I'm a bear, bro. If you think if you think 12k TPS is like the end state of this stuff, you're bearish. You got like you got to think higher. This industry is going big and like Yeah. So, so what kind of TPS? It's not even done, right? Like, no, I know. Like they're they're talking about bringing on

equities. They're talking about do it like and so if they think they're going to hit all this scale, right? Like where's that going to go? They're going to actually support the global markets as opposed to our DGEN circles. What's the TPS on something like that? Like they're going to require tens of thousands. But if there's like five apps on Mega E that need high TPS, like yeah, we're just going to we're just going to cross our fingers and pray on and then like actually like there's some unique implementations you can do like talking to M team, right? You can start doing base sequencing on top of a high capacity chain. So then you have like then you're basically unbound even further, right? Because now you have composibility. It's still based, right?

So you have like the the sequencer itself is still the one that's actually ordering transactions and then sequences they c they get app specific sequencing so they can capture their own fees just becomes you know more appealing and obviously it comes with costs but yeah the different options always just converge in some capacity like slightly like different but like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just depends on the lens. Yeah. Ethereum will base sequencing on top of maybe I don't fully wrap my head. Can you maybe unpack that one more time? Yeah. I mean, you think about what base sequencing is for Ethereum, right? It's like you you pass like you get guarantees, you pass the transactions on to validators, but like they they don't necessarily have to have all the same properties as the Ethereum L1. So, they have a sidecar, they have a whatever,

but it would be something similar. So, like, okay, maybe you colllocate another sequencer or uh a specific server right next to the actual sequencer, right? So, now you have all of these things that can be even used in separate data availability, separate ordering rules, separate whatever. That thing handles that and then that thing has awareness of everything that is going into the sequencer like which was a private me but like maybe you expose it to that one sequencer that allows it to be able to say okay we can compose with this stuff we can add to it. So now you have two machines technically that are working together to then pack all this stuff into a already high throughput thing and you have a higher bound right and you can use celestial DA for for the base stuff and then you can use Ian DA for

the main one they use blobs for the other one like you get composability options so mainet in September days no days people tried to squeeze out we'll do Q's I'll do I'll do Q3 we're trying to get to Q3 oh god he's committed to Q3 Good boy. All right, Brad. Thanks for coming, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. I I appreciate you. What do you have on the on the schedule? Uh I'm actually I think I'm missing Lay's Oh, no. 3 minutes. Uh Lay's going to be giving a talk here about scaling the EVM and uh beating out the SVM. I know that's the debate everyone tries to get out of us.

Y um so we'll be doing that and then you know after parties seeing seeing some people shaking some hands. You know how it is. Awesome. In the arena. In the arena making things happen. Shaking hands. Espresso martinis. None none of those but I'll take the offer. Yeah. You don't drink? I do. It's just like, you know, why like Yeah. Yeah. I I spent a lot of like previously it was that I spent a lot of time working out. Like I would be two hours in the gym doing all this I was like, man, if I'm grinding, why drink? Yeah. 20 hours a week to do this Why am I drinking to ruin it for like I can still have a good time. I don't like I don't need it.

Yeah. But I I've had my fuckups. This tattoo was after a night of drinking. It's like I've I've been there. I've I you know I've I've charted that course. You know my favorite tattoo? Uh the other one I was going say. Yeah, it's literally the only other one. It's this one and then the rest of my body. Yeah. So that one. Nice. Yeah. All right, bro. Cheers, man. Yeah. Yeah, bro. I appreciate it, man. Enjoy the talk. Enjoy the week. Cheers, man. All right, let's do a little quick little check-in on the market, eh? What do you say? Let's see. Let's see. Let's see. Give the people what they want. What are you looking at?

I I mean, just takeaways from so far today have been Yeah. Hey me, Bitcoin, AI, and stable coins. Um, Bitcoin, AI, and stable coins. Those are your takeaways. We had Ellie from Starknet. We had William from Botanics. We had Jeff from Hemi. All of these guys are competing for Bitcoin market dominance to generate Bitcoin yield. Yeah, you had the you had the Botanics conversation. I did not have that one. They're all They're all in that Bitcoin yield world.

BTC at 107. Alts getting crushed. What's new? Welcome to the future. If I remember correctly on our first stream about a month ago, you called the Bitcoin dominates and I was right for a while. I was right. I was right for like Yeah, you were right for like a month. Three or four days. A month there. But yeah, that thing is not top, but who cares? That thing will come back down. Market's looking good. We got Sy from story up next. Okay. See where where he's at. Yeah. Let's see. Uh otherwise just going to pull in our next one here. What do we from the crowd? Oh, from the crowd.

From the crowd. It's cooled off a little bit. It has. These fans are putting in work. These guys are uh he he got a drunk. What's his name again? Uh that's Leonard from K. Leonard. Leo, come here. Show the camera what you got. Come on. Bring bring the drawing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What what camera do we have up right now? The main one they're bring. So, this is what you get here at the rollup. I've got this. I think that's the the most like Yeah, that's definitely the most amazing painting or drawing of myself. Um, I'll frame it. That's special, guys. That's really special. Honestly, I'll uh I mean

I'll frame it and I'll always remember. beautiful conversation. I mean, it it helps to be a handsome, man. I mean, hey, take it easy, won't you? Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely. Cheers, brother. Cheers, brothers. Yes, sir. Did you get your wristband? This guy wristband. Can we This will get This wristband gets you into the rollup happy hour. Oh, yeah. When is when is it happening? On Thursday. We'll send you the link. Oh, yes. Nice. Uh, I'm going to put it here. Thank you so much, guys. Keep it nice and light. We'll see you there. That's it, man. That's it. part of the fam.

Thank you so much. We'll see you next week. See you tomorrow, guys. Pleasure, brother. Cheers. I'll send that to you there. Send him a little invite. See, hospitality, man. Hospitality. Brendan's Brendan's cooking behind the scenes. Shout out to Marcelo. He's a man. Man, been cutting all day. Brderick. Yep. The boys. Kevin. Kevin putting in the work. I think we got one more, guys. Brendan, that guy was just taken aback by that drawing. Yeah, he was he was floored. He said it. Was that the previous guy there?

Three unclaimed. Really? Oh, we're going to have to hand those out. Oh, we'll have to put out a tweet. Bring it over. Our resident artist doing self-portraits. Got MT. Oh, MT was just standing up. Who is this one? The British guy. James. Yeah James. The shades were a great great way to start off.

We are rounding out the day. Maybe two or so more more characters. We've got things things happening left and right. Friends are reuniting. [Music] We're bringing bringing more crypto youth into the mix. Gajesh from Ian Layair is entering the scene. We're live right now. Oh Out of the Okay, you're on the show. Oh, great to be on the show. How do you feel? Amazing. Amazing. Wow.

probably sweaty. Yeah, it is. Yes, you have hackathon participant. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is for this to get a free ticket. Don't ask him what he built, though. Don't ask him what he built. Yeah. Well, I did build something during that time. Not just not not here. Okay. Yeah. How's it going, guys? It's going great, man. Uh it's been a long day for us. Uh I'm just filling you up here. Um so, Shiron was talking about the latest uh vibes code. Was it called Vibes Code? Vibes Score. Yeah. Vibes Score. Yes. Vibes Score. Yeah. Yeah. Was that was that your idea that like that gives me like very like Zoomer energy, you know? That's something that I would think about. No, it wasn't by me, but it was it was a Zoomer in our team. So, he So, yeah, we have more Zoomer. I'm not

the only young guy in the in the research team, but uh So, what what what was the story like? How old are you? Although, you don't have to share. Okay. So, how did you come across and ultimately get poached and wrapped up in all of this? Like what is Yeah, you started with Salana, right? Oh, no. Totally something. It started people know you as kind of the young guy on the block, but maybe you could could tell the story. Okay. Yeah, sure. Awesome. Uh, yeah. So, I started coding when I was seven. I really loved building games and like I started with Scratch and then like I kept learning new languages. So, um, I was picking up on like I started with then C then C++. I just I I tried to get

a grasp of like like how to build websites, apps like just get like a broad variety of like what's possible and see uh but I never stopped to anything and then finally uh during co I had like all the freedom in the world. So I I started spending it in like every different possible thing I could do. So I started making videos like I I made like bunch of videos and like I had I think about a million views luckily because everyone was on YouTube on YouTube like 12 or 13 at this time just doing like coding tutorials. Yeah, coding tutorials and Wow. Yeah, actually I just coding tutorials just and uh yeah later I later that year then I started like doing freelancing and like getting

like trying to build apps which can actually generate like money but most of the platforms like didn't allow me to actually monetize my things because I'm underage like there's no way they're g giving me access to like stripe right now. Um so and then like I during the same time around the same time I got like introduced to this like webinar which was happening on basics of Bitcoin and blockchain and there I earned like $20 of Bitcoin and I had like I did no identity verification. and I just got $20 and like wow this is this is amazing technology and I went in the rabbit hole more and then finally I found Ethereum and then I was mind blown by like how um you can just build like these decentralized applications like I was 13

and like I could build all these things and like no one like looked into my previous history of like okay do I have like experience in building these apps no it's permissionless it's permissionless exactly like exactly like the name is wait what's the word it starts with an M uh meritocracy. Meritocracy completely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I got into that. I like I started off like doing freelancing for like bunch of like bunch of projects back then and then finally I was like well I'm doing all this but I'm not actually let's try to bundle all the knowledge together and build something.

And I built like a yield aggregator on polygon and like defy server was a big thing during that. So yeah, like I I built a yield aggregator and I had like $7 million of TVL for that which was like again crazy for me because I was 13 and I didn't uh like dude no who like who's going to give money to a 13-year-old to manage right the smart but you have a smart exactly so everything was immutable like you can just see this this this should work yes trust the code uh yeah later uh I later in December like once the defi yield started drop and like the protocol wasn't making any money. I closed it down. Then I I worked on building like another project which was somewhere

around the same idea of yield aggregator. But I saw that there is a huge like all the money is being like it's all the yield used to move from chain to chain and a user can't keep up with like oh I have to bridge all that stuff and it was really hard. So like I built a project which could like transfer all the money um around different chains. So raised a million dollars for that and then like uh around 2022 I ended up like selling it and like like it was it was a whole like it it was going to a bare market. So I I didn't really want to deal with it more but yeah but during that time I spent a lot of time in Salana. I I built about like like 50 60 smart contracts in Salana basically and um I was really

engaged there. I really love the Salana community. Then uh around let me recolct I also interned with Salano for some time but and it must have been 2023 then. Yeah. Oh no this is 2022. Early 2022 I and so by then you had raised a million dollars for a project and then sold it not not long after and exited that project. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. And uh that's right. And after that I I joined FTX Ventures for some time and then FX Collabures FTX like a very small like I used to this is an incredible resume just the entertaining and vibrant. Yeah. Then after FDA

collapsed, I worked on the ton ecosystem for some time and Tron uh ton ton ton yeah telegram e but um but I didn't really en like I didn't really learn something like I really wanted to get into like academics and like more like spend more time in like the the roots of the things. So um then at the same time I actually saw like I had raised like the seed series A or seed if I'm not wrong it's 2023 and I was like well I like I messaged I'm like hey can I invest and he's like yeah sure like you should and then we we started talking more and like there's a position open and I joined layer smart contract engineer I've been here for like last two years like building apps building yeah just just hacking around things

insane so so recently I layer put out uh the iing cloud uh and just kind of pushing this verifiable cloud. Uh what are some of the best uh builders and applications being built on the IGEN cloud right now that you're excited about? Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think we started with uh WIP score. So, wipe Score is like what it is end of the day is verifiable incentives. It's a platform where like you don't uh like there's you just have this one algorithm. This this one AI judge which is going to like judge your tweet and reward you based on that. It's like that damn simple like you never trust a human of like hey like I like we trust like a neutral here judge to make all these decisions right now and where all these

and and it allocates other people points. So yeah, we have put like a 50k prize spot on this and people will be um the winner is going to like be a contractor with us and also get like I don't know about like 10k and and I think you guys are pretty excited about opacity as well. Yeah. Yeah. What other apps are are like as are kind of like you know coming out that are top of the line? Sure thing. Yeah. So opacity. Yeah. Opacity is like ziggl is is like an amazing product like dude you can you can prove like any private data right now and like just have it unlocks so so much capabilities to do like um like you have platforms

like tadada who can just like disrupt uh Uber like uh like there's like a do uh there's like a do service which is like coming up and like they're just using this data to like get all these like users into the platform. I think it's just mind-blowing how how much it can bring. Then we also have like all the services like witness who have like proof of location services. Like it's like there's like so much like you can actually build a Fortnite in person and like maybe have like some like meme coner fun element to like have uh like incentivize that moment.

I'm not sure if you guys have seen the I I I think I wasn't even born during this time but I think someone did this experiment where they uh like you had to put a balloon up in the air and like everyone has to gather. I think those are some like fun things which can be built on layer uh with with witness. Let me actually think uh and with like compute and like IGN verify coming in like you can you can build like we're making crypto more expressive like previously you had to like right now if you want to do any complex like for example a fund strategy or like you you want to build like a complex yield aggregator you can't do it with without having like trusting like one party but here with layer you can just have uh you

can just write code upload it to our like soft like our like just write a docker container you know uploaded our platform we'll we'll run it and like if uh I mean the operators will run it and if uh anything is bad you're slashed and like just take my example um anyone from maybe like India any part of the world where they don't have enough resources to like build these things they can just build these apps and build this fun strategies and like it's completely metocratic like they don't have to like they have like 10 years of experience in like banking or something you just need like a strategy which makes money last thing for Yeah. Uh how excited are are you for Mega ETH mainet and the other chains building on IG DA? I I know you guys are shipping throughput there

to a whole another level. How's that going? Oh, it's going amazing. I think I'm so excited about Megat like the the bunch of apps which are like like are going to be launched. It's crazy like uh like GD euphoric like all these apps are going to build like just unlock a new category of like builders at this point. So I'm very excited. Yes, sure. Awesome. Josh, thank you for your time, man. Thanks for having me. Incredible story. Incredible story. I uh I think when I was seven, I was playing uh I don't know what I was doing. I was playing I was probably playing soccer. You weren't vodking.

Well, it's not vodking. All right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Come on, bud. I'll just be like Okay. Yeah, it's fun. Come on. Nice socks. I should bring socks here. Here we go. Yeah, I don't story set. So, I don't want to be doing a product placement for another company. No, no, no. Just hide those. Well, we'll give you the the wristband, too. This will get you into the Great. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Okay, this is great. That'll get you into the rollup happy hour tomorrow.

Wow. All right, that's why. Is it Is it working? Is it working? Awesome. Big big news, huh? OKX Ventures story. Yes. Yes. Yes. Tell us about that. What's the uh actually just kind of walk us through h how that happened. What was your thought process when you had the idea? You wanted to build this out, build this uh you know $10 million fund with them. What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. So, I think really important thing about the success of a chain is having uh successful protocols being built on top of it, ecosystem applications.

Um we wanted to find a partner who have a really good liquidity distribution uh that could uh that kind of is aligned in the vision and can help us uh list the projects that are coming on top of story and are becoming very successful uh more in an accelerated path. Obviously there's no guarantee and there's no promise here but you know because the OKX ventures team uh is very very closely working collaborating together to handpick these protocols and ecosystems uh and investing together.

They will have you know a more direct line uh with with with the team there. Um they have a massive wallet. they have a massive exchange and having that close relationship uh with between the two teams and being able to fund these companies together are is very exciting and we'll be soon I think within a month within a month announcing um know the first investment uh from that fund but not you know so it's going to take time like two you know three four weeks but already there's a kind of little winner yeah maybe you can shout some some some of them your most uh favorite and exciting projects. Tell me out of the story ecosystem or were you

most excited about? We've had conversations with quite a few, but is there is there any that stick out to you that are doing things a little bit different, a little bit more unique? So, I I think there are two things uh that I'm very excited by. Uh first, I mean, several, but I I'll just I would just I just want to pick out a few. First is we've been already talking about it a lot. a company called Arya Protocol. It's an IP tokenization protocol. So IP is a massive asset class like a $70 trillion asset class. But you know it's actually everyone from Blackstone, KKR, PIMCO, this massive private equity or asset manager, they all have a massive music catalog. The reason is it has it gives you stable yields like treasury ts

uh or real estate from royalties for royalties. So set 5 to 15% depending on the music asset and it's a going to be a steadily increasing asset because there are more streamers coming in from India to developing countries is always going to going to increase. So it's a very very investable asset class uh that where you have a stable yield pump you know spreading out the st uh IL but also but you know there's a really good capital gain path or an exit path by these m music catalog companies from private equity funds to huge labels like UMG that want to actually buy out these uh assets. So, so that do uh they uh they gave that access uh to crypto users

with stablecoin investment uh from music uh Justin Bieber peaches to Blackpink music and all these other types of music pieces that are really really top. So we have Taylor Swift songs, we've had um Madonna songs, right? We're going to expand that, right? they're going to be kind of announcing further 50 to$150 million TVL uh with exciting labels, exciting funds coming in. So that's I think one very very exciting protocol. Um that's all story. Uh and a second is uh there are companies a category of companies that actually has authorized IPs and be able to make derivatives on

top of this IP with AI remixing. So there's a company called Avalo. It's a uh they have cross uh balain uh they have uh advance and these IPs are registered on the blockchain. Yeah. And you with almost like you vibe code you actually with remixing tools you can create derivative crux chipsets uh uh you can make a derivative shoes or derivative uh whatever you know uh very very easily. You be now kind of the belief here is that if you have an IP Lego piece with programmable IP rights attached with AI tools you can make very exciting creation very easily. Back in the days,

the best you can do when you have these IP is make a fanfiction or fan art. But now you can create not only just this kind of derivative merch. We're going to have um actually vcoded games. So we're talking to a on boarding a Korean uh game developer called Verse 8. Actually, it allows you to create you know games on top of someone else like it five coded within an hour. very high fidelity almost semi Pokemon Go level. Yeah. Very very quickly. Right. Right.

Right. So we're going to be announcing showing those games how they can be created very easily very soon. Second, third is um we are uh I mean this is kind of an alpha you know something that's going to come out come soon but we think there's a very exciting exciting space in data uh data meets AI meets uh kind of IP registration licensing. So all these AI model companies have insatiable demand for data. So all the model architecture is commoditized deep to um uh open AI and compute is monopolized by Nvidia and

it's just commodity right just if you have more money you just can't get it but everyone is looking especially for the physical AI model robotics models or like you know or you know kind of the models that are building on the world of atoms and bits uh because the data that you want for your robotics companies, you cannot just get from crawling on the web. Like you you're holding this cup for like different angles for like 10 hours or you're just typing on the keyboard for 12 hours with different lighting, different like different kind of angles. This is really hard to get, right? This is why Facebook bought scale. So, so, so but also at the same time, these are all private data. They want safe IP license. Yeah. Like imagine

you are trying to put your iPhone videos and try to someone's going to use it like there's a massive IP risk. Yeah. Yeah. Right. All these things, right? Yeah. So they want like a explicit declared IP rights of this data. It's being trained upon for these new set of new frontier AI models beyond LLM. And so story serving as an IP layer but also building exciting ecos having an exciting ecosystem application that incentivizes and coordinates collection to labeling and all these things on crypto rails.

Yep. Is something that we're very excited by and hopefully we can share. And what is that what is that one called? I can't. So the other the the other thing that I think SY they they are getting really interested in and pushing forward on is uh on the on like outside of OKX but within this institutional realm of coming on and bringing their assets onchain onto onto story. Uh how's what you know what's the what can you tell us about that? What's the latest update there that you're willing to share? How have those conversations been going? I I think there is a huge appetite on especially kind of the creative IP owners uh because uh the funding is getting more

and more difficult for these IPs but they they want to utilize the crypto rails for this global financial liquidity boost traffic also. So even memes are IPs right like I I think The reason why the reason why Trump Minkco is so successful is a it's a verified I like it's like Trump IP verified coin right because it's Trump himself launching it's my IP right being put on crypto but how is that so that's Trump but like tie us into the institutions here a bit more yeah yeah so so because of that I think I think we're talking to u uh very uh exciting funds which hold

big music catalog or record labels I see have music catalog or actually Hollywood studios that holds mega IP but they want to actually create a spin-off and can you actually launch this spin-off in a memecoin style raising money uh actually launching a coin but there's a revenue burning like if actually that IP revenue gets come IP revenue gets created that actually comes into buying back the token you buy burn buyback burn style like Hyperlquid does. Yeah. So then you have you're using this IP you have not just meme cocoin it's an IPcoin. Yeah. IPcoin where I'm launching

as an IP owner and actually there's some revenue tie into that IP. Yeah. That's why I'm I'm curious, you know, you been in the restaurant business, the education business, now you're entering the the crypto foray. Like what is the next like when you set your sights and your motivation approach to the industry? What do you set your sights on? What is your next what is the inspiration, the motivation that that keeps you going and pushes you forward? Yeah. So last two right before this company I've been working on a company at the intersection of storytelling mobile for 8 years and they sold that company to a big Asian tech company called Cacao 4 years ago you know that

was capitalizing on this shift to mobile mobile right uh basically everyone is going to read and consume content on mobile that content is going to be episodic by size and that's going to actually utilize a mobile business native business model like Candy Crush where you pay microp payment per chapter per episode if you wait it's free if you don't want to wait you pay 30 cents per chapter with inapp currency so that was the model but now I think there are two big angles here at the intersection that was an IP company IP uh and uh and new technology I think the new technology is crypto and AI right IP and crypto I think crypto is best at uh financial rails like global

financial rails, investing, trading, right, and speculating. So that bet within the IP space that made most sense is IP RWA, you know. So that's why I have area, we have area, we're trying to bring more and more I more stuff at the intersection of IP and finance. The other very interesting thing within the IP vertical that intersects with AI, the biggest squaring subcategory of IP is I think data sets that are needed for AI models. And so I call it like real world data IP, real world data, right?

That that data uh the first generation of data that was sucked in by AI model companies are web web content. to be honest, they're not um they're not very respective of respective of IP rights. No, they just gobbled up the internet. They just completely over IP rights, ownership rights around this IP and they just like they just gobbled it up and they just spit out bunch of IP infringing content. You know, even like a Studio Jubilee owner should get some attribution or get some revenue off of all the studio studio Jubilee, you know, created what inspired content,

right? Yeah. Remixes that are coming out. I don't think they got it anything right. Yeah. Yeah. But okay, that train we want to fix as much as we can. But I think the more also interesting feel that we can capture right away is now all these companies from Tesla Optimus to 11 LF they're like they're yearning for real world data to train their model like point of view egocentric video footage of yourself your voice all these things and they need like 12 dialects 20 dialects for 11 laps all their things They're they are looking for those data they want it to be IP safe. Yeah.

Explicit consent that can be put on blockchain. So those things I think if someone who brings what scale AI has done onchain especially now that scale AI is just getting rescended all the contracts by other competitive AI companies but also using almost like exit infinity style uh crypto incentives to bootstrap all the data collection from different parts of the world including developing world. I think it's going to be a massive opportunity and make it IP safe and IP verified. So that one is super exciting for uh for me and the company and the story team because that is a that is a that is an opportunity coming out of the new AI

trend. So the crypto trend AI trend and the what crypto and AI can do well what is that intersection between crypto AI and IP. So that's that that is that's keeping up keeping us up at night and that's what we're focused on. That's our IPWA. That's actually data layer for AI companies using crypto incentives and crypto immutable blockchain that's actually declaring IP rights on that. Yeah, that's why man. Um, really appreciate you joining us and and having this conversation. Looking forward to the next couple months with what you guys do. Yeah, we we'll have more announcements coming from probably like mid mid to late July and then maybe we can catch up in a month. Yeah, man. I mean, I'll be I'll be around at the uh

Korean conference in September. Yeah, we'll I hope that you're there. Of course, we'll we'll be doing some exciting things there. Awesome. Awesome. More to share. Thank you. Bye. See you soon. See you, sir. All righty, guys. I think uh I think that about does it for the day. Closes out. Yeah, that was a great What time is it? 4:30. I need a beer. I think we call it. That was great. Sy is a legend. We had just we had several legends. We're uh Sy is getting his uh six and a half hour stream. Sy is getting his portrait right now. We we we we got ours our money's worth from Marcelo and the boys. That's why he's taking a picture of his portrait. Thank you guys. Love it.

Brendan's Look, Brendan's wideeyed from absolutely drawing his hands off. Guys, thank you for uh tuning in today. It's been an absolute pleasure. Day one, we'll be back. Day two. Final thoughts. Don't really have any. and just mentally mentally ready for uh for tomorrow. So, thank you guys. Yeah, thank you so much tuning in. the longest stream of uh of all time.