The Rollup TV: Monday, June 16th

Transcript

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the Rollup TV. Today's episode has five awesome guests. Starting off with Himanu from World Foundation, rolling into some of our venture friends, Robbie from Dragonfly, Jonah from Blockchain Cap, another AI ZK engineer with uh DC Builder from from World. Um, and then wrapping out at the end of the stream uh with another awesome guest in uh ASUKI's Zagabond. So guys, should be a fun stream today. A lot happened over the weekend. We had um we literally had um Trump today with Eric Trump has has put out something with regards to uh Tron

going public. We had a massive collapse on some tokens. Uh we had Circle doing well today. So, a lot to go over. Um and we're going to jump right into to some of the most recent uh news and stuff that we saw this weekend that I definitely want to make a point out of. Uh starting with this Polyhedra collapse. So, I mean, look, I put a tweet about this that was like, um, can anybody explain what happened here? And frankly, kind of all I ended up getting was that, uh, there was a DEX pool, uh, on Binance Smart Chain that somehow these farmers figured out how to, uh, you know, gain this this pool. So there was six whale wallets that were coordinating largecale dumps after converting this KOJ

uh some shitcoin to ZKJ which is Polyhedra's coin. Um a couple addresses offloaded 5 million 10 million and this just triggered a bunch of cascades. Uh I think there was like 80 there was like 100 million in longs wiped out. Um, and there was actually liquidity being pulled from the ZKJ DEX pool on Pancake Swap on Binance Chain, uh, with this KOJ token before the main selloff. Um, so if you scroll down, you you'll kind of see through some of the actual, uh, like like what happened um, and kind of like how it all played out. Uh so as you can see basically before the crash uh there was these kind of wallets that started

to to move liquidity um from the co the KOJ token to ZKJ of course classic and then they proceeded to then dump these these uh tokens pretty aggressively. So the chart is down 80%. It looks terrible. Um it's really not a great look for the team nor just the entire space as a whole. I think it really raises more serious questions about insider coordination, uh, slippage exposure and DEX market structures and just kind of like how these things have all played out slowly but surely. So yeah, I mean guys, this is just another one of those things that kind of it reminded me of Mantra, Mantra's kind of uh token nuke and yeah, just not a great

look. My my take here is that this was definitely done by the insiders. I also heard from some friends that the team had pretty much all closed source code. So yeah, not really sure what to think of this other than just, you know, that this is always possible. Um, and to be mindful when you're operating and and kind of seeing these things. I would stay far away from this project. Um, and pretty much just uh not touch it. So that's the ZKJ stuff. That's that's the poly uh Polyhedra drama. Uh, but more interestingly enough, uh, Bybit announced their hybrid decks. So, what this is going to do is this going to actually allow for buy bit to come on chain. They're coming onto Salano and they're calling it buy real. Now, first

thought is like why wasn't this done on mantle? People were asking that in the comments of the tweet uh and just in in general. I think the obvious answer is that Salana is is the home to a lot of the retail trading and just a lot of the general trading groups and so that's why it's done on Salana. But you have Ben here who actually got hacked for a billion dollars uh just a couple months back while I was in Hong Kong. Um he's announcing Bereal, our first onchain DEX incubated by Bybit live at the end of the month. Uh it's not just another DEX. It pitches itself as being a hybrid combining sex grade liquidity with DeFi native transparency. Um some of the cool features unified liquidity with the RFQ system and central limit market maker

routing similar to a meteora uh low slippage trades low slippage trades me protection um so kind of similar stuff that a lot of the salon and indexes have been working on and yeah I mean it's really focusing on real traders real assets real value and seems to be kind of aligned with this like broader uh push towards more like institutional real users I just think that this is like this is the nail in the coffin for um centralized exchanges dominance at large. Right? So what what we've been seeing in in the space for a while is that there's been a trend if you like sex dex dominance. So the amount of volume in trades on centralized exchanges versus dexes it's dexes have

been gaining since 2020 since 2019. And I think this is just further proof. I think hyperlquid pushed this uh these kind of initiatives forward. I think that the better uh regulatory environment with our administration pushed this forward and then now I think centralized exchanges are realizing that the future of our industry is going to be on chain and that that's where they need to be operating. So that to me that's my take is that this is extremely extremely positive development for decentralized exchange dominance going forward and that we will see a this trend just continue to persist. So, shout out to the BBEC guys. Definitely exciting. Uh, and looking forward to seeing more from them. Um, another thing that happened on Salana is we had a we

had seven ETF filings uh over the weekend. Um, we had Fidelity, Van, 21 shares Gayscale Franklin Franklin Templeton, Bitwise, Canary, and more filed on June 13th. So, it was actually on Friday. Um, all filings including staking language, a new twist not yet seen in prior ETF waves. This is good. I think this will also happen for the Ethereum ETF. And again, my take here, as I said last week, was that I think that this is going to actually trigger more of uh a staking ETFs, but b a more broad like index crypto index uh ETF type of um product. Next, uh so there's back and forth expected. Again, this was

originally reported by Blockworks. Um, James Sa Seafart of I think it's Bloomberg uh does not anticipate approval this week, which was, you know, this week, but previously it was estimated that 90% chance of a Salana ETF approval in 25. I think we get that. I think it's probably higher than that now, closer to 95. Um, so there's also a possibility that I I would say that I think is worth pointing out that uh Salana and Ethereum staking ETFs could be approved at the same time. So like basically there's all there there are Ethereum ETFs now, but we do not have staking abilities for them. There's a world where this leads to actually being able to have uh staking um ETFs for

Ethereum as a result of this. So I I think that's particularly interesting for the Ethereum community and just more broadly for uh the entire space as a whole. I think investors look at Bitcoin in the way that it's this like cryp or this very digital gold hard asset, something that you can really get behind and hold and you don't really care about yield. Whereas I think with uh the other tokens, they're going to want yield because they're going to realize that like there's this inflation adjusted uh basically you have to beat inflation on these proof ofstake networks in order to actually uh stay up to pace and not get diluted. And so I think that the staking aspect for some of these proof ofstake

networks uh is going to be uh more important than for some of the proof ofstake or proofof work networks like Bitcoin. Um, and so that I think is like something to to note for the overall um state of proof of stake of ETFs um and kind of like where we go from from here. We're actually going to pull up a a a new news announcement uh that has just came out today which is Trump and Tron. Um um and this to me deserves a WTF. Um because what's what's actually happening here is um we have live Eric Trump backing Tron. So Tron is going to

go public um and they're going to try to do a a a similar Bitcoin strategy thing where they're going to try to come to an IPO in the States. Eric Trump is advising them uh to actually help on this. um and and TRX is going public, which to me is just like I I don't really understand how that how this is going to happen. But if you look at the Tron chart, like it literally it literally has just been up only since 2020. The most like supply controlled chart I've seen in a long time with like excuse me, very little dips and just like it it's you know I I think a lot of people in the Western world feel a

certain way about Tron. I actually saw some pretty some pretty sad takes from some of the OGs like Moon Overlord about how, you know, this this ex this specific event plus Coinbase teaming up with the US Army and sponsoring the recent US Army uh uh promotion is just like a sign that like this administration plus with just with the way that these companies are handling, it's kind of going against the core ethos of of the space just seem a lot more negativity towards Trump uh ad administration after these two things.

And also Coinbase got a lot of heat over the weekend for um supporting the army, which I thought was like was, you know, is warranted in some sense from the deep perspective of the crypto ethos, but it also requires a certain level of understanding of like market awareness, right? Like I think with this Tron thing, this deserves a lot more flak than am I connecting on Zoom or the this new the other which am Coinbase supporting the US Army. So uh I I I think that this is just again I put out a tweet just now um that kind of explained my thoughts toward things and I said Tron going public is a sign of mania. Circle pumping hard from IPO is a

sign of mania. Bitco billion dollar Bitcoin leveraged vehicles is a sign of mania. Privy being acquired by Stripe is a sign of mania. This tweet is a sign of mania. The end. And it just kind of speaks to the state of things today. And and I and I I mean, Monday morning news cycle, what do you get? You get Trump and Tron. It's just like it it doesn't get any better. So, all right guys, we're going to get our first guest in here shortly. Um he is one of the co-founders of um of Sentient. Um, and he is going to actually be talking to us about some of the the the recent uh developments from Sensient. But I've got a bunch of questions about some of the stuff about

Bellagi, some of of his tweets about open-source AI um, and more. So, why don't we get him into the back end here, get him up here, and let's get started. Hima, great to see you, man. Welcome to the show. Good to see you too, Andy. Nice to be here. Yeah, man. Uh are you calling in from SF today? No, I'm in Dubai. Okay, right. You're in Dubai. Got it. Well, I appreciate you uh hopping on late. Uh I I know it's a bit late over there and you guys have have been working quite a bit. It it's our first time chatting. So, um would love to just get to know kind of your

backstory a bit. you know how did you find or how did you come up with the idea to uh start sentient and um you know why is this an important things for your career right yeah I'm one of the co-founders of sentient roughly I look at product and tech and the idea for sentient just come from this this one set of crazy meetings with sep and shiram and our other co-founders sir another co-founder promote uh which was mainly around this idea that we are re-entering the late '90s era of the internet except this time it is with AI and very similar parallels are being drawn very similar centralizing dominating forces like

Microsoft are coming up. Uh but what what the discussion is around what new is happening this time and how does one make sure that this time it looks different and what role can we play there and from that sentient came out as this this framework which can enable open and decentralized AGI and keep the same build energy flowing which led to this point of AI. Yeah, man. I mean, I I spoke to um um one of your investors actually on the podcast. Uh we had him in the city last week, Anand Ay, and we spoke about uh this this really large vision about um why this category of of decentralized AI is important. And we kind of mapped out

how right now if you think in the abstract as like the super intelligence of all of the combined LLMs and the resources and you know financial social human capital going into that you know 95% of that is occurring within closed doors in mega corporations in the valley right and we've got this small group of folks who are building for a future that is going to actually kind of I don't think it's going to rival and combat it necessarily really but it is a bit of an opposing force and and you know I spoke to Anand about how I think there is going to have to be some sort of critical event or there at least needs to be something which draws the need for more education of the consequences of a

of let's just say this abstract super intelligence being owned by few and I think we can draw a lot of parallels to history in in in this sense but from my mind it it really feels like you throw on a like a classic rock song and you're like, "Look, man, we're gonna go fight the good fight." Um, you just try to like reposition the the power in this industry. I'm just curious like how you're thinking about it more broadly as well holistically and um, you know, kind of if that if that if that is the right way to like frame it with regards to the like the core mission of Sentient and just of you and the people in this smaller space.

Yeah. So there there's some something something phenomenal happening which is extremely exciting. It's not it not not negative at all. It's super positive about how this new technology is going to take everything forward in terms of how productive we are. Starting with productivity just starting with productivity and going beyond uh productivity how how we interact with each other how as a society we move forward and essentially can make our attention span to infinite by giving us our clones who are minds and which is very fundamental economic growth. I'm already cloning my voice actually I'm cloning my voice for uh advertisements on the on the show.

Well, you have good voice, man. Yeah, I would use your clone voice. So, yeah. Yeah. So, so you know that that's happening and that's completely crazy development. This is one part of it. The other part of it is what every every large or small or big and small company says that this is the era of creative builders. Software engineering won't be about won't be about making sure that your data structures are tightly used. It won't be about those things anymore. It would be it would become about being creative being this person who has a bunch of ideas which they want to validate outside basically product role will become software engineering. So it will become a creator economy and creator role in software

engineering which will unleash millions of new experiences. The big question is where would this build and where would all this creativity sit? That's one part of it. The other part of it is what's the best way to coordinate all of that to give us all the innovation and AI that we deserve for this new world. And that's the big question. So first answer this is the camp one. This is the this camp always comes up at when these technologies come up. This happened as I said last time in the late '9s. The it's not necessarily evil, right? It's basically there's so much economic opportunity and so much capital starts coming in that one has to make sure that you want to dominate the whole market and to give return on that kind of capital and that's where this

originally Microsoft came it was a bit late but it came in the in the internet race and this time there are a few players not too many just two three big players uh who are painting the same picture that the best way to for all the builders to build is with us and we will give it to everybody else and that's the best way and our thesis is just as in the case of internet this was not the best way this would be extremely limited it's [ __ ] and and and the just as in the case of internet there were some critical critical inventions of the browser of the search engine the way it operates which enabled that world which led to this next evolution we need to we need to have

those critical inventions the critical aggregating offer brings to come out that enable this open system to go forward. That's what sentient is building a community build open AGI. So you supported in a similar vein a friend of yours I presume Verun Moan who who recently tweeted that within less than 5 days notice Enthropic decided to cut off nearly all of their first party capacity to claude 3x models. um they have now seen model availability issues and um they had to quickly ramp up capacity on other inference providers uh for their windsurf AI tool. Um you know they were using Gemini now um and they

were quite disappointed by the short notice with regards to this action. Is this a a symptom of the problem that you're trying to solve? um you know and does this prove that open- source AI is going to win or just a reminder you know that mo that there are monopolies on models already 100% this this is this is exactly one of those examples where where when you have this kind of thing the moment a business model goes above a threshold you want to own it completely you don't want others to have it that's not how decentralized companies are designed that's not how boardrun companies that design right like in a sense they have to make they

have to give return on that billion dollars billions of dollars of capital that you keep on hearing about hundred billion dollar of capital right how do you give return on that dominate the whole thing the everything comes to you it can be good but there's a lot of but it's not good the reason being that then you have to align everything with their road map with their thing and you know who knows what whims and fancies are there for example winds is a great product could and it's it's a very good path but suddenly there is some reason and you know stop support the same can happen even for a cursor which is a great product right but I don't want another third party app building on my models and giving it to you why don't I

have it the whole thing for my model especially when your revenue starts uh being comparable to my model revenue itself it becomes a significant chunk and that's when these things come up so this is the economic play but there's also strategic play about who I want to support who I want to destroy and no single company can have that play, right? Gotcha. It has to be open. This is just too big. This is just Yeah. Yeah. No, I totally I totally agree. And and I think one big part of that is the verification aspect, right? Like I I think that's been a consistent throughine that we've seen. Um you know, and you have you have big, you know, big people talking about it as well. Well, I think this is one property of blockchain that we really get to have uh is this

verifiability. This, you know, end users get guarantees. They're first class citizens of a network. And Belgi actually recently wrote that that AI verifying is the real bottleneck, right? He said AI prompting scales because prompting is just typing, but AI verifying doesn't scale because verifying AI output involves much more than typing. Um, do you agree that verification is crypto's ultimate use case in this crypto AI intersection or is that just like the current form that is a easily understandable narrative?

But that may not be like the like the long-term uh you know uh let's say matchmade in in heaven for for these two technologies. Verification is an important part of it. Let me break down this into break down this a little bit into two parts. So first thing is when you compare with late '90s for the internet this time we have more to align open source this time we have crypto to support us and what the way that helps is that it gives us very complex ecosystem to share our profits to actually have money flow going not just not just uh uh good heart but actual money flow going which will make business businesses sustainable it's not I it's not open source movement of the kind that I want to do it because

I'm a revolutionary and I want to have this view. That's a good gesture too. But this is more sustainable because of crypto. So crypto not only gives crypto has to be used here alignment in the sense that economic alignment all the incentives all the accounting. This is very complex flow unlike previous era of advertisement and recommendation engine where only one party serves you at the end and that party pays Google. many many parties will serve in the middle for that one query response that you get and they all should get their due d uh due rewards. That's one thing crypto can enable. This is the this is the economic part of the story. But a much more important part is there underlying it. If I'm using AI in wild open then I need more guarantees. I

need more safety. I need more alignment. And this is where verification comes in that I need to know what AI am I using. I need to know where those models are coming from. I need to be able to see those models. And when I say I, it's I and the other people who can help me understand my AI. So verification is a is a very important feature because it enables safety and security and alignment of this broad open AI where we don't know who are building these models. What's the origin of those models? All that comes through this verification layer.

Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So in the in the immediate term there are there could be some sort of deceitful deception kind ofesque uh things happening. In fact, I think I've seen stuff already about agents purposely lying, for example, and and just seeing like like this as, you know, this level of intelligence gets smarter, there's going to be uh without a doubt some sort of like malicious activity. But not only just for that ex end of the spectrum, the verifiability is really just important for your everyday use cases. Um you know, knowing what you get uh from, you know, from the tools that you're using. So that's one problem. What are some of the other

bigger challenges in this space right now with AI and crypto, you know, in this crossover? And who are some of the teams that you're most excited about that are solving some of the other challenges? I'd love to just understand bit more holistically how you're looking at this broader landscape. Right. So I think I think the the flavor of the season is usability. There's a lot of there's a lot of uh there's a lot of discussions about what use cases about AI will be cryptonative will be crypto first what kind of use cases will crypto enable uh and there are many applications which one can see there there are very interesting projects like

kao which pointed out the role of very specialized data and how this data game is now open again that's one very important kind of projects which will come up I I feel there's a lot to be done in that space more realtime data because in principle the whole the internet is open again. So many of these things can be re uh revisited and with much more exciting AI front end. So that's one kind of projects which will build cool applications which will get new kind of data here. Then then there is other kind of projects which I think are also very important and very serious which are talking about complete regulatory uh independence for all the way to the compute. So decentralizing compute, decentralizing the control of compute, taking it taking it away from

large cloud providers and thereby also from large regulators in countries, right? Once you once you take it away from cloud providers goes, that's where all these decentralized training protocols, decentralized uh right now not so many decentralized inference protocols but decentralized training protocols are out there. That's a very exciting space too. And then there are a few chains who are incentivizing agents who can control wallets and coming out like near for example is doing a great job there come up and uh that's one very important sector. I definitely believe that the user experience story of crypto will be resolved by AI and and wallets controlled by chains. Account

abstraction alone won't do it and those things alone won't do it. It's the these wallets need to be actually controlled by AI at least for smaller value of transaction at least for some part of it and eventually for everything. So that's another part of exciting thing that I'm looking forward to when I can feel confident to delegate my wallet to a piece of software which I can trust completely and that's going to happen. Uh so these are these are some of the things which I have been quite excited about. But from frankly from from the way we see it at sentient we see that it's very important to maintain even for crypto crypto or not it's very important to maintain that great UI of a AI everybody's excited about AI because

it's such a look and feel technology it's such an experience it's so close to humans remove that click thing from humans and it's like talking to us in our language and so at the end of the day AI projects succeed if you can give this cutting edge breakthrough AI to That's that's one thing we want to do. So underneath we can have all these different people contribute multiple different kind of AI but from a user perspective you should get a singular experience of this great thing only then one can compete with this closed companies because they are at the end of the day giving very good AI to the users and we have to give the same AI from the open source side that's for from sentience perspective that's the battle we have and while we do that we want to make sure that this AI is all aligned

all secure all sort of uh loyal to your own needs. Okay. So, let's talk a bit more about the the ecosystem of builders and people within the team. Um, what are some of the uh projects that you're seeing uh or ideas that you're seeing be experimented within the Sensient ecosystem? You know, who's building what? What are some of the uh uh cool cool ideas that that you're excited about? um or even just within the founding team and and your set of ed advisors what are you guys uh you know kind of looking to work on um there right right so there are there are three different categories where we are super

excited about and this is where we our thing is also coming out one the f the first and foremost categories of this agents which can do which can give you fi which can handle your financial uh basically AI Bloomberg that's a term which we started seeing recently and which can handle your financial trade and defy like all unified into a singular interface and it has appropriate tools all the way to coding to give you all the strategies and everything you need. This is an interesting problem but this because this requires many people to come together different people who are indexing and collecting different kind of data. Different people who have their favorite strategies they should share the strategies uh for different kind of requests and it all can be unified into a singular offering and given to our users. So we are enabling these kind of

multi- aent systems uh with a singular coordination layer where people not only contribute agents but they also contribute strategies to use those agents and tools. Uh all of us have such strategies for uh coordinating between different sources. So this is one kind of offering which I'm quite excited about. The second kind of thing which is which I'm quite excited about many projects on sentient are going towards it is writing the solidity code based on prompt. you know we as I said we don't want to be writing software just we just want to be expressing our intended software has to come out but not just writing that code but also optimizing it because everybody knows that anybody can write a a smart contract but very few people can write a good smart contract

and that's the iteration which right now is not covered that requires a very good understanding of the code behavior itself and we're bringing in many players to enable that kind of code gota third third category which I'm very excited about is actually very it's it's very interesting thing I think rather than thinking about very good agents and we should start thinking about very shitty agents the agents which are completely crap in the sense that nobody can make sense of it but they are very addictive they are very fun you know like [ __ ] apping that's the category I'm thinking of where people have to put out these experiences which will be very addictive and which are very good because you know this is completely new domain the bar of creating app has gone down so when I'm posting my videos or

anything. I don't want to post videos. I want to post some experiences. So what is the Italian brain rot of apps that segment that segment is very exciting and that's where you see especially people who are very young right the kind of things they are creating in AI will roughly fall in that segment. The thing about AI is technology for 0 to 25 years old. That's the user segment I want to focus on less than 25 years old starting all the way from zero years old. Yeah. And we want to build for that segment. Everybody should want to build for that segment especially with AI and that's what we are looking at. Hey Munch, I appreciate your time man. It's it's been an absolute pleasure. Love what you guys are doing at Sensient and yeah I'm just very intrigued by this category at

large. I mean there's just so much happening. Um so wish you guys well going into mainet and I hope to meet you in person in one of the coming conferences ECC or token or something coming up later this year man. ECC man. Let's see each other there. All righty, man. See you soon. Thanks for coming. All right. Bye. The future of AI. Up next, we got DC Builder, uh research engineer at World Foundation, a good Twitter follower, um or a good Twitter follow. Uh talks a lot about uh just all sorts of interesting things on Ethereum, on uh you should see a crypto. He's been around in the space

for a while. live air room. So yeah, very interesting. I mean that last uh last conversation with the conversation with accordance to what I spoke about inordance to what I spoke about that I talked about uh in person last week in the city here which will come out in in in a bit. But really we we were talking a lot about how this this kind of like AI future is going to happen and so uh I know DC is going to have some takes as well. Uh so excited to chat with him. Uh let's get him up here. DC, what's up, man? Good to see you in the flesh. Hello. Good to see you. Good to see you. Happy to be here. How are you doing today, man? Doing good. Doing good. How about yourself? Doing good.

Are you coding today? Are you uh [ __ ] posting? You leverage longing? What's your vibe today? [ __ ] posting a bit of everything else. Yeah, not not leverage longing. I don't like trading very much. So, you know how there's like the chief uh like you know how bread guy got like the chief ship poster K like uh smart guy for mega eth? Is that is that you for world? Are are you that guy? That guy. I would say I'm I'm a jack of all trades, master of none uh kind of person. Uh I'm both a research like my role is research engineer but I do like research, coding, some marketing, some comms, some events, deval stuff. It's it's a bit of everything really. Nice. Well, cool.

Well, then let's talk about some of your latest research. I think a lot of it is at the intersection of AI and ZK, which I feel like probably is is rooted upon some of the verifiability concerns with regards to AI as well as just broadly provability. Um, so yeah, what have you been most recently intrigued by perhaps uh some some teams that are building with on like on world or just kind of other research um that you've been up to in in in in that category? Yeah, for sure. I mean, ZKML or zero knowledge machine learning is like one of the things that I originally worked on when I joined world like three years ago at this point. Uh, we were interested about zero knowledge machine

learning in the context of um like um so maybe let me backtrack a little bit to introduce the the problem space. Um this system um in worlds that allows you to prove that you're a unique and uh real human being. And the way that we do that is by like having iris codes. Um, and iris codes are an embedding or a vector representation of the uniqueness of an iris or iris pair. And uh, you go to an orb which is able to prove that you're really unique human by computing these iris codes. And then you like encrypt them and you're able to check that they're unique. Uh and the problem comes like if you ever change any part of the biometrics pipeline in the orb um you essentially make or you you you

essentially change these vector embeddings or iris codes. And so you have to like resign up the user if if you ever change anything. And so a lot of the reasons why I originally looked into like zeros machine learning come from that. um because you you want to allow the user to permissionlessly reinsert themselves into the set of verified users without having to go to the orb more than once. Um so that was like one of the original ones. Uh there's a lot of like really fancy cryptography like be that multi-party computation zk and uh also like trusted execution environments all throughout world. I'm happy to paint that picture but that would be a longer uh discussion. But yeah nowadays the thing that I'm most excited about is client side proving. So you know like the doing

zk but on phones u because if you want to have privacy uh the zk proofs need to happen at the level of the user or like where the user is. Yes. And our user base is on phones on world app right which is like 28 million users uh 13 million plus that are verified by the orb as of yesterday we hit the and what are they doing on the world app like are they using other applications on world or like are they doing like what what does one do on the world app? Um so world app for for those who don't know there's two main things you can do or three main things now one is the safe smart account so it's a regular smart account wallet um so you can like transact on ramp offramp your c20 dex swap um etc. Then you have uh world ID

which is the privacy preserving proof of personhood protocol so I can prove that I'm a unique human to a website or a non-chain protocol or something like that. We're also expanding to credentials. So, you're going to be able to do things like prove you're from a specific country or that you own a passport from a specific country, uh, eventually that you're over 18 and other things. Um, and the third thing is mini apps. Um, and so mini apps allow you to interact with other applications in the world app ecosystem. So, any third party developer uh can build and deploy applications on world app and they're discoverable through the app store. So as a fraction of total transactions, I would say like something roughly around 60% of all transactions are mini apps.

Cool. So people either like interacting with Morpho which is a sorry a lending and borrowing marketplace. So you can like lend and borrow and we have incentives that are civil resistant. So if you borrow or lend, you have incentives like incentivized deals essentially something like liquidity mining but instead of it being like uh mined indefinitely by I don't know like arbitrarers or me people uh there is a limit to how much yield per person you get on a specific deployment or of of an asset. Um that's one. Um there's a bunch of others. Yeah. What are some of your favorite like mini apps that are that are cool that our audience should try out? Uh my favorite one is probably the morph one. It's the first time that I

experienced like good quality UX for like a D5 primitive for the average person. It was really smooth, really easy. I really liked it. It's like the only one I really personally use from the many apps that we have out there. Um then another one that is like quite cool is credit. Um, essentially you have under collateralized lending where you allow the user to borrow like a fixed amount like let's say $5 and then they repay it with yield. Uh, if they repay then they can borrow a little bit more.

Um, and this perpetually and like if they ever uh default they cannot enter uh they cannot borrow again essentially, right? So it's it's sort of it's sort of like a cber resistant like under collateralized lending protocol. Uh, and they've fundraised recently and like done done really well. So, that one is like really cool. Unfortunately, there's a limit to like how many people they can onboard because they have limited reserves of cash they can lend out. Uh, but they're expanding now. So, so yeah, I'm currently in the wait list. So, hoping to get access to that. So when you're looking at doing uh your research, right, and you're looking around on on Twitter and stuff, you know, who who are some of the the mustfollow accounts for this this kind of like AI ZK space to kind of stay up

to speed, you know, whether they're associated with world or not, who do we have to follow? Yeah. So for uh ZKI stuff specifically um we acquired a team called Modulus Labs uh around like December of last year. So they they were like some of the main players in this space and now they're part of the applied research department at tools for humanity which is the labs entity behind world. Uh but outside of world I would say uh Ezekiel is building the best sort of like developer experience for like ZKML stuff. Uh essentially it's it's a it's a tool that allows you to compile any uh ONX file. Um onyx stands for open neural

network exchange format. So it's sort of like a format that you can export from like PyTorch, TensorFlow and other things and just generate a ZK circuit out of them automatically through a compiler which is built by Ezekiel. So that that one is probably like the best UX or best devx for for ZKML out there. Uh there's a few others, right? Like a lot of the just like ZKVM teams are also building cool stuff that you can also use for these things. Uh but they're not like ZKML specific, right? to all the succ [Music] but but probably like Ezekiel is is one

of my favorites. Gotcha. Gotcha. Cool. So, um for for people who are like, "Okay, look, I kind of get it. I don't really understand um the you know the the need behind proof of personhood. Maybe you could just explain like what the dead internet theory means to you and like if if if that is relevant towards what world or these just general proof of personhood category projects are trying to achieve. Yeah, for sure. Um so one of the things that like one of the missions for like why world uh got even started in the first place is that um so world was co-ounded by Samman Alex Blania and uh like 10 other people uh in like 2019 or so and so the the problem

was like if you extrapolate the pace of progress of AI uh into the future AI will be able to generate text videos like you'll have a multimodel model that will be able to create any kind of content that a human usually was able to only create. And so that that internet theory is like on social media eventually all the content will be produced by these AIs. None of it will be created by humans and humans will be essentially not be able to prove that any of the content that they're interacting with is from a human. Uh and so essentially the internet would die unblocking a a bot or two on every tweet now. Yeah, it's it's very annoying. And the problem is that like you can only

solve proof of personhood at scale if everyone joins the same protocol. And so there's a bunch of solutions that compete for attention and it's hard to solve the problem at large. Um and it's it's like so far we've used like meta like huristics um about users like how much time you spend on a session, do you use these services, do you pay for the service, right? Uh, and this is sort of like what we've like done to like predict whether you're a bot or not. But if you're a user that joins the internet like post 2023, a lot of these heristics don't really work because the AI can also fake the heristics like engagement posts and other things interacting with services, especially if you have like operator

like OpenAI operator level agents. And so proof of person is useful because it allows you to prove that someone controlling an account is a unique human. And even if they delegate that account to a unique human, they're rate limited by how many actions they can do per on on that account for example. Um that that's one one way to think about it. Uh but in general like what we're building is a set of identity tools um that people can like build on top of. Um like things eventually you'll be able to create proofs about arbitrary pieces of your identity, right? Like I'm over 18.

I'm from this specific country. I've interacted with this DEX, this chain, this other chain. My followers on X are greater than this. My followers on Substack. Like all all of these platforms essentially like all of your identity will be owned by the user. And it's up to the application developers to sort of figure out how they want to do things. Another thing would be like maybe you could curate your own sort of recommendation algorithms, your own filters, your own things for how you want to like think about like distribution and like how you want to serve content and stuff like that. But yeah, a lot of the reasons why world got started in the first place is because like these agents will come come at you quick and we're seeing that like this year like the O3, Google, right? You have uh like 03, 03 Pro, Opus 4, uh

Gemini 2.5 Pro, like all these models are getting ever better. Um you have like all the agent ones, um image generation ones, audio generation ones, you know, like the 11 labs of the world. Uh GPT image one, right? Like with all the Gibli pictures and stuff. Yeah. So if you extract more years down the line, it's going to be even more important. And so we hope that by then there's going to be like a lot more people like really sophisticated people building alongside us. U because it's been hard to build a lot of these things in a credibly neutral way. Uh if we're even if we build the protocol in a credibly neutral way, it's not that credibly neutral if other people don't participate in the same protocol and like try and build and help us

decentralize the thing and solve different trade-offs and expand the sort of possibilities you can do. But thankfully like a lot of the ZK technologies are coming into fruition at the very same time that you need them for building identity things. And so yeah, it's been it's been really very incredible to see. Man, we we saw you know real time proving be brought up again by Justin Drake recently. Um and it just feels like we're getting closer and closer there. Um more more on the AI side of things from from your lens at world. what are the what are some of the top AI crypto teams right now and what problems are they solving right like when you're looking at like from this lens of identity you know you're you're

looking at it from a different lens as far as a core problem um you know and I'm just curious like like you know when you when when you look into the current landscape like what what teams stand out for you know and and what problem are they trying to solve particularly that that makes it compelling yeah so maybe I can mention some of the ones that I invested in uh as well. One of the ones that I'm very excited about is like prime intellect. Uh prime intellect is building sort of decentralized training for models and uh like the reason why crypto is mostly as a coordination mechanism right so AI is an intelligence mechanism allows you to scale intelligence operations agents things like that crypto is useful at coordination. So uh a lot of the

bottlenecks for humanity are either coordination based or intelligence based or maybe like energy based or resource based. Um so if you solve part of that bottleneck you can scale and achieve and unlock like a new sort of branch of the technology tree of sorts if you will. And so so so Prime Intellect is trying to scale intelligence in a decentralized sense and for that you need coordination because centralized systems are a lot better at coordination of resources and capital in general. And so I'm really excited about Prime. They've been doing really well in SF. They've been managed to to to hire a lot of like really prominent people like Will U from like there's so many so many nice people people at Prime. Um other use cases are sort of these like AI agent fund manager

kind of stuff like yield uh farming or like capital allocator agents. Uh one of the ones that I invested in is is a Giza. They have this product called Arma. um they deployed on base and they have I think like 30 million plus TVL um and they're able to allocate capital like the agent allocates capital on behalf of the users that delegate to this pool. That one is like another use case. Um personally like the biggest use case for AI is in crypto is just development right like it accelerates the pace of progress of coding. is like a utility uh mostly for me like whe whether it's like uh chachd or cursor or wind surf um all of these agentic sort of like github uh agents right copilot whatever um those are really useful um

as well a lot of crypto Twitter is filled with like people posting their claw code um uh bills you know it's it's it's quite fun to see like I say that much yeah I mean like I don't know like uh um there's a few people um doing that. So that that's been really exciting to see. Um yeah, other use cases in AI crypto stuff. Um some of them are around like personal agents, right? So you have a lot of data that you want to give access to the agents to, but it's really hard to mediate. Um so a lot of the things that are useful is for example if you have personal data that you can consume in a verifiable way um or at least have

the agent in like a verifiable environment interact with your data in a private way that's where sort of like tees and agents come into play. Uh another company I invested in is is Pluto and they do like T verifiable um um sort of web proofs. Um and you have this agent interact in like a chromium instance. It can browse and interact with websites for you and you get these T proofs about how it interacts with a website and uses your data to interact with that website. So one thing you can might might think of is let's say that you're Door Dash and you want to give incentives to users that are power users of other delivery apps. So like you can prove to Door Dash that you've done more than 100 orders on Uber Eats or some other platform and then you can get a

discount. But if you're lazy to do it, you can just delegate that to the agent. the agent will figure out what services you use and it will sort of create a proof to that other agent or to that website API that hey I'm a trustworthy or power user or whatever person and then you can consume this discount. That's like another one. There's like honestly honestly like thousands and thousands of things but we're only at the beginning of exploring the potential of like cryptography identity agents and how all those play together. So one last thing for you then in a post um world era, right? In in a world where no pun intended where identity onchain is more or less solved from a civil resistance

perspective, right? What do you think is the future of platforms like layer 3, galaxy Kaido cookies uh what is it now? will chain or quack chain or something or something like that like what do you think is the future of these uh incent like these mind share and these kind of campaign mechanisms to to drive value to pre-product crypto uh companies I I think a lot of that will will go from SAS and into just like regular clients for that users own it will just be embedded in regular apps like if I'm a user and I can selectively disclose any part of my identity to the end app.

And that's how they want to do like user targeting in a privacy preserving, self-s sovereign way where I only disclose what I want to the applications because I still want to have good ads. I still want to like if I'm looking for something, I I want someone to tell me that it exists. Uh I just don't want them to listen to my conversations I'm having because I have the Instagram app open or something like that. Yeah. Um, so I I believe a lot of these like data aggregators, crawlers that like try and like read cookies and all of your browser sessions and try and like scrape stuff about you to then advertise to you and sell that data to like some third party providers. a lot of that is going to go away and it's going to be much more efficient and there's going to be

less churn because Google wastes like hundreds of millions, billions of dollars on just trying to skew like just like go through all the the data that it has about you to try and figure out whether you're a bot or not or whether you're a worthy customer of this ad or you know like a lot of this this stuff is like really hard to do at scale. Um it's something I've seen only at world when you're building at scale. there's a lot of these like churn and problems and bottlenecks that a lot of big companies have that are not really visible to the end user. So to me it's like a lot of these things are going to be abstracted away. Uh they're going to be simplified.

The data is going to be owned by the user and through cryptography we can mediate our identity. Uh the only problem is that we need to solve UX so that the user doesn't have to think about this. But but hopefully with like good AI, good UX, good product designers entering crypto now finally. And uh like there's just a lot of money also to be made like good incentives, right? If you have good incentives, uh the the way I think about like how do you make apps more private is just build a better user experience. To me, the the private apps have inherently a better user experience than the non-private apps. That's why all the apps in the future will have privacy, not because people care about privacy in the first place, because we've seen they really don't. like we all use all the all the

Fang uh company apps and all of them are are like spyware for the most part and so so yeah just build a better app that has privacy built in and that's sort of where where we're all going to see like adoption move to like cipher punk from first principles as a default. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think that those like civil the ability for those uh bots and different types of of you know entities to civil uh is is particularly interesting from like the you know the looking for airdrops and they're looking for all these things and then you extrapolate that all the way outside to you know actual privacy right and like building that out and that's a whole different conversation right and has a lot more of of real world impact

on everyday people and you know I I remember getting into the space and I used to do like online marketing work and do a lot of like Facebook ads and such and I was I was pretty shocked as to how much data is is being just passed around consistently and I actually had more of a problem with it before I did it and then I was like oh this makes sense like this is just a way to uh run online uh businesses right it's a way to facilitate commerce online but the issue is you introduce AI now and and there's a lot more uh potential consequ quences from from this data sharing. So yeah, it's interesting. Dynamic dynamic DC, thanks. Thanks for joining, man. Any closing thoughts from you? Um,

not not really, honestly. It was it was a pleasure chatting and uh I hope you have a great time for the rest of the session. Take care, man. Cheers, man. Appreciate you. See you soon. See you soon. Take care. Bye-bye. See you in See you in Canada. See you there. Yeah. Yeah. That is a very very interesting set of of uh of thoughts if you run through. So look, I think a lot of people are underestimating what the need is for uh blockchains as a way to facilitate digital identity and as a way to actually uh think about how this AI technology is going to bring in to like is going to bring uh new like agents or entities to the world that don't have a

passport. they they don't have a um you know they don't have any any sort of representation outside of um well you know they haven't they haven't they're an agent that was spawn up by somebody and that's kind of where we're at right so I don't know like I think between worldcoin and then I think humanity is coming out with mainet pretty soon as well um so excited for that too um and yeah I mean we'll see kind of how that all plays out and and what that's going to look like in the future. Uh I think we're still just waiting on our friend Jonah to come in. Um but he will be here shortly and excited to get that up.

Let's have a quick look at the timeline. Uh we'll do a little Andy reacts to the timeline. I somebody just told me to put the modular in the Hyperlid, bro. I'm gonna respond and say, "Bro, it's it's generating revenue, man. I I love meeting people right now about revenue. I got altcoin Sherpa tweeted fartcoin. That's it. That's the tweet. That thing's probably going up. All right, here we go. We've got people hating on VC coins.

Uh we got Benji has just confirmed his trip to can. Shout out to Benji. We had him on last week. He got Airbnb. I knew it. I tweeted earlier. I was like, "Look uh ECC be like, uh, let's see, where's the tweet?" One month ago, no, I'm not going to Can one week ago? Okay, I might go last minute next week. Yeah, I just booked a flight last minute. Let's go. It's just classic. It's just everyone was hating on Can. Uh, let's see what else is going on the timeline here. Oh my god. Here we go. Eric Trump. Wow.

Denies. He says, "I'm the biggest fan of Tron and love Justin's son, Tron. He is a great friend and icon in the crypto space, but I do not have public involvement in this. Wow. So, Trump So, Eric Trump has publicly denied his involvement in Tron. That's pretty That's pretty funny. Uh, here we go. We got a master class in crypto derivatives from Blockworks. Yano just put out a nice pod. We have a pod with Yano dropping as well uh in a in a couple of days leading up to permissionless. Should be exciting.

Uh let's see here. Pump token is trading at 6 billion FTV premarket on AO. Only 80K of volume doesn't really matter then. Uh, let's see what else is going on. People are bull posting hype and flexing their buys at $10. Lambo land. I think flood is probably pretty euphoric today. What else is going on?

Here we go. Laura Shin goes back in 2017. So, I put out a tweet saying we're in the mania phase. Laura Shin goes, "Back in 2017, they used to say a wall of institutional money is coming and people would be excited. Now it's happening and people realizing they would sh should be scared." I'm going to tell her back. I remember when we used to meme Into them. That was the real meme. Now it's like, oh crap, what's happening to our ethos as a space?

Why is everyone leveraging up leveraging up to buy coins? Interesting. All right, that was the latest on the timeline. I think Jonah's coming in here in a sec. We'll get him in the back end to get him sorted. Um and uh should be should be well taken care of. We got a bunch of good questions for him. I met Jonah I think in um I think I met Jonah in Singapore in last year or Bangkok. I think it was Singapore. Um I think it was just briefly though at a like an altlay or event or something. Um but yeah, we have some good good topics, good questions. So let's get them up

here and uh let's jump into it. How you doing man? Good to have you. Hey. Yeah, thank you for having me, Andy. Where are you calling in from? It looks It looks cloudy. Yeah, calling in from New York. It's uh Yeah, it's pretty miserable outside today, but Yeah, same. I haven't gone outside today. It's It's Yeah, exactly. Come on, man. Like, come on. It's It's middle of June. What are we doing here? But it's I know, but I head to Berlin for Zoo Berlin tonight, so it should be very nice there. Man, Berlin looks like a vibe right now. Like, people are having fun. It just looks nice. I'm I'm a little jealous.

Well, man, thanks for thanks for joining. Um, been a fan of what you guys do at Blockchain Capital. Like I said, I think I met you uh last year, but it was definitely in passing, but I've been seeing some of your content and, you know, we've been we've been doing quite a bit of investing the last two years and trying to come up with our own thesises and such. And so, um, yeah, let's just jump right into it. We're going to go over Yeah, for sure. Let's get some of your tweets. So, first tweet is the bottlenecks in blockchain has never been execution. It's been uh consensus hot take. Uh the whole let's make the EVM faster narrative. It um leverage speed to attract marginal buyers but solve the wrong problem. The EVM, SVM, and most VMs run far faster than chains can reach finality. You can

make a car body super aerodynamic and spend millions reducing air resistance, but if the engine is weak, the car won't go fast. Basically, you're arguing that Ethereum's consensus mechanism is is old and that we need to figure out a way to uh get around that. And I just like to add real quick that I think some of the work that the ZKVM teams are doing to basically remove the need from onchain execution and just execute offchain and then verify onchain is like a step in the right direction as well. Um but yeah, curious what did you mean by the bottleneck in blockchain is not uh um execution. Yeah, this is a great question. Um, maybe take a step back and like motivate why this isn't even an important question to ask. Yeah. Um, so

if you if you try to rank order like what are the problems with Ethereum, you'd probably say it is too slow, it is too expensive, really bad. Like interop is not good. It's convoluted. It's complicated. And if you try to say, well, what is the solution to that problem? You'd probably come to, well, if you lowered the latency of the chain, if you made it faster, you would solve all three. um you would solve the well trivially you'll solve the speed problem. Um if Ethereum was two times faster, let's say that means they'll double the amount of blocks, double the block space, right? Cheaper fees, right? Supply and demand.

So faster Ethereum, cheaper fees, f right, better UX. And also a lot of the problems with interop today is competing standards and that's a function of people trying to route around the base layer, right? Yeah. Like you have these solvers debiting and crediting across L2 without ever flowing through the base chain because it's too expensive. The second it's faster and cheaper, right? it becomes the dominant strategy to use the hub. So if you want to rebuild the network effects of Ethereum or any chain for that matter, be being fast is critical. Um but it's pretty obvious with modern research that the bottleneck is not um execution and and a good proof of that is you could take the ref client and run it 10 times faster than Ethereum is being run today. The big the hard

problem in a blockchain is how do you make sure all the nodes in the network agree that this is a state of the blockchain. Um, so you could make ref,000 times more performant, right? But the Ethereum won't reach consensus that fast, right? It still takes 12 seconds. Yeah. Um, so you you need to solve that core um problem. I think Salana obviously with Alpenlow is is rethinking the problem, shipping something. I think Ethereum needs to go back to the drawing board and ship something similar. Not necessarily Alpenlow, maybe with different trade-offs, but kind of rethink the problem for ground up.

Yeah. So, um, recently Crypto Twitter, uh, rediscovered clubs, which has been a uh a a a a a a a a a a a fun thing to be a part of, but, but, uh, I think Anom put out a tweet that was basically saying that ideally like rollups should be the ideal infrastructure for these kind of like specialized high throughput applications. Why? Well, when you're when you're thinking about a, you know, very fast, you know, decentralized L1, you have this consensus problem, right? you have this this data propagation uh consensus problem where with a single sequencer or colloccated set of sequencers for rollups you're really just avoiding you know you're trading off some of your censorship resistance but you're avoiding that like uh

consensus problem that you're val that you're explaining so like I'm curious from your perspective is that how to think about it or like yeah so I think it's an interesting point um but rollups were actually similarly bottlenecked by this issue, right? So, a roll up the the true finality of a roll up and you know your transaction landed and you have complete guarantees is only when Ethereum settles, right? Like arbitum can roll back. Um anything can roll back. You actually the final state check the check that this was a proper state transition that your transaction settled is when Ethereum actually, you know, reaches consensus on a block. So any rollup that is giving you a a confirmation that your thing happened fast is it's actually an illusion. they

are giving you some sort of economic um guarantee or they're staking the reputation on the fact that this is not going to roll back but true finality hasn't been reached. So you can imagine if I'm a large financial actor moving I don't know on the order of hund00 million dollars right the the bottleneck is still there I still I still need to wait to confirm that hey my rollup transaction settled and this is by the way with a optimistic rollup even worse because it takes seven days for the finality game to be played whereas for a zk rollup right you get the confirmation immediately so you're right that you can give the illusion of of quick finality so to speak but in actuality what a large financial actor will demand that kind of finality is still bottlenecked by Ethereums.

Yeah. Very very interesting. You know, I I had this thought that and I think a lot of people shared this thought with with regards to uh like this more serious capital per se that you referred to. You know, we're seeing institutions come on chain more than ever. But, you know, I think a lot of people thought it would only come to Ethereum and like that has just been like completely blown out of the water, right? like with Black Rocks Build uh and just all the stuff happening on on Salana on Converge Avalanche um like do you think do you think institutions and these capital allocators if you're speaking to them like do you think they care about these nitty-gritty things in blockchain or is like is is is there a separate way that

they might be thinking about uh where to put large amounts of capital on chain today? Yeah, for sure. Um this is by the way a great question. Um, we've been, by the way, as a fund playing around the RWA space for a long time. Like we're early circle investors, early tether investors, Anchorage. I mean, we early investors in secure types who's doing a lot of tokenization. Um, right, and stuff on Salana and Ethereum. This has been a thesis we've been following for a while. I was always frankly surprised by the Ethereum kind of maps the argument that somehow we have a monopoly on like where institutions are going to go deploy capital. Um the claim was well we we're the most secure we're the most decentralized whatever we have LT whatever it may be and I think frankly

what we've seen over the past years that's not the case right Salana has right is similarly dominant right Apollo just made a deal with drift um they they now have their products on drift right you see black rockck feeling comfortable putting bidd on salana so you're seeing other ecosystems offering a credible alternative to ethereum so I I think the question Ethereum now needs to answer is well what is our unique value proposition to institutions. Um, I think etherealized, by the way, is is great. I'm really happy they exist because I think that they're um now a more credibly neutral. I guess that's probably an overloaded word, but an actor in the ecosystem now that is actually actively trying to think about what is Ethereum's unique value proposition when it comes to

institutions. I know that Matter Labs is also deeply thinking about this question as well, right? they're trying to create a lot of products or institutions that are more privacy oriented because that's something they demand. But there's a but you're right, there's a big open question of we no longer exist in some sort of unipolar world where Ethereum has dominant market share in RWA. There's real competitors now. Yeah. So the most pressing uh question that I've been asking uh pretty much every VC and kind of liquid fund over the last two weeks has been their thoughts around pump. Um, and and I'd like to just ask you kind of personally separate from the fund like like I think a lot of people are have like become growingly irritated with pumped out fund calling them

extractive. However, then you look at hyperlquid and everyone is very excited because they're making money but like at the end of the day they're they're effectively funding two sides to a barbell that is onchain speculation. Um, so I think I think it has a really bad rep, but on the contrary, a some some funds and and you know, investors are quite bullish at $4 billion FTV. Not financial advice, but what's your take on pump at four bill? Is it a buy or sell? Uh, what's your thoughts? Yeah. Um, so maybe take a step back to my thesis when it comes to this category where when it comes to DeFi, you have to own the user relationship if you want to make money. Um, and I the best example is a swap market, frankly, for this,

which is that let's say I guess I'm use an easy thing. Let's say you're buying $100 of Salana, right? You might be willing to pay up to $2 in fees, right? Up to $2. And everybody now in that supply chain for giving you that order is competing over that share of the pie, right? So, you have the front end wants to take a slice of that. You have the an aggregator, the exchange, you have the blockchain itself. everyone's competing over that sly and we've consistently seen is that those who are on the front end have the most ball control right so um if you're unis swap for example right you asked the question why am I sending transactions to arbitrage like what what is the point of doing that like I might as well create my own L2 and and own

that slice of the pie for myself basically just trying to eat more and more slices of the pie I think the thing that pump has done that's particularly good is that they own a lot of coverage in the market right like they are a primary venue by which users come in and make a swap and by owning the front end they have a lot of ball control. So you saw them exercise that um when they said hey why are we sending flow to radium right why are we using radium's amn giving them fees like and they built their own right they built their own and next thing you know right radium saw a big drop off of volume and now pump is internalizing that another question they asked themselves was why are we pushing users to go trade on other platforms let's have once a token leaves the um

the um graduates bonding curve graduates right like it should still in their platform. So I think pump on that front has been very smart. They want to own more of the user relationship and given the fact that they own the user relationship command more of the room. But you're actually seeing I think very viable competition. So what what I mean by that is take a look at Phantom, right? Phantom now has swaps right internal to their application, right? You can you could do a memecoin swap on Phantom and that's actually siphoning off volume from Pump. Another good example is you see Jupiter just bought Moonshot, right? that is a pump competitor. You're seeing in the Salana ecosystem at least a lot of these front-end providers competing for coverage. I think the big

open question for Pump is does this memecoin craze last forever um or or does it not? And are they well positioned in both cases? So, you can imagine that Jupiter just launched an RFQ product in order to own more of the major flows. Will Pump ever launch a product like that? I I don't know. Um or you might say, well, they should go gunho meme coins. that will be a market that exists forever and they have good coverage there. So I the point is being a front end is an amazing place to sit. There's real competition at the front end layer and there's also a question of where net new flows will go in and I think it's an open question whether pump is well situated for that. Yeah, I mean you've you've got Jupiter, Pump, Radium, um even like Camino and some of these

likes all kind of trying to build what you could call a super app. Um yeah, and kind of competing within each other uh to to basically own the Salana flow, but then you've got Phantom, which you could argue has the biggest advantage of them all because that's where everybody starts. And so that's kind of like what you're getting to and and it's kind of an evolution of like fat protocol thesis. I think like the narrative is kind of like on apps right now, but I think it's like exactly thesis. Yeah, but it's quickly like no no no no fat wallet like like you just got to get you got to own users somehow and you got to go out get them and bring them in. And I feel like that's that question is probably becoming more and more relevant and frequent in all of your DD and and

just broad uh conversations with with founders and other investors. Precisely. Yeah. And by the way, when it comes to the wallet in particular, it's a very interesting front end because if I use unis swap one day and I go to Jupiter the next day, the friction isn't so high, but it's really frustrating to turn off of a wallet, right? It's a high friction activity. So, a wallet has this very unique relationship with the user where once you start using it, unless it's a really bad experience, you stick with it. As a result, they have a lot of monetization angles as such, right?

Because they see less user churn. Um, so but I I would not categorize a wallet as being some separate category unto itself. It really truly is just an app with a interesting distribution strategy and interesting strategy to make sure that users are loyal to it. So, so if you look at the landscape now um what are some of the companies that you think are dominating the distribution front and and like what can we learn from that in future investing in the first? Yeah. Yeah. I think we actually covered a lot of it so far. I mean I mean we talked about Phantom.

They have an amazing strategy. We talked about Jupiter about how they did this brilliant strategy of um getting their RFQ to basically um to earn more of the of the fees that come from the major trading. And by the way they have their own front end. So as a result they're able to monetize there. We spoke about I guess unit train sorry Unis swap briefly who's now monetizing both the L2 layer and they're also by the way building a wallet now. So you see a lot of um the blue chip layers kind of running this expansion strategy. I mean, you spoke about Kamino. There's a lot of these guys that are all kind of thinking similarly, trying to own more and more surface area.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm I mean when I'm when I'm thinking about um you know who who are who are going to be using these these applications it's starting to become more and more clear that um the I mean obviously the the kind of L1 economics are starting to crumble a bit as far as just like broad premiums but I think even more so like an important kind of trend has been um some of these teams are now actively going and being like look this is exactly like who we're going to target and like how we're actually going to get them over the line. Like we invested most recently um in in um Santiago's uh inversion capital thing, right? And it's like very clear

expensive, but it's very clear like exactly like like what the you know kind of goal in like who the target is, how it's going to happen. Now again, it's venture, right? So, who knows if if it works, but like these developments of clear targeting of user profiles and of of like, you know, method to, you know, getting to be one of the larger chains or larger apps, I think is like more and more compelling. And I honestly think that Hyperlid has forced the hand of a lot of people, a lot of builders as well. For sure. I mean, by the way, Hyperl is a really interesting example of true vertical integration, right?

They they own the dominant front end in their ecosystem. They own the the dominant DeFi application and they own the underlying block space. When we talk about the Pi about how you're trying to vi for the most men of the Pi when it comes to user fees, they own the whole Pi. Um so that's a really interesting example of true vertical integration which also by the way translates to a nice user experience, right? They're able to design their block space in a way that is optimal for the kind of the front end they're providing. Um, obviously it has that the the bad effect that it's less interoperable to rest of crypto. So there's obvious there's trade-offs. Um, but yeah, Hyperliquid is definitely a fascinating example here.

Yeah. Just one last thing for you, Jonah, when you're looking right now at um like investable categories uh or or kind of sectors that are, you know, maybe like one or two orders of of thought down the line from what is currently present in the market today or like exciting today. like what are some of either you know and I tend to think a lot of this might be driven by the proliferation of AI and just this kind of like general uh trend and change like what are some of the the the second and third order like thoughts that you're having with regards to the to okay here's what's happening in the market today as a result of that x y and z may o like occur so this this is going to be a very investable idea or category yeah

um so we as a have very nice relationships a lot of the fintech players and we were always told by them is that for them running the crypto side of their businesses is far cheaper like an order of magnitude. So I think as we see more clear regulation we see the circle IPO which has I think proven to institutions that crypto is here to stay and we're seeing tons of tokenization happening. I imagine a lot of businesses and folks are going to run their institutional side of their businesses on a blockchain, right? So that's like the RWA thesis. So I think an open question is what does distribution look like there? Do these RWAs sit on a blockchain but are distributed via the

same channels like a Charles Schwab or Robin Hood or the are the crypto players beneficiaries? So I think the second order effects of tokenization being kind of more comfortable for these larger actors. I think who owns the user relationship in that world. How do these things get distributed is going to be a very interesting question. Another interesting category we're looking at is and I'm sure you've heard this a thousand times but um there's I don't know how many people are there in the world 8 billion. I have to imagine there's be way more like AIs running around right. So um stable coins are probably going to be the dominant um rails on which to use, right? I don't think an AI model wants to have T plus2 or T plus1 settlement, right? They want

to have instant settlement, programmable money, right? Their programs who talk about programmable money. So I think it would be very interesting. But if anyone out there is building it, DM me. I would love to hear. Um but teams kind of thinking about how we you integrate AI models running around the internet now paying for things and as being a unbelievably untapped like market and like the intersection of that with stable coins that I think will be quite interesting. I mean X42 is a new standard. I'm curious if that gets adoption. Um I'm also curious at what layer of the stack does that value get captured. I mean, it's the issue or business model when it comes to stable coins is pretty clear, but the kind of the business models sit on top of that.

I I I think there's some open questions. Um, so anyone has unique thoughts there, I would love to uh to hear about it. I'm sure you've probably gotten a bunch of people on your show talking about this. Yeah, everyone wants to talk about stable coins. That's the uh stable coins AI and just kind of where there's going to be more and more uh places to kind of basically create their own pie as you're saying because the issuers are taking a lot of it. and then broadly obviously RWA. So Jonah, I appreciate you joining, man. I appreciate your time. We'll have the link up in the city. I don't know if you want to eat, but I'll be around for a bit. Awesome. Yeah, this is really lovely. I definitely appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. Yeah. Cheers, man.

See you soon, brother. Peace, man. I I I always enjoy speaking with uh just people that are thinking about venture and just looking at the larger picture from the from the media. I mean, look, like everyone wants to hit the next 10x and liquid and and, you know, buy the next Fcoin and be a part of Hyperlquid and such, but really where I think a lot of the value is coming from is going to be in these longer term trends and just seeing those play out more broadly. So, up next we got Robbie, uh, a analyst, researcher, a I was following his work back before he was at Dragonfly. I think he was working with Deli and and doing some of the research there. Kind of just piling on to the

conversation that we just had um and stuff about symbol coins and the wallets and I think Robbie put out a really good post about the fat wallet thesis that I'd like to get his update on. Um so we're going to bring him up and uh we'll get Robbie up on stage. What's up, man? Welcome to the show. Good to see you, man. Are you in the city? Nice. How? Yeah. Yeah, I'm just I'm just across the bridge. Um I've been here for like two three months, so it's been it's it's been a bit of a journey, you know, but it's been nice.

Yes, sir. Man, I caught one of your posts uh I don't know, it was probably a couple months ago now about the fat wallet thesis, and I I remember reading it and being like, okay, uh this makes a lot of sense. I I think it's I think it's a bit early to actually kind of like where we are in in the space now, but now now that we've seen like things like Privy get acquired by Stripe, the amount of growth that Phantom has had um and just broadly like teams shifting towards this ownership of user relationships. I I think that you were spot on. Um so you wrote that maybe a couple months back. I'm curious how how much that has changed or or or even just like shifted since then and maybe just why you you believe so strongly in this

from like a early stage investment thesis. Sure. Yeah. So, first I got to caveat that uh nothing I say everything I say expresses kind of my personal view and not that of Dragonfly. So, and in addition to that, nothing I say is uh investment advice, legal advice, etc. So, got to keep the the compliance team happy. Um but yeah no so I think at a high level the sort of the fat wall thesis if you were to kind of distill it down it was that the two most sort of valuable resources in crypto were one exclusive order flow and then two distribution and I think order flow is kind of downstream of distribution so they kind of go hand inand um and sort of the thesis like what I laid out is I think actually wallets sort of own both

um and historically I think you've always had kind of the fat protocol thesis and I think more recently evolved into sort of the the fat app thesis this idea that apps are going to disproportionately capture value. Um, and I think ultimately it's just as simple as whoever owns the end user. Um, and I think people underindex on sort of wallets kind of within that. Um, and I think if you kind of think about what is the canonical gateway into crypto, right? It is wallets. Um, and I think for some people it's different and um, I think it's moonshot, right? And I think like it's not just owning I think order flow um and and sort of exclusive order flow but I think it's also owning sort of fee insensitive order flow and I think that's a very important nuance and if you look at something like you know

moonshot I think Axium is probably the best example today um where they it's not just owning the end user it's owning end users who are pretty fee insensitive um and they're willing to pay 100 up to 200 basis points on swaps right and I think that's an incredibly valued position to be in the stack and if you look at sort of the majority of where value has accured. Um it is sort of those front-end fees um that end up becoming sort of the majority of the value captured in the crypto stack. Um so that was sort of like the genesis of the fat wall thesis. And then to kind of answer your question on you know how I think it's evolved. Um I think it's actually more true today than it ever has been.

Um I just think the way sort of you define a wallet has kind of changed. So I think historically the way I would have defined is just um you know you you cited kind of Phantom and you know MetaMask and and these guys and I think now what you're seeing is sort of wallets are incre like sort of the line between wallets and applications actually blurring. So if you look at something like um you know Axium you know I think you could call it a wallet sort of they own kind of the they have you know they have custody and they they handle the wallet stuff. Um but they're also facilitating within their front end um you know swaps. I think they also do yield on sort of vital assets and a bunch of different things. Um, and I think that's fundamentally the idea, right? If you're owning the end user as

that front end, which they're interfacing through, um, you kind of have the most exclusive order flow within the entire MUV supply chain. Um, so if you increase your take rate, users may not switch given their fee in sensitive. But I think everyone downream of that in the MV supply chain, if they increase their take rate, users are going to leave. Um, and I think that includes stexes, right? So if you think like you know if Radium all of a sudden said we're going to charge 100 basis points on swaps but then all of that order flow is now just going to get routed elsewhere. Maybe it's going to Orca or maybe it's just an RFQ that routes that flow offchain as well. Um so that was kind of the thesis and I guess that's how how it's evolved in my eyes. Yeah. So, actually was just

speaking speaking to uh to Jonah from Blockchain Cap prior to this and we were speaking about how the there's kind of a a bit of a vendor lock in if you will with wallets where you set up a seed phrase and you they're they're much more sticky than you know switching from a unis swap to a a radium or from a you know a sushi to uni to a aggregator. Um, do you think that that that that is is a big part of this of of this thesis is that it's less so about where they enter but more so about if you can if you can own the the beginning of their experience where they don't want to have to go and like make different wallets and keep track of all these things if they just have that one that that is a

large reason as to why this is going to work out outside of the economic kind of take rate um you know ideas that you've brought up just from a pure user perspective, you know, think about, you know, how many wallets you have or like the like the main ones that you use, you know, for me it's it's, you know, you've used the same ones for a long period of time. Um, you know, so I think is it less so about the economics and more so just about like user behavior or I guess it's a combination of both. Yeah. So the way I usually frame this is I think technically switching costs are very low. Again, it's your seed phrase, right? You can import export your seed phrase however you want. I think it's psychologically switching are very high and I think you implicit you implicitly

put a lot of trust in your wallet, right? Because ultimately they're the ones custodying kind of your assets, right? Or at least that's the way you perceive it as the end user. Um, and I think there's also like a sort of path dependent nature. I I think users get very used to an interface. Um, and then ultimately they don't really want to switch. And then coming back to my original point, fundamentally most of these users, they're trading, you know, meme coins. And um, I think it's it's a very binary outcome that they're looking for. it's either this thing's going to zero or it's it's going to be 100x, right? And when that's when that's kind of what you're expecting, I don't think, you know, paying 100 200 basis points really matters to you. Um, when you're kind of seeking that binary outcome.

Yeah. All right, shifting gears a bit to some of the stable coin stuff that that I think you've been, you know, quite interested in. And I think this is one thing that people are uh kind of getting the horse in front of the carriage a bit, per se. And we die put out a tweet uh about a month ago saying that it's wild that merchants are still paying 2 to 3% from each sale to banks and credit uh companies. How come crypto has not yet won in consumerto business payments? The necessary components are token incentives, payment app, trady grade account statements, on-ramp from banks, and then for for actual businesses, POSOS, uh stable coin accounts with yield off-ramps, etc. But I I do just kind of feel like the industry as as a

bit uh has a bit of like this idea that we can just plug in stable coins that that that with the current infrastructure, it's going to solve the kind of last mile problem and this this kind of like fee problem when in reality we're still kind of missing a lot of of I guess what you would expect in traditional payments. like what is your your thoughts with regards to kind of stable coins actually coming in and uh you know saving us that two to three% killing credit cards like like like what is stopping stable coins right now from actually winning consumer payments.

Yeah, it's a really good question. Um so I think there's there's a lot of nuance with respect to how payments actually work. Um and I think logically where most people go is they look at you know credit card payments they say merchants are paying 2 to 3%. They look at stable coin payments. They say they say, "Well, it costs maybe, you know, one cent to do a Salana transaction." And the conclusion they quickly draw is sort of stable coins are going to eat the world. And and I think unfortunately it's it's incredibly nuanced. Um and if you actually unpack like what is that two two to 3%. Um there's a lot of different kind of costs baked into that. And I think even even before that, what you have to do is first distinguish between credit card payments and debit card payments because they have fundamentally

different kind of cost structure. So, if you look at debit debit card payments, they're actually not that expensive. Um, so when you're I don't know, when you tap your, you know, Visa card um you know, you're paying the card networks, you're paying um sort of the issuer bank and and that's really it. And it's not it's not actually that expensive. These are under probably 50 cent transactions. Um now, credit cards on the other hand tend to be closer to two two to 3%. And the delta between the two reflects actual risk um that issuing banks are taking on because fundamentally what they're doing is they're extending you credit. and there is a risk that you ultimately don't pay back that credit.

Credit card transactions also have a much higher fraud um risk in addition to kind of what I just cited. So that is what that two to 3% actually reflects. Um and intuitively stable coins are instant settlement they're a debit like transaction. Um so they don't have that same credit risk. So if you actually layered in like what would that cost um with stable coins you would end up being around sort of the same cost um as like traditional credit card payments. Um and then in addition to all this um you have sort of these the rise of real-time payment networks. Um so these are often referred as RTP rails. Um and this has really been popular like Brazil you've pics India and you know you and these and these other regions um it hasn't fully

taken off in the US yet. Um there's a lot of structural reasons why um but these are these are free transactions and the reason is is because these settle directly with the central banking at sort of the most fundamental layer. Exactly. And and my view on this has always been that I think domestic payments get eaten by RTP rails. And I don't think stable coins really have much of a um sort of there's no consumer surplus really gained by by stable coins when you have very efficient RTP rails. Um and I've I've kind of been very vocal on Twitter, but I actually think in and I think instead the focus should be on global crossber payments because that's where that cross structure is less a function of of you know risk and all these other things. it's more of a function of just antiquated kind of

infrastructure. Um, and I think that's kind of the real opportunity. That's where the greatest sort of consumer surplus is ultimately gained is in the context of of global payments. And I also think and this is probably the most important piece, there's there's a structural incentive for for countries domestically to keep money held principally in their own currency. Yeah. So if you're like, you know, China, you want people holding, you know, money in in the Chinese currency. If you're India, you want people holding it in the Indian currency. And same thing in the US, right? Um, and for that reason, there's no sort of top- down incentive for governance to build very interoperable global rails. And I think as a result, for the foreseeable future, you're going to have very inefficient sort of global payments. Um, and that's where I think that is the opportunity.

That's ultimately the wedge um for stable coins. So, I don't know. I would like to see more sort of thoughtful discourse on crypto Twitter with respect to kind of payments. But I just think that's where the focus should be and I think that's where, you know, crypto and stable coins specifically have the opportunity to actually eat kind of global payments. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Brazil in the last two years just basically in the northern hemisphere winter going down there and it's summer down there and surfing and you know just hanging out and pix is everywhere. I mean it is it is the thing that they use for everything and of course I don't I didn't get a CPF which is like their government uh identification and so I didn't have pics and it definitely made like it it definitely made life outside of the uh

like outside of stores and restaurants and bars but like you know you go to like a random beach in Brazil and you got somebody selling like coconuts like like like you know aua de coco is what they call it and it's just like they're like oh we we don't we only take cash or pics and you're like, "Bro, can I can I just like tap?" And you're like, "No, there's no tap." Like like, you know what I'm saying? So, so, so I experienced that firsthand and I also agree that the Brazilian government and the Brazilian central bank wants visibility into that control and again they have that incentive to keep that within their own currency. Now, when it goes to crossber, then that's where you get Tether's massive use case in Brazil has been in crossber payments. That's when you get Syria, uh, Turkey, that's

when you get all these countries kind of coming together. Um, I do think that there is a world that I can go to the coffee shop and pay with USDC though. Um, but I just think that that there needs to be a level of of um kind of like integration into the traditional POSOS systems of of basically every like toast, you know, like the actual hardware toast and some of these other things um to be able to actually make that happen. Um, but yeah, I think it's it yeah, it's a bit of this this discourse that is like, oh, we're going to save the world with stable coins, but it's like, well, guys, like there's there's there's quite a bit to actually solve here still.

100%. One thing I would add too on that is I do think if there is a world where domestic payments get eaten by stable coins, I think the only path in my view at least is if you get an existing fintech and I think Stripe's the best example and I actually think this probably is their longer term strategy. um where I think their vision is like hey we can sort of disintermediate core networks and banks using crypto rails right um and fundamentally these are sort of open asset ledgers and um they provide very credible sort of neutral infrastructure um and I think like what that allows you to do is is basically um you know disintermediate Visa and Mastercard um and even banks themselves right because what you're doing is you're holding treasuries and you're actually capturing that yield yourself traditionally that would have been

captured by banks um so I think there's a world where you know stripe ends building out their own global payment network using crypto rails. Um and to your point Andy where you know ultimately this has to get integrated into sort of the existing flows and how we actually interface um with payments. I think given Stripe already owns sort of the the merchant relationship they can actually integrate that directly with merchants um and they have an incentive to. So I do think not to be you know I'm very skeptical obviously of stable coins in the domestic context but I do think there is a world where you know someone like Stripe or even PayPal um ends up sort of pushing this. Yeah.

It would make uh a ton of sense if they launched their own as well. That would be like the full end for them. Um do do you think that that that's why they bought Privy like part of this kind of broader payments uh play to you know either stable coins or just kind of get closer to like I guess why do you think they brought like why did they buy Privy like like why is that so so important for Stripe? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think it's probably just to make it even more seamless for merchants to integrate sort of stable coins, right? Um, and I think if you if if you're a merchant, right, like you kind of need two things. One is you need orchestration and sort of the actual rails themselves. Um, and that was I think intuitively why they why they

ended up acquiring bridge. Um, so they got that piece and then it's like okay, what's the other piece that that we need to make the seamless? Okay, you also need wallets. You need like where where the users actually going to hold these stable coins and I think embedded wallets are very elegant solution as well. So I think that's probably the logic. Um and it's like okay you can own the wallet and then you can own the orchestration and then the rails themselves are very credible credibly neutral just given these are blockchains. Well now you kind of have a a network right and I think sort of they're already well on their way to kind of building this out. Last thing I have for you Robbie I' I've been asking all of my you know fund friends VC friends traders uh bullish or bearish on pump fun at four bill. What's the call?

um what's your kind of thought process towards how to value this thing? Yeah, again notancial advice advice and it does not reflect sort of dragon flag but um no I think and this is another thesis I've kind of just been working on and sort of flushing out but I actually think if if you think about like who so I kind of talked about like who owns the end user and I think it is front ends but I do think users ultimately govern by tokens. Um and I think if you ask yourself the question like why do you transact on Salana versus you know Ethereum it's because Salana is tokens that you want to trade that Ethereum does not right and I think it is simple as that and as soon as you want to go trade you know a or you know maker DAO that's when

you're going to use Ethereum but unless unless you know you just want to trade Salana tokens you use kind of Salana so I think users are ultimately governed by tokens um and I would say nothing else and I think that's consistent with the fact that sort of the principal use case for crypto today is is trading and speculation um and I think with respect to pump pump ultimately owns the issuance of the tokens themselves. So they actually own the tokens, right? There's two sided marketplace where you have people spinning up tokens and then you have people trading tokens and I actually think that is one of the most if not the most defensible positions in all of crypto. Um because there's again there's a very strong twoided network effect there. Um, so I think if you're if you're bullish on memecoins, um, and that's that's a whole different

question, but I do think if you're bullish on, you know, memecoins are going to continue to, um, sort of expand and you're going to see more and more people wanting to trade these things, and you think this is a long-term sustainable structural trend. Um, I think pump is the most obvious and and sort of cleanest way of expressing um, that thesis. So if if that's kind of your view of the world, I think pump um, is quite Yeah, I mean, that's what I that's what I heard like maybe a year ago as well. at least part of that like I was speaking to um Chris Berniski from uh from placeholder and we were in Hawaii and I was like man so pump like is this investable from a VC perspective and and like the question is well obviously it is because freaking uh sixman ventures is up is going to be up

like 10,000x but but the question is like how sustainable is this like like you know part of the market and h for how long will speculation run and like I mean I think like like the logical answer in what we've seen, you know, this my this is my third cycle now. It happens every cycle is that in in any sort of bearish market like any sort of meme activity and that kind of stuff just dwindles really really really quickly. Defi yields uh compress. So I mean we'll see what happens. I think I think a lot of people are going to fade it. Um you know it's a big it's a big uh it's a big ask at four bill raise one bill but um that's kind of the state of the affairs. I just think it's funny that Pump gets labeled as being super

extractive, whereas everyone's kind of like all hands on deck for Hyperlquid when it's two sides of the same token. One is per, one is memes, and like it's just this it's like the it's like the picks and shovels for providing people to have fun or to speculate or to gamble. So, totally agree. Yeah, Robbie, I appreciate your time, man. Have a great rest of your day. Uh thanks thanks for joining and uh love your work. Thanks, Andy. Take care. Be easy, buddy. Bye. All right, we got one last one today. Zagabond from ISUKI.

Again, really enjoy speaking to people who are thinking about longer term thoughts in in the space, especially from the investment perspective. I I just can't stress enough how much I am looking to make sure that the the deals that we ought to do or want to do have this this like focus on exactly where they're going to get their users from. Like I I think a lot of teams were were sending decks and pitching for different L1s and different and different types of uh of of chains back before it really like it really mattered. And again, I think Hyperlid pushed the the envelope on this more than ever where was like, okay, you need to know exactly who's using your product and how they're going

to get there and and and and kind of exactly what the ideal like loop of discovery into uh like top of funnel distribution. So, in this case, owning the wallet uh from what Robbie was speaking about all the way down to like the core bottom layer, which is what Jonah was speaking about, which is like owning the chain. So for uni chain, right? So I mean you can just see the verticalization of all these different uh you know products and and companies. I mean you got Coinbase base Coinbase wallet um the the stock the exchange now per unis swap unis swap wallet they're trying to do unis swap social now there's um uni chain uh there's obviously the decks across every other

chain and like the list just kind of keeps going. So, that is uh that is going to be the continued trend. I think guys, um we have Zagabond joining up in a bit. I'm going to uh I'm going to jump back to the timeline and have a look at what's going on for you guys here. I see we got a clip from my take on the Polyhedra dump. That thing was crazy. Um lot going on there. All right, let's see. Narov tweets happened to me today. Go in the jungle. Ask how to pay for the coffee. Answer: USDT or cash. Wow, that's pretty wild.

Let's see. Austin Austin Federa efficient market hypothesis. The market will supply anything people will pay for. Mod AGI will have a perfect 100 sleep score and never needs to meditate. How you going to compete with that? Anan Jesus that is that is crazy. Rookie XBT Fartcoin doing 40 mil in spot volume over at Coinbase on a random Monday with BTC looking ready like it's like it's ready to melt up. Salana ETF approval likely around the corner and pump fund TGE. Everything is lining up perfectly

for the PVE coin of the cycle. Okay, rookie Peter from uh 1KX. Many token holders are about to straight up be Bonnie Blue. Jesus, bro. [ __ ] with the incoming wave of crypto VCs that will push for equity value acrruel over live tokens. I'd say can we have an example that kind of comes back to what uh Pronov was saying uh with regards to uh I if you didn't watch that pod there was one that we did um on on the rollup last week and it was it it was with Pronob and we spoke about how um these kind of onchain

IPOs are going to happen and I think that is uh that is like a big a big big big trend and that's what I think uh Peter's referring too. Uh, okay. Wow. JP Morgan has filed a trademark for what appears to be called a stablecoin, JPMD, goods and services, virtual and digital currency, digital tokens and payment tokens, D apps, blockchain enable currency. Wow. JP Morgan has filed a trademark for what appears to be a stable coin called JPMD.

Got to comment on this one. This is really, really bullish. All right, I think we should just be one minute until we get Zagabond up and we should be ready to go. Wow. It's funny to speak to um speak to uh Robbie from Dragonfly, right? As uh Rob from their team puts out stable coins and the collapse of the legacy payment model.

Man, everyone is just so bullish. All right, last couple tweets here. Let's see what else is going on. War means buy more Bitcoin. Iran is tied to China, Russia, Pakistan, North Korea with their implied alliances. The US seems to hint towards getting involved if Iran does not comply with the current US proposal which drags China to the table. As Iran delivers roughly 16% of Chinese crude imports overseas and China buys roughly 90% of Iran's production.

Jesus. War means printer. I agree. I think so. All right, guys. We should be up in just a sec here. Um, just waiting on Zagabon and then we're going to wrap for the day.

Checking out the timeline once again. Mitosis looks like it's going to launch their token soon. That's interesting. Michael Sailor's posting AI videos. That's interesting.

Laio, remember Laudio? The big Infoi experiment that had 90% pret mind share. It launched 15 days ago, now at 1.5 million uh market cap, 2.6K in weekly fees. Yikes. That's not great. That is not great. All right, we will be just right back up, guys. Give us one second. [Music]

[Music] Hey, [Music] N.

[Music] Hey, [Music] hey hey. [Music] Hey.

[Music] Hey. Hey. [Music] Hey, [Music] hey hey.

[Music] So JP Morgan is launching a a stable coin. Um I ju this is just in as of 52 minutes ago. Um JPMD.

So basically what what what we have here is a trademark filing for JPMD. Um, you've got their Ohio location and basically what they're trying to achieve with this. Cool. Thank you. Uh, as as I was saying earlier is trading, exchange, transfer, and payment services for for digital assets. So, the banks are coming into stable coins in the biggest way we've ever seen. Um, this is something that is completely uh expected, but uh like like wow. And it is happening so fast. JP Morgan was very anti-crypto, very anti- uh everything. I mean, Jamie Diamond would get on TV and call it a fraud and a scam. I'm telling you, I was at Stablecon like two weeks ago or or

so, like here in the city, and man, almost every private bank or financial services company that I spoke to was trying to launch a stable coin. It was insane. Like, the smallest of the companies were trying to launch stable coins. So, all right, I think we got Zagabond ready. Uh he's in in the back now. We're gonna bring him up. It'll be our last segment of the day. Co-founder of ISUI. Um welcome to the show, man. Welcome up. Uh so Zabon's up. We're gonna get his audio right. And um let me just give you guys a backstory. So, I joined uh I I bought my first Pudgy

Penguins in like 20 like late or like mid to early 2022. Um I I had bought like I don't know like a collection of like 10 or 15 of them. Uh I don't know why I just you know I I had done pretty well in the 21 cycle and wanted to participate. So did that and um through that process came to actually end up doing the seed round in Pudgy Penguins in the Igloo company. Um which was insane. The day after FTX collapsed uh literally I I had had um basically gotten the okay from Luca and the team went forward with it which was down in the depths of the bear. Uh you know I didn't really have much capital. Um the team wasn't the you know punch penguins

was not anything close to what it is today but I remember at that point the the only team that I was going to look at outside of punks was going to be. And so now Zagabon has kind of come full circle. He's here today with us to talk our industry's culture to talk anime to talk anime chain. And thank you. It has been just Pudgy Penguins, Anuzuki who have taken NFTTS and gone to the next logical step which is trying to cross the chasm in terms of like pop culture and in terms of reaching new audiences with different types of uh basically of initiatives outside of the space. So Zabon welcome to the show man. I was just giving a little preamble as to how I got involved into NFTTS. I was pretty

deep in in DeFi first um but then you know kind of came along here. So welcome on man. It's good to have you. Welcome on, Zagaban. It's good to have you on. Um, and I was just giving a little preamble as to how I got started into NFTTS. And I was talking about all the all the exciting things that that I had originally gotten into with Pudgy Penguins and did then did the seed round and then now have came to watch both of you Isuki and Pudge Penguins be the only NFTts that have actually gone out and built real communities and real culture and become a brand of its own representing crypto in a much less

financialized version than a lot of the kind of perceptionist you know now. So thanks for joining man. How how are you today? I'm great, man. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's good to see you again. I think we were uh hanging out what in Asia last year as you guys were rolling out anime chain. Anime chain, anime.com. Yeah, that was a fun circuit. Yeah, man. So I mean look so my thought process with like the entire ISUKI brand is like okay you start with the NFTs you get these really core collecting or this core kind of community who's strongly committed and then you go and you build this massive top of funnel outside of it with a very specific target segment in this case

being anime which is like one of the largest industries in the entire world. Um and then you're able to do so much more with that. Um, so I'm thinking kind of like as we're looking at anime.com and anime chain, how are you how are you going about this transition even further now? Right. So you've got anime chain, you've got anime.com. Um, you know, just kind of put the pieces in my head as to how you went from to where you are now and kind of where you see yourself going. I think that will set a good foundation for those who are watching now.

Yeah, we started ISUKI about four years ago now and the vision is to create a brand that encapsulates web 3 culture because it wasn't really anything like that around the time. People were really thinking about NFT collections as a brand. It was just, hey, here's a, you know, a bunch of JPEGs. We have a cool community and let's see where we go from there. But we said, we want to create a brand that really can combine digital and physical because that's a new wave of storytelling that wasn't possible before. So for us, it wasn't just the anime art. it was doing drops that um really had uh tie-ins between physical and digital. We did that with the physical back token. Um and then we auctioned off these skateboards and you know they they all broke the record for

the most expensive skateboard ever sold. So that was like about two and a half years ago. Um and uh we did in real life events where you know we did live airdrops and that was a a new thing at the time. no one had done a live airdrop for people at an event. So these are things that I would say are core to uh what ISUKI is all about. Um, and uh, as we as we grew the project and grew the community, um, and started growing the IP beyond just web 3, um, what what I realized was the anime industry could really, um, use web 3 as a technology to help democratize it because right now the production process for anime is very centralized and people don't get to

participate. Fans want to own a piece of that uh, future of the anime industry, but they're not able to today. And so with animecoin and anime.com, the vision is um how can we build something that has distribution to anime fans around the world being anime.com, how can we give back ownership and a piece of that culture that fans and creators in the industry help create and that's animecoin. And so it all started with ISUKI as an NFT project. But um look, we're after so much more than just um building a brand now, right? We really want to build the future of anime together with the fans and the creators and that's we're up to today. All right, so let's go way back then and let's talk about the NFT cycle of 2021. I'm just curious like what was your personal

favorite, you know, set of events or moment from that cycle that was just, you know, it was magical back then. It was just mints and it was just whitelists. It was just an entire it was an entire ecosystem. Like what were some of your top top uh you know memories and just overall vibes from that that era? You could literally mint anything and it would go up 10x. I was minting crypto junks, right? They were like, "Yeah, you can you can imagine what it was." And and my my thesis was you can't be junkless in the metaverse, right? So, I got to mint these things.

It was like 0.08 ETH or something. And then they went up after um but the top moment for me was probably um you know what I think is really cool about NFTTS is it helped bring back a group of friends that I hadn't talked to in a long time. And I'm sure like for a lot of other people, crypto has has done the same. Um, and so for me it was uh, you know, I've been trying to get a couple of my buddies into crypto for a while since 206 2017 I was telling them buy ETH, buy Bitcoin, you should learn smart contracts, learn Solidity, and they kept pushing it off. But then 2021 um, with NBA Top Shot, yeah, we're all NBA fans. I said, "Guys, you can collect you can collect like a Luca Dunage game

winner in the playoffs. That's sick, right? These are officially licensed and the pack opening experience was lit." And so my favorite moment was um I got a couple buddies together and we were just pulling together our money to rip Top Shot moments and we got a Steph Curry um like diamond platinum like whatever rarity moment and we were just going crazy on like Discord cuz we had P and it was worth like 5K and that moment was so uh I think impactful in terms of how we thought about experiences with NFTTS and funny enough. Those two guys are actually my co-founders now. That's 2 p.m. who's our CTO U who have you talked

to before and then location um who's my other co-founder and so um you know these experiences really help bring people together and so I'll say that's probably my top moment. Yeah, man. Dude, and that's the thing about the culture, right, is that every time I've been to like a a party for an NFT, um it it's always been a way different vibe than typical like crypto events. And the people that have like coalesed around them are are just far different. Um and I think that that that speaks to like a different type of person that that like now Isuki and Anime.com are trying to onboard, right? It's not necessarily like the same type of category, but I think that it does a lot

to expand the kind of addressable market for crypto and for our space, right? Like, you know, really, you don't really need, you know, you can just be somebody looking for community and and I think that's a big thing that uh people discount the value of NFTTS for like, oh, why would I pay for this JPEG? But I think like I think that uh the community aspect is almost priceless. Definitely. And I think the the core community in terms of like the super fans, right? The ones that want to build alongside the the team and the project, I think 10,000 is is a great supply and you really only need about a thousand diehard holders to really help push a brand forward. Like you saw this with

Bor Apes, you saw with Pudgies, you saw it with Isuki and that part doesn't need to scale, right? So I love the exclusivity about a limited supply NFT collection. What does need to scale though is the IP. That IP needs to be loved by millions of people across the world. Um and the the core holder base um can still be that super small community that's been building with the team through it all. So um I think now projects are starting to find that if you only build for the you know 50 to 100,000 people that are in the space um that's tough. Even though I think crypto is really good for capital formation and so you're able to create quote unquote valuable projects that hit a really high

peak in a short amount of time. Um but for this to be sustainable and for this entire space to grow I think NFTTS has to provide a lot more utility. It needs to reach a lot more people. They don't all have to be high floor price NFTTS. You're seeing this now on Telegram, right? And so we're we're very much focused on expanding the IP and growing the community outside of Ethereum because there's there's applications and platforms now like Telegram that understand why NFTTS are valuable. And when projects drop sticker packs on Telegram, there's utility, right? People use it to express themselves. And these stickers can be really high supply. Um and uh the purpose of it isn't to create an exclusive uh community, which is what

the core NFT collection was. So, I think long term like NFTs can be used like across the board. Um, and there's so many different use cases and I think we're only scratching the surface. Yeah, man. I mean again when I look at the landscape right now it's it's very clear uh ISUI and Pudgy Penguins are the culture of the space pushing outside and going to get new people bringing them on a and kind of bring them into this perception of of crypto that that is just far different than the financialized you know kind of typical speculative use cases but also has that in you know embedded in some capacity.

You also recently wrote that that you wanted to kind of tokenize fandom um and that this is this was something that you find powerful when you're looking at Luca and Pudgy Penguins. Obviously I you know I'm a big fan. What what has inspired you about what they've done or or what have you kind of learned from from anything that you've seen from from that community? They've done a lot of things well and um I always give my shout outs to Luca. um you know I text him whenever he drops something dope and you know hopefully we kind of uh you know inspire each other right to keep pushing the space forward.

I think one thing they've done really well is understand um the the power of each and individual holder. Um it's it's really amplified in this space. Um and when you have the collective belief of even a thousand strong holders that could create a billion dollar FDV because a token doesn't it's it's not the same as an equity, right? A token is like a unit of belief. It's it's there's social value uh in there. There's economic value in there. There's also uh cultural value in there. And that's what tokenized fandom means to me is that it's a it's a new

way of thinking about value. And it couldn't exist before with traditional instruments, but now with tokens, you're you're able to have that. And if you give it to the right people and you empower the right community, amazing things can happen. And so um I think what Pudgis have done really well is to do uh is in doing that with um the Pudgy collection and Pangu. I think for us it's with the Isuki collection and now with Animecoin to help empower um a a global community of creatives that are going to shape the future of the anime industry. Um, so I think it takes it takes a lot of um a lot of foresight, but also just um you have to show up day

in and day out to to to make sure your community stays on track. And that's something that I think there's only a few projects that have made it this far. You know, a lot of them when things get tough, when prices go down, founders will just be like, "Hey, you know what? I'm pivoting to web two because that's safe, right? Or you know what? Like I can't take this anymore. like I'm just going to quit. We've seen that time and time again. And if you don't have a vision for what this could become, like this space will will eat you up alive. Like you you will not be able to make it. And so, uh, when I look around, um, I feel really good knowing that we have leaders like, um, you know, Luca that are helping, um, push the space forward.

And so, um, I think they're doing some great things. Yeah, man. I mean, in that tweet as well, you you wrote quite a long post about your career, right? being in in the space for eight years, running running the the ox, Slack, I remember ZRX in uh 2017, DeFi, OpenFi, uh and just kind of like the the rise and the fall of that last cycle. I mean, it hit all of us hard uh just from the the amount of growth in the space to the amount of uh contraction that happened quick. One thing that that you guys clearly made a shrunk bet on was was was building anime chain, right? using Arbitum Privy Conduit Celestia some of these technical partners to make this idea come to life. I'm I'm curious like

why why you wanted to create Anime Chain and and then why you chose um some of these technical partners to build the stack that you guys did. So if we're So my thinking was if we're putting in the right uh resources and and putting in the effort to create anime.com um which we want to be the home for anime fandom and we want this to be a platform in which anime fans can express themselves, collect things from their favorite IPs, um and really have a have a better social experience than they do today, then that culture and that user base Um, we want that to uh to to funnel that to the rest of the ecosystem in a

way where like the value can can create like network effects throughout this ecosystem. Yeah. For us, not for just the general base layer, right? Or you know, Right. Exactly. Yeah. And so like if we own the distribution then we should own the value that we're creating as an ecosystem, right? Um and so what's the best way to do that? And I think, you know, Arbitum was a great partner to us cuz for me, like the tech is one thing um and you know, they they have like the orbit uh chain solution and and it makes it easy to spin up your own um uh L3. Um for me, it's really about like the ethos of the people that I'm working with. And when I met um AJ and Stephen um who who who works on uh offchain labs, they they really understand the

ethos of um you know crypto and what Ethereum is all about. And I think they reached stage one decentralization on Arbitum before anyone else. Um and so I feel like with those aligned values um I could commit to being a partner with them long term, right? And so we decided to build with um arbitrum and then um you know with uh other uh tools like privy and um you know conduit it just makes it easy for us to actually just own that that uh stack where we can just focus on acquiring users building experiences uh for anime fans that helps onboard people into the space and we weren't able to do this you know 2 3 years ago. So this is only possible with

all of these um you know info partners now uh which is great. So in terms of uh timeline, we we want to uh have anime.com um have a core product loop and start getting distribution, getting real users. Um and we have more features coming out, right, to tackle that. Um and then once users are here, we want to then invite other builders to build in the anime chain ecosystem. And the core value prop is that hey, we have millions of users that are anime fans. build custom apps for them and we will give you users and that's when Animecoin will then start being um a currency for the future of the anime industry. And so that's the kind of the roll out. Um and

so we're in no rush to say hey we want to open up an ecosystem. You can build any app you want. You know we want to give you grants and all that stuff. I think that'll come with time. And like I said the biggest value prop are users at the end of the day. teams always tell me like they want users to actually use their um products and it's not just about you know getting a check to um to to build something short term. Yeah, man. And and I think also you can go to future um you know anime companies uh telecom companies, TV providers, local communities and if you have this strong Zoomer if you will young person base of users that are real that's something that I think a lot of these older companies would pay for as well just

from like an advertising perspective because it's hard to get like you know so so many people are are using like the typical social platforms but the younger generation they have like a different way of using online uh you know just all networks crypto etc. And so I think there was a huge value proposition for you know some of the older more uh traditional you know you know whether it's public media or uh magazines and stuff like that to bring them onchain to to your ecosystem right and that that becomes valuable to those companies that don't have that level of distribution directly to this new set of of users really 100%. And and so I think it's corporations um that are looking to tap

into the younger audience and for anime it's the IP holders as well in Japan that are looking to tap into this younger audience and there's there's really no good way for them to do that today because when they partner with um if you think about like the biggest uh anime companies here in the west it's like Crunchyroll right Netflix they're not focused on community they're not focused on experiences they're just focused on streaming right? Watch anime and then you're done. But then when we talk to anime fans and we've done plenty of, you know, user studies and we ask them where the pain points are. Um, a big one for them is we just want to experience anime after we watch it. Like we want to go to events. We want to discuss things with other fans. We want

to collect more things. We want to buy officially licensed merch. Why is that so hard? Right? And so I feel like the fandom is really underserved. Um, and you know, in about a couple weeks from now, we have an Isizuki event during Anime Expo, which is the largest conference in LA. 500,000 people around the world are coming to LA for Anime Expo is that's how strong the fandom is. We have our own side event and we're sponsoring Anime Expo. Um, and there's, uh, you know, anime companies that want to work with us through through this event because they see that like this is where the anime industry is headed and, you know, they're sponsoring or they're um, filling up our uh, claw machines and

gacha ponds with some of their products um, because, you know, they they want to start establishing this relationship. So, I think we're already see that momentum start to come our direction. And so as as a space, as a crypto space, we should feel really good knowing that there's teams like ISUKI, Doodles, Pudgy Penguins that are thinking about this from a consumer lens and talking with the right people in the industry and helping move everything in our direction. Man, I hope you go out there and absolutely crush that and have a great time and onboard a ton of new people. I think that's exactly where the space is is in need, right? We've got a lot of like this institutional onboarding happening. stable coins.

There's a lot of this kind of large capital, but really we're not really going to get to where we need to be until that more consumer, retail, friend, family kind of uh branding is real and becomes a real thing. And that just takes time and you know, you've seen that and you'll continue to see that in your endeavors. So, wishing you the best, bro. Appreciate your time and uh looking forward to uh seeing what comes out of Anime Expo and and everything else, dude. All right, man. Thanks, Andy. Thanks for having me. All right, BG. See you guys. Peace, brother. All right, guys. Um, fantastic stream. I I really really am impressed by Pudgy Penguins and Isuki as being able to go out there and actually bring on new new

people uh in a nonfinancial, non-speculative way, purely brand, purely IP dominated. So, uh, been been a been a bit of a marathon today. Uh, we'll be back to you guys tomorrow. I think a lot has happened probably behind the scenes off the stream as well. got to catch up there. Um, but I think JP Morgan being the biggest thing that you guys saw in in in between those last two guests. So, as always guys, thank you for watching World of T. We'll see you tomorrow and peace.