The Rollup TV: Pantera, GSR, Pump Science, AI Supercycle EP 1

Transcript

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>> Dang dang. >> Whoa. Welcome back to the Rob TV. >> We have massive TGES upcoming, don't we, >> dude? Yeah, we do. Ana, Monad, Plasma, >> Fogo. >> Yep. I'm excited. >> We had Syndicate recently. We had >> That was a billion dollar launch. >> Aster. Dude, my Aster tweet is going crazy viral. 250K views, guys. If you haven't seen that, look, it's on my Twitter as of like recent. Um, basically just CZ responding to Hyperlid with Aster. Um, yeah, pretty pretty wild pump. That thing just pumped from 50 cents to a dollar. It's over at 8

billion market cap now. So, um, yeah, that's the response that CZ had to Hyperliquid. >> I don't know, man. I'm I mean, I'm bullish. I'm not bullying any of the copycats but >> remember the whole mental gymnastics we went through trying to pretend like, okay, if we were CZ or if we were Brian Yes. and we see >> um CZ mostly because they have the per and we see hyperlid success. What would what would we do? I saw you just quote tweet that recently. Yeah, you had Jeremy on. We had like Jeremy came on the show. How is Brian reacting to Jeremy going deeper in the hyperlquid ecosystem?

>> I mean, yeah, that's what was my last question to or my last take to Jeremy was like um he was talking about how HIP3 is so bullish for uh these, you know, being able to create markets anywhere and being able to do anything with these markets. You can deploy them into any front end. And I joked, I was like, "Maybe we should get Brian on the phone and get him to stop building out PERS and just integrate Hyperlquid." And he kind of he kind of laughed. He kind of threw it around. He was kind of like, "Yeah, okay, man. Sure thing." Um, it was funny. I don't know. It was funny for sure. So, >> seems to be the the way that the world is going.

>> We've got a banger lineup today, Rob. We've got Panta Partners, Cosmo, and we have uh Paul coming on to talk about State of CryptoVC. Paul wrote a really great post that's going to be a longer segment talking about their Solana debts. That's going to be the first one. Then we have and shout out to them for raising 500 million. That's a big one. Then we got Frank Shaparo, head of content at GSR, formerly the block, big OG journalist in crypto. We got Benji uh from Pump Science Molecule, more DSI stuff following Bio's big raise from Arthur's Fund. And then we got of course the AI super cycle episode one with none other than the half humanoid half agentic being near CEO co-founder

co-former former creator of transformers Google Ilia >> menventor we're having inventors on the show now >> unfortunately I'm gonna have to step out uh while you chat with Paul uh and the Panta guys but I am stoked to be back and uh pick it up with uh Frank is gonna be really interesting. He is very investigative, has a lot of news coverage and a lot of interesting takes. >> Um, very unique coverage on the ecosystem. So, I'm very uh curious and interested to talk to him. Y >> and then the DIY stuff, I mean, it it kind of flops back and forth. I think there is a lot of fugazi kind of nonsense. Yeah.

>> That happens in that space. It's just another fundraising tool. But ultimately, after our conversation with Paul on the DI front yesterday, I kind of have this reinvigorated sense of conviction in that sector because they're doing things that are only possible using blockchain technology. We're going to go live with the Panta folks now. Uh we're going to bring them up and get that thing rolling and then we're going to roll into the rest of the show. Welcome back. Thursday, September 18th. Big day yesterday with the Fed. Guys, sit back, relax, enjoy this first segment with the Panta folks, and we will see you guys there. Uh, we're going to bring them up shortly and get them firing. So, uh, looking forward to this one. There's a lot of talk around their

Salana Dat. They raised 500 million for it. Um, and yeah, it was a big big moment for them. So, I'm ready. Uh, we're going to bring them up um, and get them firing, get the boys going. So looking forward to it. And yeah, let's go. Let's get them up. I think I got him ready in the back. I mean, these guys. Okay, perfect. Sorry about that, guys. All right, last last run through here. Promo.

Okay. All righty. And it's show time. Here we go. All right. Welcome back to Ro TV, guys. We have two amazing investors and new uh friends of the show today. We've got Paul from Panta as well as Cosmo. Uh welcome to the show, guys. Um welcome to the World TV. >> Thanks for having us. >> Hey, man. Yeah, >> great great uh great art there, Cosmo.

That that's that looks like a uh an impressionist piece. Yeah. No, it's hammer and sickle. I think it's a it's actually Andy Warhol. >> Okay. A little bit of taste. Well, Paul's calling in from Rio. You've got some cool art. We've got a big Salana D on the table. We had Jeremy Aair on the show earlier this week talking about Hyperlid. There's a lot going on, guys. Um, first time on the show. Paul would love to know a bit about your background. Um, you know, you're a partner at Panta, but you've been involved with a lot of companies. And then same to you, Cosmo. and then we'll dive into to some of the VC things, some of the dats and more. And welcome guys to the show.

>> Awesome. No, thank you for having us Andy. Yeah, I'm a managing partner here at Panta. I've been at Panta now for 11 years. Actually, I mentioned that earlier at the this the Stellar conference that I'm at in Rio, and they're just like 11 years in crypto. That's like insane. I mean, the uh the first investment that I I was sort of uh was happening right as I joined Panta was the circle investment in their series B. So glad to see >> companies going from you know early stage all the way to IPO. But yeah know I manage the venture team here at Panta and my background has been now primarily in venture capital and I'm getting to my 16th year in venture capital. Before that I was focused on investing into mobile uh mobile infrastructure, mobile

applications and then before that I started off my career as an economic consultant and then I was also doing business development and growth for some early stage startups in the daily deal space. So I I sort of bring that uh analytical background uh with you know startup background and then you know just been sort of crypto native in terms of my investing experience for the last 11 years. So you know uh 265 companies 22 unicorns I've sourced and led 17 of them. So I can talk about the different cycles and all things around it. >> Guy's a dealmaker. Cosmo welcome to the show.

>> Yeah thanks Andy. Excited to be here. Uh yes I'm Cosmo. I'm a general partner here at Panta. Uh I joined a few years ago really to brought in by Paul and so huge huge kudos to him for us connecting and and uh joined to help complement everything that we're doing on the early stage side which is you know led by Paul and I manage everything that's more public markets or or liquid liquid facing. Most of my career has been in traditional finance more classically tradi background before entering crypto. I did banking, private equity, and then was at a hedge fund doing doing long short equities for a long time. And my whole ethos and reason for being in crypto is to try to bring a lot of that classic like financial rigor and fundamental value lens to to crypto,

which I think three years ago when I uh when I was trying to starting that, I feel like I was shouting from the rooftops and everyone was like, "What are you talking about?" But now more and more like people are even talking about revenue now for the first time. >> Turn to fundamentals, baby. Yes. >> Yeah. And so I'm just like finally this whole this wave that I've been trying to push forward is actually happening. So it's been exciting to see. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it has been and the market has certainly started structurally changing towards that at least in the last quarter or so if not like two quarters. So excited to dive into that. First up we've got Paul's 60page report. Maybe 50 60 pages. Um guy just put 18 years down into a PDF and said you know what we're going to ship

this. So, lot going on in that report, Paul, on the state of Crypto VC, what's happening. Um, some of the, you know, interesting stats there. $16 billion raised this year. Um, focusing on different, you know, preede, seed, series A. You kind of laid out the the thesis for each with a focus on series A as well. Um, also a record number of M&As and IPOs. So potentially VCs can be thinking differently about exit strategies now as well as just bifurcation and performance of different crypto assets due to kind of what Cosmos is saying right with the actual kind of new fundamental focus. So Paul maybe just bird's eye view what is the state of crypto venture as you put out this report talk to us about some of the actual funding some of the types of

projects what trends you're seeing from investors what they want to invest in kind of open-ended here and then we can you know kind of dive in. Yeah, and I know Cosmo could definitely add a lot of a lot of color to this, too. Yeah, it just kind of felt like there was a lot of stuff going on in crypto VC and you know, my thinking around publishing the blog Verata Verdict was really to highlight some of the trends out there and and really then dive into what I'm seeing as a VC, some similarities to traditional VC, some differences between doing VC and crypto versus traditional VC. And you know what we're seeing um this cycle is that it is much different than previous cycles. I've been doing it

since uh you know 2014. So you know back then I mean the cast of characters were much different. You go to a conference and you see a bunch of libertarians and cowboys and um definitely a lot of technologists but but no one that really sort of had the the business background to be able to take things to market. Then you started to see guys like Jeremy Aair out there and guys that have uh exited companies in the past and with his background taking companies public and and be been successful in the internet era was was phenomenal. And so you know they started coming into the space and then the 2017 bubble was really just like you know how do we sort of start using tokens for for capital formation but a lot of retail uh

still still not not much regulatory clarity and then of course like the cycle beforehand we started to actually see DeFi come to the forefront but at the end of the day I mean there's this cloud around regulations that really made it tough for companies to even operate uh if not like go out there and and really feel comfortable around uh getting product market fit and then you know this cycle I mean to see the regulations come about has really brought on partnerships and uh buyin from institutions um you know Stripe launching an L1 Robin Hood getting into the fold through their partnership on launching tokenized equities and and then we start seeing like all these banks and payment companies starting

starting to get into the fold. uh it's really just bring a lot of validation to the space and then of course like we start seeing uh the IPOs coming to market. I mean up until now everyone's like well there's only been one IPO. Now we've seen like three or four happen and they're all Penta portfolio companies. So we're really starting to see like this graduation where uh you know we can see exits. we can see um public market interest in a lot of these uh companies especially around the intersection of uh stable coins and um in payments um you know the genius act obviously helps with that and then we're we're seeing you know IPOs around custody and trading I

mean just like the uh picks and shuffles of the of the entire ecosystem and you know with these IPOs we're going to see a ton more M&A right I mean people are going to really put this capital to work and so most of the M&As have been uh through larger crypto companies and so and a lot of it through Coinbase. Now we're going to see a lot more diversification of companies that are going to make acquisitions uh all these guys that are going public. Uh in addition to of course like these larger companies, these payment companies. So the M&A market is just really starting and I think it's going to get much higher. Uh, I also think the the funding market has started to pick up a little bit, but okay, it's >> it's nowhere near 16 billion is nowhere near where it's going to be. I know a

lot of companies that are waiting until uh later on this year to see more IPOs, to see more regulatory clarity so they can go out there and launch their token. And if they're going to launch their token, they're going to want to do a pre-TGE round. So, we're going to start seeing some bigger and bigger growth stage rounds. We're going to see more IPOs, more growth stage rounds there and actually more talent coming in from these traditional tech companies because we're seeing a huge intersection of payments AI >> Deep, etc. And so I do think that we're going to see uh probably starting off with a lot more growth stage deals as people start hitting the market on the IPO and TGE side of things, but then right afterwards we're going to see a ton more funding around the um the early

stage side of things. Yeah, I mean it feels like this year has been a bit slower. I mean if you just look at 2021 2022 on the venture side from the funding perspective it's just been a pretty linear uh you know trend down and I I'm not sure how we break that what what kind of happens there because that 2020 to 22 period was obviously zero interest rates maximum crypto infrastructure investing. Um but perhaps what you're saying which is now these larger larger companies either looking to IPO or looking to do a token launch etc. Um you know I have a couple that come to mind that I've you know heard of you know through through the grapevine of companies that you wouldn't think would be launching a token or like look seriously considering launching

token like well this is going to outpace anything else that we've seen in a long time in the crypto market if these guys are actually launching a token. >> It's insane. I mean well look I mean there's this thing called uh FTX BlockFi Teruna. I mean, we got hit with some really gnarly stuff that uh would bring most industries down, but we're resilient and, you know, now we have regulations really sort of providing a lot more sort of comfort that you know, hopefully these things don't happen. uh and and then going forward, I mean enough regulatory clarity and comfort where we're starting to see companies actually established companies uh in crypto thinking about just removing equity all all together and putting all of the value into the

token because they believe that that's going to drive >> uh sort of sort of focus and uh you know sort of sort of a you know a great way to sort of bring value in a decentralized way. And then of course we're starting to see established companies like companies maybe not like your I mean obviously we're seeing Stripe on one end uh but we're starting to see guys below Stripe starting to think about launching a token and feeding that back into their business model which is which is awesome. You know it'd be a huge risk in the past and now it's become a lot less of a risk and more of a weapon.

>> Yeah. And so, you know, Cosmo, when you're kind of extrapolating this venture landscape into some of the more liquid kind of current uh happenings in the market, I think part of Paul's report mentioned that, you know, Q425 into Q126 uh is looking fundamentally stronger than past cycles. Um, and just generally thinking about how obviously these treasury companies have came about. I'm curious what you think from the fundamentals perspective on this cycle for the or this kind of part of the market kind of how are you seeing what is happening in the VC side of things or let's just say the kind of cleansing of the funding of a lot of different

projects uh for the sake of funding I would say at least with the higher interest rates more you know harder to to get access to capital some of these venture funds are having trouble actually raising their next fund this is leading to like a bit more of constricted environment. Now, obviously, Paul has said that this is likely to change as a result of some of these larger companies coming on doing these pre-token rounds, but we've seen this now materialize this kind of like the downwind of this phenomenon has has materialized in the liquid market with this kind of bifurcation. um how are you seeing the fundamentals of the current you know quarter into the next few and h how does that kind of relate to the downwind of the of the constriction of

the VC investing in the space? >> It's a great question. You know, when I when I think about this, I I do feel really fortunate to be at Panta where clearly Paul's been doing this forever and venture. And so we have this incredible lens into exactly what's going on in the venture landscape. And then on the public side, you know, that's what myself and we have a bunch of dedicated analysts and a team really focused on liquids. And it almost it's almost crazy to me sometimes when I think about how any venture fund could possibly operate without a real lens on the public markets and and conversely how could you possibly be the best public markets investor you are if you don't really know what's going on the early stage either and so I feel like there's so much sharing of information and synergies here that we get this

really broad view. Um all that is to say that yeah I mean clearly the both markets really jive and and and jive with each other and impact how each other is doing whether it's on the private or the public side and I would say from a you know 30,000 foot view it's like things could not be possibly better for the crypto landscape right now right like you look back over the last couple years I always like giving some of the historical context it's like you know 2021 was this crazy time of so much awesome like speculative excess and you know a lot of things that were going well DeFi was was amazing and then 22 and two was like this this bust of after that speculative excess there's always this bursting of a bubble and 2023 then was this time of all these you

know all those uh all those problems coming to root whether that's whether that's you know the us digesting the wounds from FTX you know users feeling like they were disillusioned they were hurt during the boom and then capital really leaving the space because they felt like they lost a lot of money and we started to see that change right in 2024 and this year is really about all those what were once headwinds becoming tailwinds across each of those things whether that's users starting to come back now and interact with DeFi and other crypto applications in a big way whether that's u you know capital allocators now feeling like wow they they really have to be involved in a way that they weren't before uh because our government is involved and and because regulations become more clear and then specifically like man on the regulatory

front it's like all systems go the last few years has incredibly tough for all all markets, not just venture, not just private and public, but like how could you possibly be a team and want to talk about any good news if if you the second you talk about something that's going well, like you're afraid you're going to get sued, right? And so like and and so we're just seeing a total release of that now. And how that's playing out in the public markets is very clearly this year has all about been a story of public markets and public equities investors really wanting to allocate to digital assets, right? You saw that in per performance of Coinbase and Robin Hood just taking off this year. You see that in um the IPOs this year that are cryptoreated,

many of which are investments like Circle and Figures doing extremely strong. And then um and then the the emergence of these digital asset treasuries has just been also another indicator of just how much equity investors, public markets equity investors feel like they need to get involved and all that bodess really well for tokens. Um and like if tokens do well then that feeds and that should feed the early stage uh market as well because then you have more reason to invest in private deals if you know that there's a reasonable exit. So uh one thing that was being said Paul or sorry Cosmo in the earlier stages of the DAT kind of you know mania was oh all of the speculation in the market in crypto has now moved to public markets

you're never going to get an alt season coins aren't going to do well because everyone's just all that speculative capital energy is in the public market. How do you feel about that today? has that spilled over into the crypto kind of uh core market or is that still very much happening in the public market? Well, so I think what's so special and great about these digital asset treasuries and you know I didn't look we did the first like we were the really the guys that started this and we I feel very humbled to like be able to say that uh but also really excited that we got to see everything right because we were there day one from starting the first one which is DeFi Dev Corp in in late March early April and then really anchoring most of the main ones coming

along like Bitmine with with Tom Lee who I talk to every week and then you know us launching now our own with Helios HSDT our Salana and so we've really been able to see how this evolved along the way and it's look I I I could not have possibly imagined there'd be when I did that first deal that we'd be sitting here 10 billion dollars of capital raised later and like tens of billions of dollars of value created later like how how huge this has become but one of the big and one of the things I didn't foresee which is your question is that so much of the participation is actually not crypton natives right it's incremental new capital coming to the space it's guys like Citadel or Brevin Howard or you know all and real long long short funds like Steadfast coming in and saying like we are equity we are

public equities market investors and but now we're going to start allocating to crypto like those guys were never going to touch tokens in their whole life right but they're willing to do it in a public equity rapper and so we're bringing like literally 10 billion dollars of incremental new capital buyers that were not crypto natives into into crypto and that's what's been so powerful is that has all of been this is dads have been such such an incredible job of broadening access and broadening distribution to a whole new buyer base. And that's really why it's been I I don't think it's been cannibalistic. It's been very incremental in that it >> Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you know what's kind of ironic here is I've been in the space for uh 2017, saw that big kind of like how the cycle works then and then

saw how the cycle worked again in 2021. And now rather than actually seeing it play out from a, you know, Bitcoin goes first, then ETH, then that then the rest of the market, it's it's it's been that, but it's not been because like, you know, Kobe is is like saving the lows at 3K in the bare market with his like 100 Bitcoin buys. It's like, no, no, it's like large players came in, did the treasure companies with E or with Bitcoin first, then ETH, now Salana and other coin. And it's just been a very a very funny way to think about how all that's happened this time around so far is that the institutions have came on and just played by the same rules that the crypto markets have been abiding by for the last eight years.

>> Yeah. Um >> yeah, Paul, >> totally. I think that's what's so great is that like um like and I thought about this, you know, I'm you know Paul is like the guy when it comes to like being cryptonative and knowing everything. I almost feel like it's like such a newbie when I compare my experience to Paul's, but like when I came in, like I'm I'm really a like a Trafi tech investor, right? I'm not like a I'm not going to lie and say I'm like, you know, this this massive crypto bull that I've been my whole life because it's not true. But when I came in to crypto, it was because I saw so clearly the writing on the wall that ever if crypto is ever going to grow up as an industry, if it's ever going to go from, you know, at the time

two trillion or today three or four trillion of market cap to 10 trillion plus of market cap over time, the only incremental capital coming in has to be new capital. It has to be not retail capital. And it's like trady institutions, right? And and when you think about what they're doing, like that's all they are going to be more steady hands. They're going to like the cycles are going to elongate and be less crazy one way in both directions, right? Less crazy highs, less crazy lows, but more serious capital, more funly oriented capital and like incremental and and therefore like the way that these things trade is just going to change very drastically as all this this this very new category of investors comes in.

>> Yeah. No, it's it's huge for the market and and what may happen would be that uh you know we thought the ETFs were going to be >> we did >> capital coming in. Now we're going to see more ETFs and we're going to see more DATs. uh it seems like most of the capital is coming into Bitcoin, ETH and Soul, but that's just going to fuel more entrance coming into the space, getting acclimated with with learning about, you know, cryptocurrencies and the use cases behind it. And then I think it's going to flow back to retail and back to institutions for the longer tale eventually. um whether it's these TGES that happen or you know we're starting to see more longtail DATs come to market

and and you know it takes some time for them to really kind of hit their stride in terms of you know fundamentals and whatnot but you know I do think that this is going to open the door for more capital on retail and institutions come in for the longer tail that's my pieces at least. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I I mean yeah I think so as well. I mean, usually like the the tail end is usually the stuff that institutions wouldn't really want to touch anyhow. Uh, but it's what gets a lot of the retail excited uh on on the long tail. Uh, Paul, last thing for you on on the VC side of things because we're burying the lead here on the Salana that everyone wants to hear about. Uh, why are you guys concentrating on series A bets? I'll give you just a bit of context. We sure

we've probably done like 50 or 60 investments. And so, I'm asking this from, you know, a junior investor to a senior investor. And we have done a lot of like seed preede stuff, but we did like quite a bit of of um series A as well in like late 23, early 24 of like quality infra that felt like it was derisked. It felt like at 100 to 150 or you know even like anywhere up to 200 which probably looking back was way too expensive for our check size which is you know typically between like I don't know 10 and 50 uh K. Um, but we felt like it was just like good quality brands that had a good track record and didn't feel like as much as as a gamble.

Like we felt like, all right, we'll probably be able to get a decent return on this, but maybe these aren't going to be our our 100xers. Um, but at the same time, it felt like a good safer bet. But I'm I'm curious when you're looking at the the the differences between why seed is is not as appealing or why following on in series A or why the current market dynamic is ripe for actually doing more of these later stage type of deals even though they're still early. What is the what is the thinking? Is it a is it a macro thing? Is it a micro thing? Is it a situational uh market thing? Why is this uh the concentration for Panta?

>> Yeah, I'll I'll help to shed some light on it. I mean I think it's definitely a combination. I think for any investor you sort of have to think about what is your fund size and what sort of returns are you uh looking to generate or you're promising to your investors. Uh I think for us like we have a fairly large fund size and so we have a lot of flexibility and in terms of the other factor that that I I think about too is market dynamic. And so let's let's start with early stage tokens. I mean if you're able to get in early on an early stage token for the most part at least the trend has been that you're not going to

get diluted in the next round. you're just buying a slice of the token cap table. So, it's pretty lucrative to get in really early and uh be able to then double triple down later on. And so, for early stage tokens, uh even being a large fund, it's actually great to to to get in on the seed stage side as long as you feel like uh you know, this is a team to bet on and and and and uh it's non-competitive and things like that if that's your sort of mo. But on the uh and but but the the downside is that like it is a lot more competitive on the sestage side in general. And so thus like if you're able to wait for the

series A and you have the capital to do so, series A is a great time to be investing um for for for you know uh for crypto because there's not that many funds out there. I could probably name like maybe five to 10 versus like the number of entities that'll go into like a Cstage round is probably over a hundred, right? And so for us, we definitely feel like series A for early stage token is is is a good bet, but then especially for equity, there's less entities that want to go into equity because the liquidity is not as immediate as as uh tokens and you have to be a lot more hands-on and that sort of thing. So definitely on the on the equity side, we focus more on series

A's. We take the board seats. We know we have to be a lot more hands-on. A lot of these companies are are in it for the long term. A lot of them might need to get licenses focused on enterprise and institutions. And so, you know, that's really where the big focus on series A's are is on the equity side. >> Yeah. So you guys have kind of become like this M&A, IPO, treasury company, VC, like you guys are almost like like a a crypto asset manager like like full on like it's not just like a VC anymore. It's it's very much become a a multiaceted operation over the last five years.

>> Yeah. I mean look, the way I I think about that is that the core of what we do is really early stage venture, right? Like that is the heritage of the firm and that's like that drives a lot of what we do. But like I was mentioning earlier, I think it's actually like intellectually dishonest and impossible to be a good early stage investor if you don't actually have the viewpoint of you like a venture investor. You have to sell your investments eventually. Like how could you possibly be a good inventure investor if you don't actually know how you're going to sell them into public markets, right? And how public markets interpret your investments. And similarly, like you can't be the best public markets investor you can be without having a sense of really what's the cutting edge and what's around the corner. I think just very naturally that

means that we've evolved to realize we just want to deliver the best possible returns and make the best possible investments for our investors and the best way to do that is having this broader view and I think and and and and I think that's made us better you know private markets investors better public market investors and it's really allowed us to create new categories and do things in a way that other funds just aren't set up to do right like this DAT stuff it's like like you know again going back to early March or late April or sorry late March March, early April when when we did DeFi DevC Corp, it was like no one else was really giving them the time a day because they were looking at venture they were looking for venture funding, but people were like that's not really venture. It's sort of like a

public equity. Um like this is like a micro strategy thing. No one in crypto really understands that other than Michael Sailor. And so it really took like this very rigorous Tradfi analysis to get comfortable with that with that. But then on the flip side, it also took a venture style mindset of like we want to try to create a new category and we want to try to start a new company. And so you really need to marry both otherwise this wouldn't have even started. And so I think we we're just really uh fortunate to be uniquely positioned in a way that we have such great expertise across multiple multiple facets of the market that allows us to do special things that other people just don't understand. And you know we're we're again it's it's great that when we do things that they work of course and

if they work then other people fast follow. That's what's happened with dads. >> It definitely is. >> Yeah. I'll add on to that. I mean, we are trying to be the leading investment firm uh a a ideal partner for any institutional investor or even sort of like high net worth individual. And so this whole space started off with VC then it turned into hedge funds because things got you know tokens and things got liquid and things are are you know the public markets started to evolve. And so at the end of the day, I mean, that's why we launched a venture fund that includes both privates and publiclix because like look, I mean, there's going to be so many different ways outside of just even like uh investing, providing liquidity, um you

know, all this kind of stuff that's like very unique to our space. So just invest into our investor uh in in venture fund and get access to all of our best strategies. Um just make it really simple because we don't know what's going to come up next. hats. Yeah. Maybe there's another strategy that comes up and, you know, we're just going to fit it into the same thing. >> Yeah. All right, guys. Helas debt $500 million. Mert is not happy with you. If if Mert is watching this, I'm going to clip this. What is your word that you have to say to Mert about the name? Let's start here, guys. Come on. >> No, I'm so grateful. Like, look, we thought it was a fun uh fun coincidence, right? Obviously, we don't choose the name of the company. uh we're trying to find a uh a public company that is

willing to do the dance and we found a company called Helas. You know like hey we we like Helas, we love Mert. Um and we of course reached out to him early on uh to say hey this is happening just FYI. Um and uh and you know he's he's a great guy so in good nature he's totally fine with it. I think our goal eventually is to uh we're definitely open to open to rebranding and renaming. We don't want the confusion. But, you know, for today, the the the company that we've done the dance was at the Helas. And, you know, we're we're grateful that Mert's been really chill and and and uh and cool about it.

>> Someone's messing with you guys. Cool. All right. So, $500 million sold Treasury. Why now? Why? And why Salana? >> Oh, totally, man. I mean, I as I think about, you know, our I think it's two reasons. One is from a DAT perspective over time we we sort we really helped kickstart this trend and over time we've just been so involved in helping a lot of teams like talk to uh get involved and like start their own thing whether it's any of the bankers or any of the lawyers or sponsors generally my team is like we're one of the first calls if not the first call for anyone considering doing a debt and so we've been pretty fortunate to be involved all along the way you know we've invested now over $500 million in debts we've done over 20

deals. we've been in all the helps anchor many of the most important deals like Bitmind with Tom Lee um Caner Equity Partners or 21 with Jack Mers and so and so we just feel like we've gotten to a point where wow we've built all this expertise and like we know so much about the very particular nuances of what makes things work and what makes things not work like why don't we like try to do one and really lean in with all that expertise and energy to try to do something great and then at the same time Salana Salana is our biggest position at the firm you know it's it's it's something that we care deeply about. Um you the first DAT that we did the first DAT the first US debt outside of Micro Strategy was a Salana debt. And so like actually the original idea was a

Salana DAT and it was DeFi Dev Corp. And so we're sort of coming full circle that like man after this five months of learning um like and after seeing the massive success that Tom Lee had with ETH man it felt like it was really our responsibility to come to come to market with what we think is the best vehicle for Salana accumulation specifically uh and to do that in service of Salana but also do that in service of you know what we believe is a deck could really be and so that's why we're coming to market is like we feel this burden of of uh of of uh of being fortunate to be in this position and also responsible for trying to make great things happen on behalf of Salana and on behalf of the dad space.

>> Yeah. And this is why like I I love working with Cosmo. I mean like uh you know as they as they look at Salana from the public side like we've been involved with Salana since you know the seed round looking at it you know understanding tool and what his vision is uh and along the way we've been able to sort of uh invest into projects building on top of Salana. So we've been able to see them marry both their technical expertise to their commercial uh go to market strategy and so we really started to see a lot of momentum around gaming defi and then now sort of you know obviously there's a lot of stable coin stuff on Ethereum but we're starting to see a lot of great partnerships like Visa we're starting to

see a lot of traction around payments for Salana and obviously they they've been a leader around DPIN and things like that so you know the develop veloper adoption and the quality of developers and obviously the transaction volume has been very very promising. So from the venture side of things like we're we're pretty excited. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful. I mean it's been on a ever since Kyle announced his DAT it's been on a run. I think he tapped the full 1.6 billion into the chart just in like matter of 72 hours. So we saw that uh today we obviously have well this will go tomorrow. So FOMC has happened. We'll see kind of how that shakes things up. But I think I think generally pump pump is bringing Salana a whole another leg here of attention and of mind share with with their streaming

product as well as just like the revenue kind of stuff that we were talking about Cosmo which Cosmo by the way I'm I am the creator of the revenue meta the silly uh phrase that goes on on Twitter that was my poll back in the day. Um, and so, so when you guys are thinking about the Salana Data specifically, and I think, uh, with with the other DATs that you've done, I I saw Kyle Sani go on on either like Mer or Thread Guy talking about how they plan to get maybe was even TBPN, they plan to get 15% or something in Salana DeFi potentially. How do you see the actual usage of the Salana which you've accumulated or or are planning to accumulate um being used outside of just holding it in a you know secure custodial environment? Do you

plan to stake it to get yield? Do you plan to use it in DeFi? You know, is this going to be what what provides Salana DeFi another leg up? >> Oh, totally. I mean, I think one of the most exciting things about DATs is that they're like they're almost like a third leg of the stool for any protocol. you know, most protocols have a labs entity. They have a foundation, but like for a variety of reasons, the labs and the foundation, they can't do certain things or they can't invest in a certain way. And so, uh, but having a third and so the DAT fills a really nice third leg of the stool where we can be aggressive about talking about Salana. We can be aggressive about, uh, about talking about the investment merits of Salana and and investing in across everything across Salana. And so that's been, uh, I

think that's just so important. And so we do feel like it's our responsibility in starting on Salana, Helas, HSDT like it will be a huge participant in making sure one that we are evangelizing all the reasons why we think Salana is such a great token and such a great investment uh for for for mainstream and then two how we can deploy Salana in a very effective way to maximize yield and maximize shareholder value for our shareholders because that's that's ultimately the goal, right? Um and so and then but in doing so we're really helping drive that flywheel of Salana and like by using Salana more uh by deploying D5 more it just proves out that it it can be used in a productive way and and it hopefully attracts more people.

>> Yeah. Hey Ram, what's up man? You can stay and just uh stay quiet. This is going to be a fun uh fun little ending here. I I appreciate you you being on time. We're all good. Marcel, just uh back to backs here guys. Um cool. Let me just get you back set up and then Paul, I'm g bring it back to you. Same same question. And um yeah, Paul, anything to add there with regards to your thoughts on how you see either, you know, this Helioat from Panta or others contributing to uh their respective DeFi ecosystems and perhaps even the timeline or a process that would have to happen for us to actually see these DATs deploy into DeFi protocols, smart contract risk, with custody risk and all these different

things. Yeah, I I echo what Cosmo mentioned. I mean, we we'll sort of see if this actually replaces the foundation and and labs, and it's just a great way to use um you know, financial instruments that have been around for a long time, access to public capital to be able to really just, you know, go in there and and really sort of accumulate uh the asset through uh you know, staking, uh DeFi, all that kind of stuff. And uh I I think it's going to be uh a great channel for it's already happening for most of the uh the top protocols and yeah we're going to see it happen for the longtail too and you know we're going to be strategic in terms of you know helping

these guys out. >> Are you guys going to raise more capital and deploy more? Is this the beginning? What's your vision for this Helios company? Oh man, I I want Helios HS or I don't I I I hope the capital markets will allow Helios HST to be, you know, the preeminent leading salon of that. And I think we're we're well well positioned to do that. I think we're going to have a lot of velocity out of the gate, which is what matters the most to public markets, right? It's it's how fast you can scale, not necessarily your starting point. I think we start we're starting at a really really solid foundation. And then uh and that we're gonna that that'll allow us to grow really quickly and you know I think largely we have I have a lot of experience navigating the capital

market. I mean that's most of my career is navigating the public capital markets and so we're we're in deep talks with how all the different ways that we can raise more capital all in service of uh our Helios HSDT shareholders but also in service of uh broadening Salana adoption. So one thing for you then uh Cosmo Dan Morehead uh the you know founding partner of Panta went on CBC and said when asked that you know Bitcoin had this longevity Ethereum has this longevity Salana's kind of newer better and there's there always kind of be seems to be this successor and I think the question was around you know Dan you know you know what's going to come and replace Salana and Dan was like

well I mean really nothing like there there's gonna you know It's really good for, you know, uh, basically doing NASDAQ right now. It can do more transactions than than NASDAQ. And, you know, he he he had his well articulated answer as to why there's not going to be something that replaces it. Do you do you firmly agree with that? Because what I would push back on that is that in crypto, all we've ever seen is successors come and replace the incumbents. And I know we're getting deeper and deeper into the markets. Um, but Hyperlquid is a great, you know, recent example of why perexes are have been really hard to create a a strong moat. You know, you could argue that Hyperlid may have it now or may not. Um, you know, so when it comes to Salana and Dan's conviction here on this, you know,

specific idea, do you do you firmly back this? What what's your take on this? >> Look, I believe that we will live in a multi-chain world. Uh, my observation is that a couple observations. One is that protocols are flywheel businesses, right? They're they're networks that require density to really scale and develop a mode. And at some point, you reach escape velocity where your network is very very hard to displace even if your technology isn't isn't like the latest and greatest. Um but and so like there is a huge scale and early mover mode that Ethereum and Salana both have developed and Bitcoin for for what Bitcoin does. Um the flip side is that when you think about you know what we actually need like faster better like I

always go back to uh I you most of my career has been been an equities analyst and covering consumer and internet stocks. I always go back to you what one of the biggest stocks in my you know early in my career was Amazon right and Jeff Bezos would always say there's this like holy trinity of consumer demands that never that will never change and they are they want faster they want cheaper they want more convenient and that's what Salana is. It's faster, it's cheaper, it's more convenient, and that's why we're so pumped about it. And that's why for me the clarity of of the investment piece is so obvious because that's like what how the greatest companies have been built. Um, and then but like there's always faster. There's always cheaper and but when you think about like what the use cases are actually are like Salana's like pretty

freaking fast and like pretty freaking cheap and probably fast enough cheap enough for anything that we need at least for the foreseeable future. And it's not like Salana is a static thing either, right? is constantly upgrading. We have fire dancer coming out. We got, you know, double zero increasing uh throughput and so um we think Salana not being a static thing will continue to evolve and get better and better over time and there already has this pretty strong deep network effect. >> Yeah. No, I agree. I mean look uh on transaction throughput um general purpose blockchain salon's got the lead. I think it's theirs to to lose. Uh I do think Hyperliquid and others could potentially make a dent if they focus on certain verticals like of course Hyperlquid uh has a lot of you know sort

of um traders on their platform and guys that are very sort of financially savvy or maybe you come across like other platforms that are focused on certain like you know RWA use cases and things like that. So I think we will see a lot of verticalization where you can make a dent get some traction and potentially expand over to being more general purpose. But again, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Salana have a head start around that. Salana is just focused on that transaction throughput that is very appealing for a lot of use cases like you know AI deep pin payments. Guys, last thing for you. I had um the framework ventures guys on recently, Vance and Michael, we spoke about the you know just where we're at in the DAT

idea. Uh, I think Michael was saying like we're if there's an inning before inning one, that's where we're at. But people on Twitter were saying we're in inning seven or eight. And Vance was like, why are we even talking about innings here? This is not the right way to think about the markets. The cycles are kind of stupid. yada yada. So, like very just bullish mixed with like a this is a new world that we're living in. When it comes to where we're at from your perspective in this DAT uh, you know, phenomenon, where are we? Are we in the, you know, very early, middle, kind of close to the end? Like, is there an end? How do you guys think about the development of this debt market considering you guys, frankly, I mean, you guys didn't create it, but you, you know, you really accelerated. You poured

gas on the fire following strategy. Uh, Paul, we can start with with you. Cosmo can close us out. Um, it's been a great stream guys. >> Yeah, I'll I'll I'll be short here because I think Cosmo's got a lot more to say, but uh it's it's it's a very strong trend. It's a needed trend. it's not going away. Uh we'll see some es and flows along, you know, we'll we'll see some consolidation like we we did with the uh the ICO market and whatnot. But uh again like this is this is something that's bringing sort of a a a new set of investors uh new strategies to the market um accomplished leaders and entrepreneurs that are really finding ways to you know asset accumulate and also just bring an next generation of

investors to come into space. So I'm I'm excited. I think this is a huge thing >> like I also agree you have to evolve as the market evolves and you know every day is a new day and so I think calling innings is is a silly game. It's like fun but it's a silly game. I would say though that there's a huge difference between like when people think about the evolution of the space there's a couple ways to think about it. one is that um you know what we're seeing now is the creation of the genesis of a whole new category of companies right like these DATs didn't exist in a major way before before March April this year when we did that first soul deal like Micro Strate was big and there's MetaPlanet but really kind of no one else there's some in Canada but smaller

>> and uh and and so we had this opportunity or entrepreneurs had this opportunity to just create a whole new category of companies like rarely do you get that right and obviously only happens once you only create a category once then it's created And so we we're in this stage where we're probably in the later innings of creating the category, but we're in the but we're in the early innings of how much these can grow and evolve over time. And so I think when a lot of people talk about cycles with that, it's like I agree. We're like towards the later innings, if you're only thinking about the later innings of the genesis, uh but but we're still early innings in terms of how much impact they can have over time.

>> Well guys, congratulations on the uh creation of these DATs. We can give you some confetti, maybe a money ray. Hopefully we see Salana hold up well and continue you guys can continue to accumulate. I think the big goal for the Salana ecosystem is going to be to get to that $10 billion mark for one of the larger DATs so there can be you know more of more financial engineering to to basically raise more and keep accumulating. Um we'll have to have another conversation in a couple months when these things scooped up multiple percentage points of of the supply of some of these largest networks and talk about what what happens now. uh if the ownership of these networks is is in these massive public companies at scale, what the ramifications are on

governance, on the future of these protocols. We're definitely entering a more sophisticated era of the space. You guys are leading it. Appreciate both of your time and being here today. Paul, Enjoy Brazil, Cosmo, you're absolutely locked in, man. So, thanks guys. >> Awesome. Awesome. >> Great chatting, man. >> Thank you guys. All right. Boom. Man, Panta >> the largest >> dude. They started data been in this game going back all the way to like 2015, maybe even earlier. One of the first institutionalsiz VCs. Did I tell you that the story that the reason why I I found I had so much confidence to decide that Hyperlid was the one to

to ape on the second it launched was because I was with some of their team the night before in Hong Kong having sushi and drinks >> with Panta's team, not Hyperl. >> Panta, Spartan, some of these others, man. >> Yeah. Yeah. Spartan guys are great, too. But Panta's just been around for so long. I mean, I I didn't, you know, get a chance to uh to participate in that one. So, what what were the key takeaways? How did you I mean, when you're when you're like, how broad do you go? How how deep do you go into particular things? And generally, like what what stuck out to you the most, >> dude? They are so bullish on Salana. Um they raised $500 million for the Helas Dat. Crazy bullish.

>> Did you ask them why they chose the name Helas? >> I asked them if they were going to change it. They said that they told Mert. Um, actually that's a great clip uh that's going to come out. Uh, Clippers, if you're watching this, I asked the Panta guys if they're going to change the name from Helas and what what Mer said and they told the story about it. It was really funny. Um, so they are going to change it, but it was just so happened to be that the company that they wanted to buy was called Helas and they were the or the company that was willing to support the deal was called Helas. >> So, so they did that one. Um, and yeah, so they so they did that. So Panta is doing a lot of series A investing on the venture side because they have a lot of

size and because there's so much competition at the at the seed round that as as long as they can get these deals in on the on the series A side they're comfortable with being in there that are kind of like whatever there's way less competition on the on the on the series A because there's only like you know 10 investors. Um, we also talked about the kind of state of DeFi and how a lot of the Salana DeFi companies are going to be beneficiaries of this DAT. If you saw uh Camino, it went up like freaking 50% the other day after after Kyle Sani said that he was going to be participating in these and using Salon DeFi to get yield for the fund.

>> So, that was great. I mean, look, they are just set on wanting to use these treasury vehicles to raise more capital to buy more soul. Soul is one of their largest positions and and yeah, I mean they have they think we're they think that we are are late in the like in the design of the DATs and like in how much financial construction could be made but early still in the overall like you know overall uh picture that they see this going on for a while. also just generally they are have been involved in some of the regulatory work and they're very very bullish on the the the entire

space and so Paul put out this report that was like a 60page report I'll pull it up for a second here's on my screen and then sometime next week we'll get the we'll get the screen share dialed um and yeah if you look at Paul's tweet he put out this massive coin um this kind of state of cryptovc article. Um and I think that was really really well done >> and done some great research over the years.

>> Yeah. Because he he wrote kind of just about how it's going to how VC's, you know, working, what they're doing, yada yada. I mean, dude, these guys led uh the M0 $40 million series B. So, you got to think that to lead a $40 million round, they probably invested in well, I suppose they didn't lead, sorry, but they probably invested at least four to five mil, maybe two to three, you know, and then you start to think about uh you know what what the size of the deals they're doing, right? If they invest 3 to 5 mil, they're happy with the three to 5x. They're not looking for 100x in series A, right? And so, you know, they they said that regulatory clarity turned

tokenization from a huge risk into a weapon. You know, Paul was very bullish on this state of affairs. So, yeah, it was an enjoyable it was an enjoyable segment. I mean, I thought it was fun. I thought it was great. And yeah, we got Frank next. So, that's I'm pretty stoked on this. >> Obviously, Frank does some great research as well. We're going to cover everything that he's been up to recently. Uh, before we get into some of the recent things from Frank, >> Yeah. Uh I I think it's no coincidence that DATs preceded ETFs. >> I we've been talking about this ETFs there. There's going to be a wave of ETFs that are now going to get issued. I think it's no >> I I think there's no doubt about that.

ETFs are the retail vehicle of choice. Uh this is what opens up uh regular regulated brokerages and uh people that uh operate and work and invest via these regulated brokerages. They can now day trade. They can go and they can hold and invest um on their own behalf as well as through an adviser. Uh so retail gets in after institutional happens every time. Yeah. >> DATs were a primarily institutional vehicle. >> Yep. And so makes so much s just makes complete sense now that you know after institutions have loaded up their bags via these dats which we may see more but that thing seems to be coming to a close and now it's ramping into into this re

retail vehicle via these ETFs we're accelerating we're moving along >> yeah but I think CMS had a good point we'll drop that one on on Monday right like who knows who like I don't think anybody that I know is going to go and be like hm like without the advice from somebody like us or something who's going to just go and start buying ETFs who hasn't like like is financial advisor going to call you and be like, "Oh, dude, like you should be buying this Avalanche ETF." I don't know, man. >> The only exception to that is Coin is not Coinbase, Hyperlid, because Hype isn't listed on any of those other venues.

>> Yeah. Yeah. What was Did you think John Sharp's tweet was uh particularly insightful for some reason? I just think it was pretty indicative that once these things go live, it's like the final boss unlocked. The final like the concentric circles of people that are within the industry and kind of know how to get access. >> Yeah. >> They've bought obviously. >> Then we have this other wave, decentralized exchange, centralized exchange, DA institutional wave. We're going and outwardly expanding the universe of buyers. ETFs unlock essentially the last the final boss of buyers. So I think after that then what how else do you ex >> exactly >> that's like like the the stages of adoption that I think that we're seeing

right with the space. I mean there's going to be more and more buyers but um yeah 10 trillion seemingly is not that high of a total crypto market cap but it's actually going to require more than I had anticipated to get there. like we are already doing a lot more than I had kind of been thought of that we were doing to just to get to where we are today, >> let alone to get to uh you know 10 trillion. So >> we got to get use your imagination. Think about all the possibilities of where we still can go.

>> Well, yeah, nation states will get us to 10 trillion, right? But I don't know like we had like we we're at 4.1 trillion right now and uh we've had a lot of financial engineering going on in the in in the last couple months. So all right guys, we got Frank um in the background. Frank's the head of content at GSR. Uh also a you know afficionado of other things in the northeast of the USA I believe. Maybe a lobster roll or something. Uh we we'll have to get his take on the best lobster roll in the northeast of the USA.

>> Had an absolutely iconic mustache, but by looking behind the scenes now, I think the mustache may have gone. >> All right, let's up. >> Still got the best mustache in crypto without even having the mustache. Frank, welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having me. Longtime listener, first time guest. >> Yeah, man. Yeah, man. Well, it's it's good to have you. Um, we're sitting here at the at the intersection of a lot of the uh bigger kind of public markets, crypto markets, media. Um, obviously we're doing the streaming format. You got a lot of of experience uh kind of building the block from square one. Uh, you know, being one of the early early

uh employees, partners there. Um, maybe just a quick intro about yourself. First time us meeting you, Rob, and myself. How did you get how did you join the block? Why did you uh start doing crypto media? Um and then take us up to where you are now. >> Yeah, sure. So, I started covering the space in 2018 at a mainstream business publication called Business Insider, which then changed the insiders back to Business Insider. And the market was um a bit more um simple to cover at at that point. There weren't as many market participants.

there weren't as many um esoteric um uh platforms and initiatives and and companies. So, a lot of it was just covering the market movements and what was happening offshore in in perpetuals. And then, uh, at the end of the year, um, ETFs or excuse me, futures, um, began trading on CME and and, uh, CBOE. And that's when the the the the narrative of the institutions are coming kind of started cementing itself into the market. And that's around the time that we started the the block because we thought that that institutionalization would happen quicker than it did. I didn't I didn't expect to be caught in

the doldrums of a bare market for three years. And and thankfully with the um the the tenacity and the fortitude of a lot of the the folks that were at the company at the time, we were able to weather that that that proverbial storm. Um and then you know after doing something for seven and a half years of my life um I I uh you know took took an opportunity to apply uh the media and content skills that I had sharpened walted um editing and doing multimedia for the block um within a trading shop.

And and that's not too far of a divorce from um you know my breadand butter work which has been covering effectively the market structure of crypto which uh is very much tied to the institutionalization and and then also of course the regulatory backdrop which today I think in today's price action is is it's really evident the extent to which that has has flipped and when you look at you mentioned Andy the the the um the the ped dantic um you know whimsical wonky new financialization of of new products coming to market.

>> Yeah. >> Um that's one force that's one tailwind. But really I think what we're seeing is where the market would have been years ago had it not been for one um chairman Gary Gendler who I think really set the market back several years. And when you look at the demand in the recent IPOs that have come to market, the IPOs that he effectively banned from happening during his his um reign of terror at the SEC, it illustrates really the demand that there is in US equities for crypto market exposure. And you saw that in the 6x I guess pop in circle, the then 3x pop in in in bullish in the those equities in the first day of trading.

And then you know we're obviously seeing that sort of like um Titan uh I think Gemini was a 14% pop and figure was a >> 24% pop. But what that shows is that there was this demand that the regulators have have >> basically um blocked off right and really I mean it's it's it's pretty it's pretty insane from my vantage point. I was just talking to a reporter at the New York Post about it and you know the current SEC uh especially in yesterday's news that um we're we're going to have effectively a more streamlined process for new crypto ETFs coming to market which is a watershed

moment and will lead to um effectively a Cambrian explosion in in new access vehicles to crypto. The current administration showing what could have been done, what would have been possible had it not been for the unbridled relentless capriccious arrogance of the former administration that wait. >> Can I get a [ __ ] Gary Gendler or is that inappropriate for the stream? >> I don't know. My grandmother might be watching. >> But look, I think we I think we agree with you, Frank. And just today I saw you retweeted there's a you know SEC is pushing through the generic listing process for these ETFs. Rob and I were kind of going back and forth about the impact of the digital asset treasuries

versus the ETFs. I put out a tweet yesterday kind of saying look guys uh I spoke to the Canary Capital CEO a couple of weeks back. He said the timeline for these is pretty much mid-occtober. You know what is the rumblings in the in New York within these kind of uh media crypto uh finance world? you know, you you you're going out for drinks, you're you're doing a coffee meeting with uh you know, New York Post media. What is the what is the current rumblings? Um you know, what is the rumor mill saying? What can you share with us with regards to these ETFs with regards to this kind of public equity models and and that >> Yeah, of course. I think to um set the stage right the Bitcoin ETFs

which were among the biggest debut of a new financial instrument a year ago still so that you know forget about the ETFs that are coming that product still very much so has not um been fully unleashed onto the street so a lot of the activity that you're seeing is visav be self-directed brokers, people who um are more comfortable with um you know dabbling in financial markets than uh more passive investors.

And so this trend or this theme of 1 to 3% allocation to crypto in a standard portfolio where in the I don't even know if we're in the first inning of that. I think that the players are still tying their boots in the dugout or their cleats in the dugouts. Um that's how early that process is and the um the you know I talked to people who are you know trying to onboard the likes of Morgan Stanley and and the financial advisors that they're talking to are asking if you need a wallet to have an ETF. Like it's it's very much that early in the process of unlocking what is effectively the largest channel of wealth in uh the country which is the advisor

space. And so that is all to say that even with the Bitcoin ETF which you know across the 10 or so products that exist in market have billions of dollars under management it's still very very early for them those flows and that liquidity uh is still in the naent infant stage and so and we're at 117 right with with that still being very early That's not to say that and and then at the same time, right, for the longtail crypto assets, these uh vehicles haven't even launched yet. So that's on the that's on the asset management side, right? You know, you

could see that alone um providing a massive tailwind for Bitcoin to as the Winklust twin said during their debut uh go to a million dollars per Bitcoin. >> Yeah. And the other tailwind I think that's interesting is obviously this regulatory tailwind, right, where companies can actually access the capital markets and and the public markets specifically. And there was a bank that last night had a very um large dinner with some of the top crypto executives in the space that uh are eyeing the public markets. Very large bank. I won't say which one it is. um with all of the heads of their um uh effectively I think their their um financial industry group for their their

investment banking division. Um and you know if you think of some names they were probably at that dinner last night and so one tailwind right you have um the the wave of of crypto companies tapping US equity markets is still again in in the early stage as well. I mean, you think about the number of companies that are um you know, we've had f four recently go, you know, there could be at least, you know, there's at least 10 that I can think of that are very that are in short order um eyeing the markets in the next three to four quarters.

>> So, >> yeah. Well, I'd love to get your take on one of the more creative models that we've seen, and it it's yet to develop. So I'm actually curious from your perspective how this thing could cross the chasm because it kind of spans party lines if you will and that's Coinbase which is obviously a public company on regulated exchanges. Um I was at base camp in Stow Vermont this kind of uh retreat for uh the base portion of Coinbase and and Jesse Paul like the you know the leader of Bass said that they're starting to explore this network token. So then you would have this company that has circulating shares on regulating exchanges for Coinbase, but then its product base would have a would have a network token. And so there's a a

few different angles to look at this. Some people are saying, well, how can they do that? Shouldn't shareholders be furious unless you know that that all goes to them? But just from a innovator standpoint, this is a really interesting model to have a dual offering onchain and in a regulated off-chain offering. How do you kind of square this balance? Do you h if you're Brian or Jesse, how would you go about kind of rolling this out so that it's wellreceived? >> If I was Brian or Jesse, I don't know if I'd be on the show. I'd probably be somewhere in the, you know, >> buddy. We just had Jeremy on the show.

Come on now. >> Come on. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I would I I would just be doing it for my boat or something. Um, no, it's a really good question. And one thing that I would say is that I think um it's it's a question that the analysts who cover Coinbase um have have yet to sort of wrap their their minds around when they think about uh the the performance of the stock. It's still very much tied to um that sort of take rate from trading revenue and the business um the business as it's viewed by the analysts who cover it which mostly are folks who um you know cover brokers and exchanges.

they've really kind of ignored the the value that sort of is um unlocked from from networks like Bass or from um um you know the the venture book and the exposure that Coinbase has to the crypto economy at large and and I think Coinbase has done a very good job hammering home the messaging that they're not necessarily just a broker an exchange or a trading platform but are trying to rebuild the economy via crypto rails, but that's not something that the street has fully granked or um uh appreciated. So, it's kind of a two-way

street where there's um this gap in in understanding. I guess the the the actual question though about like the extent to which a native token maybe dilutes or um extracts economics from shareholders. I don't know if it necessarily does because you would imagine that the revenue that they get from base is then you know going to um kick up to the the broader um Coinbase entity. Um, so I think I think it's a net net positive for for all people involved. It just gives the company more levers um to to play with.

>> Very curious to see how it goes. I saw you bull posting Robin Hood and they're they've went and launched a a chain on Arbitum and >> they're getting close to doing it. Yeah. Yeah. >> Getting close to do it that, you know, they've expressed their plans and also their plans to go and extend that into its own chain external to to any dependencies on arbitum. So, it just naturally occurs to me that Robin Hood may be exploring and considering similar business models of having a dual offering as well. >> Robin Hood Robin Hood's a generational company. It's it's one of the most impressive firms operating in the world in my opinion. And >> I I mean even outside of crypto, if you look at the um the the the 401k product

that they launched, I think it was this summer. I mean outside from just being I mean I mean these are beautifully designed products and seamless to use, easy to understand and the the the only hiccup right like again they were another victim of this sinners in the hands of an angry god regime run by Gary Gendler where had it not been for that they would never have had to delist tokens that clearly now are not securities, but outside from that, I can't think of another company that has had so few hiccups in sort of rolling out um phenomenal product for their clients.

>> Frank, I just want to bring it back uh in the same vein here with regards to Robin Hood, with regards to uh Coinbase, the main driver for revenue for uh base, the L2, is just simple sequencer fees. um they derive, you know, millions of dollars a month in ETH paid to them by their end users and their fees are extremely cheap as they are, you know, comparatively to other L2s. Maybe Polygon is cheaper, maybe a couple others. >> The whole meta right now is buybacks. It's, you know, Hyperlid's the best and pumped off fun is buying back and everyone's happy, right? if Bass decided to buy back the base token with sequencer fees and not allocate that in some capacity to Coinbase uh directly

like in a direct payment versus more of like I I'm sure Coinbase shareholders would maybe have some sort of token allocation or something. But should Bass want to create more of the onchain economy and keep the onchain onchain, how do you h how would you feel about Coinbase's uh position then >> in in terms of the value that would acrue to shareholders? >> Yeah, in terms of what is better to hold or would this then cause an issue potentially? >> Well, I mean I think the holders are going to be totally different, right? like the people I mean what the the the people who are you know now that Coinbase is right you know part of um you know the the broader um the the the the S&P

um that that's a totally different um investor group that's not going to be investing um for Coinbase upside visav base right and sure there are probably a lot of folks who would invest via base that might also hold the underlying stock, but they're probably going to hold it and think about it in a different way. Um, probably, you know, for me personally, right, like I hold Coinbase as part of a, you know, a Roth um, investment account. So I think it's just going to be those are just two different types of profiles and and so the audience or the overlap of people

that maybe will be exploring the outside opportunity betw twix the twain is probably small I would say. >> Yeah, I agree. I think uh I think it's different. It just brings the question like does two separate and like two separate assets or you know investment vehicles create more value or does it just you know split the value and I guess that's yet to be seen. Frank I want to shift gears here because I think the whole world is entering a different era of marketing communications uh content and so I want to kind of hone in on GSR is a great example. Start broadly here. You know, I just I just saw a post that A16Z was hiring a

Clipper. That means that A16Z is coming out there probably finding some like 20-year-old native person who has been doing this for like three years as a as a as a young person and has the internet native feel and is they're hiring a clipper. GSR, one of the largest funds and successful firms, just hired Frank to be their content media guy. There are endless examples of financial and large companies hiring influencers. Bread Guy, Meg ETH, ICO Beast. Um, you know, list goes on within crypto Twitter and beyond. John Wang just got hired for Kelshi. Uh, a couple others, right? And so when you're thinking about this like newer era of crypto media, of crypto

uh content, of comms, right? as we are bleeding into the actual real world, let's call it now, better regulatory regime, you know, we're we're getting a bit more of a positive perception, etc. How do you think about uh crypto media and this this this new format and this new way of actually uh creating content and specifically for GSR, right? It's like in the past, sure, GSR might have a CMO to help do interviews for their founders or maybe kind of like, you know, do some social media posts, but now all of a sudden, Frank's profile with a large audience becomes like this face becomes a a big part of the brand and it gives a whole another kind of layer to this thing. So, take this

wherever you want. I just wanted to set the stage for the last 10, 15 minutes and really kind of just nerd out about where media is in today's age. >> It's a good question. Um, so I had a friend of mine who texted me the other day asking if AI would impact specifically he asked, which was funny, the role of an editor-inchief at a media organization. Um, which my answer was no, not really, because the role of an editor-inchief is more so to kind of um guide the the strategic vision of of the newsroom. If anything, AI will probably impact um the the actual number of of folks you need to staff a newsroom. So, it would impact

journalists. Um and so it's it's it's difficult to have this conversation in a vacuum without thinking about what's happening in media um uh generally speaking which is that you have the rise of AI which is introducing new content forms into market um a lot of which are you know erroneous or disinformation. And I'm sure a lot of people have been on the other end of a um chat GBT hallucination. And you also have uh you know thinner margins and a lot of newsrooms um as a result of um this this growing trend of distrust in in traditional media

institutions resulting in a lot of um folks within these newsrooms going independent and spring and basically creating um entities around their own personal brand. And we saw that very recently with Alex Heath um who who just he's a veteran reporter in in technology um kind of stand up his own um his own media entity effectively and and and we've seen a a number of of there's a number of those examples um recently. Um so there's that trend right where the individual right really plays a key role in in trust versus the institution

itself right people want to read Andrew Ross Sorcin not necessarily the New York Times or in the case of Alex right they want to follow Alex's reporting not necessarily that of I think he was at Fox if I'm recalling correctly and I think that's the case with with with most outlets. Um, and I think the same thing can be said of and and because that's happening, right? Because there is less emphasis on being in the New York Times or being in Fortune or being in any media publication as a founder or as an organization, as a firm because of this this this growing

affinity for the individual, which is a interesting conversation to get into why that's happening. I think it probably has to do with just this generalized distrust that's growing in in in all institutions. >> Corruption bias. Yeah. >> Yes. Um this growing affinity for the individual I think raises an opportunity for firms where it's like okay I don't need to be in all of these publications because the people aren't going to them anymore or have the same degree of trust in them anymore. So wouldn't it just be easier to an extent to get one of those people to craft and shape messaging and information in house and I

think that's effectively the storyline at the same time right the way we consume information is is changing and um I had a colleague at the block who runs our multimedia efforts his name is Davis and he's He's uh really great. We were going back and forth and we do a lot of this. Um we dig into a lot of the the the boring um details of of uh media and marketing and there was a survey we were looking at that suggested that something like 80% of all marketers surveyed in this survey uh emphasize the importance of video content. And so, you know, it's it's something that takes

a a little bit more personality, a little bit more skill than just like writing blog posts, which people aren't consuming in the same way. And you've seen this in a number of recent um series A's announcements where they're not putting out the standard press release and getting the standard TechCrunch article or the standard Fortune article. They're putting out these like cool videos. the old Cluey uh is the famous one there. That guy is an animal. >> Yeah. >> But that stuff is like the is like the Paul River, you know, the the British are coming after that after that one. It was like I mean it was happening before, but I think in like the web 2 VC world, that thing really just set the stage for

what's coming. >> I think that's right. And I I I would I would describe it as such. >> So, okay. Okay. So, Frank, so that encapsulates the personal branding, why there's this distrust with institutions and media at large, as well as just this idea around people buy from people, people enjoy people. And you know, you you you really gave us the full 3,000 or 30,000 foot view around general media. This is happening. And this is a trend that I talked to Yano from Blockworks about in New York probably three months ago. We spoke deeply about this and how you know part of his house of brand strategy why he is kind of been uh you know big on his personal brand you know it's just extends extends and so when it comes to uh gsr specifically you know in your in

your thought process for what you want to do as the head of content for a company that is let's just say not notably known for content or you know probably existed just fine without it. in fact did you know now you kind of come into the space what is the you know what does Frank's you know roles look like at gsr you know how do you help them and maybe you could then like kind of like explain why you think everybody needs a Frank you know because you're doing x y and z for this firm and it's helped them in this way just kind of curious like what the real value is be behind having someone like you >> well I make really good lamb chops I think and I'm jelly I'm nice to be

around. So, um, but I think the question's valid when you think about a competitive market. Um, and a market where, listen, at the end of the day, you have to compete with a lot of noise. um in a market where if you're a serious project and then the next day the president of the United States launches a memecoin that sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the room. um it it's tough to sort of have space for or or even dats right you know there was I was reading I I think it was the block or coin and there was one day where 80% of the articles on

site were about debts and so in a market where the attention is the the the sort of the task of garnishing um of of attracting attention is so difficult. If you as a service provider can provide a a vehicle for attention that can be very valuable to client or to potential partners or to potential um uh investments, right? So we do have a VC, right? And so if if you know in a competitive environment where people are trying to write checks, but you know

people founders want more than checks, right? They want connectivity to potential clients. They want marketing. They want um help with hiring. That's something that can move the needle for them in terms of making room on the cap table for you. And this isn't too dissimilar. If we look at US equity markets, right, there is very little difference between the actual service that's provided by New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ for instance. I think the fees at New York Stock Exchange are a little bit higher. um at least they were when I worked at NASDAQ a decade ago and and but the actual like product of tapping the public markets is effectively the same. Na Nazi has a bit of a different model, blended human

model with DMMs that sit on the floor of the exchange and NASDAQ's electronic. But in being in that seat um 10 years ago, the main differentiator was and and what they've built on is access to media marketing capabilities and activations. Right? If you're a founder looking to go public on New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ, you're weighing the question of do I prefer um to ring the bell next to where CNBC films in New York Stock Exchange or do I want my face plastered on Time Square?

That's not a very technical trading question for a founder to wrap their head around. It's a marketing question. And when I think about a firm like GSR, I imagine that that might be a similar question for a token project that's looking to um to to to start trading. Which service provider might give me a little bit more juice in terms of exposure and and access to what uh to the attention economy of crypto? >> If that makes sense. I don't view it very differently from from that from that analogy.

>> It does. you're you're explaining the trade-offs >> at play here as founders make decisions and uh they decide on who to hire, who to work with, who to partner with, and who to take investment checks from. >> Um, >> which is kind of like this media VC model, Rob. Like we we're basically running this model. >> We have like a separate fund. We're going to roll the full new brand out and whatnot. It's all prop cap and whatnot, >> but but essentially it's like Yeah. you know, this media VC model, Frank, is is it's just I mean, you joined the big boys. Rob and I had to look inside our pockets to get the the VC side started, but you know, we're 26. We're you know, we're just it's a journey here. Um, but this is essentially the model that we're

describing. It's like this media VC investor model. And then you can do events, which you guys do at major conferences. I'm sure there's going to be one in Korea and Token, which we'd love to be at. And then you just get really high quality people in the room. Guy like Frank's there. I see a guy like Frank there. I'm like, "Oh, that's Frank from Twitter. Oh, I want to go talk to Frank." And then it's like, and it's just this flywheel. And so this media VC idea is just it is an interesting paradigm shift from traditional Yeah. traditional media, traditional regulated investing. Crypto kind of flipped the regulated investing thing into fully democratized access as long as you're accredited, have some reputation, etc.

And then now with social media, we have the ability to just create and build your own Atlantic or your own whatever it is. So Frank, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it over here. >> No, and it makes a lot of sense. And Andy, what you're hitting on is something that um I saw watch play out in real time among um the the market's most secretive HFT firms when they got into crypto. I mean, firms like Jane Street to a much lesser extent or firms like Jump. It was really the first time they had ever talked to media or had any sort of public facing um external presence because they had to to engage with this new generation or class of founders, right? Um before Jump got into

crypto, for instance, their website was just jump trading >> with the the five or so cities in which they operated. And now obviously it's it's a bit more um open and and and every sort of trading firm has gone through um that evolation evolution to uh approach this this current market. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. You know, as we first kind of ran through with that phenomenon, it kind of occurred to me that maybe technology was the one that brought the barrier of entry down, but it actually just seems more like it's just the maturity of the industry. charity of media grew into social media and democratized it and brought that barrier of entry down and now anyone can kind of spin up their own

media entity. Similarly, you have that in crypto brought brought the barrier of entry down. But early on, like you're saying, market makers actually, even though the technology might have been better, they actually had to kind of figure out and n navigate the industry and become a little bit more public until the industry matured, you know, now it's a little bit more permissionless. >> Yeah. Um, Frank, I think uh we're running up on time here. I do have just one question for you because I saw that you recently had a birthday maybe last month. Happy birthday. Happy birthday.

>> And um the menu looked delicious. I think maybe my invite got lost in the mail. It's okay. >> Next year post office isn't great. >> Um but I'm curious, do you have any advice to your younger self, you know, maybe from a decade ago? What uh what realizations uh have you made as as you break through into your 30s? >> Wow. Um well, you've made me feel very very old. Um, one thing that I would say is that it's it's super important um, as a young person in any space, but in crypto particularly because of how fast it moves, is to really keep an open mind as it pertains to people and and projects,

right? because um and and to you know people you know as a reporter you kind of cover their stories and their journeys and and you know one thing that I've tried to or strive to do over um the last eight and a half years is um create a venue where people you know regardless of how um early they are in their process or how new they are to the space can can share what they're building and what they're doing. And, you know, focusing on or or really only entertaining established people um can

be a bit shortsighted because people just I've seen, you know, people just blow up um in in fantastical ways. And so, you know, I I guess that boils down to um not being a a prick >> pretty much. I mean, that's what I was thinking. Just don't be a douche. >> Yeah. >> But that is a really good thing to end on, Frank. And we appreciate that. I I've I've experienced that. I'm sure Rob has as well. You know, you can't you can't judge a book.

>> Don't discount Don't discount people. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Thank you, Frank. >> Yeah, of course. Thank you. >> Thank you, >> sister man. >> We'll see you next time. >> Take care. >> Thanks for calling in. Peace, buddy. >> What do you think about the the last quote Rob? >> Don't be a prick. I think that's pretty good. >> Don't be a prick. >> Yeah, I think that's I think that'll work for you no matter what industry you work in. So, that's pretty pretty uh pretty solid, >> dude. How about the personal brand stuff that we were talking about earlier? It's all about the person. >> It's on point. >> We're gonna get you dialed, man. I find it interesting that like this hasn't always been the case, but like we talk about it like it's an emerging phenomenon.

>> Look, because influencers are new. >> There was never a platform previous to techn social media where I could be a person and be heard so loud other than like the radio. >> Like if I had my own radio show, >> you could write books. >> You could write books >> or radio had their own voice and ultimately I think it is >> and then you had blogs. No, you had blogs. You had blog writers >> that was right. >> Yeah. >> And then from there you had social media. >> And so now it's like >> personalities, characters. >> It's the same reason why the brand account doesn't get as much engagement as the personal account. It's the same reason why the brand the the person should deliver the news. If Robbie and Andy go raise 20 million for a fund, one of us is dropping it. It's probably

going to be me, right? I'm dropping it. Why? Because that thing's going to go to trillions. rollup can have its own post, but you know, so it's like these different like like there's a reason why when you think of gsr, you think of Frank now. It's just trippy like I mean we we got Benji in the back, but this is just an ever changing phenomenon. >> I I think it is interesting to explore why this is the case and it's because seemingly brands are more corruptable than individuals and you could have >> you could hide behind this veil of being like the brand. >> Exactly. You don't know who's interested or who's involved.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And you don't know whose motive, who's pulling what string behind the scenes. Whereas, if I know that it's you tweeting it, I know that unless you're corrupted some capacity, which individuals are equally corrupt. And then when you put them together, they become a a big giant corrupt thing. But at the same time, we also have a lot of b a lot of ways to work together and have positive outcomes. Uh that being said, yeah, I think I know it's Rob. I trust Rob. I trust Andy. It's like the rollup's great and it's gonna you people trust the the the rollup, but like GSR, I mean, tell me who else works at GSR. I mean, I mean, I know that we're not like close to them, but like I don't I think we've met a couple of those guys at at conferences, but I I see your point

ultimately and especially if you have met these someone before, they've met you, they trust you. If you are to trust the rollup, that is the question. >> Yes. >> Who else is at the rollup? You know, who else is an interested party? you you it's especially as these organizations grow bigger and bigger and bigger, it's almost effectively impossible to get to know everyone at the organization and so you can't check all those boxes, but it is easier to check those boxes for an individual. I'm excited to continue our decentralized sign.

>> Yeah, let's get Benji up. He's been very patiently waiting. Benji, >> Benji, what's up, man? for joining >> conversation you guys were just having. >> Yes, >> please. >> Yes. >> So, did you guys ever watch Dirty Money? >> That sounds familiar. >> Okay, so Dirty Money was kind of like a docky series. I think it might have been on Netflix. I forget which streaming platform it was on, but one of the things they went through was just like different shady business enterprises in the past. And one of the ones they went through was HSBC. So HSBC was basically financing the cartels. So they would just like accept, you know, bags and bags of cash into HSBC, take it, ask no questions.

>> Wow. >> Their their penalty that they got was basically like, forget, but singledigit billions in terms of fines. >> It was a speed bump for them. I mean like it was basically like a smack on the wrist effectively given how much they were making from these c from financing these cartels. >> And I think that just to bring it back it's like when the entity is accountable and no individual person feels the pain then there really isn't an incentive to be a good actor because you can hide behind the veil of the brand. But when if if you personally are wrong and you personally feel the pain of engaging in some sort of bad behavior, whether

you're deceiving or you know engaging in nefarious activity and you feel the pain, it really is a good inhibitor to being a bad actor. So I think this is where it comes from. It's like some combination of like authenticity that the market is demanding and accountability. I don't know if you guys just saw this news, but like Charlie Kirk's wife >> Yeah. >> taking over. Yeah. >> Um because like she's the like who else works at Turning Point USA. Like you don't know, right? But she's the next closest person I think to that brand to take over and like the right face. So anyway, I think it's a super interesting point. I mean, at the end of the day, your guys faces are the rollup, right?

Your guys posts get way more engagement than than the the platform. So >> Exactly. It's trippy. super trippy. >> But the platform has provided us and everyone else who has a platform like that is a brand outside of just their person has also provided legitimacy and provided a whole sense of of of oh like it it makes it feel bigger than what it really is. Like it makes it seem like it's not just like a oneman show or twoman show. >> It's almost like a vessel to like carry the message. like we kind of are our own vehicle for that in our individual brands, but we also kind of have this as like the arena, like the venue in which people come together. At least that's

that's kind of what it feels like. >> Totally. Um anyway, I think >> really cool show though. Thanks for thanks for telling us about that. >> Oh, of course. No, no, definitely recommend it. Definitely recommend it. >> Yeah. Um, it's also interesting just to segue a little bit here that individual and the capacity to be wrong and people kind of like let it slide. Like Anom the other day was like doesn't matter what the FOMC does, we're going to be down afterwards and like the market's going to be lower no matter if we cut 25 basis points, 50 basis points. Well, we're much higher today. If you hadn't seen the mark, you probably >> Thanks. Let's [ __ ] go.

>> And so, but like people are going to continue to listen to Anom. like they're not going to they're not going to hold it. You know, maybe if you're you can't be wrong too much, but you can kind of just put things out there and people will sort of forgive you if you you know, make a mistake. And maybe on an entity entities aren't necessarily able to do that on an ongoing. No one's really able to do that on an ongoing basis, but you know, it pays to kind of say what you think and put it out there. >> 100%. Um I know you guys, so I I watched you guys stream yesterday with Paul. Um, and know you guys love talking philosophy. Don't want to go too deep down that rabbit hole.

>> Yeah, exactly. >> There's an interesting model by which like so you have like only fans and subscribing and like free to to follow. Like there's different monetization models >> for for exclusive or non-exclusive content. I think a really interesting one is the one that Bology proposes where it's basically like you basically give a percentage of your future earnings to a platform or there's some way to track based on who I follow how much income I get >> almost like a record label >> kind of kind of kind of but but it's a mechanism for like um charging for content so it's like you know if I give

you stock picks and you make money like everyone can see how much money my followers are making, >> right? >> Yeah. >> So, An could be wrong, but if his all his followers are losing money, that should be transparent, you know, like you're making bad picks. >> Like, give me bring back GCR who like just called everything. >> Yeah, I think the prediction market meta is kind of trending in this direction. >> It is. It really is, >> right? Because and we can we can in theory spin up a a market, right? Say Khi's getting a lot of attention these days. spin up a market on Kalshi, have it kind of plugged into our stream and have people vote on it or bet on it, right? And then we'll be able to see like some people make money, some people

will lose money, and then us as creators can kind of take a cut because we were sort of the vessel that carried that market and generated some trading volume. I think another like interesting parallel here is that and and we drew this. >> Please take us to Dra, please. Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing. Or, but I'm going to make I'm going to draw this connection because we brought it up after Paul's uh episode yesterday, which is that this creator economy model is very similar to the to the like paying like knowledge to earn kind of model. like in decentralized science science and like bioprotocol specifically, they've kind of built up this like knowledge graph of different scient scientific discoveries

and there's kind of like these network effects of like, oh well, we had that one over here and that one over there. You're kind of like incentivizing the the creation of that where it wasn't there before. And the parallel in the creator economy is that now we have creator coins and we're able to uh kind of continue to push like oh this is what good content looks like. This is what good science looks like. So I the the hyper financialization kind of gets a bad rap I think sometimes but generally the trend is continuing because my understanding is that like inefficient markets seek efficiency and they'll just naturally tend in that direction. And so with that, I'm curious, you know, have

you seen this similar? Is this the right way to think about it? Have you seen this um play out in the DI world as it continues to proliferate? >> Um maybe not yet. I don't know if it quite has yet. And look, I don't know if it's just like a given that markets trend toward more efficiency. I actually I don't have a good like hypothesis for why that is, >> but um I think that the way that we see the kind of like creator capital markets meta intersecting with what we're doing is I mean if you go on to pump fund and you look at create creator capital

markets as they are, you know, tokens are pumping and dumping within the hour. It's basically like how much can this person do something ridiculous to keep attention for as long as they possibly can and it typically doesn't last more than an hour, right? And then it's over. Um, and like that's how long you can keep attention for, you know, just like putting your face on a stream. We see scientists as the most upstream creators of everything in society, right? like it is the science and the knowledge that you're talking about that drives all product development that drives basically our technology forward, right?

And so we so at we have pump science this is and and bio to a certain degree what we're all doing is trying to take these creator fees and just direct them toward research which just has cost associated with it to develop that knowledge and to do it do so in an open way. um but have these scientists and give them the platform to not only tokenize their ideas and uh fundra for them through these creator fees but uh then also do product development and actually create things from their discoveries. So I think like knowledge is valuable but it's valuable in so far as you can create products from it right it is ultimately end products that create value knowledge is like cool if you know

you like thinking about ideas right that's the value it provides but products are really like what touch you know the market and like touch people and improve their lives and ult and that's what that's what we're trying to do. So it's science for the sake of um product development and and in our specific case it's a life extension. >> Totally understand and agree. My mom's a pediatrician. She I showed her the segment from yesterday, just like five minutes of it. I thought she would find it cool. I showed it to her. Explain the 80% of time scientists and researchers are spending on trying to actually acquire funding that the 20% is literally doing the the actual work. And so, you know, she actually mentioned a good point where in today's world, much less than in the past, there is a very

very big push back from the administration of how much funding they're trying to give to medicine at large. Like it is getting gotten cut off significantly since Trump. Um it has been really slowed down. And so I'm curious if you think that what you've seen on the market given Trump has been amazing for all of the entire crypto, you know, landscape and the entire admin. It's not just Trump, you know, he's launched memecoins and [ __ ] but it's the entire it's the entire admin and the entire regime. So has it been negative for, you know, decentralized science? Is it harder to get funding now? Um, kind of maybe you can just give us a little bit as to like how that

process is going. We didn't really talk about it at all with Paul. Um, and maybe it's different in your case with pump science and kind of a different kind of area, but just curious. >> Yeah. Know, I I actually love this topic, frankly, and I'm excited to talk about it. But, um, it is so beneficial for us. I can't even tell you for a number of reasons. >> Here's reason number one. If you are a researcher and you're typically used to getting grant funding, right? And that's just what you expect, you know, like you apply to the NIH for funding and you get it basically every time without a worry. And now all of a sudden that's gone. Now you're looking at other options, >> right?

>> And we are one of those other options, right? So finally we're starting to land with um a lot of scientists that were otherwise like I don't need you. I can take government money. Why do I need to take this stupid crypto? You know, have to figure out how to make it work with my university who is riskaverse, right? and like they don't want to touch any of this, right? So, but now they're willing to entertain the conversation. So, hugely beneficial for us on that point. Here's point number two, which I think is actually um I think touches a bit closer to home. So, the way that funding gets dished out is taxpayers pay taxes.

Those taxes get allocated to the NIH and other government bodies and then it gets sent to labs. But the problem there is obviously principal agent, right? You've got these people who are sitting in these grant allocation committees who are determining who should get the funding and you have central actors who have their own agenda and it doesn't necessarily represent the agenda of each individual person. Right? It is they're not you just it's classic principal agent problem frankly. There's no other way to put it. It's like they don't represent my wants and needs, right?

They don't represent your wants and needs. They represent their own. And what are theirs? Sometimes there are usually they're basically former professors in academia and they want to elevate their own standing in science. And so they continue to fund ideas that make their work looked like it was foundational to the field. And this is the classic problem you saw with like Alzheimer's research. We have not advanced in Alzheimer's for freaking like half a century. And there's been tens of billions allocated toward it.

Why? Because we keep going after the same hypothesis because that's what gets funded by the people that make the decisions of what to fund. And the result zero progress instead of funding people who maybe have like non-conensus ideas. That's what capitalism is good for is like funding non-conensus ideas that can potentially return a lot because by definition they're non-conensus from the beginning. So why we're really excited about this kind of like general I would say like reducing the power of the federal government to allocate research funding is you it's it's a fixed sum game. You're putting the the capital and the power back in the hands of the individual. And so what you see is a lot of people are just

interested in how do I maintain health? How do I focus on longevity versus you know how do I cure Alzheimer's once I get it? It's like how do I prevent Alzheimer's? That might not be in the uh incentive structure of the medical system as it was, but in this new world, um it's potentially a you know, people call it medicine 3.0, but it's this more individualistic preventative type medicine that only individuals have the incentive to do. Not the pharma companies, not the hospitals, both of whom get paid when people are sick. But um anyway, so I think this is another vector why this is actually like maybe a good thing. There's an example of what you were talking about and I forget the exact the paper and and the topic, but the researchers are making these

outlandish claims and they're actually so corrupt that they're faking data in order to prove things wrong and then they use that as leverage to go and get another grant. like look I disproved this thing but they used they did they were able to disprove it because they boiled down the data and used such a small sample size that it was able to show contradictory results therefore lead to this new discovery discovery in quotes obviously right and so what you guys are doing is more so aligning interests also kind of point yesterday was that you're bringing down the the cost of capital because now you're you're able to fund scientific discoveries I think the the uh quote yesterday was like500,000 all the way to it was an order of magnitude less that

it costs and therefore pass those savings on to not just uh researchers but also consumers at the end of the day. Benji, I'd like to get kind of an update on like you know what is currently going on at Pump Science and also because we've had a couple of these other Dside projects out there. You know, it's a pretty niche community. I'm I'm sure you're tight with you know Bio Protocol and the guys at you know Paul and those guys. How are you working together with other DIY projects to ultimately, you know, grow the wealth of knowledge across the space? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, as for the current status, um there's kind of like the crypto onchain component and then there's of course like the scientific component. Starting with the onchain component. So, we um at Pump

Science, we launched our launchpad on July 31st. And basically what the launchpad is is it's like a bonding curve to AMM migration protocol basically to create you know the creator capital markets for scientific research. That's what it does. So the the trading fees 70% of them go to the scientists. Why are you laughing >> dude? It's just like it's just such a f like this capital markets like suffix for anything is just hilarious to me. Like soon enough we're going to get like freaking Dogcoin capital markets and it's going to be like all right.

>> Well, look, I think you you pitch it as crypto. Everyone's like >> SBF, you know, you you pitch it as internet you pitch it as internet capital markets and it sounds like equity capital markets or debt capital markets right? It's like buttoned up crypto or internet capital markets, >> you know? So, I think it it's really good branding, frankly. I think it's really good branding. >> Continue, please, Benji. >> No, you're all good, dude. It's hilarious. And true. Every cycle we get a new brand. I love it.

>> Yeah. >> Um, >> and so in Pump's case, in Pump Science's case, you guys are thinking about it in a similar way. >> And I mean, look, I don't know if we're smart enough to innovate on tokconomics, but we can innovate on application, right? And so we're taking inspiration from these other protocols that are going viral for memecoins and we're just taking the same tokconomic structures and we're just applying it to this new application which is for science capital markets, right? And um so yeah, that's basically what we've done. We we're we have our own custom bonding curve. We migrate to Meteora. um we have dynamic fees to to reduce sniping and yeah we take all we take the fees and and we put it toward the scientific research and um

maybe for those of uh your audience who are less familiar all of the experiments that we have are kind of like uh it's all a cart so um we don't allow you to run any experiment that you want it's not like you can give catpiss to chameleons like that's not an option right what we do is every token corresponds to a specific compound like a drug, caffeine, atheenine, you know, aderall, whatever you want, and you can test it on animals, different types of animals to see whether or not it makes them live longer.

Lifespan is a really good surrogate for health. If something inc if a compound or drug increases the lifespan of an animal, it's probably good for you, right? not a guarantee, but it's like a really really good kind of the same way that TVL was a good metric for for DeFi, like lifespan is a really good metric for longevity. Um, dude, if you got with the smirking, I could talk to me, >> dude. I just I just um I mean, I was smiling because I just I'm I'm enjoying the what you're saying. I think it's funny basically.

>> Okay, awesome. Awesome. >> You're taking it in a way that I'm like not believing you or something. >> Okay. Okay. Yeah. No, I mean, dude, I'm I'm scarred. >> I was giving Paul everything. >> I'm scarred by Tun. >> I was giving Paul everything. I was giving like I I shots at Paul. I'm just I'm I'm I'm hanging out today. >> Awesome. Okay. Okay. Okay. >> I'm just enjoying. >> Amazing. So So yeah, like we we've got this on protocol. We've we've done about 22 million in volume so far. Um we've fundraised for like uh mid4s in terms of worm experiments, like 45 worm experiments. uh 20some fly experiments and I think almost 15 mice experiments we have gotten funded which is like there are numbers on the board you know like I never thought we would get here

this fast it's been a month and a half and we have fundraised for a ton of science and so the question is what does that actually do right it generates shots on goal right so now we have the opportunity to develop IP and basically just like discoveries on these different compounds that are being submitted and in the hopes of making discoveries, right? Like at the end of the day, you know, science is, you know, the slot machine, right? You are just like testing to see whether things will work. There's no guarantees, right? But the more shots you have on goal, the more likely you are to to, you know, find something valuable. And so, you know, that's what our community is all about.

It's like they're basically a lot of them are, you know, former memecoin traders who are kind of jaded by the pump and dumps that they see and they want to, you know, participate in token markets that feed their soul in a different way that actually contribute to humanity in a substantive way um more than entertainment. And so that's kind of what we find in our users um and in our community um is you know not all of them are scientists by any means but they're all science curious and they want to participate in something more meaningful. Um, and so yeah, like we've run I I I need to get the exact numbers in my head in terms of like how many experiments we've run so far, but you know, I would say like, you know, something close to Yeah, like 50 worm

experiments have been run. Something close to uh like yeah, probably 20 fly experiments are either completed or or end route. And we just ordered the mice for um a longevity mice experiment. Um, and I can get into the experimental details if you're interested in, but everything is about life extension, right? And this is be and we chose that because the typical pharma and biotech spaces are not focused on it. It's very much like uh a blind spot of theirs because they're all because you can just charge more for treating disease. And so they're all focused on that and we see a massive opportunity in just supplements, health, life extension, whatever you

want to wellness, whatever you want to call it. And so who exactly is conducting the experiment? Is it you guys or is it a team that you've funded? >> Yeah, it's a great question. So as far as the user is concerned, we run the experiments when when they mint their token, there's a legal agreement that they're signing that says that obliges the the platform Pump Science to run the experiment, but we outsource that obligation to labs that we white label. So there's a few labs uh a few of them are in Switzerland. Um one of them is here in the US and they run the experiments for us. Um and that just makes it super easy to scale, right?

We're just developing pipes with them. You know, we we send them what compounds to run, they send us back data in just very standardized ways. And if you think about it, like our goal is to basically be like the red zone but for science. you know, we're just streaming and this whole thing bottoms out at content and people like you to come in and interview all of the scientists and be like, why is your compound promising? Um, you know, what is the data showing? Right? It starts to look like kind of equity research. Um, but it's obviously very like scientifically minded. It looks like biotech equity research. Um, and we start to release like trials data and we like look at the press release and like is it working? Is it not working? And

we're just trying to do this all in an open and transparent way where you know people can see the data in real time versus in the typical biotech space where it's just a pure insider game. So I would say like very much in the same way that Anatoli was sick and tired of getting frontr run stock trading and decided to make a fair game. I would say like we're we're trying to do the same thing but for biotech. We don't want insider games. We don't want front running. Um we don't want insider trading. just want pure markets that all get information at the same time and can make trading decisions accordingly.

>> Dude, let's go, Benji. Dude, honestly, man, if Truman wants to be bearish, whatever man. >> I mean, look, he's probably he's probably got a lot of good points. He definitely has a lot of good points. You guys have a lot of good answers, but you know, people people are thinking in a very boxed in manner in in in our space. It just happens, right? And so at least props for trying to, you know, get out there and have this vision of, okay, you've got this entire platform to learn about it to educate. You've got the actual experiments happening. You've got the financial part. You know, I could see it end up being a true like a true kind of hub of of science effectively. I mean, it's going to be a lot of work.

You know, good luck to you. >> So, I'll see you I'll see you in three months. See what's going on back on the show. But >> yeah, awesome. No, I I really appreciate that, dude. It it means the world like more than you know. Um there's so much FUD. You have no idea. Like I've gotten death threats uh like many many times in the cycle already. And you know when you when you launch tokens into the world and put your face behind it, like it's not pretty um when the markets come down, but we're we're so committed to making this work. Like we're so bullish on it. Uh we can just eat the glass, take the tunes to the face, take in their feedback, and just like implement it. frankly implemented.

>> Awesome. Well, keep up the good work, Benji. Uh we want to see some scientific discoveries. Bring them on the show. We want to we want to be uh part of the biohacking uh longevity experiment that we have playing out. >> Amazing. Appreciate you guys. No, thanks for having me. We'll talk soon. >> See you, buddy. We'll see you next time, man. >> Thanks, homies. >> Cheers. All right. >> Cheers. >> Alrighty, Rob. Um that was a fun conversation. started off all over with with the uh with the um >> I mean just the newest developments in media and >> shift the brands and the trust and then into DI which they're weirdly connected.

Um yes >> they are. I mean, you could actually extend that even more because you have the distrust in universities which are typically the ones that are collecting the grant funding, but you actually have most of the time the university is taking a cut out of those grants. And that's why the Trump administration cut a lot of that funding is because they were at >> Trump was effectively at war with Harvard over the whole DEI stuff and the whole Ivy League schools. I know cut a lot of their funding and the argument was like look like this should be going to the scientists directly anyway. And so now coming full circle, it is.

>> Yeah. >> I hope Benji didn't feel bad that was like giggling at him or something. It's just it's funny like the DI is just very so early and I I he it's funny when you start talking about science in the realm which is like such an academic thing, right? Such a strong academic thing. Like Rob, you have a math degree, bro. Like that is that is a thing, right? And then you just throw in like Yeah, we have the same mechanics on our bonding curves for like AMM fees. And I'm just like I'm just it's such a dichotomy. It's hilarious.

>> Yeah, because there is a very stark contrast. Also, I think it was Peter Theal who said something about like the word science like if you have something that isn't science and you just put it behind science. >> Yeah. >> It cancels the entire thing out. like political science. That's just politics or like social science. It's just like >> it's just like the humanities. Like just putting science behind it is a key word to say like this isn't actually science. >> Well, look, Paul and Bio got a great round close from Arthur.

>> Arthur's knows what he's doing. Oshot knows what they're doing. They're definitely obviously very uh very just investor kind of oriented uh kind of uh you know make money, build a strong fund, have a strong outlook. So they're obviously bullets. So something is happening that people should pay attention to on both with what Benji's doing with pump science and what with um Paul's doing at at bio. Uh I don't have any exposure here, guys, but um I love learning and love having them on. And I think Rob, we're ready for our next uh and final guest, the first episode of the AI Supercycle with Ilia. Um I got a I just got a text from Mads from Maven asking me what this haircut is. And then

I got my other buddy Reed saying I look like Miami Vice. Um so that's about where we're at today. >> You're going with the slick back look. Next thing we know, you're going to have a button-down shirt. Then you're going to have a jacket on >> and then it's just waiting to get a haircut. We're going to have a makeup girl like putting like stuff on your face before we go three, two, and she's like running off the picture. >> Oh my goodness, dude. All righty, guys. I think we're ready for Ilia. He's uh he's coming up. Um and yeah, I mean I think that is the that is the that is the main uh you know the main first show for this.

>> We're excited. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Let's make sure that we have everything teed up. Uh I think Ilia is is one of the key people in this in this sector. >> Well, yeah. I mean, he's one of the earliest in AI people in crypto, you know, like actually in AI. >> And I think it's important to mention that Near started out as an AI company and I didn't know that. >> Yes. >> When I first learned about Near, I just saw their L1 and I said, "Oh, it's another Alt L1." Yes. >> So, they actually built out an L1 to solve >> the machine to machine economy problem that they had. needed some sort of way to process microp payments for labeling data um and incentivizing intelligence in an AI network.

>> And so when they kind of hit that roadblock on their path of being an AI company, that's when they switched and they said, "Hey, we have to build this out in order to fulfill the vision." They went, they built out the blockchain. Now they have the blockchain. They still have a lot of the existing AI infrastructure. And so now they're able to put these pieces together. They're kind of revisiting the original vision of um the AI super intelligent network that they're building out now. So, >> well, look, I'm stoked to be partnered with Near. I think they're one of the best companies for probably the best crypto AI company. Like, everyone else is honestly so early, full of you know what, and just doesn't really have the breadth and depth that I think Ne does in terms of actual people, headcount,

work being done, and then actual depth in terms of Ilia and his background. So, we're stoked to bring the show to you guys. >> We're on the path to Jensen Vong. So, is gonna kick us off today. This is the first episode. And that's just an idea. That's just an idea of where we're going to get you guys fired up because we're fired up for this show and we're excited to show you. >> All right, let's bring Ilia up, guys. We'll do the first episode of AI Supercycle. Enjoy. Let's go. Here we go. [Music] [Music]

All right, welcome to episode one of AI Supercycle presented by Near. Today we have the near CEO co-founder Ilia Poskin to talk about the near vision for AI and really just uncover and unveil this next generation forwardthinking model of AI. Ilia, it's great to have you on. Uh it's not your first time uh but it is your first time on this new show. So welcome on in. >> Thank you for having me. excited for this uh show overall and excited to dive in.

>> I think we're pretty excited about userowned AI and uh some of the things that you have cooking over at Near. And so, you know, we call this show the AI super cycle. Uh I guess let's just get warmed up here. Are we in an AI super cycle Ilia? >> I mean, I call it AI last cycle because I think uh everything from now on is going to be done by AI. But I mean for sure you know if we think of kind of broad technologies that have reshaped the world electricity uh cars internet uh I'm you know AI by its magnitude is probably going to be bigger than those and so it obviously builds on them but I

think kind of bringing intelligence and and kind of allowing to program it to define how it's done to also leverage it ourselves. I think it will reshape the world in massive massive ways. >> And I think just the the the spending right now in terms of AI investment is certainly in a super cycle. I I think you could argue it is propping up the entire stock market in the US currently. >> For sure. Yeah. I mean I think like we definitely see the infrastructure buildout phase, right, which we've seen kind of before with internet. Um but at the same I mean and like there is discussions this is this is a bubble or or not a bubble but at the end I think

the opportunity that it brings like similarly how even though there was a lot of investment and potentially bubble that happened in you know end of 90s in internet right we know now that internet was indeed massive you know shift in how we do work how we consume information how the world operates and so uh kind of AI is doing the same but I think on accelerated terms and so that's why we kind of see uh you know a lot more um investment a lot more kind of hardware being built out because uh it's very very energy and uh kind of comput consuming

>> yeah I'm I'm thinking about kind of the power laws at play here now like you know there there's tons of investment we saw you know uh OpenAI and Oracle did this $300 billion deal recently. Neither, you know, the the joke is that neither Oracle has has 300 billion dollars to give and and Open AI doesn't have three billion 300 billion in in uh compute to give. So maybe before we get into some of the nitty-gritty around the technicals of of what Near is building when when you see some of these massive partnership announcements, but underneath the surface h how are those deals done? what is really going on underneath the surface to to allow them to make a deal like this?

>> Yeah, I think I mean to to draw the line with crypto, right? Um you know, crypto thought they invented the partnership game where you know you partner and like both tokens pump. Uh but you know the we're we're uh definitely not the first at uh kind of these games. So traditionally like in in you know in Treadfi there's a lot of deals which are done on on leverage and on uh uh effectively loans and especially when we're talking about this capex heavy work. Um so Stargate example right Stargate example was saying hey we're going to have 500 billion of hardware

built right 500 billion project of building hardware now the thing is like if you want to purchase for example I mean let's use small numbers$und00 million worth of compute you don't actually need to pay out 100 million from your pocket you can say hey I'm going to put in 20 million of from my own uh pocket and then I'll go in and borrow 80 more million, right, to buy a 100 million worth of compute. And so this is very similar how you do with house, right? You have a 20% down payment and then you know you pay out x amount uh every month for the mortgage uh except here the compute actually

makes money, right? So when you get 100 million worth of compute, you're actually making revenue from that. So you can pay back the loan while also uh taking some revenue. And so now you just did a 5x leverage effectively because you know you effectively put in 20 million of your own money while leveraging up. Now the people who are playing these games with you know 500 billion obviously are way better at this. Uh and so their their leverage is is higher. They're, you know, when they announce 500 billion, they effectively split it, you know, as an investment over five years. So this is already 100 billion a year. And then they also say, well, first year is not going to be 100 billion. We're going to only put 20

billion first year into the ground, right? And then scale up from there. And so the 20 billion, you only then need, you know, five billion of actually your money maybe or even four. And so like it all kind of goes down to uh like the exact implementation of that becomes like a financial engineering problem. And obviously like there's really good people there designing this. And now you know if we're saying this year it's four or five billion. Well, uh, OpenAI is already making almost 20 billion in revenue this year, right? And so like now this is actually a manageable numbers. Uh, and given their growth has been such parabolic and they project

that growth as well, you know, they can expect that next year they'll be able to put in more. So like it's it's all kind of I mean I think the interesting thing about AI and where kind of it it interestingly overlaps with crypto is that a lot of AI right now is financial engineering >> right it's all about like how where to get compute how to get the best like best price for electricity how to you know combine it there's a lot of actual electrical engineering obviously and and software engineering that comes in but on the surface like this big numbers are all financial engineering and where again crypto it's potenti potentially has you know a huge role to plays because you know we have instruments to do this kind of things uh although I

don't think right now crypto has actually the depth of for example you know you can't go and and borrow 20 billion uh of of capital on chain uh but I think the opportunity is there to really kind of create new instruments and new assets uh for this kind of stuff >> yeah and I think that the this deals really just signifies that OpenAI is going for you know to be one of the larger companies in the world. I mean whether public or private or you know eventually going from private to public. They're signaling like look like you know this is something that uh we're basically our product's going to be used by everyone worldwide globally everyone's going to be subscriber you know we're going to you know reach that

level of Google apple kind of uh you knowesque type of of capability which is extremely promising for the entire AI space as a as as a whole but I think now is a really good time to kind of segue into some of the things that you guys feel from the near perspective is is extremely uh pressing in today's time. So you know you being one of the co-creators of the of the transformer model um have you know outwardly suggested many many times on our show and other shows that the current centralized AI systems are unsustainable and frankly fundamentally broken. um you know you've been a big advocate for userowned AI which emphasizes the need for privacy and confidentiality I think

in you know prompting and data sourcing in uh the training of different LLMs and basically what we're trying to do here is unlock the full potential of AI in a per in a personal and a professional context um and so you know broadly when you're looking at this vision Ilia you know we're trying to prevent a future where a single AI can control in information. We're trying to create a more peer-to-peer network in the state of, you know, Byzantine fault tolerant networks like blockchains, but for AI systems. Um, and basically we're trying to create individual AI agents that can interact directly and autonomously in the system. So there's a lot to kind of uh overview here, but I would like to

just hear it from you for as the first episode of the of this show to really set the through line for the message that we are going to carry uh on your behalf as we go and grow this uh show. you know, kind of what is this core message that you have to the AI community, to the world, frankly, for how you would like to see the development of these systems go uh for the better of humanity. >> Yeah, I think it's a good segue from saying, hey, we expect AI and you know, OpenAI is trying to play this role to be this kind of general available technology that everybody in the world uses, right? again kind of I mean to draw the parallel with internet right

you five billion people are right now connected to internet that's how they consume information that's how they connect to each other that's how they you know shop they and uh kind of entertain themselves and work and so as AI becomes that as well um it's extremely important that we don't end up in AOL world right where you know imagine AOL was the only company that provided internet globally to everyone and you know you want to host a website you need to go to AOL you need you want to search for something you know AOL is effectively only option to you know sees the results right that's a very you know scary and kind of dystopian world and you know very

very kind of luckily we haven't end up in that right and kind of the uh openness of the internet was uh preserved and so similarly kind of how do we ensure this happens with AI and again I actually believe AI is a more sh like world changing technologies than internet even is because internet is still kind of allows us to go and you know see the information and kind of decide if we want if we like it or not if we believe it or not etc with AI what's going to happen and kind of you know looking into the future

the AI will effectively be our lens into the world, right? You know, be that very explicitly, right, where you're wearing the glasses and you know, there's an AR on top or implicitly where you know, as you read in the news, it's all generated by AI. Uh, as you know, then like the messages kind of all the content, all the consumption, all the decisions that you make, right, they're going to be either done by AI or augmented by AI. And so whoever controls that AI whichever kind of decisions you know and biases were introduced in that AI system will decide on how people are actually perceived the reality right and so I think that's a very kind of scary situation if that is effectively

controlled by one company however you know however good or bad that company is just like that company always will have a singular bias and so that's where kind of the idea of user on the AI is not actually like open source or closed source um It's certainly about AI being yours, not theirs, right? Like how do we make sure that everyone has, you know, right to AI in a way and uh make sure that everyone has control and kind of sovereignty over their AI uh and kind of avoid the collapse into effectively 1984 where you have a big brother watching you at all times and really feeding you what you should see and what you should uh do. So that's kind of the fundamental uh and I think

it's very much born out of kind of crypto values as well. Um but it's way bigger than you know kind of crypto uh have been trying to do especially in the past couple years right where it's been like hey this is a new financial system to really like hey this is a new like internet right kind of back back to those discussions we've had you know in 17 18 19 when we were like hey we actually want to rebuild internet in a new way uh and I think now it's pretty clear that inter AI is rebuilding internet right and going to re change how we interact with internet and we need to make sure that it's built on a kind of the right ways and so where this kind of goes to blockchain is I think

you can't expect to try you know like let's imagine somebody right now says like hey we'll do you know your AI but we'll do it as a for-profit company I think the challenge here is that you're going to end up in a very similar situation as like the existing companies have end up because it is very resource intensive. It requires massive amount of capital and financial engineering to really scale it and bring it to the world and you need to raise capital to do that. You need to effectively do all of those actions. And so if you are doing it in kind of traditional for-profit way, you will end up kind of still o owning the control and governance of the system. And so that's

where we need a decentralized right at at the fundamental level system where you can both raise capital in decentralized way and kind of distribute value to the users themselves. You can have people participating. You can have people kind of forking and you know making it their own routes where they need to to really kind of create this ecosystem that is uh building user on AI. I think you make a really important point about AI taking the place of the internet as the lens in which we see the world because you could say that for a long time Google you would be kind of your gateway. You would search and then

that would kind of open up the encyclopedia of knowledge that that takes place on the internet. Now you could argue it's social media. AI is replacing search. Also social media companies are integrating AI deeper and deeper into their systems. Meta obviously with Instagram, Twitter has Grock, each of these systems are now integrating AI. And so I think we all have this this sneaking intuition that blockchain is a solution for some of the problems that it could introduce. But could you more just could you just go a little bit deeper into why it's a problem that these are the companies and the centralized nature of these systems

is are the ones that are pushing AI like why is it such a problem that these each of these companies has biases and they're implementing it why why could that turn out so dystopian >> yeah so maybe it's worth starting with like AI is not a new thing right obviously we have LLMs Jared of AI uh kind of popularized by Chad GPT but the thing is Google has been doing AI since effectively founding right they largi PhDs and the search the page rank is the AI algorithm of 90s uh similarly the feed that Facebook built right has been using kind of machine learning AI principles so the reality is like we already seeing internet through AI lens

for decades now and we know all the challenges that that brought right like we have constant you know battles around have this been censored or are the content being shown in like uh right ways there is like pressure there was pressure on you know social media to remove some content or censor some people and then there's another pressure which is when they don't censor like is this the right approach or not so we already have all this kind of issues uh like for the companies that have you billion user scale and AI is just going to exaggerate that right I mean we like actually past couple weeks been interesting as a confirmation for this

right we've had you know entropic and others just change their policy to start training on your data we have uh chat GPT effectively saying hey we actually running analysis on all your chats and sending them to humans to look at it and sending them to police if there's something flagged right So um >> what >> we have uh obviously Sam saying that not nothing you say to Chad GBT is privileged in any way right I mean they're already sending it to police but also like this can be subpoenaed at any time uh and so so like we don't even need to go into like hey you know there's a malicious act of you know one of these companies like I'm I'm not even

talking about that I'm talking about like very practical things where as these companies become big they effectively succumb under the whatever like political and kind of uh societal pressures are and there's no right answer. We know that like that's why that's why blockchain is such a >> again the neutrality is really important right because you cannot be kind of sus susceptible to any of the pressures because as soon as you give up one you start giving up the other. the, you know, these are the same companies that succumb to the censorship uh regime that was taking place during, you know, some of the elections in the United States.

And there were several, you know, >> controversies that ended up not really turning out to be controversies because these these social media companies really did succumb to the censorship pressures that that you're describing. And ultimately, we'll get to blockchains and why they're censorship resistant and how it helps, but yeah, please finish this off. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just just to give you like a bunch more examples, right? So if we go to a more malicious approach is well there's this concept of sleeper agents. So you can actually train the model in such a way that it doesn't uh behave abnormally when you test it benchmark it or in normal ways but it actually changes its behavior at a specific moment of time during specific conditions. So if we imagine how the

next stax net if you're familiar this hack that happened with like Iranian uh centrifuge happen like the next stax net will be just a sleeper agent inside the coding LLMs where as somebody you know write some code like it would activate and effectively inject malicious code into the their codebase and the thing is like if you don't know what is in the model you will never know um like that that this happened uh we have you obviously like uh kind of unclear where where to stop, right? Um on on the like I mean there's this complaints that uh entropics quality of the model declines during daytime,

right? >> So uh you don't know again which model you're using. You don't know what quality you're getting at this moment. Um so kind of is this the you know the best model you have? is this what you paid for etc. So like there there's already a number of challenges even before we go into but but the the really scary ones is like right now if you go in and prompt you know take one of these models and prompt it like hey suddenly change my opinion about this topic right and just put that into system prompt on your uh in your chat GPT or whatever uh and it will start doing this across all the chats you're doing right it's effectively in system prompt and it's tell like as you're talking about

something else it will keep keep changing your opinion and so like this is totally like you don't even know if this is happening right this can be in the current system prompt right now like everybody should like like you know whatever CEO of whatever company right um so so it's really like again important that we know what goes in because otherwise we effectively giving up the control of the information we are consuming and again people we already see from the you know empirically people are trusting more and more this AI systems especially around things like you know like talking to them as therapists talking like you know making decisions etc and I think actually that's going to accelerate because I do

think AI will become our kind of delegate of decisions in the world and you know be that political decisions right who to vote for uh who to vote for what to purchase etc you know which car to buy et like all of those things will you know we'll be using AI to kind of make decisions And uh yeah, we have no if we don't know what goes in, we don't know what you know what's in the model, what's in the system prompt, you have no idea kind of how you've been impacted by any kind of biases.

>> And so yeah, >> are are the system prompts for the major models Anthropic Claude OpenAI CHBT like are are those currently available? Can you can we go find the system prompts for for these? So pe people have uh so there's a ways to like you know kind of trick the model to output it but again we don't know if this is the real system prompt or they told to output that >> but also even if it's not system prompt you can just train the model like effectively whatever you go in system prompt there's ways to like kind of pre-enccode it into the weights as well. So like there's very hard to kind of extract back the like this kind of if people really want to hide it, it will be really hard to extract that kind of bias. Like you need to know the the

pipeline what goes in. >> Got it. Okay. So now I think this sets up really nicely for a credibly neutral censorship resistant base layer that is totally verifiable so that you can see the system prompt. You understand what goes in and then you can understand if it's being tampered with. And so we can see not just the input the original input system prompt but we can also see all of the potential attack vectors and the ways in which we're injecting bias into the system. and and this at at a theor theoretical level is blockchain, but I'm curious more about Mir's implementation of this. I think you were starting to get into why blockchains are

important to solve some of these issues with bias and censorship and privacy and all these things. Maybe you can give a little bit more of a general, you know, solution as to why blockchain is the answer. But more directly what why is near blockchain the answer for AI's problems? >> Yeah. So I would say specifically blockchain is component of the answer right. So you need like a whole system um to to really deliver a a result here. And so what near combines right it's not just blockchain it combines a set of technologies. Uh specifically we have a technology called decentralized confidential machine learning. So this builds using blockchain a decentralized

uh kind of network of accelerated hardware that runs in so-called uh secure enclave or trusted execution environment mode where all the compute that happens there is confidential private and verifiable um and and it's a very pragmatic choice because all the cryptographic primitives right you know people love ZK people love fully homework encryption they're too slow they're too expensive and they're not practical uh for use in kind of AI workloads. And so we have this kind of pragmatic approach where you you know give up some of the sovereignty given the kind of the hardware uh manufacturers involved but in turn get you know this verifiability and privacy

for it's it's less than 5% overhead usually 1% overhead uh to the normal compute cost. So, so that gives you effective ability to run AI agents as well AI inference and AI agents in a verifiable and confidential way. So now you actually have a guarantee that this specific model was run on and you I'm as a user know that it run was on my data there's nothing else ran on my data and this is outcome and nobody else will be able to get this data and this this run. So that's a really important component.

It uses blockchain for uh you know the marketplace itself for compute for the payments for uh kind of uh coordination of this whole system as well as key provisioning and management. Uh there's another component which we call chain signatures which is a turn the near validators themselves run multi-party computation network to allow for data encryption decryption as well as uh kind of signatures on for other transactions on other chains. So that allows to have actually end to end encryption for the data. For example, you can encrypt your private uh information, memory, you know, connections to, you know, Gmail, etc. And it's only decryptable again

inside the agent that runs on your behalf. Uh and then that is also allows us to run autonomous agents and kind of other use cases. So it's really like a combination of technologies that working together uh to provide us with a solution. But indeed solution is uh kind of from a user perspective offers you effectively a private AI that you can use that you can trust to add a lot more context right like one of the challenges like I'm I'm you know feeling feeling very unsettled to try to connect my Gmail for example to open AI right because my Gmail has a lot of you know websites and like uh access controls through it etc so like if something

happens like who who knows like you effectively can be compromised across a lot of places. Uh and so you really want like to know that this data is not going anywhere that this really uh kind of stays private. And similarly in a worker environment the same thing right like you know you guys running the podcast you you definitely don't want all your data to like randomly go somewhere. Um and especially financial institutions legal healthcare like there's a lot of industries who for whom data is extremely sensitive. So this opens up an ability to really use all your data, all your context in the AI uh while knowing that effectively it's as if it was running locally, right? Uh but really getting the best of the best models uh

open weights models. Now further than that, it allows us to start actually building fine-tuning and then building models in a new way where we actually know that this data was run, you know, with this code and this is the model we received. And so that's kind of the the new thing we're introducing. We call it open uh like open source but encrypted weights models where you know what goes in but the model weights themselves are stay encrypted. And so because of this you actually can monetize them. So you can have now a monetization loop that allows to fund research in kind of and development of this model including compute and in turn receive a model that

can pay back which means also you can now you know do financial engineering. So you can actually have a token per model right which you can distribute you know as investment uh for people who contributed to it and then the token will capture the revenue from this model going forward. So that actually allows us to to bring you know this kind of verifiable understanding of what what goes into the model and because it's an open platform you know if you don't like what went into into that model you can go fork it you know train your own version with maybe different biases and use it but at least now you have this choice and you kind of have a monetization framework around it to also benefit the contributors and developers

and and comput providers. >> Yeah. So, so I I would say then like the core the core idea here is around the user data, the memory, the context and models inferencing being private and owned by the user. This is like the core idea that we must always get across. >> Correct. Yes. And then basically this we we we can achieve this through Near's you know setup of effectively what I would consider like a a decentralized confidential like cloud-like system where uh you know you have GPUs and CPUs that run in these kind of secure confidential vaults and then you've got you know on top of that you have things

like chain signatures and you've got the uh you know in uh encrypted model weights that that he just spoke on and so effectively we can create this end to and encrypted system uh where models can only be decrypted wi within these like confidential uh you know like scope of scope of of agreement basically saying okay like we we are going to allow the uh unencryption or the decryption sorry of these given model weights but only in a secure environment and basically what what we get to at a at a point as a result of all this should it work should we be able to educate uh you know persuade and kind of empower

people. >> We should end up getting a world where you feel comfortable connecting your Gmail and your YouTube and your and your Google Docs and your Google Drive and everything to your to your LM. And that will give you a much better experience, much better result. Uh but also maintaining the same levels of core privacy that you know that you would expect from any other kind of large tech company or just in general uh kind of like what you're doing on on on chain. And so the the future could look like a better version of what we have today because users are willing to provide more information to be more open about their personal life, but also just connect other APIs, connect other services into one um and into this kind of fully private userowned setup.

>> Exactly. Yeah. like it the the idea is that you can actually get a better product because you are able to connect more context and again right now AI I think the AI capabilities are you know really good it's really now about context and in turn you know going forward it creates us a model where we can actually know what you know we get the organic mo organic you know far farm uh farm-totable model where we know what goes in into this as well. Uh versus right now, you know, you you have no idea what kind of GMO is in it.

>> Yeah. Things are slammed full of antibiotics putting putting microlastics in our AI. Um I I think you know people have if you've been around the space and and you know you've probably seen near uh because you guys have been around a long time, you guys have survived multiple cycles. um but you have um built pieces of this technology as you've as you've gone and progressed towards this vision and so I can remember when you know near was you know it was an L1 kind of and then it was chain abstraction and then now it's AI and I think to someone who hasn't been paying attention this might

feel a little bit discontinuous so I just want to give you a chance to explain the continuity behind this vision And then ultimately once we've kind of gotten, you know, up to speed, you know, where where do we go from here with near and and how it is intertwined with AI? Could you just kind of could you just kind of like tell the story and catch people up and then and then try to forecast out and tell tell what is coming up next for Near? >> For sure. Yeah. I mean the story we started as AI startup right back in 2017. In fact, after I worked on Transformers, I left Google because I wanted to put that into production and and build a product. And the realization was it was too early like we didn't have

enough compute. So what we were trying to do was to get a lot more training data. Uh and so we were coordinating a lot of uh computer science students around the world to get us this training data. and we were lacking a global payment network that we can use to actually pay them, right? Like into China, into Eastern Europe, into Southeast Asia. There's there's all kind of challenges paying in in the fiat world and especially when we were sending like 15 cents, 30 cents here and there, right? Uh neither Ethereum or Bitcoin were able to do that in 2018, right? The fees were higher uh even back then. And so near protocol started as like hey how do we actually build a network that is able to kind of

coordinate this kind of uh you know data contribution data labeling type thing but obviously you know we went and talked with more developers and realized that like everybody has this problem right you know not just not just for machine learning and so uh kind of we ended up building this generic layer one because we wanted to make sure everyone can use it and so uh interestingly the data labeling platform actually launched in 2021 and it's been running ever since called uh kind of near crowd. There's also a few other uh data platforms like public AI that launched since then. But the as part of this vision back then we kind of realized like you know the vision of AI like near AI originally was

kind of changing how you interact with computing because if if your AI can write code I mean kind of what we discussed right the way you will interact like you will not need apps you'll need you will not need SAS you can just have AI build it on the fly and then we bring the blockchain we realize like hey actually you can also change how the data is done and how the ownership is done. And so back in 2019, if you go back and actually listen to some of my talks, we're talking about, you know, user on internet, right? And I would say like, hey, we need to replace Google and Facebook and build user on internet. And the problem there back then it wasn't clear how to do that, right? Everybody's like, well, how how you going to build a decentralized

Google? That was the question I would get. And I'm like, well, you know, we need to build the foundational blockchain technology and then we'll, you know, build stuff on top. Now, with LLMs now, it's pretty clear how to build decentralized Google, right? I don't think anybody is actually asking this question anymore. Uh, even, you know, social media as well, like we have we have answers now. So that was always kind of like hey the transformation is going to happen uh and it's going to happen kind of across the whole stack and you need blockchain as a way to you know um around it kind of root of trust coordination microp payments etc. Now with chain abstraction again the part of the realization was like well as we're building this it was actually clear that

you know there not going to be a single chain that wins everything right there going to be applications everywhere they're going to be kind of smart contracts and value everywhere and so you want to unite it and again AI will be the interface but you want a way to really give AI like a way to navigate the whole web 3 and so chain abstraction kind of for example chain signatures were built to navigate the web 3. It's also used for encryption and decryption of the data for the AI, right? So, it kind of serves multiple purposes. Um, uh, I had this discussion as um, uh, uh, Justin Bonds actually like he's like, hey, wouldn't AI just go and like have accounts on every chain? And my answer is like it can, but then you're

losing all of the kind of controls and uh, kind of systems that you can attach. And so if your AI is already running on near in verifiable way, well your near account now is kind of the control plane, right? Where you can say, hey, you cannot do this types of action. You cannot kind of escape this. You have near intents that allow to execute actions across all of these chains. And you have kind of near chain signatures to really kind of control the assets and and value across all of the uh different platforms. So it's really like kind of composes all together into one stack.

Now going forward I think I mean we're definitely continue you know building out this TCML kind of this private confidential and verifiable cloud part of you know use cases you can use it for is to run for example autonomous agents right where you run instead of smart contract you run the AI agent in this kind of confidential verifiable way it you know can run on any of the nodes available on the network so you cannot shut it down you can give it a mission you it may or may not have token holders and now it can go and do things and again intents serve as effectively a way to execute actions in the world right be that you know onchain or offchain so

kind of the way I I assume like you know and we're kind of building toward the vision is every individual has their AI that is really their interface to the world right their lens to the world it is able to go and execute actions both onchain and offchain using intense type architecture, right? So everything from you know give me some Bitcoin to go and uh you know buy some pizza or you know I want to build a you know house for my for my kid. Um and then on the other side so this is like individuals and they kind of using the intents between each other as well as with other autonomous agents right that are running in this they have a mission they have maybe have uh kind of shareholders and

so that all together this whole system effectively is this like super intelligent system where you kind of have lots of this AI together you know maybe solving problems together as well uh and so that's kind of the vision we're building toward kind of lots of infrastructure privacy user ownership but also kind of how all of this forms you know a super intelligence swarm as well. Um but all of this you know we continued learning and iterating right because like uh as you mentioned right we we we kind of focused on different angles of this vision at a at a time because you can't like you know ship everything at a time but as ecosystem expands we actually have different teams

going in all the directions now in parallel and so uh there's definitely still teams on near that are building ton of innovative you know D5 primitives that are multi-chain uh there's teams doing AI that kind of leveraging this. So kind of the way we think of this is like this is going to be a multifaceted ecosystem that together forms this kind of really innovative way you're going to interact with with new internet >> and Ilia I think that that you can tease maybe a little bit as to one of the upcoming products that will launch uh this month or early next month for Near AI or at least kind of a uh maybe give us a little bit of a hint.

Yeah, I mean so there is a fully private end to end encrypted chat. So that you know should replace your chat GPT and let you uh kind of day-to-day switch uh to the product. So we've been we've been kind of testing it with few of the close partners. Um and yeah, pretty pretty excited for this uh coming to market because this this is kind of first version of really like all of those pieces working together and showcasing how to do this. It also serves as developer platform because like as a you know everything you you as a user you use it if you get go and log in later in other applications with the same account those applications you know on your permission can access your context as

well. So this means that new applications can sprung up kind of leveraging this and kind of keep expanding the the network. So I think there there's a lot of exciting stuff coming up and uh yeah I'm looking forward >> and that'll operate in that same like you know encrypted and then decrypted you know based on user user uh preference but w within a controlled environment kind of setup correct >> correct yeah >> yeah beautiful Ilia Paliskin episode one AI super cycle one of the co-creators of transformers at Google now with near AI we have a this is like the beginning of a parabolic S-curve rise on this show.

Ilia, we appreciate you being the first guest on a Sunday. Um, and for helping us put this all together. Robbie and I are on the road to Jensen Huang on this show. Um, and uh, we're not stopping until we get there. So, appreciate your time and uh looking forward to to seeing this new chat product come out, speaking to you again in a couple of months as well as just, you know, co-hosting some of these together if we get a really awesome guest that you want to be a part of that you think can uh be a part of the Near ecosystem. So, Hilly, appreciate your time, Ed.

>> Sounds good. I appreciate uh you guys doing this and excited for what's coming. Beautiful. Thanks, Ilia.