Why GameFi’s Best Apps Will Outperform DeFi | Roundup

Transcript

all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-host today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as a financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode [Music] all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup about curve you got Michael's one and two Yano and Spencer Sun who's back from his uh two-week tour in Japan welcome back brother we missed you yeah thanks for carrying the torch while

I was gone let me asking did you did you listen to us did you listen to us while you were gone um but not the intermediate one between those but you know it's like pretty good that's a good thing that you didn't listen yeah I think there's some comments haircut or something that yeah live but there's some promises made yeah there's some promises man we'll see if they're kept um yeah well Michael and I are now synchronous in our hairstyle so feels good also right in the world yeah there does seem like there's a little coordination on the uh the framework side and hairstyle yeah has Adam got you guys going to the same uh yeah tell us about the trip

um yeah it was it was a lot of fun um like I said used to live in Japan so have some experience out there and went to East Tokyo and then I did a quick trip to Korea and also a bunch of the people who had come from the other uh crypto conference uh in Hong Kong so it was a good kind of uh you know view of like the entire landscape and seeing everyone um I guess the the quick breakdown that I would give is Heath Tokyo was uh it was either the highest or the second highest amount of submissions that they'd ever received for the hackathon um and it was a really good mix of local Japanese and foreigners that were there and when I used to live in Japan there was like a very very small crypto scene uh the government would have to give you

permission to what to list new tokens on exchanges and effectively the whole scene was was bit flyer and you know when I lived in Japan it was like coin check had been hacked Mountain have been hacked like the government was like pretty negative on the entire space but you know the amount of submissions that you had for that hackathon you had government officials coming around to saying you know Dallas are going to be you know uh or recognized as legal entities by the end of the year it really feels like kind of crypto and AI or or Japan's like two-prong Sam Altman was also down with open AI not for East Tokyo but for just like pushing that Tech agenda um and so Japan basically missed all of web 2 and it looks like they're determined not to miss web3 and you know

who knows if if any of the projects coming out of these uh hackathons are going to be billion dollar companies or deck of corns or whatever but it felt like that was the first local event to really have a lot of activation energy just for the local scene um and it was awesome like you know youth conferences in Japan are always very special Defcon Osaka was the last one I was at but it was just super cool to see people building and Japan has a lot of Ip you know things like anime manga Pokemon whatever you want to call it a lot of the focus there is like putting digital collectibles on chain I think that's pretty cool um and so that was Japan uh now I would say like Japan is just starting their their kind of crypto Journey but it's being pushed by by the

local government and went to Korea as well um and the vibe I got from Korea is just that they're living in the future um from you know things like you know web3 and crypto to iPhone and internet adoption to just like the prevalence of plastic surgery and like you know you look at all the Netflix stock or Netflix top shows it's like okay dramas you look at the headliner from Coachella it's blackpink who's a K-Pop group like for their size of country it's like probably a 50 or 60 million person country they're punching way above their weight in terms of technological adoption and and just like Global clout um and I came away from Korea just like even more convicted in web3 gaming there are so many web3 gaming companies that are

building in Korea like one of these is gonna hit like a lot of large numbers somebody's gonna make something happen all of the local big gaming companies are Marching In the direction of putting things on chain um and I would say that you know we're going to see a bunch of games come out of there and probably the next year like they're pretty early on in terms of their development cycle like most of them are launching like their land or nft pfp collections this summer so like call it a year until they really get going um and Korea just like a bunch of really interesting consumer apps as well uh I mean the other part that I kind of like talked to but didn't go to talk to people that went to the HK conference there's so much excitement coming out of

China as well apparently mainland China is now kind of back open in terms of being able to access exchanges there's a bunch of provisional exchange licenses that are being given out um that are effectively facilitating the on-ramping of spot and Fiat flow and unlike two years ago uh there looks like there's actually off ramps to these exchanges they used to be like you'd P2P trade usdt for make accounts that's been formally outlawed and they've like actually put in proper off ramps so between everything just like super positive trip and always inspiring to get like a little perspective from the different parts of the world because you know you sit in San Francisco long enough you definitely go a little bit stale um and so cool to just be out there that

was a long-winded uh explanation but yeah it was a great trip a lot of fun while we're the non-crypto things that Korea so Advanced on I mean like if you haven't watched this show it's called The Glory um it's like the show on Netflix um you know like that's like very Advanced like you think about things like squid game that's like just like very Advanced like pop culture art and I would say like pop culture or television movies like they're probably a year or two ahead of where the US is in terms of just the depth of storyline and like you watch these you know shows and like it's been a while since there's been an American show that I've kind of like not been able to turn off and Korea definitely has that K-pop is like this

new art form where the music doesn't really matter as much as like the community and the group and like with the rise of AI and stuff like that like that's kind of where music is going in my opinion um and then iPhone adoption like even things like plastic surgery adoption like they're just they're living in the future um like 5G adoption as well if the they were the first country to have that they're yeah they're in the future yeah what did you learn by spending time with the the guys at hashed um what did I learn uh or like did it make you change your mind on like like just from a crypto like Venture lens did it make you like think differently about things I mean the thing I came away with is like a ton

of respect for hasht uh like you know you think about what they've been able to do in Korea there aren't really any analogies in places like Japan like Japan like desperately needs someone like hash to kind of like plant the flag have a lot of incentives and you know hash got to where they are today you know basically from prop Capital uh and they've since raised you know like regular Venture funds and they're raising them from like you know just like very legitimate Korean institutions and they're and they're really helping bring the asset class to that country um especially in the wake of things like Luna so like just tons of respect for them uh but in terms of like things I've been thinking differently on um

I think it's like just like better reasoned understanding of things like web3 gaming and how different it looks in Asia than the US um and I would probably give Asia like just Asia has more users of these things they're less they're more acclimated to crypto like that's going to be like the initial user base of these games pretty pretty condensed that yeah are they spending time building things like in D5 like are there the like aves and uniswaps and compounds of of Korea and Japan no I mean like Defy is is kind of uh like the incumbents that are in place today are very unlikely to be unseated by local players unless like things take a very different

turn with web3 gaming where it's not uniswap on the game chain it's like you know something else that could happen but it doesn't seem like it's it's like it's much easier to reason through building a web 3 gaming startup versus trying to go off and compete with uniswap it's like you're just going to have that adverse selection of people not wanting to go and charge off in that direction one thing that you mentioned Vance was that there was a lot more it seeming kind of like app Focus from some of the people that you were speaking to in in Korea and Japan and I do think maybe this is just my perception because of what I've been digging into lately but I do feel like a lot of the uh the traction that you're seeing here in the US is very infrastructure sort of

based projects like eigenlayer or Roll-Ups and things of that nature so is that is that a fair comparison that people over in Asia are a little bit more focused on apps and actual things that you can do with crypto as opposed to the heavy infrastructure Focus that you see over here in the states a little bit yeah I think the West is always leading in terms of infrastructure but I'm not sure how important that is anymore in an age where we have like abundant block space for probably like the next five or ten years of consumer applications um and just like Asia has more of a background in consumer applications to start with so you know they have really big gaming companies they have really big messaging companies they have really big consumer apps that they build but you know like

they haven't really kind of built the infrastructure before and I think they just feel more comfortable building consumer apps generally and I I think that puts them in a pretty good position going forward um the other stuff I'll say is like with web3 gaming um the importance of like a very Lindy economy that's bootstrapped and signaled by institutional investors versus like there's going to be thousands of games to launch in the next few years that's something that's starting to come into Focus for me in terms of like just the economies of the game really need to be backed by high signal folks and and you know a lot of money needs to be put into them to to make them even just like seem legitimate

um and it seems like that's what a lot of the you know Asian gaming startups are looking to Western investors for is like put money into this you know buy and farm the land like you know help us develop this economy um it feels like you know that's what people like you know us and hash and other big Venture firms are good at but there aren't a ton of big Venture firms in Asia you know and so like they're always kind of missing that pillar of like how they go to market um so I mean it's good for like you know people who invest both across the US and Asia but there's definitely going to be a need for that type of persona in the market but overall really fun trip um had a bunch of drinks with people went out you know built some

relationship and like went for such a relationship business that you know you kind of forget that if you sit behind a screen all day you definitely get stale and you do need to get out there a lot of trips plan to you know places like India and places like Africa for this this year and excited to see kind of what else is being built in crypto globally yeah so maybe on that theme just maybe kind of the theme of this podcast is uh you know we talked at the very tail end of of last week about their for the first time at least in my experience in crypto it's seeming like the US actually has a chance of you know of losing this and it does seem like a lot of activity is moving out and that's primarily due to regulation so it was kind of funny to watch there were

two kind of regulatory Updates this week and they stood in really stark contrast to one another so there was the Garrett Gensler testimony this week which I'm a little hesitant to get super deep into I think a lot of people probably followed that and have kind of their strong conclusions about it but I do just want to get your guys uh sort of brief thoughts on that and then I want to actually spend a little bit more time talking about I don't even know how Mika markets in crypto the regulation that just got passed by the EU Parliament which feels really promising to me actually and it's not very it's not very often that you see the EU leading the US in regulation especially when it comes to something like Tech so for me I just really I felt like it was a very stark

contrast but maybe before we get into that I'd love to just get kind of a high level on what you guys all thought about againstler's testimony yeah um I I think unfortunately you know it's all kind of a performative um expose of perspectives um you know there's never going to be any decisions that are made in public forum like that there's never going to really be any like changes of mind in a public forum like that I think it was very clear that there is a lot of disinterest in the way that things have been going uh regulation by enforcement action has not been successful um you know one of the questions that I I think would have been

um you know great to ask would have been and it was a sort of asked in an indirect ways um you know if if the rules today are sufficient for protecting um U.S consumers U.S investors then then why did we have two of the largest um explosions in the industry in the last year um you know the only thing things need to likely change um so I do think that you know there's a lot of there's a lot of emotions frankly in that um in that chamber but uh it all of the work that goes into policy making all of the work that goes into decisions and and um things that actually effectuate the industry happen behind closed doors with um you know people who aren't

necessarily the ones making those comments um it's the staffers it's the policy makers it's the people behind the scenes um so that's really what I'm looking forward to is to see what some of the actions are coming out of these types of discussions there's there's also another um uh discussion uh on the hill uh specifically talking about stable coins um you know it'd be great to see some sensible regulation about stable coins come out of that um and yeah Mike you're 100 correct all of this runs directly in the face of what uh at least was I I believe got the the vote today it needs to be verified by EU members but but Mika is moving forward and while it's you know probably

not perfect uh it at least is good in a lot of ways is of at least defining the rule set that people within the EU will be able to operate under the the like the regulations in Asia aren't perfect either like the 8K uh sfc which is their version of the SEC was like yeah all the D5 projects are under our regulations too you need to come in and register so like you know it's positive that they're opening crypto back up again but you know they don't have like this nuanced understanding that uh is just like by and large just way better than the US um this is not the case Japan is great as well but the Japanese government moves extremely slowly um

honestly I think Korea is probably the country that's again living the most in the future with regards to regulations um they have no tax on on crypto trading they have uh security token legislation that's coming into view they have uh and a separate carve out for utility tokens um but like again it's not perfect the the one that I'm I'm pretty interested in that I don't know enough about is the UK landscape I've heard it's just like a basic transparency and disclosure regime um but it's you know I take notice of coinbase going out to the UK you know relative to the amount of users they have there that's a lot of time to be investing in a place like that so nothing's perfect um and I think the fact that you can

have Senators grilling you know Regulators in the U.S is is also not something that you have and you know frankly any of those countries so it's just cool to see it play out and there's always going to be ups and downs and at the end of the day the courts are going to need to confirm a lot of this or at least confirm Regulators power or not power to do things um but there's a lot of people who've like you know said their piece on the Gary Gensler hearing like bashing him has become fashionable like I don't know I don't think a whole lot of Tad to that the thing that I I maybe want to double click a little bit into is Mika itself and you know this is uh um uh this is for the EU so to Vance's Point that's that's a good clarification

it's not for the UK um it also does not specifically Mika itself doesn't include something that was also passed which is the travel rule uh maybe it's called the trm I believe um or or TRC but basically it's the UK or sorry the eu's equivalent of the travel rule with fat f um which puts um you can think of it in terms of Otay when do centralized providers need to provide the government with information on certain transactions that are happening from centralized service providers um uh crypto asset service providers sasps as they're called in the EU um fortunately one of those was not a

peer-to-peer transaction but if it was from one SAS to another sasp or into or out of a sasp um you know there are going to be new rules uh pertaining to how those centralized providers are going to need to report those transactions to the government as they currently do right now so if you move ten thousand dollars or more in the United States that is something that has to get followed literally with the FBI and so there are going to be controls around that um you know For Better or For not one of the one of the initial models that they were considering was all peer-to-peer transactions or just having a self-custody uh Ledger um or or a self-cosity wallet with

assets on it completely outlawed um so this is this is definitely a good outcome it's not a great outcome um Mika itself uh also specifically carves out both the defy and nfts from being as part of the the coverage uh of this this rule set um and it does put a lot of focus onto what can be considered a stable coin and the rules around stablecoin stablecoin issuers the amount of assets backing these stable coins um that's what a lot of the focus seems to be um so once again you know let's not let um good be the enemy of great or whatever that phrase is

um I'd much rather have something positive that we can move forward with in an area as big as the EU where a lot of this activity already was originating from um UK I'm sure we'll follow suit in in certain ways maybe differences in others but uh positive uh trajectory in the face of what seems to be negative territory in the US I thought two of the most interesting things from Miko were um So within Mika they introduced three subcategories for crypto assets there's asset reference tokens there's what's the second one e-money tokens I think it was and then and then the third Buck is actually utility tokens um and that was interesting to see because that's the European Parliament directly saying that there is now so

that some of these tokens do have utility on chain that's them saying that some of these things have utility and then the other interesting thing was uh for a crypto project to launch in the EU it needs to have certain things that happen it like has to be legal entity has to register with the EU they have to submit their white paper and get approval and then they also have to take approval for stable coins which in my mind is like the EU basically putting their stamp being like these stable coin things okay we we see the value here uh and if you're a crypto project like you need to take these these stable coin things um and I think it also puts uh usdc under the European banking Authority which is uh like a big step forward for them so yep at the same time another

thing that happened today um and I'm gonna butcher the name uh Society General um the bank in in uh I believe Switzerland launched the digital Euro on ethereum today or announce the the launch of it um so you know that you're already starting to see some of the movies that is something that in a bull market that is like you know Watcher Guru 20 000 likes like 500 Twitter people being like European biggest bank launches stable nobody's talking about that that's I didn't even know that yeah I don't know if it's the biggest bank in Europe it is a bank in Europe putting paint issued coins on ethereum um so yeah like people are already taking this uh vote and it wants you

down I don't know the process I know it has to get approved by EU Parliament but June I believe uh January 2024 is when the stablecoin section will become valid and then around June 2024 or maybe maybe it was June and by the end of 2024 for the for the two different sessions but 2024 all this becomes legitimate and active um and the other thing uh you know that was in there is when launching a token project or a project that has a token one of the things that I think is is just a no-brainer in terms of any regulation is when you file the the white paper when you or publish the white paper you also have to publish a list of all the different holders of the

token and this is exactly something that happens with the S1 process of going public in the United States who owns what and then every single time that someone who's an Insider or declared to be an Insider makes a transaction either buying or selling those Securities you have to file with the SEC I don't think we need an onerous process like that but actually being able to track who has ownership where is that ownership how does that ownership trend is the team selling all their tokens or investors selling all their tokens like these are things that will help with the clarity and understanding of of what is backstopping these token networks and I just think a really important Improvement into into the transparency of these ecosystems yeah it feels like this was a relatively

good spirited way to tackle on a holistic framework for crypto and the other thing that we haven't really talked about is now you know there are 27 I believe member states in the European Union now you basically have to register in one of those member states and then you get the same treatment across all those different member states which is so different for how it works in the United States just look at the bit license for instance in New York for an example of that I got a question for you guys so all this is very promising this is definitely a big step forward in the right direction for Europe would you recommend portfolio companies especially early stage portfolio companies to go be Dominos out of Europe depends what they're doing yeah and if it's

if if they have something that's truly permissionless that you can launch and never have to maintain again I think you're fine no matter what jurisdiction that you're in and I think that's ultimately what people should be aiming for unfortunately in the process of like starting a centralized company to gradually decentralizing a protocol it's it being totally permissionless usually that takes a few years I still think the US is is probably the best shot because you know as an entrepreneur you're not just considering the regulatory Clarity or lack of clarity you're considering the Capital Market formation that you have around you you're considering the local talent for hiring into your company there's like a baby of factors that you have to consider um but there's no doubt that the needle

is moving more and more towards probably not Asia because there frankly isn't you know regulatory Clarity there either but Europe is becoming this like potential second banana that's you know potentially equal with the US going forward um and that's that's crazy to me um you know yeah that's a what Intergalactic bag combo by the US it's it's so sad to see that I agree what about the would you consider the labor practices and rules that Europe has for instance in somewhere like Germany it's basically almost impossible to fire someone or something like that does that factor in how you think about operating a startup at all

that's more of like a larger Stage Company question um startup I think you're have the benefit of the doubt just because you're hiring fewer people so you better make those hires count but um yeah like you can even see it from coinbase like what they're doing they're launching a international derivatives exchange based out of Bermuda obviously but targeting probably mostly Europe and Asia um and so even from a user perspective the the aperture is opening just beyond the US yeah let's talk about the coinbase news because this felt really significant to me so pretty pretty short tldr but basically coinbase has been granted and license to operate in the offshore Haven of Bermuda and it's seeking to diversify its business outside of the United

States so I guess in theory what this would be is some sort of offshore derivative exchange vis-a-vis FTX back in the day or darebit or something like that and now this is where I'm kind of you know coinbase hasn't said this but I'm paraphrasing I would guess this is them actually taking seriously the idea that the growth and growth in the United States is going to be limited and maybe hedging the risk that the U.S Administration is just ultimately super unfriendly to crypto what do you guys think about this I I think you could also see this as an opportunistic there it's either there's two I think there's two camps here the one Camp is this is them hedging their bets and there's like this SEC Gensler war on crypto in the US and they need to hedge and you saw I think Brian posted a

picture on Twitter with someone in the UK and you know they tweeted out that they're you know yeah National Expansion and then like same week they do this Bermuda thing and like this is them kind of like hedging basically the US the other take on this is that they see a massive Market opportunity uh The Regulators are coming down on on uh on binance pretty strong and um yeah I mean if Finance were to disappear there's really no good options to to trade perps and to trade derivatives right now you're kind of going to like places where liquidity sucks or like places that are like pretty shady right now or places that are like you could go on chain but there's a lot of issues with on chain and uh this could be them saying like look at some point crypto is

going to need like a very regulated very like stable uh derivatives and perps market and something that like big institutions trust for this stuff and maybe they can fill that hole so so 100 agree with you know I also keep in mind the second largest uh competitor to binance just blew itself up about five months ago and that was servicing derivatives markets in international uh jurisdictions non-us jurisdictions so I I think it's more a move that also this isn't something that just happens overnight like oh we applied and got it and like boom it's happening the other thing too is that they also said that they could launch the product as soon as next week which means that they've been

building this product for a long time uh and this is probably something that stems out of of a market opportunity less more recent news less more regulatory news um I think the bigger thing that's more regulatory news or just like kind of the Winds of of politics going right now is their visit to the UK and I you know having a bit of an inside look as to how usual PR works the the two narratives coming out of there is Brian um basically saying moving coinbase to a non-us jurisdiction is not out of the question you know that is a that is a seating of the thought of well what if we made coinbase a a UK company going forward and our headquarters was based in the UK

um you know who's our regulator at that point um what are the regulations that we have to abide by at that point um I think that has to do more with the political wins less the the derivatives product they just happen to coincide in the same weight I I don't think coinbase is leaving the US it just like the vast majority of their business is retail flow on coinbase.com so you know like all within the context of like they're probably building this straw man argument for hey we're gonna leave and hey we have other parts of our business too um but overall I just don't see them leaving the us and we'll see what happens with this Wallace notice but my guess is that they're gonna fight that pretty much tooth and nail same with bittrex and those cases are going to

take years like you're probably looking at you know at the end of the day when that is resolved either way it's probably someone who isn't Gary gensor that's at the SEC like it's it's just gonna take so long um not saying anything about him leaving or anything like that in your term but uh yeah they're starting to build the straw man for you know we can go elsewhere we'll see how real that is in time but certainly you know for members of Congress when they hear this you know they probably don't read too much Beyond like the headlines that's just my guess they have a lot of stuff that they're doing um this probably resonates with them um and I think there still is this lack of international venue for people to trade in the wake of ftx's collapsed per

Michael's point it would be great if it was them like that's one of the things that I've been looking for in terms of my like bear Market checklist like on-chain activity like I would say that that's pretty much back like we still need to get more nft users more game users more defy users Etc but like we're back um the other one is just like the rebuilding of the credit and The Exchange Market right now the credit Market is still a zero like dollar lending is is gone away but what that's been replaced by are these perps and on-chain venues but um having someone as legit is coinbase with the ability to attract market makers like that's kind of what you need for this next run to start taking shape so just just to double click one more time moving outside the U.S really doesn't have any effect on U.S customers

it means that you're like contracts that you signed swimmage from uh coinbase Incorporated uh us to like coinbase Global LTD and you know the headquarters of the company switches from some place in San Francisco to some place in London and you know the taxes and and you know maybe the the dollar denomination turns into a pound denomination but you can switch it back to dollars if you want like nothing really tangibly happens to all the existing us customers it's just their uh UK company serving U.S customers hypothetically um and so I I think you know there is a serious potential for them to leave what would that do to U.S customers basically nothing what would that look like to us

uh Capital markets I think they'd still trade on the New York Stock Exchange um like I don't think tangibly that much changes if they move other than having more favorable regulatory um dealings I'm not I would push back on on some of these uh on some of this I I don't personally think like zooming forget the growth opportunity over the next like two or three years I don't think the future for how crypto is traded is these offshores offshore unregulated venues I just I just don't I think there's a pretty clear future for me if I had to bet on a future I would say there's going to be large heavily regulated exchanges based in probably the major jurisdictions like the US they'll

probably be one in Asia somewhere like Japan or South Korea or something like that and maybe an EU one but I just I don't see I don't see it as being a good move for coinbase to kind of try to chase the market that Finance is dominating right now because I don't even know how that would work as being a a public company in the US I definitely don't think you would see an offshore unregulated exchange be able to go public coinbase is already public so I don't know what that looks like in terms of of risk but I can't imagine that their investor base would actually love that even if it starts printing money for them because the risk is just way too high FTX is in everyone's memory I I just I I'm in the answers I don't think they're going to do it but I don't think

it's a smart move even if they even if they did we're also talking about sort of semantics here you know most companies like there the way that most companies function is you have a US entity and then you have a UK entity all the business that happens in the rest of world whether or not you're selling you know cloud storage you're allowing people to trade on your platform or you're selling advertising all of the all of the activity the business activity that happens outside of the United States literally flows through Ireland the UK whatever International entity you have set up all the business activity that happens inside the US happens with the US Inc Del orc Corporation just about every single time

what they're talking about doing is a fundamental shift of just saying okay which one's headquarters which one's secondary and you have this intercompanying agreement which basically says all the revenue that happens in one entity happens there and then you flow it back to headquarters like that it's like a semanted shift in a lot of ways but just to double click on what you were saying might I think all they're doing is they're saying listen we want to get regulated so we are the regulated opportunity internationally where there are no regulated opportunities to trade derivatives internationally it doesn't limit them from saying hey eventually if there's an opportunity for us to be a regulated derivative exchange for U.S customers that we're going to go after it they already have said that they have

multiple broker dealers that haven't been activated by the SEC they've been in process with the cftc to make those types of trading operations available I don't think it limits them into perpetuity I think this is just you know a new business line that they haven't been able to access previously yeah this this would be a regulator just be serving the the countries that are outside the US that finance service right now like all the finances friends like all those venues are regulated as well so don't want to cast too much you know of judgment on like places like Finance because they are regulated in most of these countries in the world right so was FTX but right hi everyone exciting announcement here from the blockworks podcast Network we are hiring

two podcast hosts to build a show with us called Lightspeed tldr of Lightspeed is that it is a show for Builders tinkerers and lovers of Technology it's a callback to the Heyday of Silicon Valley where Great Tech was built in garages not in corporate fortresses and was truly the wild west Lightspeed is an exploration of crypto from the perspective of a builder and an engineer who's designing for scale and is interested in onboarding the next billion users into crypto if this show sounds exciting to you you have a background in podcast hosting or content creation go to the careers page of blockworks that's blockworks.host careers I've also linked it in the show notes here you can just click there it'll take you right to the page you can also follow me on Twitter I'm Mike ippolito underscore you can just slide

right into my DMs and we'll set up some time to talk would love to hear from you we are super super excited about this show speaking of FTX I'd love to get your guys take on this idea that they might restart um and I guess I saw Bloomberg reported that it might there might be a possible bid in from tribe Capital so this all this all happened when um Andrew Dietrich who is an attorney with FTX um and uh Sullivan Cromwell told the U.S bankruptcy judge that the company might try to raise money uh and basically make creditors whole through a restart on the exchange I think this comes off the back of the news that they found some 7.3 billion dollars worth of assets I haven't seen what those assets are the

last time I looked at the the balance sheet of FTX I wasn't super impressed with what was on there but I would assume if this is um if this is the recovery team saying this then it's probably pretty real and they basically floated this idea that um his name on blanking on the uh John J Ray uh is basically going to be thinking about this in in Q2 so sometime over the next three months he's going to be assessing that idea and yeah Bloomberg reported that tribe um is considering injecting uh basically leading a 250 million dollar round uh of which 100 would come from themselves in their LPS and I guess the last thing I'll say before I get your guys opinion is they initially were an investor in

FTX themselves so I'd love to get your guys thoughts on do you think this is viable do you think this is a good way to make creditors whole and what do you think about tribe leading this uh depend I mean first thing is the question on that the amount of assets like what are what are different things marked at I'm looking at serum on coin gecko that's still marked at like two two and a half billion so I think they own like 30 or 40 of that like that's obviously not real um and to your point like looking at the schedule assets it's like it's not all like you could sell it into real US Dollars and distribute it to people so there is still a hole um and the question is like how do you kind of get people as close to Hole as

possible letting this get drawn out by lawyers and trying to do a distribution like the the Voyager distribution was like the most straightforward thing ever it was just like take the crypto give it to people it's been like almost a year at this point and there's still no progress they're still charging outrageous amounts of legal fees like hundreds of millions of dollars are going to the wrong people and not to the actual predators of the estate which is just like awful and so my general bias is that crypto people should always seek to figure things out between themselves and not involve Regulators Bankers or lawyers to the extent possible unfortunately um like I think the FTX uh you know like getting the equity to be monetized AKA getting into a higher market cap value

where people are again using the exchange it's generating profit and you give people a share of it it just depends like are people down to sign up for keeping their money on the platform and trading it on the platform for some exchange of the exchange fees or some uh you know a pro Rod of the exchange fees I I don't know I I think like a couple of months ago I would have said definitely yes that's a possibility when coinbase is spinning up a licensed derivatives exchange I think that just like makes the opportunity a little bit smaller um at the end of the day you also need somebody to run this so I think like happy people like tribe uh who are a very legit firm um actually like lead the the effort to to get this spun back up it's certainly

pretty positive um and I would definitely put you know our support you know Financial or otherwise you know behind something like this just because I think it's egg for the creditors but B it's probably a pretty big business opportunity if done correctly but how do you lock people up onto the exchange and get them to stay there and use it that's still the question that like Voyager is still trying to sell their platform it's like Okay who wants to be a voyager customer in the year of 2023 probably not that many people like that's always working with our event you you would invest in this FTX why is that something that you would allocate Capital towards I mean like you're getting it at a 99 discount too it's 34 billion valuation back in the day and maybe that was a

silly evaluation and it was like SPF in fact but the exchange was generating I guess you kind of need to dig into like whether the actual profit and how many numbers were also fraudulent because like that's kind of the Delta of what we don't have at the moment is like how big would this do was would this exchange have been if it was run as a legitimate Exchange right yeah Revenue number is real that we saw yeah yeah right the death that spiral is like was Alameda all the volume and did Alameda have Capital because they stole from FTX customers if not you know then this isn't legit but you do need the the layer of data and like you know would we put our support behind something like this maybe and live in the right mind would ever use FTX again wow a lot of

people like they have like a very you know expansive license exchange even though we would run illegally you know you know what would help Jason is if a really big backer came in with a gigantic balance sheet and put their name behind it that would that would help that would really help yeah the other the other thing that I think is I mean it's gonna take a long time to play out I I don't know if you guys have been following this uh um celebrity uh promotion uh class action lawsuit that's going on for anybody that supported um or promoted FTX um I I read a little bit into this it's actually really an interesting one where the claim is that every that all the

people that supported uh FTX so Shaquille O'Neal Larry David uh coincidentally not Taylor Swift because she asked the one shadow people question yeah sure um I I think that's something that never happened apparently it's it's been just apparently it's been discovered in emails um that they're using in the case Adam Moskowitz is the lawyer who's putting together the class action lawsuit also was the lawyer who did the 1.4 billion dollars of recovery um from the from the Surf Side um uh building collapse uh a couple years ago um but he he's put together this class session lawsuit effectively saying that every single account represented in

unregistered security because every single account when you signed up for FTX was an interest bear account um which uh According to some of the perspectives of like I think um uh whatever the SEC I know New Jersey has said that um you know those interest bearing accounts are our Securities they prevented coinbase from creating that because it was an unregistered security offering but every single person who had an account at FTA was also given an unregistered security as they signed up because everyone was an interest bearing account um and so it becomes a question and you know whether or not you know you get into the legal semantics I don't think it really matters for this point but

what really becomes a question is like what do you actually retain if you start FTX yet if there's no interest bearing account if you have to trade certain assets if you don't have you know the market making capabilities that Alameda probably provided um if you don't have the ability to like launch I mean they were doing such Wild West things like launching coinbase as a synthetic asset before the coinbase IPO even happened um you know like that type of stuff would never be able to fly and what you know will become a regulated institution and whatever way shape or form it manifests going forward also you know there there's a five billion dollar class action lawsuit on the table here uh for for these

celebrities who are going to recoup if if there is any money that happens they're going to go back to the estate and say what the heck you know I I supported this so like there's just a lot of red tape legally that has to get sorted out on this um it it almost feels a little bit premature to to want to re-spin and reskin uh FTX um just because we don't even know where like the end of this road leads I'm just like discovering the bottom yeah I think the the I mean you guys might know better than me but I think that the reason why you might want to buy FTX and restart it is there still is you know to my knowledge I don't know if it's the industry-leading you know risk management risk engine that they said it was but there

definitely is still Tech and connectivity that was built in and there definitely are still lots of accounts that if you assured them that there was different management and a large balance sheet behind them then they might stick around with FTX because these sorts of accounts are famously sticky so I guess this would make sense for someone that has a really large balance sheet doesn't have necessarily the in-house competency to build a crypto exchange but wants a piece of crypto so I don't have my tinfoil hacks I'm at the office but if I did have my tin foil hat I would put it on and I would make a little prediction that a bank ends up buying FDX I bet that FDX ends up in the within is a nice little piece of crypto

property that uh maybe like a Jamie Diamond type figure ends up with his hands on no in your game you're playing my friend too regulated also Vance I think you're on mute you're on mutants foreign yeah far far too regulated you know yeah I can hear you now bro every different podcasting talker every week you haven't been here for the last couple weeks the podcast all right so what do you what are your thoughts on this that too far out there

I think that's too far out there I I I think uh I mean it's cool that tribe is is trying to do this and it's cool that they also have the connection of being you know initial investors and FTX as well so I think there's kind of like a little bit of like making things right but um there's a good chance that when you enter the exchange landscape by the time this gets respawned it's significantly more competitive than it was in the past like binance is now seemingly like you know like centered in Dubai um and not leaving and and you know figuring out that that's like a better path for them coinbase is launching there there isn't his room as much room for FTX as there used to be the decentralized vendors are starting to take off as well

um so TBD I also don't know what is real about that business or what is fake like do they really have an industry-leading risk engine because it didn't really seem like it towards the end didn't no but I do um look it's uh I could be totally wrong about that and uh that I would have to add a snag on my face but I I do think I do think definitely at least JP Morgan I kind of I don't know how real these are but I heard rumors that they were looking at you know crypto exchanges and if I were them this would be a time to pick up something on the cheap that at one point had a great brand and a bunch of customers so they should be like that literally I mean did they ever write a line of

code okay I mean the reason that Mike could be right here is like you do see um like there was a citadel guy at uh at blockworks beers we also the same blockworks beers last night and there was a citadel guy there and he's on the crypto team and uh you know the Citadel Charles Schwab and I think it was Fidelity came together and they kind of quietly created this crypto exchange called edx but like yeah I mean he was telling me it's full steam ahead over there with with the exchange and then you have um you know NASDAQ is doing a lot in the crypto exchange space so like I do think that these traditional players want to be primed to capture the crypto Exchange Market uh when the bull market comes back

I'd run it though like you hear about these things and then like a year later you're like what happened to that and then it's like oh yeah that was shut down I'm trying to make it so that Mike has less egg on his face you know I appreciate it I appreciate that yeah I got standing up your wall but yeah I I listen I I no one should ever be faulted for tinfoil hat conspiracy theories um seriously thirst and then it rained I'm waiting for oh you sure it might I actually have found myself I was looking for that online I thought it was a pretty funny t-shirt um you guys want to talk there's this is

kind of a little bit of a wonky story but I think it is I think it is pretty cool so flashbots launched their Meb share product today so Mev share is um it's basically a way to return Mev to to users so like the one of the big the big things that's happening right now in in Meb is in at least the way it works in ethereum today the vast majority of Mev flows to um validators and there are some good reasons for that happening um it's kind of like the security budget for the network but overall the Mev supply chain is getting much longer and much more complex and I think participants are kind of waking up to the idea that honestly the the people that the generators of Meb are actually users and

users are kind of getting raked over the coals right now and the big Trend in Meb service providers is basically finding ways to return Mev to those users and the the way that they're doing it is kind of a cool a cool mechanism where basically I don't want to get like too too deep into the weeds of how it actually works but basically user privacy plays a super key role so they're introducing a new set of actors that are executors it almost you almost think of it as kind of like an alternative sort of private mempool and you as a user can choose to reveal certain parts of your transactions and if you do you'll basically get compensated for revealing that for from these actors calls executors they send

that to a Matchmaker which is just a fancy new word for the person who's bundling these new transactions and then they get routed down the rest of the chain and then you as a user can actually get compensated for the Mev that you're generating so flashbots isn't the only one to do this there's also Rook has a solution out there and same with block native Matt Cutler's firm so pretty cool um definitely an interesting I think it's a step in the right direction for the way Meb works on ethereum today Mike it seems like there are two solutions to me or like two ways to attack the Mev problem right now there's the first bucket is like trying to decrease the amount of Mev in the system and then the second is like the just kind of

understanding that Mev will exist and so trying to get Mev back to the users as much as possible which kind of like first off is that is that right and then second is like which bucket do you think is a better solution there yeah that is right and this is pretty fiercely debated I would say it's kind of a philosophical battle but I would say the maximizing Mev but then redistributing it is probably winning if you want the the sort of Steel Man for the opposite side there's actually a a pretty thought-provoking piece written by a guy named Ari Jules Ari Jewell says the PHD advisor to Phil Diane actually who is one of the the co-founders at flashbots and he basically made this

analogy where you know it's it's hyperbolic in nature but it paints an evocative picture it's like the way that crime happens in New York right now is not very efficient so basically what we should do as a city is just systematize burglaries muggings Etc and then we should take basically attacks on those burglaries and muggings and redistribute it to the victims and to be honest I think that's a pretty Fair Way um that's a pretty fair depiction for how maybe happens today the problem is and maybe is so thorny that as soon as you start to dive into these things of like Fair ordering you know then you're you're basically just favoring a different set of actors right so first current first come first serve sounds like that would be a more fair system but then you realize that basically all

you're doing is incentivizing actors to be as close as possible to you know the sequencer if you're on a layer two or the Builder or validator on the layer one and then it just becomes a latency game and that's not very fair either because it favors deep pocketed actors but it also causes Geographic concentration and that's not good for the health of the network so there's really not you know there's no perfect way to do this I don't think in flashbots if you if you sort of look at the history of everything they've built they're they're basically their goal as a as a company is just to kind of shine light on this problem and then to to use mechanism design to basically create a whole bunch of like small pieces that

can be used to to solve these problems so Mev boost which is they they actually started with Meb def um which is back when ethereum actually had mining and they kind of originally solved the problem of those uh gas auctions um those pgas and then after in in uh in when we did uh sorry the merge and transition to proof of stake that transition to relight boost and that or Med boost and that's why they have all these uh relay auctions so that the 90 like still they're big actors in involved in the validator space in the Builder space so that uh really small actors like validators have the same uh right to compete basically and Meb is the large ones and this is just another

tool in the you know that they've introduced and this probably goes beyond the the bounce of this podcast but a lot of this fits into this gigantic solution that they have called Suave and Suave is probably the most audacious project in all of crypto right now I would say I know that's a big you know that's a tall statement to make but the the scope of what they're trying to do is just so so massive um it's super interesting totally agree that you can eliminate I think there's some that you can't there's also many different types of Mev so like what are what's an example of Mev that you could eliminate each usdc sandwich attacks I think that's pretty easy to eliminate you just

have someone you have a market maker quote closer to the actual price on an exchange instead of letting it go through you to swap like I think that's able to be eliminated versus like redistributing the value from that transaction like you could probably do both but I think better outcome for users is that you just frankly have a better price um what's up what's some type of mebe that probably couldn't be eliminated I don't know if anybody saw people trading the Pepe uh coin on uniswap Jared from Subway just like insane degenerate activity like you know a coin that was launched 15 minutes ago pumped to like hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap there isn't an efficient market for that on a centralized exchange on a centralized exchange no Market maker in

their right mind would quote you on anything regarding that price and so that's always going to go through you to swap that model is probably better to just redistribute that in the oven share with the user because Jared from Subway was absolutely eating yesterday he was cleaning up on just Facebook retail fish you know bidding this this coin up and down so like I think that's probably like a better solution for redistributing and then you have things like nft Mev like all the gas auctions that happen for the initial or initial whitelist you know all the secondary trading that's super inefficient like you could kind of probably go either way with enough price Discovery but like Meb is not just one thing it's certainly concentrated in you know the the

sandwich attacks right now of like the long tail uh coins but I don't know like I think there's going to be a variety of approaches that work um yeah and and I think another one is like sharing it with the wallets versus the users right that the wallet so the sleeping giant of me and I was gonna say we we haven't even touched the biggest I think solution to Mev for the bulk of where Mev is originating from which is auctioning off the order flow to something else that doesn't flow through an amm we haven't really seen that done yet uh I don't think at all definitely not at scale um and that that's a pretty dominant mechanism for trade for Exchange in traditional markets that could very

easily live on chain and that would solve I think the bulk of uh bucket one that ants was talking about but not to be able to touch the long tail they're also probably not going to be able to touch the nft transactions gas auctions but the the basic trading pairs that originate most of the volume on on uniswap or the light uh those are going to be things that order flow auctions can definitely take the bulk of yeah and to be clear that's the direction that Mev is heading in and Vance to just do your point about avoiding him we should at one point get the founders of uh of Osmosis on here Dave OHA and and sunny they they are very much in this camp that you can avoid forms of Mev and I think that is the the way of thinking

in in Cosmos generally and you can look at the protograph module on osmosis as a pretty cool example of this where there's basically a protocol owned bot that does back running on the protocol which is pretty non-harmful form of Mev and then those tokens go to the treasury the I'm sorry for for folks who've already listened to me used this analogy before but um the I think one of the design principles at on ethereum is they tried to not make a whole bunch of changes there is this idea in public policy where even a very small change that you make for the right reasons can have drastic effects that you just don't don't see when you initially make the decision so the example was there's there's the um there were at one point

the sort of rule about third strike offenders um with and you basically got very long jail times if you committed a third strike with the idea being look everyone deserves a second chance but if you're committing a felony for the third time we want it we want to seriously disincentivize that and they and they uh drastically up jail time for for third time offenders and they what they found out was that it didn't actually disincentivize uh crime at all but it did lead to drastic spikes in the murder rate of counties that imposed these rules because people that were going to commit those crimes kept committing crimes anyway but they knew that if it was their third time they were going to go away for a long time so something that might have just been a robbery became a murder as well so that

sort of thinking in public like people who are public policy planners are really aware of these sort of unintended effects and that's why I think for very good reason it takes ethereum a really long time to come to protocol level decisions like PBS and actually a lot of the thinking in uh for someone like the Mev big brains is actually finding ways to not do things on protocol or test with less permanent measures before making like a protocol level decision so you're probably right Vance there are these examples of like this is a really obvious easy form of Meb to combat but then you kind of end up playing this game game of whack-a-mole and you can have a lot of unintended consequences that arise from that totally I one other

thing I think is interesting is like um like sharing I mean we said this before like sharing mad with wallets or like with specific groups like imagine the Pepe you know uh coin yesterday trading up down sideways like imagine everyone who was buying or selling Pepe like getting a specific share of that order flow like you kind of have these meta games that metastasize and and sometimes it's good sometimes it's bad but right now it's just Jared from Subway like that doesn't fulfill like that good of an office I had to juice between all of them yeah do you guys think it's significant that that Meme coin ended up going to like 100 million as opposed to yes 100 that's like you know you talk to an

indicator grits and animal spirits are like just the vibe the temperature of people how they're feeling and I haven't seen anything like that happen since Bonk in Solana yeah I think that was like at the beginning of this year but like you saw this activity level this price level where Mev Bots turned back on the gas got super crazy the burn got super high the yield got super high on each like imagine when that happens at scale in a bull run in you know the next year or two like that's gonna be pretty crazy for for eth do you guys think that this next bull market so it feels like every bull market is kind of more and more muted or less and less intense basically um what do you think this next bull

market will will be like similar like you know you've kind of decreased the intensity by another 25 relative to the last or what the last one was actually in anomaly and that it was kind of muted and and this next one could be crazy what do you mean by what do you mean by intensity um are you talking about the overall multi that the market cap goes up each yes that's right yeah exactly yeah I think that's hard to say because so much of that market cap is just Bitcoin and now eth like I I think a lot of it is what is going to happen with a long tail of assets what's going to be the new dominant Narrative of assets that are doing well versus not like what's going to be the new market of

opportunity that people are working on right now but then in a year or two from now are are doing the best relative um and yeah sure there will be a driving force of you know Bitcoin leading to the wealth effect of ethereum leading to the wealth effect of defy and you know it it definitely flows downhill but I do think what will drive this next bull market is a new narrative and that's what we're searching for right now um I I think it's going to be just like you know after the.com collapse like it was the highest quality names that recovered and did really well and it doesn't look a lot like the Ico bubble like where you have thousands of new projects Each of which could potentially be the winner like we know who the winners of D5 are probably going to be

and I think those are going to continue to do extremely well just because they'll be able to generate revenue and give it back to the holders but you're not going to see like a hundred new uni swap Forks all of a sudden start competing for the top spot that game is Just ranked over um it depends on what the biggest asset is if it's eth like that implies an entirely different thing about the intensity and scalable Market than if it's just Bitcoin like personally we do we do believe it will be and then it's just like games like games are the ones where you're going to see a lot of like open market competition for the number one spot because there's just like is no no dominant incumbent yet and so like you think about it it's gone from like icos which were just like crazy Bach and

all free for all whatever to D5 which was a little bit like that but like a slightly better reasons to now like flight to Quality you know better reason thesis on the majors and just like a free-for-all in the gaming space and I think the reason why it might be more intense is just because gaming has more users than any other vertical could potentially have and so if you have like you know a community of like two million monthly active users that are actually on chain and doing things I don't know all bets are kind of off when you enter the actual user adoption phase and we just have not been there over the past three Cycles yeah my my kind of thesis on what's next is is frankly games but what we had with

D5 was a large number large n of different applications like you know every single food coin ever uh people are just buying up those domains to be able to launch like a D5 protocol underneath it with smart contracts that they rip from from something else and I would say a small relative small number of n of users of those applications whereas I think with gaming it's going to be the complete reverse you're going to have a small number n of games that are actually really fun to play with economies that work but the end because gaming is such a huge industry and the best games which are the ones that are subseating are going to be the ones that can bridge the gap between you know web 2 web 3 and in a novel way it's gonna be a huge number of users so it's going to

be much fewer winners than the D5 ecosystem was in in 2019 2020 but it'll be larger winners because of that any anybody could have launched an Ico it was it was harder to build a D5 project but you could still copy paste it's going to be extremely hard to build a competitive game if you see one on the market that's really working it it's going to take you years and so that's what I think is nice about gaming is like we're not going to see the fragmentation of this industry a thousand times over like we did with D5 like if you're in market and winning it's probably you're probably gonna stay winning for a long period of time um so well you know it was intense what was intense about D5 is you literally had to

be up 24 7. what was intense about the Ico craze is and Vance and I lived this while he was in Tokyo we'd literally have a follow the sun model of like standing up on the news where it would be his daytime it'd be behind nine time and then reverse like that type of model I don't think is going to be the intensity or the reason for intensity for this next phase it's going to be uh just because of the development time for for successful games it's going to be a lot more um linear but the the outcomes are going to be that much bigger so the massive wealth effect is going to happen again it's just going to be in a different category you guys kind of have red pilled me a little bit on on GameFly actually because I think the the important

question to ask in terms of what's going to be successful is what does the user Journey look like for getting people involved in crypto and the person who first kind of planted this little seed for me was Gabe Layton I think his name is um with uh his idea like free to own nfts and the idea is actually people are first going to get an nft and that's what's going to make them get their wallet and that's what sort of facilitates their on-chain journey and I think there's probably a really good case to be made the same thing with gaming where people just all you need is like one Smash Hit of a game like a Candy Crush level game that's crypto native and that just Trojan horses people into the space and then maybe you end up earning like a significant amount

of assets you're like oh it's a pain in the butt to like take these assets out of the crypto system I'm going to use for instance defy as my as my sort of native Finance what you just said is RC moronic as it currently stands because you can't have a successful game in the way that web3 gaming currently exists we talked about this last time or maybe it was the time before wallet wall you can't have you can't have millions of players concurrently if you also have a wallet that people have to use so the best standard are the ones that abstracted away whether that's crypto native web3 Native is Up For Debate like we we debate this internally all the time but you know like if it's web 3 native with a smaller number of n users but still a lot larger than what Divi

saw I think that's probably where it starts and then it expands into millions over time but don't you think that with the first of all those things like account abstraction that fix a lot of those problems with things like session keys and stuff like that then you have wallet as a service like don't you think that that's a solvable problem it just hasn't happened yet and I would imagine that I mean you guys would know so much better than me right but I would imagine app developers and game developers that you know when you launch a successful app there's kind of like a native wallet that's a part of that and you can kind of just generate your own keys and you barely even know that you've just opened a new crypto wallet decent history that's like as of like a month and a half ago I just had that

experience for the first time actually at nft NYC of like interesting creating them I created a wallet on my phone from a from Google Chrome on my phone created it with like my Apple ID minted nft on the page so with it within probably 30 seconds I created a new wallet and minted and and it was and it was completely seamless this is awesome even l2s frankly like actually launched on ethyl one last bull market like it they built running along the way but you haven't been able to build a game you haven't been able to onboard people like this is all brand new so like it's gonna be a lot easier to onboard people but like still if you're a game and you're like really bringing a lot of people the nice part is that

there's nobody there's nobody chasing you like nobody chased axi when it launched because nobody was building games back then and still games are gonna take like two or three years to launch from today that are just like getting funded right now so it's gonna look a lot different and very positive that there won't be this damn fragmentation that's that's a huge positive for the space Oh Yeah events you missed this but we did a review of the the uniswap mobile wallet as well and it might not sorry what'd you think um uh we had miles uh who's the host of season three of bell curve and Jason my friend he he actually downloaded it and tried to mess around with it and use it

and he had some basically the tldr was that they're kind of almost split in between having a super easy retail never touch crypto interface like a Robin Hood uh and versus like a very crypto native like on-chain uh sort of user and it almost seems like their ux is right in between those two those two things but I I still do think they you know I I actually downloaded it after that episode and it is super easy and you can just generate yeah I mean I I see what he means like for instance there should just be a default it should put you on one chain for instance and uh you should have the option to flip because it was a little confusing it's like wait there are different versions of this token and I don't know which chain I should go on but but that that

said I mean it did abstract probably 75 80 percent of the of the pain of metamask for instance it was a great first shot at getting something in the App Store as we discussed um and getting something live with a brand of uniswap I think they'll probably move in the direction of easier easier onboarding easier cost user experience to get more of that consumer base and I agree so the other day that Miles had was like it seems like they're going after onboarding new people as opposed to building the power tools in a mobile device that already existing like crypto native D5 users are that I want to use um those are start to like chip away at all the different product fixes and Bug fixes and whatever to make it easier and

easier over time as we were talking about it's also a lot easier to get in the app store and then make changes in updates than it is to like have this full-fledged product that you spend a year on and then try to get it through yeah I I just think it's it's in my My Hope Is that we do change the use because right now it basically happens to exchanges centralized exchanges and uh definitely lots of props and love to to coinbase but I think it would be cool if we could change the the user onboarding flow into something that immediately put people on chain and I think the mobile wallet from uniswap is very interesting I think game five could be interesting if that wallet wallet wall problem is solved but um

yeah I mean like pretty great setup for whatever comes next that we have like all of these mobile onboarding funnels we have like coinbase derivatives launching off offshore we have on-chain activity and ease move to proof of stake L2 scaling like everything looks pretty positive even though like Michael and I were talking about this uh eth is you know at 2K Bitcoin is like around 30k people are just they got beaten down so hard in 2022 that you know feels like they're still dealing with the some of the like post-traumatic stress disorder of that year but that's also kind of what you need like you need the disbelief you need even the OG's like kind of like fading it I don't know

this you know and I've talked about this the in 2019 the whole Market almost 3xed and very no one was really talking back then about like it's the return of the bull market and like that was the time to be getting involved I that's the kind of thing we we've been waiting for a little bit because in in before FTX you know we were in a bear Market but on every pump people would be like maybe it's the bull market again and I think you did need that to get Stamped Out and I think this is the most optimistic this is the most bullish bear Market I've only been to but this I feel like most is you know throughout your long-storied career my long-storied career yeah uh second Rodeo but you think that you feel like they're six months ahead of us in

terms of like where they are in the bear Market it's like pretty interesting people are definitely more optimistic um and I think that's just because they have the local governments kind of behind them in one way or the other interesting I mean they also had the their explosions happened six months prior to you know the FTX explosion which is probably more you know domiciled in the US just based on the connections that they had so like I I mean I I'm I'm a staunch believer that 2023 if you look back on on and I do this a fair amount uh you look back on the trajectory of 2017 18 19 20 21 like 2019 is the the best comp that we have for for what 2023 will probably be and you had things like algorithm launching

in May of 2020 or 2019 you had kind of like Bitcoin bottoming and then 3x scene really quickly like there there were a lot of kind of like bullish little green shoots that you could point to in 2019 that um people were just getting excited about and and this was before defy even existed as like a category um and and it feels like we're still on the precipice of that with the backdrop Mike to your point of eth Bitcoin D5 all having happened already it's just kind of like what is the next thing you know it's a crazy Asia perspective that that somebody told me that like basically stopped me in my track they're like yeah like us got wrecked last cycle I was like yeah well you guys did too

they're like no no but like you guys got wrecked by Voyager Celsius FTX you know like by Genesis they're like yeah our country protected us from that I was like I'm not sure that's how it happened but like I understand your point like but yeah we just looked like incredibly stupid um and you know a bunchels but some of it's like frankly like the fault of regulators letting this stuff happen like if you could distinguish the good guys from the bad guys we probably would have been able to you know distinguish who SPF was who Alex machinski was I don't even know who that Voyager guy was that was running it out of his garage but like come on like that shouldn't have been very hard to tell

hmm all right guys I'm Gonna Leave in here [Music]