Bankless - 106 - How to Become a Whale | Tetranode

Starting point is 00:00:07 Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. Guys, exciting episode today. This is how to become a whale with a whale, tetranode, a defy whale on crypto, Twitter. We're talking to him, unpacking the alpha today. There's a few takeaways for him. I'm going to list him here real quick. Number one, why farmers like Tetronaut are the best alpha. Number two, why Tetrod loves Ethereum, not Alt Layer 1s. It's an interesting discussion.

Starting point is 00:00:44 Number three, Alpha from Tetronaut's Infinity Gauntlet. These are the projects he thinks are going to be the next big thing. Number four, how to survive the whale games that are played in crypto. Number five, is that actually parting advice, how to become a whale. And that is the theme of this episode. David, this is pretty cool with Tetranode. What did you think? The Tetranos story is such a story that you can only find in crypto.

Starting point is 00:01:07 My gut take on Tetronode is that he's a guy that really resonates with the crypto industry itself. And maybe perhaps in the rest of the world without crypto might have been just a guy. But in crypto, he's tetranote. And so he really found his calling for because of crypto, because of what crypto brings to the true. It's somewhat true of all of us, I think, like of a lot of people in crypto. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:01:30 Yeah, I definitely find resonance with that as well. And I think we start this podcast on common ground with you, me, Tetranode, and most every one of the listeners, at least the ones that played like, you know, internet games back in like the late 90s, early 2000s, talking about Starcraft and the meta and how to think about game theory and how to move quickly and press buttons. And the conversation kind of rolls from there. And so using that as a foundation to consider crypto games and defy games and how to corner markets is a really, interesting parallel. And ultimately we come full circle back to a very similar conversation at the very end. And just to set some context, I mean, Dutch food's a pretty big whale, right? It's like I don't, I don't know how you measure that in terms of like amount of eth or like, but it's a lot. I mean, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. The brand is that he's a big whale. Big whale. We're talking a lot of

Starting point is 00:02:23 money. And he's got some really interesting takes and some really interesting projects. I do get a feeling like, unlike other whales, maybe we've talked to on bank lists or we've interacted with in the past, he is not purely a trader. Like, he's not like dumping on people, right? He's a positive sum whale. He's a positive some whale. It's almost like an early stage investor with a massive pool of capital. I almost say like it's sort of a VC type model, but it's not a VC.

Starting point is 00:02:55 It's done in a very defy-native, crypto-native way. And it's so cool that he can do this as an independent individual without like an office in Silicon Valley, like without a, you know, a massive team. It's just kind of him. He's putting in the time, working a hundred hour weeks, he said, but he's also like living life, you know. He's also has a family and he's also like, you know, spending time with his kids. And it's a really cool juxtaposition. And this is something that crypto uniquely enables, right? He's a one-man VC. And I bet you he's probably outperformed the average VC, probably significantly. I'm going to go ahead and guess. And this is exactly the power that crypto enables people where, like, no, you don't need a family

Starting point is 00:03:39 office, you don't need lawyers, you don't need infrastructure, you can do this from home. Like, you could hear his kids in the background, and the guy is outperforming everyone. And he's also anonymous. Like, you don't even actually need to know his name. So these are the powers that private keys in crypto can really imbue upon everyone. And so we kind of start this and end this conversation as like, hey, we want everyone to be a whale too. And so Tetranote has his way of becoming a whale and carving out his niche. And he has those lessons that he can impart upon us. And we can take those lessons into consideration.

Starting point is 00:04:12 But at the end of the day, everyone needs to take their own path. I hope every listener here becomes their own whale in their own specific niche inside of this greater Defi ecosystem. And maybe Tetranote is just carving the path for the rest of us. I think we'll leave our other thoughts for the debrief, David. But one last thing I'll say is like one lesson I learned is anybody can be a whale because it actually depends on the size of the pool that you're in. Right? And so even Tetronode, he's not an eth whale.

Starting point is 00:04:38 He's not a Bitcoin whale. But in markets that he's closer to where he's got a kind of a larger vested interest, he's working directly with the teams. He is a whale. I think that's a lesson for us all. I hope you enjoy this episode with Tetronode. We're going to get right to it. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors.

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Starting point is 00:07:32 He is a famous defy anon. He's known for his Oracle Whale Twitter profile. And I think that's a tip of the hat to how he's kind of a whale on Ethereum. Very active on Twitter. Generated a cult following of his own. People pay attention to what Tetranode says. They pay attention to what he does, what assets he buys. And now we're going to hear from the manwain.

Starting point is 00:07:53 himself because I think all of us have one thing in common David we all want to be whales tetranode it's great to have you on bankless welcome hello hey just kind of drop myself into here unprepared but you know there's no ruffling of paper this I'm noted with the last thing of you so it's totally off the record here that's awesome I guess I think it's better that way yeah I think that's why people enjoy you the most is because the off-the-cuff nature and the very casual identity that you have portrayed yourself is very real to a lot of people Okay, okay.

Starting point is 00:08:23 And so that's what we're going to do on this podcast, because we're going to get real, real. In addition to that, Tetranode, we want you to teach us how to become a whale like you. Because I think a lot of people listening to Bankless want to be Tetranod when they grow up. Okay, so I'll give you my best shot. Like, you know, part of it is the sort of the endless digging that we all go through. We live and breathe this up, but sometimes, like, you can expose, like, two people to the same situation and they would, like, act differently. You know, like, I treat it as like a video game, like, like an RTS, you know, like StarCraft. So you have like a fog of war and you have very limited, you know, intelligent.

Starting point is 00:09:00 So you go out there and you scout and you dig and the more info you find, the better situated you are. So that's like the general high level overview. So I can go detail by detail, you know, like what I did. That's cool. And you sound like you're maybe a gamer by background too. A hardcore gamer. It's a little RTS like, you know, Warcraft 3 or something, the fog of war. Yeah, all of them.

Starting point is 00:09:20 Yeah. Like I first started Age of Empires, you know, and. And then it was like, the next one was StarCraft and then Warcraft 3. I am with it. Yes. This is what I did. And how do you think these games taught you to be like good in crypto? It kind of taught me about like resource management, you know, and how to deal with decision making with information, you know, with limited information.

Starting point is 00:09:46 I used to play a lot of chess as well. You know, like I first started chess when I was 16. and then I actually made it to like state level and then I got silver medal just like one year right after it was so that was like totally unexpected and then afterwards I went out to college so I just cut it off right there

Starting point is 00:10:03 but I just got thinking had I done it like when I was six I would have been like the national champion but it would have could have should have you know had I been like in Bitcoin in 2009 you know I would have been don't we all don't we all anyways I digress

Starting point is 00:10:20 It's interesting. We've seen so many people show up in crypto and be extremely successful via poker. Hazu is a famous poker player. Hasib is a famous poker player. Ari Paul as well, I think. Yeah. Poker and crypto go hand in hand. But I'm also not surprised that RTS, like StarCraft games also do well in crypto, but also you're the only person that I've actually like articulate the fact that Starcraft in these RTS games are kind of like the original backgrounds of your skill set. And the differentiator, I think,

Starting point is 00:10:50 think between poker and Starcraft is there's so much speed in StarCraft. You've got to press buttons real fast in StarCraft to be able to keep up with the meta. Can you comment on that and how perhaps that influence your style with how you engage with these crypto systems? So just as a disclaimer, I know poker, but I'm a really bad poker player. But when it comes to StarCraft, you know, there is a sort of chance. You know, there's chance in this scenario. But a large part of it is decisions you're making and you can become very methodical in the way that you press forward, you know, on your strategy and how you manage things. There's just a lot more decision making in Starcraft, like, as you would with crypto.

Starting point is 00:11:35 I think that lends a better background than poker, you know. Like poker, you have multiple outcomes, multiple probabilities. But in Starcraft, you actually resolve it to one using hundreds of decisions. So there's a lot more granularity. And I think overall it's just like a very, very difficult game to master. So that applies generally to RTS too. You know, I've played like from age of empires to like StarCraft 2, which is like the last one that I played. I think just having that decision making drilled into you split second decision making and also playing in team games as well and just like managing the whole thing.

Starting point is 00:12:11 So that also applies to like wow guilds as well. But a concrete example of how like StarCraft's adjuncter. applies to like say crypto is that okay when I'm playing like a four on four you know and there's this one guy talking shit over on the other side you know he says like like suck it down or something and so the four of us you know are conspiring and we're like hey let's go fuck that dude over in particular and so we did and so he's screaming and taunting you a bit but eventually we removed them from the map you know and we eventually overtook everyone but those things you know in crypto kind of exemplifies teamwork and there's a lot to be said about

Starting point is 00:12:48 market making, you know, in psychology. So I think the same thing can be applied to crypto, too. So there was a couple of times when someone was like talking shit about me and was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, why didn't you do this? Why did you do that? You know, so I pissed him off with like a tetranote candle. A tetranote candle. Something like that. Wow. So now you're, you're lighting them up with like liquidity and crypto trading and like, you know, tetranode candles rather than like, Starcraft, zerg swarms. So, yeah, no lower entries, just leave them in a desk, you know, and be like, this is how, you know, I can fill in the market, so stop talking. Okay.

Starting point is 00:13:25 So you play StarCraft, you play RTS games. You're an OG gamer, the classic Blizzard games. But also, in addition to that, without telling us who you are, who are you? You know, I'm just trying to, I guess, like, crypto has become a hobby for me. Like, before I was, like, a gamer, and I was looking for, like, you know, a graphics card to build PCs with. And in 2010, the graphic cards prices got jacked up. And I'm like, I can't find like these radion 5870s anymore. Now what's going on?

Starting point is 00:13:57 So I looked into forums and there's this thing called Bitcoin mining and that, you know, struck my curiosity. So the first question is like, okay, this Bitcoin, you know, can't I just like copy it, you know, copy and paste it and double spend? You know, that's a double spending problem. So I find out that I can't, you know, because of through hatching algorithms, you know, and, you know, it just drove into the math. And after I figured out it was good, I intended to send $100, you know, to Mount Gox, but the process was too difficult. And, you know, I was riding my bike in college.

Starting point is 00:14:30 And I was just like, forget it. Too hard. You know, this was in 2010. So, of course, we all have our moments of regret in crypto, you know, in the past, especially, like, in the early, like, 2010. So that was one of my biggest regrets. that was a figure mistake, I think.

Starting point is 00:14:49 And then what happened next? Right. So I saw the thing going up, you know, and I saw it go up to 30, and I was like, oh, God, I should have, I should have, I should have. Then it crashed down to $2 and it was like, whoof, dodged that bullet. Didn't hear about it until like two years later, you know, Bitcoin is like $266, you know, in April 2013. What? You got to be kidding me.

Starting point is 00:15:12 Yeah. And then, you know, every day. from Benin, I thought, like, what I would do with just, like, you know, if I had, like, a thousand Bitcoin back then. And then 2013, I was, you know, working and a friend reminded me that Mount Gox, you know, it just crashed. So that was my opportunity. And I had money at that time. And so I just dollar cost average over the course of like three years into Bitcoin. Actually, I extend that because I just continued on to Ethereum. But yeah, it was filled with, You know, like most of the stories of the early adopter, it was filled with

Starting point is 00:15:47 FOMO, regrets, and a lot of money thrown at, and waiting. So Tetranode, at what point did you feel like you became a whale? No, what, when I got, like, when I became like a millionaire, I didn't, like, feel anything. I just kind of sat there and just looked at it. It's like that. Did that really happen? You know? And so I don't think like I felt like it was worth anything until 2018 when I started moving to markets in ways that I couldn't imagine.

Starting point is 00:16:22 You know, that that was like before the crash. Like after the crash, I was like, I still held. But it was, let's just say that as we held Ethereum through 1420 and it crashed down to 80, we lost like 94% of our net worth. I don't know like where you guys were, you know, at the moment. Oh, it was painful. Yeah. Dollar cost averaging. You're holding.

Starting point is 00:16:48 Yeah. Yeah. Crying. Sad. Back in the days, like you had two options, you know, you had like, I think Maker Dow and you had like coin base, right? So you can either buy it or hold it. And I held it, you know, we didn't have farming.

Starting point is 00:17:06 We didn't have like options. We didn't have puts or calls. Yeah. So I pretty much just. like held through the crash. So for the first like four years of crypto, I just like held, you know. So that had built a lot of disciplines. So it's a discipline that most of these newcomers, I feel like they don't have because, you know, they have like a wide variety of options that jump from just to that. So you have like the rise of the rotators in this current gen.

Starting point is 00:17:30 So Tetradone, you kind of started back in the early days, but, you know, maybe didn't stick with it until you had some money, you know, after Mount Gox, you have 2013 dollar cost averaging in. You started first feeling like a whale in that big Ethereum bull run. It sounds like you probably got in on Ethereum relatively early. You know, 2017 was just crazy. Absolutely insane. And then early 2018, you're feeling like a whale. You're moving markets. And then boom, crash. Like 2018 just knocked the wind out of most of our sales. And then 2019, you know, continued. It was a cold, dark, bear market winter. So what were you doing at that time? It sounds like you stayed around. You were still holding. But like what were you doing? And then what

Starting point is 00:18:19 was it like coming out of that? Maybe coming into 2020. You know, I was just like holding and traveling the world, you know, and just having a good time and just raising my family in 2019. 2018 was just like, oh, God, my network is just like melting right before my eyes. And then I I kind of, you know, got on Twitter because I was on Reddit before. So a lot of crypto personalities like anti-prosynthesis and Mr. YouconC, you know, they moved off Reddit because it wasn't the place to be for crypto anymore. So we moved on to Twitter. So on Twitter, I saw like a bunch of, you know, Bitcoin Matthews like A Pompeiano,

Starting point is 00:18:56 just like spouting out complete bullshit, you know. So I was like PMing anti-prosynthesis and I was this person and that person and I was sparring with you on Reddit. So, you know, let's go and fight these maxi together. So that started out was just sort of dispelling untruths, you know, on Twitter. Because I was retired and I didn't have anything better to do, you know, aside from traveling the world and raising my family, but I also wanted to keep up with the news and crypto.

Starting point is 00:19:26 Tetra, I have so much I want to unpack with so many questions about, like, why you were bullish Ethereum back in 2017. I often joke with Ryan about, like, before Defi came around, before MakerDAO came around, like, why the hell were we excited about Ethereum? Because there wasn't that much there, like, to be excited about. It's ICOs, like, but I want to return to that conversation. But I'm also just intrinsically fascinated about, from what I've gathered from you from other podcasts and other just history lessons that I've heard you teach to, you know, other mediums is that you were a person that I don't think

Starting point is 00:19:57 expected wealth in his life, and then a bunch of wealth happened. How did you just deal with that? The crazy world of crypto, especially when it was so crazy back in the 2014 to 2016 era, like put a lot of wealth in people's hands that never expected it. Was that you? And like, how did you just like deal with that psychologically? That is a good question. You know, I just deal with it and just kind of stared at the screen blankly and just autistically about it. And it's just a number in front. Sounds like not dealing with it. Yeah. It's just a number, you know. And what we have in crypto is even better than what a lot of like famous people and executives don't have is privacy.

Starting point is 00:20:35 So, you know, like I didn't want to make a big deal about it, you know, and be like this big shot guy buying diamonds off the store, you know, and showing off their blinks and casios and Lamborghinis. I just kind of kept quiet and didn't do anything until I was able to buy like a house, you know, with like one third of my neck worth. It was a very nice house and, you know, still is. But yeah, like the ways that I think about it is like the money obtained in crypto is not to spend money. the whole point of retirement is to take a nap anytime I want I still drive like a Toyota I don't care yeah so

Starting point is 00:21:14 when it comes to the material wealth that's not what I was looking for I'm just looking for like to live and breathe in crypto and finding opportunities you know and to use that capital to kind of anchor myself further into the crypto space and further push it and become the market maker one thing that I feel like I've learned about wealth is like you know the purpose of wealth

Starting point is 00:21:34 is to make you free. Yeah. And if you're not achieving freedom with that wealth, then, like, what is the point? Do you agree with that, or what do you think the purpose of wealth actually is? What is it for you? The purpose of wealth? Well, I think it comes with several levels of needs fulfilled. You know, like, first of all, when I was, like, pissed poor, like, I'm just looking for money, period.

Starting point is 00:21:57 So that's like, you know, you're gasping for air. So that's, like, the level one. And then after you've done relatively well, you know, you're looking for like a million dollar or a K retirement or whatever. So once you achieve that, then what's next? You know, like my next goal is to make like other people that level too. And inadvertently in the process, you know, of keep digging and digging. And through like several failed ventures, I was able to find like the flow state, which I am currently in right now. So I wasn't always successful.

Starting point is 00:22:28 I invested into several ventures that didn't turn out. So well, including the Auger ICO. Even though I made profit off a bit, it did not become like the market-wide Oracle that it could have been. So the other one was just like Funfair. You know, you've heard like the legendary jazz, you know, which is known to be the cook creator of some Star Fox technology, I think. Anyways, so he was brilliant and, you know, he had experience behind him and he had reputation too. So I invested in the fun fair. I looked at everything and it was good.

Starting point is 00:23:03 However, I guess like it wasn't very well understood at the time that execution matters too. So everybody was just like plowing their houses into ICOs. So Fun Fair went up a lot and I was not trying to take profit. So I kind of wrote it up and all the way down to like, you know, lower than it was during the ICL. Because I was waiting for them to execute and bring like a product market fit to their project. you know so product market fit is what I was looking for for the entire time I wasn't looking for wealth I was looking to become like the biggest customer on there so I can gamble you know and make money off of the platform so my policy for most of the projects I'm involved in is that

Starting point is 00:23:47 am I going to be their biggest customer if the answer is no then it doesn't fit my use case and therefore I have no like sort of pull over the project you know I must be their customer I must be their biggest critic as well. So that brings it to skin in the game. You want to be the big fish in the small pool sort of thing, or the whale, maybe I should say, not fish. So when it comes to like a product, you know, like what kind of problem does it solve?

Starting point is 00:24:10 You know, like I must be able to use it. So as you can see it with like projects like dopeX, right? I'm like going in there and I'm playing with the options game too. I'm the market maker, you know, and I'm giving them all kinds of inputs and they're making great use of it. I want to talk about some of the projects you're excited. about in a minute tetranode and just hear what you think you know where you think some of the

Starting point is 00:24:30 alpha is in the space but before we do i see you were talking about fun fair and auger and some of these early iCO examples and what's really interesting you know to me is you said like look i made money on auger but yeah it didn't blow it out of the park and a lot of those early iCOs they made returns denominated in usd and dollars but they did not do very well denominated in eath right It's like the ETH you put in these ICOs far underperformed rather than just holding the EF. I'm curious what you do now. Like how do you denominate your portfolio today? Do you denominate it in ETH?

Starting point is 00:25:07 Do you dominate it in dollars? How do you sort of, what's your measure of wealth and liquidity? It's all in EF. Before like we were able to farm and put capital off of like our decentralized platform. Then it would have been more in U.S. dollar. But right now, you know, like every. everything's denominated in Ethereum, like, okay, you know, if you want to market make, then you must have Ethereum as well. It goes with like the automated market making process. It's like,

Starting point is 00:25:35 okay, so if you have like this many tokens, then what are you going to be nominated in USD or the pair that is bought and sold into? So everywhere that we go, even if we cross bridges, you know, Ethereum is ubiquitous and there's no way around that. You know, this is speaking from an operational point of view. It's not even just like, you know, very craft. thing. It's the hardest money on earth. I want to lean into that a little bit because, to turn out, you've been maybe loyal is the right word to Ethereum for a very long time, even before Defi even came around. And so why were you bullish on Ethereum before Defy was even a thing?

Starting point is 00:26:12 Because like I said earlier, like sometimes I joke with my early Ethereum friends before we even invented the word defy. Like, why were we excited about Ethereum? Like, there were no examples. There was nothing in the app layer that got us excited. Okay. What did you see in Ethereum that made you optimistic about its future back then? And do you still see that today? So in order to get excited about Ethereum back in the days, you know, you have to compare it to what Bitcoin offers. So back in the days, you know, you have like Bitcoin having like their sort of output script,

Starting point is 00:26:41 having primitive things like colored coins, you know, and even the counterparty XP. And while that is, you know, a very sort of innovative. step about Bitcoin, it did not go very far because of like the block time and sort of the limited language expressiveness that Bitcoin is limited to, right? So I've read the Ethereum white paper, which is like, I believe 58 pages long, you know, by Vitilic. And while I didn't understand everything that he had written, you know, I got the big picture about like smart contract, you know, and where Crypto is heading. So when it first launch in 2000, 2015, I bought the first Ethereum on Cricken.

Starting point is 00:27:28 And I told, you know, my colleague and my coworker, and he's the shadow tetranode that is around to this day. It's not a very well-known fact that there is someone, you know, like on my order of magnitude, just going around and quietly conspiring with me. But anyways, so I told him that, you know, we're looking at like Bitcoin's biggest rival right now, you know, right at the time of the July launch at 2015. you know, right there. So we bought a bunch and we kept DCAing. And of course, like, at the time,

Starting point is 00:28:01 there was also the block war going on as well, you know, like with Gavin and Driesen and Mike Kern. And they were battling the rest of the block stream mafia on, you know, what the future of the Bitcoin scalability solution should be. So I was very, very angry that Bitcoin couldn't scale past one megabyte, you know, and they're kind of gumping it. So lots of things were said back and forth, you know, but ultimately I left for Ethereum

Starting point is 00:28:29 because they offered a more flexible outlook and they were more embracing of new ideas whereas you look at Blochstream and they look like the tallyband. So goodbye to that. And I think a lot of people would ask that same question today being similarly frustrated with Ethereum's scaling strategy and looking at new horizons with new technologies in 2021.

Starting point is 00:28:52 Right. And so with all in 2021, it's been just the rise of the alt layer ones with new scaling solutions, kind of fractal off of the same like frustration about Bitcoin's scaling solutions or scaling debates, scaling wars back in 2016, 2017. But why, I mean, you're a farmer. You look at all the frontier projects that are across the ecosystem. But from what I've gathered, you've stuck generally to the Ethereum ecosystem. Why stay bullish?

Starting point is 00:29:20 In 2021, why stay bullish on Ethereum? and why kind of just like disregard the rise of the Alt layer ones? Well, it all comes from the understanding of the scalability Trilemma. You know, you can either have decentralization, security, and scalability, you know. So solving that Trilema is a very hard and long problem. And so far, the solutions that I've seen, you know, popping up like the quote unquote Ethereum killers, they don't quite solve the scalability Trimma, you know, to the satisfactory. that we want to see. They're mostly engineering tradeoffs. Like Solana is just like, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:59 like they implement like so many shitty like engineering tradeoffs that it's starting to show itself, you know, like the shortcuts that they take to scalability is unacceptable from a decentralized point of view. Not only that, but how am I going to trust like, you know, the amount of money that I have on Ethereum chain for Solana, you know, to have outages like that. And one day, what happens if they have complete outage, not to mention their large node and their larger requirement would cause the node to become part of data center and that fragility will have a fat tail consequence, kind of like the 1,001 days of a turkey. Do people call you an eth-maxi for that opinion?

Starting point is 00:30:38 I'm an I'm an ec maxi. You know, I take it as it is. But, you know, like the first principle approach, you know, kind of rationalizes why in that way. Because like Ethereum, you know, we accept like scalability. issues like even Vidalek said himself that the skillability right now on the blockchain sucks, and that was years ago. And so solving that, that is a hard problem.

Starting point is 00:31:02 You know, there are a tradeoffs to be made. And we're still researching it because even if Ethereum has data sharding, now we come into the limitation of how much can a single-threaded beacon chain handle. And now how many executable shards do we need? and how would that affect composability? So it's not an easy problem, and a lot of chains are making different tradeoffs. But ultimately, Ethereum is the first and most decentralized,

Starting point is 00:31:30 and the other ones, they often have a lot of VC money into it. So anything that you throw in there in terms of decentralization is probably owned by, well, a number of entities. So have you captured your activities to just Ethereum and its related L2s and side chains, or have you actually gone on to other layer ones to, quote unquote, you know, farm the alpha there? Have you stuck to the Ethereum ecosystem or have you kind of, you know, take perhaps a short-term profit-maximaest approach and try to, you know, squeeze out some alpha in some other ecosystems? I experimented with like a few other change, you know, like Phantom and BSC.

Starting point is 00:32:08 I found the bridging U.S. not very good. So I didn't want to put my full amount. And thankfully, I didn't because like there was this one hacking the BSC bridge. that costed them like $80 million. That could have been like my money, you know, unbapped. And recently, I think the Solana wormhole hat, even though it wasn't like a bridge-related issue, it was a smart contract hack,

Starting point is 00:32:30 who would put like their life savings in there anyways. So bridges are dangerous. They don't have the security guarantees that L2 dues inheriting their L1 parents. So I try to stay away from that on principle. So Tetranode, sometimes when David and I talk about Ethereum, the way you just talked about it, We call ourselves not necessarily ETH Maxi, but a decentralization maximus.

Starting point is 00:32:52 And then people are quite ready to point out. But Ryan, David, people don't care about decentralization. Okay, that's like, you know, some of you do, like the early crypto zealots do, the cypherpunks do. Crypto boomers. We get it. But mainstream isn't going to care, right? They just like, they can't pay these very high transaction fees. So they're just going to go where there's apps they want to use and transaction fees are low.

Starting point is 00:33:15 You just made the case for decentralization. Why do you think decentralization actually matters to the rest of the world beyond us, like decentralization maximus? Decentralization, the consequences that require decentralization is a fat-tailed event. Let's just say that you have like a bunch of notes shutting down because they've grown too large. Then it's clear why we keep the Ethereum notes, you know, very widely distributed rather than just like a handful in a data center. So we need decentralization also because we want it to be censorship resistant to.

Starting point is 00:33:54 Now, let's say certain three-letter agencies, you know, want to press on, say, a highly centralized system and shut down their server, then you don't have the option of withdrawing your money or doing anything about it. So I think the world needs decentralization because of accessibility. So if you centralize it, there's a simple. going to be some fragile point that will bust sooner or later. Like we've seen it in all sorts of examples like, let's say, um,

Starting point is 00:34:25 finance, right. They're playing the dangerous shell game and eventually that's going to blow up in their face. So that's the most extreme example of a permissionless blockchain that is still centralized a lot of people use. And there's going to be trails of tears, you know, falling out in case anything happened to CZ or the entity that controls finance. So I would not touch that with a 10-foot pole. So Tetraina, we've just talked about

Starting point is 00:34:50 kind of the layer one and your background, how you got into crypto and how you became a whale. Now you want to maybe talk about some of the projects that you're really interested in, because the theme of this episode is how we could become whales. Okay. So the person that's listening a bank list following a similar track, right? It's still, I think all of us believe it's still very early in crypto. There's a lot of opportunity out there. And you are in the midst of harvesting a lot of opportunity in some of these early defy applications. I want to talk about your infinity gauntlet. Sure. So this is the gauntlet that Thanos uses, and this is a meme that we've seen on Twitter. It's a meme of an orca whale with an infinity gauntlet, and each infinity stone is a project

Starting point is 00:35:31 that you have a stake in. Can you tell us about this? Like, where did this meme originate? And tell us about the projects. Like, what does it take to become an infinity stone project for Tetronode? I think ratwild is out of nowhere, you know, just, just, that and I just rolled with it. Yeah, wrap well, just drew it, you know, and then I added like a few projects onto that as like an additional meme. And it kept building on itself and it became so popular that now, you know, it's likely accepted that because it's associated with me. So, um, some of the projects that we want to talk about. I mean, you can pick one and I could just talk about it. I'm sure. I'm totally unprepared. No page rustling whatsoever.

Starting point is 00:36:15 of projects that we have are definitely goes down the line of stuff that we've been thinking about recently, which is curve, convex, dope X, and then also rocket pool. Like, why those capture your interest. But I kind of actually want to throw it back to you, Tetronaut. Say I am a strapping young founder of some upstart defy application. And I aspire to be an infinity stone on Tetronaut's gauntlet. Like, what do I got to do? Like, what's the criteria? How do I become, as a defy app and Infinity Stone on your gauntlet. Like what makes you really, really care about the product that I have? I guess like what I look for is product market fit, you know?

Starting point is 00:36:53 So how it incorporates into my day-to-day operations, right? Let's to say like your Sysmodal, which is right in the eye right there, right? I talked to the founders, you know, actually the founders reached out to me and, you know, briefed me on the project. And immediately I found a use case for it. it, right? Which is to anonymously attest that you have what you claim you have. Let's just say that you wanted to prove that you have a punk, you know, an alien punk about proving, without like showing which one you do. Well, Sysmal with CKP can do that. So that immediately sparked my

Starting point is 00:37:39 interest. And so does the conversation of tokenomics come into question? or is it strictly like, oh, as soon as you saw a product market fit, you were on board and like we can fix or tinker with the tokenomics later? Yeah. Well, I'm not too worried about the tokenomics because I usually get the ear of the founders and, you know, I would give them input on what worked and what doesn't. So eventually it'll kind of converge on what I envision it to me. Some projects more than others, you know, but I'm always like happy to lend input, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:08 into the tokenics and make it so that the treasury doesn't leave. Because I know, I know exactly when a treasurer leaves because I'm a farmer. And farmers takes the most advantage of those three giveaways and stuff like that. So I tell them things like, don't do buybacks. Don't do buy backs, you know. Like that, that would cause the treasury to bleed. And it doesn't do anything, you know, it doesn't do anything for your token in the long run. So the thing you look for, then Tetranode, is product market fit above all else, it sounds like.

Starting point is 00:38:38 Yeah. The token economics, it doesn't really matter because those can be tweaked. and changed on the fly, the hard part about these projects about getting on the infinity gauntlet is do you have product market fit? Do you have something novel that will work and there's a big addressable market size? Is that how you evaluate these things? Yeah, yeah, addressable market size, you know, and what I can do a bit as an customer. So that's how I found these project and that's why they're still useful. And, you know, I don't think there's any that ever fell off the gauntlet, you know. So we've got a very talented analyst behind

Starting point is 00:39:11 bankless. His name's Ben. And he recently gave me this take that farmers have the best alpha, just because they are the deepest in the protocol and they just understand the strongest dynamics. Do you agree with that statement? And if you do, like, could you elaborate on why farmers just understand things better than generally everyone else? Yeah, because we're all trying to make money. It's so simple. Farmers are operators, you know, they don't just like buy it and hold based on what Bitboy recommends, they go in there, you know, and they operate themselves. They know exactly when their treasury bleeds. So the feedback loop, you know, is very close to the metal, as close to the dollar as you can get. I want to get back to the Infinity Gauntlet, but this is an interesting

Starting point is 00:39:55 side path here. Who are some of the other farmers that you respect in the space? Let's see. A shout out to addresses that you watch. Yeah. A shout out to one of my earlier partners in crime. His name is play you. It's spelled P-L-E-E-Y-U. Let me just make sure on my Twitter that I got his handle right. It's a crypto punk with a headband in purple glasses. Yeah, the female crypto punk with a headband, yeah. About to get some followers here. So the other one is Dijan Spartan. You know, he's the one who prompted me that sparked my interest in coming back to the space, you know, rather just retired and hold, you know, to take a more proactive stance in his face because I saw the amount of alpha, you know, even though that he's,

Starting point is 00:40:40 he's like this obnoxious guy, you know, full of hentai and just like these shit posts, you know, and he's crazy, but he's onto something, you know, so I followed him ever since and I followed him in his footsteps. And I actually became the DGEN Spartan in in 2021. And I guess I took it one step further in that I can move markets in ways that he couldn't even imagine. But he is my I still want to go down this path. And I also still want to come back to the infinity gauntlet. But like when you say you can move markets, uh, so David and I don't do a lot of that, right? Like we're kind of like fundamental investors sort of buy and hold, right? We're not, we make content. Right. And so like, what do you mean? What powers do you have? What how are you

Starting point is 00:41:27 moving markets? Like how does this work behind the scenes? I think I can form bottoms, you know, or just cause FOMO by either tweeting or just moving the market to myself with brute force. So all the tools are available to me. And I also like talk a lot to founders, you know, and in conversation with them on the direct of things. So once I hear the news, you know, I just like snatch it off. It's, uh, I can move markets up to an extent. And so let's put it into more realistic perspective here. Now, I am not the market maker in Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:41:58 That's why in my profile picture is an orca, not a blue whale, right? Yeah, there are like people, you know, with like 30 X-My network and those are the real market makers, you know, like 3 AC as a market maker, like Alameda as the market maker. I think Jump Capital is a market maker. I'm just like a defy, D-Gen, you know, who happens to move like coins that are nine figures or less. So I don't consider myself like that big of a market maker. So you still ape into things? You're an aper. Aper, yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:26 I mean, the whole market is just so inefficient right now. and the information asymmetry is almost vertical, that if you see anything like convex, you know, getting pushed down to $2 by farming dumpers, then there's your meal ticket right there. So the information asymmetry still happens here, even with the majors, like Ethereum, it hasn't been priced in.

Starting point is 00:42:50 Like the true valuation, market valuation, Ethereum has not been priced in. Otherwise, Ethereum would be like number one by a wide margin just because of the amount of money settled, the fees paid, you know, and with the news of the merging coming up, the tokenomics coming up, I don't see a reason why Ethereum shouldn't be number one, you know, in the future. But that's a free market, you know, and I could be wrong, but I'm willing to bet my money where my mouth is. As are we.

Starting point is 00:43:17 That was one of the first things that I really noticed about the space is the significance of information asymmetry all over the place. And it was so compelling. It was so addicting. It was like dopamine rushes. Every time you could find this information as. asymmetry is dopamine rush after dopamine rush. Yeah. But also at the same time, for me personally, my personal disposition is that I second

Starting point is 00:43:36 guess myself to the point of not pressing the button on my ledger. And so back to it like a psychological question. It's like it's one thing to be able to identify information asymmetry, but it's another thing to actually have the conviction to actually move the markets and actually place your money where you actually have that conviction. Yes. Do you have any thoughts about like how to actually go from identifying information asymmetry to actually acting on it in the best interest of one's portfolio.

Starting point is 00:44:02 Yeah. So here's how I rationalize my decision making. The information does symmetry exist in that you know it while most of the other players do not. So this doesn't surface. This doesn't have consequences until like several months down the road. Right. So you either act on it or you wait until, you know, someone else shows it to you by then, of course, you wish you would have.

Starting point is 00:44:26 So it's better to sort of be on my. own judgment than to wait to get validated, you know, after the fact. And the reason why I can be confident in that is because, like, I have many, many years of, you know, like, failed ventures behind me, not to mention, like, first principle understanding of, like, how the tokenomics and everything works. So it's just a matter of experience. So the way I look at it is that there's a lot of sophisticated trading firms out there, you know, with, like, dozens of analysts. And yet they have not, like, outperform me. I believe it's because they have all the tools in the world at their disposal,

Starting point is 00:45:07 but ultimately, it's their personal intuition to make a call. So, you know, you could have, like, this state-of-the-art fighter jet that you're piloting on, but ultimately how well you fly it is up to you to pilot. So no matter how sophisticated, some things might be in crypto, or hectic it might be in crypto, trust your intuition at the end of the day. Tetsronaut, we were just a minute ago talking about kind of like whales having the power to move markets. And, you know, I'm curious a bit more about that. So in what circumstances would you want to move a market?

Starting point is 00:45:46 Or like, how are these whale games played? Because I do think sometimes whales, maybe some, some deservedly so, get kind of a bad rap for, like, dumping on people. for example dumping on retail dumping on the smaller fish um is there a place for i guess the the gentle whale or the benevolent whale who doesn't play those sorts of games um what's your take on these things are there good whales and bad whales and how does the smaller trader interact with these forces um there are a lot of ways to answer this questions you know from my perspective because like for certain areas like in Ethereum and Bitcoin, you know, the majors, like I am just another retail trader, you know, and I'm at the mercy of the market makers, which I do not know.

Starting point is 00:46:35 But when it comes to like smaller coins that I am a seed investor in, I have complete market control over it and pretty much what I move, you know, what I say goes. So I guess for the markets that I control, we're just trying to, you know, liquidate the short sellers. Like we withhold news and we have like timing of news that would cause the market to jolt up. But we do it first, you know, before we release the news. But if there were any sort of like insider selling, I haven't, you know, experienced it myself. But I can imagine like, okay, you know, if you're part of the founding team, then and you have a fight, you know, and you get mad.

Starting point is 00:47:18 You suddenly like like sell about telling anybody that that sort of front running the, I'm, outbreak that, you know, this person to the CTO refines from, say, you know, Project X. So we, I actually have like a couple of ware rooms, you know, that I sit in and kind of, you know, just decide, hey, you know, this month right now, you know, with certain releases, we can actually like burn, you know, any kind of shorters that tries to bring the price down.

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Starting point is 00:49:35 bankless nation already have their ledger hardware wallet. But the ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Leisure Hardware Wallet, the Leisure Live app, and soon the CL Crypto Life card powered by Ledger. The CL card powered by Ledger is a crypto debit cards with powerful features like an instant exchange to Fiat, where crypto assets are only sold at the moment that you swipe your card. And also credit from crypto collateral, where you can collateralize your crypto assets in order to get a higher credit limit. You'll be able to manage your CL card powered by Ledger inside the Ledger Live app, right next to all the Defi apps and services that you're already used to using, making the Ledger Live app your one-stop shop for all of your financial needs. Go to ledger.com, grab a ledger, and download Ledger Live to get all of your Defi applications all in one way. place. Is it important to you, Tetranode, to like, I guess, play long-term games? Like, knowing that you're a whale, not in Bitcoin and ether markets, but knowing you're a whale in some of the projects that are on the infinity gauntlet side of things, you know, is the reason you don't dump on retail or play malevolent whale games? Is it reputation, really? Is that what matters

Starting point is 00:50:43 to you? And you talk about that a little bit, because it feels like every project you enter, a tetranode, infinity gauntlet type of project, has your brand and your reputation stamped on top of that. How important is that to you? And are you playing the long-term game in these markets? Yeah, more or less. I'm lazy, so I like to guard my wealth, you know? So I don't go out and look for like positive funding

Starting point is 00:51:10 or negative fundings that it perp. You know, or try to scalp every movement. You know, that's up to the more sophisticated market maker to earn Delta Alphabet. But yeah, I don't like try to do that. Like, there's a lot of different ways to make money in crypto. You know, like, you could be like the tokenonic advisor

Starting point is 00:51:26 and you can just get like one or two percent of like the organization that you're working with. Yeah, so the way that I make money nowadays is one, you know, farming and two, becoming involved with a project. So therefore, like, I'm the advisor. So with the amount of projects looking for me, I have the option to turn it down because I'm overwhelmed, you know, with the amount of stuff that I have to help with.

Starting point is 00:51:49 Like, right now I need to go and execute some things with Ferrari, you know, that I need to do, like, after this meeting. So it just seems like another project with exhaust my bandwidth. So there are some things that are not scalable with me. What are they looking for when they're looking for your advice? Are they looking for, I mean, everyone wants capital these days, but they're not just asking for your capital. They're asking for your expertise.

Starting point is 00:52:11 Yeah. Are they looking for your farming expertise or just, like, branding expert? Like, what advice do you have that all of these founding teams really want? You know, some are market making. Some are marketing strategies. Some are tokenomics, you know? So I just wear a lot of hats. Like, I've just been in the space so long, you know, and defy so long that everything is valuable.

Starting point is 00:52:35 Experience is valuable. So recently, you know, like Jones Dowell, they just launched their first donation event. And it went bad the first time because the bots just like ate it up because they have like an $11 million sales cap. So of course like just one or two bot is able to snatch up like 90% of the token. So they were like, let's cancel it. Let's do it again. So I advise the founder to do it again with a secret twist. Let's have a no limit uncapped ICL.

Starting point is 00:53:09 And it did just that. So we were able to raise 20,000 if. And then what do we do? We returned 15,000 of that back to the participants. So now we have a fairly distributed token. And the cap is only 5,000. So those are some of the tactical advice that I can give, you know, like different things that can be exploitable. But in my experience, I'm the one exploiting it.

Starting point is 00:53:37 so I can give advice on the defense of the dark arts. So Tetrono, since we promised listeners, we'd get back to the gauntlet and the affinity stones. Could we just like quickly rattle off the projects that we're talking about here? Yes. And so, I mean, people who are watching YouTube see a bunch of logos,

Starting point is 00:53:56 but could you rattle off the main projects that you're involved in that you really like? That are currently on the infinity stones on the infinity gauntlet. Okay. Yeah, because I guess they change, don't they? Yeah, but what's here now? Okay, so the one that I want to point out first is still pecs. That's my highest conviction and it still is.

Starting point is 00:54:13 And they're executing and pushing out stuff like there's no tomorrow. We have like 50 different projects, you know, we're trying to integrate with our option vaults, you know, the SSOV single staking options vault. So that would allow composability in terms of options and allowing the project to have more capital efficiency. You know, it allows markets to speculate on their prices while they continually accrue fees from the speculation. And then the next product that's coming out is the Atlantic puts. Now we're still talking about dopeax here. You know, so it will allow for simpler words, limit orders that you can farm the underlying asset, you know, while you put the limit order up.

Starting point is 00:55:01 Let's just say that you wanted to put like a limit order for, DPX, you know, Dopex token at $1,000. So while you're waiting, you can use that $1,000 to farm with integrated and you won't get liquidated or anything while the Atlantic Post is in session. So we'll have a combination of Atlantic puts and calls, and we have like 50 different Dow's, you know, signing up. So the market, the addressable market for Dopex is probably like in the 11 figures, you know, if we're being frank about it.

Starting point is 00:55:34 And we're pushing out with our stable coins too, the DPXUSD, which is created from our DPX. Our DPX is created from sort of the tiers, you know, and angers of failed calls and puts. So it's an amazing tokenomic system that, you know, have most faithfully followed my advice. I just think like the entire Dopex team is amazing. And there are a lot of people smarter than me. And I'm just doing, you know, one, the back-end tokenomic advising. and two, the market making, and three, the marketing. So the option stuff, I'm still learning on the go as well, and there's a lot to cover.

Starting point is 00:56:11 But that's my highest conviction. This is all on layer two as well. Yeah, so, dopex? So, yeah, the layer two, decision making was mine and Deepak when the TZoc chat asks me, you know, do we want dopex on layer one or layer two? So I say, go layer two because we can attract capital to layer two. you know, and do the Ethereum ecosystem of favor, not to mention that the money follows us, you know, not the other way around. We make the money follow us. So ultimately, we're one of

Starting point is 00:56:42 the largest TBL on Arbitrum currently. That's awesome. Very cool. What else you got? Let's see. Redacted and Olympus, you know, are partners. Like they own about 10% of each of their DALs. So I think we're sort of tweaking the 3-3 model so that any time that, it reaches nearly the risk-free value of the treasury underneath that we're able to redeem, you know, and do some treasury operation just to make sure that the tokens, you know, are redeemable, or at least we have a limit floor, you know, at the RFP. Butterfly is using their CVX token, you know, and recently they just, like, acquired VOTAMAP to kind of influence their voting on liquidity. So when it comes to Olympus and redacted,

Starting point is 00:57:32 about liquidity control. So would you group Olympus and Redacted? Are you grouping them as kind of the same project? Or they just sort of related? Their partners. Their partners. Like the reason Redacted existed is because their treasury would deal with more volatile tokens that Olympus Treasury just wants to stay stable, right? So the goal of Olympus is to have a stable token, you know, that's back. and we have this sort of 3-3 going on, but we're trying to reduce that 3-3, you know, to a few thousand percent a year instead of like 58,000 percent at some point in time in the past.

Starting point is 00:58:11 So I think we're starting to reach the point where the stability, there is a hard floor where the risk-free value is. Olympus recently had like an 80 percent drop, something like this. A lot of people were saying, like, project's dead, it's over, like everyone to go home, that sort of thing. It sounds like you don't see that. Yeah. What do you see?

Starting point is 00:58:31 What happened with this big drop? And then how does Olympus resurrect? I think it's because, like, in the bear market, the monetary premium drops down to zero, if not even negative, you know? So all of a while, they kind of overlook the fact that Olympus has, like, the second largest treasury in DFI. So I think we have currently about 500 or 600. million dollars at our disposal. And if the moment the market cap of Olympus is below the treasury,

Starting point is 00:59:04 and then of course we can do market operations that brings it to the floor. So I'm not too worried about like people freaking out or saying it's over because this is one hell of a back on. It is backed at the bottom. This is what we were talking about earlier where you like, there's information available to you to understand that there's a market efficiency somewhere. and it's up to you to press the buttons on your ledger or your metamask to take advantage of that situation. And sometimes it's actually as simple as verifying on chain. Let's keep going through the gauntlet then. What else he got?

Starting point is 00:59:35 So now we have like the next one, the Fayev Protocol or aka Faye Rari, since Faye and Rari merged. So you have the young talented Rari team, which I work closely with, you know, merging with the larger and more well-capitalized Faye with Joey Centurro and their brilliant team. coming together. And they're coming out with some extremely awesome product that will increase capital efficiency even further. So one example is the standard they're making its ERC-4-6-26-2-6. So that allows for depositing of yielding assets, you know, like let's say CVX, CRV, you can deposit into fuse and then you can borrow money from it while you're staking, or you're staking and earning like the regular income from convex.

Starting point is 01:00:25 So there's no reason why you shouldn't put it into fuse because then you have more stable to farm with or you can lever it up, you know, whatever you like. And then Faye is coming out with like a couple of other products as well. Like one of their maker down moment is Terbil. They can now mint Faye, you know, off of like certain pools. And you can get interest-free Faye from farming, from depositing an asset and then farm a bit. Yeah. I think the one I'd like to ask about next is something that I think all of us actually share in common, which is really just a lot of optimism about Rocket Pool. But I'd

Starting point is 01:01:02 love to hear from you about why you think Rocket Pool is a interesting project. Rocket Pool is the only decentralized staking option right now. Like all the other ones requires like elements of trust and it's down to like, yeah, I don't want to name any of the other Staking Pool. There's a lot of staking projects out there. But RocketPool allows you as a node operator to stake other people's like Ether. And then you can earn fees off of that and it's paid out in staking awards and RPL. Now, RPL isn't just like a useless governance token. It's actually used as insurance, you know, that's required to get staked into Rocket Pool. So it does have intrinsic value and now it's intrinsic value is tied to the value of the staked ether, right? Because you need at least like 10%

Starting point is 01:01:54 RPL as insurance through your staking lot. But there's a lot more that we can do, you know, with the rocket full token. The community right now is just like busy with executing the various bits and pieces right now. We're doing curve integration, you know, and we're figuring out how to make it more liquid for rocket EF. Tetranet as an ETH whale, do you feel comfortable, like depositing your eath into rocket pool or like a significant portion of your eith into rocket pool and staking it that way or is it still too early in your mind um you know like that's on a back burner for a while and i should because what i want to do first is run a rocket pole node myself but right now i'm at a situation where i have like a dozen dows constantly pinging me and i just haven't had the bandwidth to go down and sit down

Starting point is 01:02:42 myself and do it like what i like to do is have like a firsthand approach to it now rather than say oh, hey, buy myself. Like, I got to go and investigate myself before I do it. Totally. I think one theme that's coming across to this whole conversation is actually using these D5 protocols is what is really giving you your edge here in this entire space. Yeah. Not buying a token on Uniswap using the product. Not buying a token because a YouTuber said you should buy it. Actually, like seeing if it works. Because Tetronaut said you buy it.

Starting point is 01:03:13 Yeah. Yeah. It's always like the. first principle approach, you know, and also just as importantly, skin in the game. I see too many BCs, you know, like incorrectly evaluating a product because they're theory crafting and they're sitting under armchairs and they're reading their white paper, but they've seen nothing, you know, on the ground below. So that's what makes me different and that's why a lot of protocols seeks me out because like I'm out there, I'm executing. I'm in the front line, you know, I'm the general, but I'm also like, you know, doing the shooting as well.

Starting point is 01:03:50 I love that term. Theory crafting is awesome. One question I have about the Infinity Gauntlets is why the ChainLink logo is wrapped around the Ethereum Ether logo. Is that strategic or is that just, am I reading into this too much? Chainlink is like an agnostic framework, you know, an agnostic framework used as an Oracle right now. And it's anchored mainly on the Ethereum blockchain, even though it could choose like all the

Starting point is 01:04:14 different blockchains. to record its Oracle data until. Because Ethereum is mostly centralized and is the most resilient. So I think chain link and Ethereum, you know, goes hand in hand. Because chain link is kind of agnostic so it can be anywhere. And yet it chooses to be on Ethereum. So I think it will do well, you know, if Ethereum does well. What else is left?

Starting point is 01:04:37 I feel like we talked about a lot of the Infinity Stones. I think Curve is left. You want to talk about that? And is there anything else? I think curve right now is evolving. and it's progressing because we're having like Curb V2

Starting point is 01:04:49 where anybody could put up their stuff like uniswap but with a twist that you know we pay out in our CRV token the CRV tokenomics is one of the best that I came across and it still is to this day

Starting point is 01:05:02 you know like the way that CRV is issued it's kind of a bidding war and that creates a secondary economy across like a Dow who wants to control it right so at the very base CRV is responsible for earning fees, you know, off of like the curve platform.

Starting point is 01:05:20 What happens is when you introduce like a voting system on it, the vote who gets the CRV, you're basically bidding for the right to earn a dollar. So how much is that right to earn a dollar worth, you know? So that's the monetary premium incurred by the CRV. Yeah, we can do like an entire episode about this bit to keep it within the scope of our, discussion. The CRV token, you know, it provides like a different market from what the normal AMM like Uniswap v3 is doing right now. And it seems to have a lot of capital locked up. I think about 20 billion the last time I checked. We actually recently did a full entire episode on

Starting point is 01:06:02 Curve, Convex, and that whole ecosystem. And it really just struck me and Ryan as something, exactly what you just said is very significantly different from almost everything else that we're seeing in Defi. And it actually kind of made me, a little bit scared for everything else that's not curve in Defi because all of the layers on top of curve really add on what seems to be like a bunch of armor to curve. Like curve really seems to be layering on a bunch of just like peripheral protocols that are also built on curve that are all fighting exactly what you said, fighting for the rights to earn $1.

Starting point is 01:06:35 Right. And that fight itself is some sort of like decentralizing force around the curve application itself. And I remember getting into defy and Ethereum in the first place, kind of to answer my own question about why I was bullish on Ethereum and DeFi back in 2017, even before we had invented Defy, it's because I imagine stuff like that. And now in 2022, like, it's only curve. Do you also share that same concern as in like only really curve has this kind of curve wars layer on top of it and the rest of DeFi is doing like these defy governance tokens and what is a governance token anyways? Like, yeah, maybe one day.

Starting point is 01:07:12 will vote in fees. Do you share that concern? Well, the curve ecosystem, you know, it has the network effect right now that everyone wants their stable to be on curve because there's already a lot of liquidity on the curve. But more than that, you know, like their sort of AMM curve is pretty brilliant in terms of like how capital efficient it can get, you know, and how scalable it is.

Starting point is 01:07:35 I feel like with the uniswap tip, you know, it does a lot of really cool things, but it poses a lot of problems for market makers like myself, you know, liquidity providers like myself. So just like if I were to provide like, say, a million dollars on Uniswap v3, you know, for something like a stable, then I would have to concentrate the liquidity and I would have to fend off against the just-in-time attack. But also like when I'm providing and it creates like some Oracle issues, you know, having concentrated liquidity like that. where if you run an oracle off of curves liquidity,

Starting point is 01:08:12 you don't run into that liquidity cliff, you know, incurred by concentrated liquidity. You know what I mean? Like some of the stuff, you know, is kind of like rotator territory, and I'm stumbling as a word cell. Yeah. Would I go so far to assume that you are bullish CRV and bearish uni?

Starting point is 01:08:31 Um, I wouldn't say bearish uni, because I use uniswap for certain things like, limit orders. And I can see where, where, like, if you're a sophisticated market maker, then you're able to earn a lot of fees. Right now, like, the thing that I see with uniswap is that they have their 0.01% stable swap. And it's right now, like, 50% of the volume of, like, the tables coin traded. So that's very useful. But as a liquidity provider, I'm not so sure if I'm able to do that, you know, and still be profitable, like 0.01% is basically doing it for free.

Starting point is 01:09:11 So there's opportunity costs where curb pays more. So I'm waiting to see in the long run, you know, where the steady state equilibrium is in terms of curb market share versus uniswap market share. And it's a free market, so I'm waiting for it to battle out. But I wouldn't count uniswap v3 or, you know, uniswap team in general out. They're both brilliant. Do the concerns about like, oh, governance tokens, it'll just turn on fees one day. Like, we've been saying that for, I don't know, as long as governance tokens have been around. Curve is actually spitting out fees to the governance token holders. But like that's, again, that's the only one. Does the whole just trope of, oh yeah, uni, comp, you know, insert your

Starting point is 01:09:49 governance token here, it'll just one day turn on fees and spit out fees to the token holders. That's a line that we've said. Do you believe that line? And it's like, do you follow that, you know, governance just has value somehow, or are you concerned about like the fact that maybe these applications don't actually put out dividends in the way that we might expect them to? Yeah, I would advise, like, the vast majority of my projects that online to have profit sharing at some level. Otherwise, people will take profit in one way or another. So they're going to take profit by going the usual route, which is to sell it. Right. But with profit sharing, you can create a where you can stake it, you know, and take away that liquidity and give the tokens of intrinsic

Starting point is 01:10:36 value cash flow, you know, of the platform. So let's just say if you're a Dow building a big treasury, well, all you have to do is just like launch with like, you know, 30 or 40 percent of the token. So you still earn the platform fees. But also, you build a monetary premium, you know, off of your token because it has cash flow. Those without cash flow, you know, it's 2022. the government thing doesn't really work because the voting, you know, is more or less like a handful of entities, just deciding the outcome of the vote anyways, the decision making anyways.

Starting point is 01:11:07 And sometimes, you know, like the voting is even binding. You know, like back a while ago, your finance had a vote on whether, you know, they should like print more tokens or keep it at $30,000 a way it is. And of course, like they voted to keep $30,000 tokens. And of course, that was never honored. So I feel like the governance token vote, you know, It's just like a decentralization theater when it comes to it.

Starting point is 01:11:32 No, and it's not very well understood how it should be used effectively. So, you know, profit sharing or just shenanigans. Shenanigans. So many things are underpinned by shenanigans in this industry. I want to pivot the conversation a little bit to the conversation of layer two's, because as we all think that we know, we're all about to do this whole L layer two migration. I've started to migrate a portion of my portfolio. and other people are doing the same.

Starting point is 01:11:58 Some people are already living a layer two life. I'm wondering how much of a layer two life you've been able to live. And what do layer twos need to do to convince somebody like Tetranode to completely live a layer two life, 100% on layer two? Have you started dabbling in layer twos? And what would it take for you to move over completely? Right. So I have like, you know, one third of my portfolio in layer two. It's going well.

Starting point is 01:12:23 There are certain problems, you know, there are certain use cases where. I say later too is just not there yet for me and that's like the lending market right now because arbitram has been shown to have some spotty downtime and I think it's because it lacks redundancy in this infrastructure right now so if you were like at Abe or fuse right now you know like you have to prepare for the scenario where if arbitram went down for an entire day you know and the market crashed you know you have to have such a margin that you don't run into bad debt I remember some back and forth with Avey, you know, and they have measures to kind of prevent that. But as the entire layer two infrastructure, there needs to be more provision.

Starting point is 01:13:07 So that's the challenge that they have. Are you privy to kind of the constructions of these different layer twos? And if you are, do you have like a preferred layer two that you feel safest on? The ideal layer two would have fast withdrawal time, you know, without having like a third party, synaps, you know, or across protocol, you know, arving and charging a fee. So I think ZK Sync is sort of the holy grail of scaling. It's just that it hasn't had like a generalized EVM compatibility just yet. You know, that that's where everybody should be.

Starting point is 01:13:44 So I think the end game of Ethereum is to either have like EVM compatible Stark or ZK6. Before that, you know, like we do have several ZKSinct app, you know, we have several Sarknet app, but the ZK sync scaling is per app, so it lasts compulsability. Let's just say DYDX, right? So you can't really build on top of that because you have to be like per protocol roll-up. So yeah, we need a generalized EBM-compatible ZKP scaling solution. Yeah, so it seems like you're really excited about ZK roll-ups because you have just those extra assurances about fast withdrawals and some of the assurances about its uptime.

Starting point is 01:14:23 But what you also kind of just indicate is that you're also really interested in like the composability that you kind of only really get on, at least for right now, on an optimistic roll-up, something that is much more EVM compatible. Yeah. Is there a Tug-a-war here or how do you square these two things? I think in a very, very long run, we'll see like CKP as the end game. I mean, I'm sure like Stark, you know, is more effective, but right now it's just like close source. But ZK Sync, I'm favoring right now because it's open source. but we don't know what's going to happen over the period of 10 years.

Starting point is 01:14:56 And also, like, Stark is also quantum resistance too so that that's future proof, whereas ZKP may or may not be. So still waiting for the market to have to final say. Do you have a favorite L2 activity? What app on L2 do you use the most? Right now, it's still fax. So I used to farm on there. I also like buy options on there, market make on there.

Starting point is 01:15:20 So that's the extent of it. But I'm still, you know, speculating on how dependable, like, lending services is, you know, in the face of, like, day-long failure. So I'm kind of avert to using leverage on L2s. Ted Trinode, I want to ask a question that's been, you know, some of the news recently. But, like, I think very much in this conversation, there's kind of the VC almost institutional side of crypto and of defy. And then there's, like, the more defy native side, right? So you have like VCs over here and you have like defy whales, liquidity providers like yourselves. And sometimes you have like VC, defy style startups.

Starting point is 01:15:59 Then you have like more defy native startups. And the ecosystem is interesting because on the defy native side, you have these defy native builders and these liquidity whales like yourselves. One of them that's been notable lately is Danny from the Wonderland project, Danny Sista. And that project seemed to go off the rails in it, you know, a pretty big way, right? There's like controversy in the space. There's like, I mean, bankless listeners know there's a convicted felon,

Starting point is 01:16:26 maybe possibly like running this thing. What do you think about that whole situation? Do you have any like learning lessons or thoughts coming out of that? Yeah. In so many things like I could say, you know, to resolve it to different perspectives. But first and foremost is that Danny personally is a friend of mine. You know, he's always been one to one with me.

Starting point is 01:16:49 for financial dealings. And he has also saved me several times by tipping me off the various things that I cannot discuss here. But his relationship with Sifu, I don't want to speculate too much into what it is, but I just don't want to be associated with corruption, you know, with that out of an affair.

Starting point is 01:17:13 Danny is very Italian, and he deals with people personally in a very Italian manner, right? And so sometimes, you know, like, it works on a personal connection basis, but business-wise, it might not be working out so well, you know, like, sometimes it's not a scalable operation, you know, to deal with people in such a personal manner like that. One challenge, I think, that that whole situation really posed on everyone is we want everyone to be able to maintain their privacy for obvious reasons,

Starting point is 01:17:49 but also when it comes to developing defy applications that eventually ultimately comes down to users pressing the approve button on their metamask saying, I do approve of this contract touching my money. There's an interaction there between anon developer and approvals and trust. How have you navigated this world? The Danny situation is one of many situations in the broader crypto ecosystem. system, and I expect this to be just an even more significant conversation moving forward, especially as U.S. regulations starts to really incentivize anonymity in the developer space.

Starting point is 01:18:25 How have you navigated the very murky waters, the fog of war, if you will, as we started this podcast with? How have you navigated the waters of just like an anon yourself? How have you dealt with us just like figuring out how to play the crypto game? Well, like, you know, about half of the industry is anonymous. Yeah. I mean, it's interpret layers of trust. right let's just say like in the traditional finance world you know you are compelled by by the force of law

Starting point is 01:18:51 it's like okay if you do something wrong you know it's a lawsuit it can cause like your financial situation to go down or you can get arrested and put in jail but in here you know if you've just the wrong person then instantly you get rugged and you know the punishment is a crime so the way that I deal with that is through having a lot of eyes you know on certain things that requires my scrutiny. Let's just say, like, I was farming on a non-project. Let's just say Machi, big brother, Jeffrey Huang, you know, like, like Serial pumpkin dumper, you know, and I was farming on that project called MIF. It was a long ago, you know, like MIF finance. It was a fork of basis. So how do I know this guy is not going to rug me? Well, I go and I looked at

Starting point is 01:19:37 the diff checker, you know, between like the synthetic fork rewards and the original stake in contract. And so I don't see anything that says like change of ownership of address, then I think that that's okay, you know. So I also have like several eyes, you know, like in this secret Discord group that we're totally not in, right, David? That just kind of scours the code basis for various anomalies. So we have so many eyes on that. So I think I kind of run like in a non-team, you know, of analysts in which I am the anos myself and everyone contribute. So that's the system of trust, you know, that I built over this past cycle. And it's worked well for me. It's really funny how social crypto actually is, right? And it's like all of these

Starting point is 01:20:23 different groups, some anon, some represented by like, you know, just depictions of cats, you know, all sorts of craziness. But yet it's all people at the very bottom of this. And there is some trust exchange on that level. As we start to draw to a close here, Tetranode, I want to ask this question, right? So I feel like hopefully listeners have observed. what it's like to, like your transition from sort of becoming a noob in this space where we all started to becoming like the tetranode crypto whale that we know you are today. How would you summarize advice for someone who is trying to take a path like that? There's small fish, little fish. We all started that way in crypto. We all want to be whales. We all want to be whales.

Starting point is 01:21:04 How does someone become a whale? What are kind of the steps or what advice would you give them? Okay. So the first one is, of course, like the one that I hammer over and over and over again, which is like first principle approach. You know, like learn the basic building blocks, learn the basic cryptography and then build from there, you know, the implication and then the economics, you know, and work it all the way to the top to where you see a project that lines up from the bottoms up. the next one that I want to emphasize is sort of the skin and up game approach which is to operate, operate, operate. So do something, you know, anything. Because in the end, like, even if you did it something wrong, you would know what not to do next time.

Starting point is 01:21:50 And that's empowering, you know. So don't just do it blindly. Do it with the first principle backing, you know, that you have. Even if it doesn't work 100% of the time, you have guidance there. Right. So first of all, do something, but also have the research and knowledge backing it. Tetranot, you have such a presence on Twitter. You have these fantastic illustrations and memes that I think you have just like fantastic designers for like meme artists, crypto meme artists. And kind of like how we started at the beginning of this podcast, like people follow what you say on Twitter. They follow the memes.

Starting point is 01:22:26 They follow the internet crypto native culture that I think is something that you're helping create. They also follow you on chain. They see what you're up to. They see what you're doing. In 5, 10, 20 years, what do you think the legacy of Tetranode will be? I don't know. Maybe I'll just disappear off the internet, like, after I get bored or something. Satoshi style.

Starting point is 01:22:47 35 to 40 years, you know, like my kids are my legacy. So that's the end of that. For all the games that we play, you know, in my view, like, I can be successful. I can be like 12 figures. But I wouldn't be successful if my kids wasn't there to. enjoy it. You know, so family is what really matters at the end. Just that they will be all that remains of you, you know, like many, many years from now. You plan to teach your kids how to defy tetranos? Yeah. I'm already having like test cases with like, you know, kids around my neighborhood and they seem to be,

Starting point is 01:23:18 you know, it's like tetranode, when are we making the Zoom call? We should make a Zoom call weekly. And I've been kind of slacking on that because, you know, like the bandwidth is very thin because I have like a newborn and a toddler, you know. And they're, yeah. eating up like most of my time nowadays. Yeah. And then crypto eats up the rest as we know. Tetranode, this has been a fantastic conversation and I think we've learned so much. We wanted to ask this question at the very beginning, but like I think it's actually a better fit at the end. I haven't asked it the whole time, but what is a tetranode actually? Oh. Like what is a tetranode? What does that mean? Okay. So a tetranode was like a quaint to

Starting point is 01:23:57 sort of villain or destination where the Straggs is the nerve center of the Straggs like processing you know like on the planet Strzog and Quake 2 I believe or was it Quake 4? It's a quake reference Of course, of course! Why didn't we see that coming? Yeah. Yeah, fun fact here is that you know like one of my best crypto buddies

Starting point is 01:24:22 T-Sachad, it's a high-level villain from Roonscape as well. So, you know, Roomscape and Quake, you know, the old school stuff. So we said, we're going to rugpole you

Starting point is 01:24:35 because we said there was going to be the last question I want one more. No rush. I don't know how old your kids are, but maybe you take them to daycare, maybe you shake hands with other parents. I don't.

Starting point is 01:24:43 Okay, well, regardless, let's imagine this scenario. I am the babysitter. Okay, so in some scenario, you meet someone and they ask you, what do you do for work? What's your answer? I say I'm a retired.

Starting point is 01:24:57 software engineer that sold like some startup, you know. Yeah. That's a fantastic answer. What do you tell people you do, David? Oh, I tell them I've read a podcast and I tell them to subscribe. Yeah. I tell them I'm still working, you know. It depends on the situation, really.

Starting point is 01:25:15 Like, I really don't want like people, you know, that I meet to still have like nine to five jobs and I say I'm retired, you know. I'm just saying like, oh, I work at home, you know. Yeah. And I still do because even in my retirement, I work like 100 hours a week. It's not even a joke. It's because like, it's not because I'm compelled to do the 9 to 5, you know. It's because I'm compelled to participate in the turf war.

Starting point is 01:25:38 Does it feel like work? No. It feels like I have a compulsion to go in and dominate and corner the market. It's a different motivation than say, you know, oh, shit, you know, I got to get paid. Do you know, I kind of feel like we came full circle and we're back at Starcraft again. Like that's what you do full time. It's like, this is Starcraft, right? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:59 It's funny. Yeah, it's just like the competitive impulse. It's funny. I think Ryan and I might be resonating with you in a different weird roundabout way where, you know, we don't press the buttons on our ledgers as often as you do. But I feel like we've cornered the podcast market pretty damn well. And that's the thing that doesn't feel like work for us and feels very, very much like an addiction or a compulsion. Yeah, I mean, like related to what you said about the compulsion to like, you know, win, win, win. And it's like, you know, Anthony Sassano was just commenting to me like, how do I get like all the seed rounds that you're getting, you know, it's like, didn't you already get like a home ring with Maddo?

Starting point is 01:26:35 Most of them. Yeah. Didn't you already get a home run with Maddo? And he was just like, you know, I just want to, you know, to win. That's all. I just want to win more. Yeah, that's the compulsion that we have, you know, win more. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:26:52 It can't stop, won't stop. And you know what? It's really another shared thing is like I feel like so many people in space. Well, you know, some people played poker. Some people played chess. Almost everyone in the space has played video games at some point in their life. And that's like a shared heritage. And I feel like somewhat video games has taught me almost everything I need to know about crypto, right?

Starting point is 01:27:11 At least it's the foundations for a lot of those things. So that sounds like another thing you share. Tetranode, it's been a real pleasure, man. Thanks for hanging out with us. looking forward to seeing how the stones on your gauntlet perform in the future and just what you're up to next it's always exciting Ryan David it's been a pleasure speaking to you so you know like in a future maybe we'll make a return you know at some point maybe after each time is 10,000 you know and we're in a celebratory mood yeah so uh yeah it sounds like may yeah is that about right

Starting point is 01:27:43 son do a calendar invite I didn't say what year but yeah so anyways so we'll say in touch, you know, through Twitter and that room that we're all not in. That's right. Totally. No clue what you're talking about. Yeah. I don't know. But we're not in that room at all.

Starting point is 01:28:02 So we shouldn't even be communicating there. Bankless listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this episode with Tetranode. Tetranode, thanks a lot for hanging with us. Okay. David, Ryan, I will see you later. Action items for you guys. We're going to put a list to all the projects in the Infinity Gauntlet. all the infinity stones for you there.

Starting point is 01:28:22 So you have a reference for that. And also, we'll put a list of some of the Twitter accounts that Tetranode said you should follow some of the other whales in the space. I don't know, David, should we put a link to that secret room that Tetranos talking about? I think we're absolutely sure. We'll spin up a brand new Discord room. Guys, I hope you've enjoyed this episode. I think, look, if Tetranode can do it, all of us can do it.

Starting point is 01:28:48 but it takes some time and dedication. You've got to stay involved in these projects. That's what I learned coming into this episode. Risks and disclaimers, the one thing I also learned, and I know in every bankless episode, is none of this was financial advice. Eth is risky. Bitcoin is risky. Some of these D-5 projects are certainly risky, too.

Starting point is 01:29:06 You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.

Bankless - 106 - How to Become a Whale | Tetranode

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