Bankless - Fiskantes Predicts the Next Meta | Layer Zero

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

With clean takes and tasteful anime, Fiskantes has one of the best degen anon accounts on crypto twitter. In this episode, we explore the many metagames of crypto and investing like Bitcoin, NFTs, Mem...e Stocks, and Poker.   Where will the next meta be? Hint: the frontier is where the magic happens. ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis  ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER:          https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/    🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST:                 http://podcast.banklesshq.com/    ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS:  ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA  👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave  ⚡️ MAKER DAO | THE DAI STABLECOIN  https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO   🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 5:00 Fiskantes and Poker 13:19 Whale Dynamics 18:50 The Next Meta 22:55 The Current NFT Meta 28:43 The Meta Diverges 39:07 Exploring at the Margin 45:45 Intuition on the Frontier 51:10 Exporting Culture 55:44 Anon vs Crypto IRL 1:00:56 Living Online 1:09:00 Squad Wealth 1:13:45 Parting Wisdom ------ Resources: Fiskantes on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Fiskantes?s=20&t=vm_h2ChpdCBFIzJxi7Gv-w  Zee Prime Capital: https://zeeprime.capital/  ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:06 Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, this composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. The Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down and always has been. Today on Layer Zero, we're talking to Fiskanties or Fiske, who is an anon crypto Twitter participant, but also part of the prime capital. And Fiskey has been known for just very good and sensible and strong takes in the crypto-twitre sphere, as well as being somebody who is just a well-seasoned investor in the crypto space. And we talk about the frontier versus the center of crypto and how the frontier always expands and it attracts the individuals, the explorers. And as the individuals of the
Starting point is 00:00:59 crypto frontier frontier meta-game, find something new, something cool, like NFTs. We found NFTs and all of a sudden it changed the Overton window of the meta of crypto. But then it became a little bit more institutionalized. It came a little bit more expertise. And so the frontier shifts. And so as Bitcoin has been completely subsumed by people that also trade stocks, the institutions of the world, it has become institutionalized. And the frontier has been expanding beyond Bitcoin and it has been expanding beyond Bitcoin ever since. And so it got to Ethereum, but then Ethereum became institutionalized. It got to defy, but then it defy is becoming institutionalized. And the frontier is always where the individuals lie, because that's where the professionals aren't. That's where
Starting point is 00:01:42 the institutions aren't. And so this is the way the crypto industry explores. And Fiske talks about why he enjoys being on the frontier so much. We start with his background with poker and connect that to many other themes throughout the podcast. So I'm sure you're going to love this thought-provoking episode with Fiscanties on Layer Zero. Right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors, that make this show possible. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative is trying to find the next hidden gem.
Starting point is 00:02:10 Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantage ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Also, crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto IRA via your 401K or by contributing directly from your bank account. There is no setup or account fees and it's all you need to do to invest in crypto tax-free.
Starting point is 00:02:34 Let me repeat that again. You can invest in crypto tax-free. Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto Crypto-I-R-A to invest in crypto-tax-free. Just go to alto-I-R-com slash bankless, that's A-L-T-O-I-R-A dot-com slash bankless and start investing in crypto today. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 Internet,
Starting point is 00:02:58 with over 50 million monthly active users. Control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad blocking. Inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet, built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street. More control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3, your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different.
Starting point is 00:03:19 Brave Wall is built natively inside the Brave browser. No extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your cryptocurrency. assets and it can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and defy apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a season pro, it's time to switch to the brave wallet. Download Brave at brave.com slash bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day and we need bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. Across is the fastest,
Starting point is 00:03:56 cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about the long weight times or high fees to get your assets to the chain of your choice. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across bridges are powered by Uma's optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from layer two back to Ethereum. A token proposal is being deliberated as we speak in the Across Forum where community members will decide on the token distribution. You can have your part of Across's story by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder
Starting point is 00:04:22 and helping to design the fair, fair launch of Across. If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely, go to across.com. to bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. Hey, Fiski. How's it going? Hey, fine. Yeah, just in a hotel room in Spain. Thanks for having me in this weird hour of day. Oh, of course, of course. Thanks for making the time out of wherever you are making your trips for it to do this. I appreciate it.
Starting point is 00:04:47 Thanks. Yeah, I think it's better to be on this podcast than just partying somewhere out. So happy to be here. Very, very true to crypto is like rather be in the crypto world when out and about. I want to start this conversation with poker because you are one of those crypto people that came into crypto with a poker background. And poker seems to be one of many ways that people ultimately fall in love with crypto. People that loved poker seem to be able to translate those skills into crypto pretty well. So I'd like to start this conversation there. How have you like noticed or paid attention to just like poker skills and how it relates to crypto skills?
Starting point is 00:05:21 So I would say that poker in itself is very similar, let's say, to trading, more. than like to let's say crypto investing or getting deep into the tech side of things, which I started to do a bit more. But still there are many lessons that I took from poker that I couldn't or wouldn't learn elsewhere how to apply like basic statistics to make like decisions under pressure regarding to finance, right? And one other thing, I don't think I mentioned this one before because I was talking a lot about my poker background.
Starting point is 00:05:54 One important thing that I realized only recently is that during my poker case, I had to play many tables at the same time because I was playing online. And you need to basically make a lot of decisions pretty fast. Like most of these decisions are pretty trivial, but you still need to like consciously make a decision and click the button and move on to another table. And now I realize that when I'm like, let's say, researching our deal flow for Z prime, I'm getting a lot of inbound through my DMs. I'm actually pretty fast at like spotting what kind of things are interesting and what I want to disregard.
Starting point is 00:06:28 Like some of my associates, they go much deeper. They start to like research, you know, see the deck. They go to some other data sources and they do a deep research. But at that time, I already know if I want to fold or continue to pursue the opportunity. And I think that's something that maybe not many poker players would tell you that this is important because most of them were playing live where you only can play one table and you can focus on your one hand and one opponent. But with online poker with multitabling, this was very important.
Starting point is 00:06:58 to be able to decide very fast and intuitively. And this intuition just, I mean, of course, it doesn't just come out of nowhere. You need to see a lot of action. I need to play a lot of hands to be able to internalize the decision-making process in a way that sometimes I can't even explain why I don't want to do some investment,
Starting point is 00:07:17 but I just know I don't. And I need to spend a lot of time thinking to formulate my decision-making process because it's so intuitive at this point. I saw so many deals. It's similar to poker. I saw so many poker situations that it just comes naturally. So I would say that this is like one big advantage that's like less obvious than just saying,
Starting point is 00:07:36 oh, I know what expected value means and how to play with odds, how to have a correct bank role management, for example. Interesting. Okay. So yeah, I think to put the right image into listeners' heads, we shouldn't be like looking at Fiskey sitting at one poker table playing one game in deep thought about one move. But instead like an array of poker tables going and paying attention to all of these things, poker tables all at once simultaneously. I have another friend that has the same background that
Starting point is 00:08:02 has also done very, very well in the defy space. And he talked about how he had this script that would play in the background. And it would just tell him the right move to make for like 99% of moves, like most of the moves, because like most of the moves, like, okay, we are obviously playing this. We are obviously calling or we are obviously folding. And so then it would just call his attention into this one particular scenario where he would actually have to do the computation in his head. but it was like a chip in the brain, right? He was like this AI enabled thing able to master, like, he said between 30 and 60 tables all at once.
Starting point is 00:08:33 And he was farming this whole like online poker thing and this script was playing to help him just like judge. But he said that at some point when it came time for like the human element, it was all about pattern recognition and like intuition and just like seeing and quickly interpreting data and being able to come to a split decision like very, very quickly. If you're telling me that these skills have translated into the defense, space when there's absolutely like no precedent with good products and or at least it's just a short
Starting point is 00:09:02 precedent of good products in this space like that pattern recognition skill i think is must be the thing that's really coming alive here is all that tracking yeah it is i mean i haven't played so many tables i played like up to 12 maybe 14 and you don't have any particular script so it was all like me doing the like quick math or whatever quick decisions but it's very similar and yeah you are definitely correct that in crypto, the landscape moves so fast and changes so fast, it's very different than poker. In poker, you still have, like, fixed amount of cards you play with, you know, there are a fixed amount of situations that can happen.
Starting point is 00:09:38 They are all kind of constraint between very simple set of rules. In crypto, you have all these, like, I don't want to call them games because sometimes they are, like, legit products building something interesting, but they are sort of gamified in a way that you need to understand, specifically in D-Fi, need to understand the rules very quickly. you need to maybe be able to review the code if it's like fork of synthetics contract or if it's something new. And then you need to decide very fast if you want to kind of farm or if you want to just do something else or if you want to accumulate a token. And yeah, so I think like at the beginning when the meta, so to speak, changes, you need to be more qualitative. You need to go deeper into everything and only over time as you start to understand how this new set of projects or products operate and you can like switch to more like autopilot.
Starting point is 00:10:25 mode, but at the time, usually, you know, it already starts to vain. So we are already looking where the ball will be next or what will be the next, like, interesting thing. And yeah, I mean, one more thing that's interesting with crypto and poker is that many of these, like, even DeFi projects or even crypto games, they actually face similar issues that online poker rooms faced early on in the early days of online poker. They were rewarding professional poker players that played a lot of table or gave them all the mode of volume, which is now the same as, let's say, D5 Project that rewards TVL, like big whales
Starting point is 00:10:58 that do a lot of lending or liquidity providing. And this is something that actually was not sustainable, especially in poker, where you need to have both sides of the table. You need to have professional poker players that are inspiring and attracting all the fish at the table. They are playing a lot of volume. But then you also need these guys that come in and want to play and have fun. not just to win the money they actually need to be happy to spend money to be losing over time and still keep playing, right? Otherwise the poker
Starting point is 00:11:26 game is that. So in many crypto games or even some defy-project that are more, let's say, zero sum-oriented or like shortly, this is the case. And if you want to play these types of games more actively, you need to understand this equation. That being said, I'm much
Starting point is 00:11:42 more enthusiastic about things that I can just bet on long term and just help the founders build something really big. But yeah, I mean, I don't deny I play a lot of these short-term games as well, especially early on in D-Fi summer, but I wasn't still so well-off as I am now with my investments. Right. Yeah, I actually want to go into that because I think that's a great metaphor, and we love metaphors here on Bankless, of course. Can you talk about how these online poker rooms would incentivize volume, incentivize the whales? And the gist I'm getting here is that,
Starting point is 00:12:09 like, you need to incentivize the whales because they're the liquidity providers of these poker tables. It makes the poker rooms full. It makes the poker website, like, easy to find a table, but also you can't incentivize the experts too much because then they'll just milk all of the newbies for all their money and the newbies won't come back. Can you unpack this dynamic a little bit more? Yeah, I mean, it was kind of simple. The basic reward mechanism was reg back. So when you play poker, you pay rake or fee, let's call it a fee. And when you play a lot of tables, there were some levels you could achieve if you played a lot of tables or like turned over a lot of money where you would get, so to speak, reig back or like,
Starting point is 00:12:48 like rebate from the fee you paid. And some poker players were actually just playing for the maximum amount of reg back they could get. And with fees, they would be even losing money. Playing so many tables, they weren't even winning anymore because they couldn't focus on the game itself. But when they got their reg back back, they would actually be up quite a lot. So they were subsidized.
Starting point is 00:13:09 Yes. Their performance was subsidized. Yes. And it was like basically just, let's say, wash trading, incentivized wash trading. When I make this comparison to, let's say, exchanges. and yeah this was of course detrimental because then you had all these brain-dead players that would play very boring ABC game that wasn't entertaining for players who want to have fun
Starting point is 00:13:31 they weren't able to enjoy the game so much and they were losing money against them and they weren't even getting into interesting situations because these players would just play very simple and just play the best cards basically so then like some of the best poker rooms figure out they need to cut this sort of rewards him and they need to start rewarding interesting actions. So they would be rewarding all kinds of things that would help to make the game more interesting. Like the most of you's example would be win with 7-2, you know, which is the worst card in poker. And when you win with 7-2 or if you bluff someone out from the pot and then show 7-2,
Starting point is 00:14:06 then you will have some bonus points or Raybegg or something like that. So this was something that majority of the best online poker rooms, switch to kind of attract more action, more interesting, fun action. And of course, like many, many professionals were disgruntled by this because their reggae-back schemes were cut down. But it was, I think, net benefit for the game itself or for those who wanted to enjoy the game. So I kind of feel, I mean, of course, DFI is not just like zero-sum game against some, like, different type of players, but it's still worth to figure out what kind of actions do we
Starting point is 00:14:44 really want to incentivize for longevity of the project and not just for Wells to come in, suck it dry and then jump onto the next ship. Right. Earlier, you talked about the difference between like qualitative and quantitative areas of crypto where like as the new thing happens, you have to lose your metrics and you have to leave your metrics behind and you have to go like understand something new. And then over time as you understand it, you can turn into more quantitative understanding of whatever this new thing is.
Starting point is 00:15:10 Is that when we apply this to the poker metaphor? and we just like have a ton of liquidity incentives or just like participation incentives for all these people that are just farming as many poker tables as possible. When you said it just turns into like drabness about the liveliness of the game as it's just like uninteresting, is that just like we have these people that are just way too quantitative about the poker game and they're not being fun. And so like the poker rooms would have to like throw in some like gold stars every now and then some like some Easter eggs.
Starting point is 00:15:43 to make it more like quality of life? Is this like the right progress? Yeah, that's one aspect of it, but the other aspect is that you want to make these quantitative, very like professional and not into the game type of players win less. So the players want to enjoy the game and who want to deposit the money into the gaming ecosystem are actually happy to do it,
Starting point is 00:16:05 that they are not losing as fast, right? So that's another maybe even more important aspect to it. But we are talking here about zero-sum game, which like a lot of crypto, is, but not all of it. So there's a big difference between crypto and poker and other zero. Some days that crypto is actually, you know, despite the fact that like 90% of it is still about speculation, it's still like building something new that can grow like multiples, right? And it can, yeah, it can make a meaningful impact. That was one of the biggest reason I kind of quit poker and
Starting point is 00:16:34 started focusing elsewhere because I didn't feel like playing cards is like, you know, it's something that you can do for life and just be satisfied with it. Right. It's extractive rather than generative. I want to apply the pendulum between quantitative and qualitative. Is that a pendulum in defy space? Like, you know, we created yield farming with the comp mania back in 2020. That created DeFi summer. And that was like a new paradigm. And so people had to re-establish their fundamentals. And then NFTs came. And that was a new paradigm. Is this like a pendulum between like qualitative and quantitative, would you say? Yes, I think so. And like these Dijans now call it meta or changing of meta, right? There was
Starting point is 00:17:12 Olympus Forg meta, then before it was yield farming meta or yearn for meta, an NFT meta. And for me, the qualitative is definitely much more interesting. I want to kind of predict what the new meta will be before it happens. I'm not really, and there are many people, I think the majority of people for some reason, they are
Starting point is 00:17:30 much better at the second phase where the meta already occurs and they try to chase the copycats and forks and they want to kind of systematize the game. At that point in time, I'm usually already like kind of over it and I'm trying to find what the new interesting thing will be. Of course, I can be wrong. It's much more risky endeavor, but it's much more fun.
Starting point is 00:17:51 But I mean, majority of people I speak to and interact within crypto, they are much more interested in like established meta and how to like kind of systematize it quickly. So when Olympus was a big thing, then like everyone was jumping on Olympus forks and I was already looking elsewhere. It wasn't interesting to me to just go too much into detail into various copycats. So yeah, it's definitely a pendulum, but I think there is like more value to focus only on one leg of the pendulum. And for me, it's the first leg. Right. Okay, yeah. So you got to pick your side to optimize four.
Starting point is 00:18:28 Isn't predicting the next meta, it's got to be the hardest thing to do. You're basically trying to predict the market, right? Yes, yes. And it's not a structured process. It's just basically, if you have enough time, which is a luxury, of course, enough time and focus to fuck around and just do what you find enjoyable, then you can really find new meta just by accident by just being somewhere very early and just play with it without even expecting this to be a next huge meta. Like this happened to me by accident when I discovered NFTs like in 2019. I wasn't too much into art or anything like it, but one day I stumbled on super rare. which was like very early
Starting point is 00:19:08 NFT or still is an FTA art marketplace and I was a scrolling through and this is actually pretty cool I can collect art support some digital artists I can like buy their pieces I can maybe display them somewhere maybe I will have some sort of a screen at home but I can you know display my
Starting point is 00:19:25 art pieces as I would with like physical paintings for example maybe this is yeah and I have like some sort of a ownership proof which you know falls back to like this tokenized the blockchain sort of asset that I own with my signature. So I was like, okay, this can be interesting.
Starting point is 00:19:42 I didn't really expect this to be super huge, but I started to buy some NFTs from this artist early on. Some of them made like huge multiples. And I suddenly realized that I am early enough to be able to understand and orient in the NFT space, even though I didn't expect this to be like new, huge thing. I expected to be some sort of a fringe thing for a couple of enthusiasts. And one of the reasons I was,
Starting point is 00:20:06 able to do that was that I'm working with a team of people. I'm not like solo, lone wolf in this sense. So I had more time to just do stuff that picks my interest. There are people out there who are doing everything on their own and they really need to be focused on their niche and they don't have the luxury to just go forth and discover a new, like weird things that are happening maybe under the lid somewhere. So where would you say we are now in the meta? The one thing about the NFT meta that seems interesting to me is like it's not like we rotated from the defy yield farming meta into the nfti meta. Well, we did do that. But then the nfti meta continually changes in of itself. So we have the changing nfti meta landscape and then the actual higher order nfti meta itself, right? Like
Starting point is 00:20:54 NFTs are a new thing, but then like people rotate inside of the new nfts. Like right now I think we're on like an anime nft profile pictures is like the new nfti meta. If we wanted to describe, maybe both like the meta inside the NFT, but also the current meta of the entire crypto industry. Like how would you describe these two metas? Okay. So like NFTs itself in general, I would say are something like layer social. I don't want to give it a number because, you know, layer one, layer two, layer X, whatever, but it's social layer for crypto.
Starting point is 00:21:27 I think that since NFTs became somewhat big, like even Twitter changed very much. Like before that you had all these debates about which blockchain. is more decentralized or Bitcoin versus Ethereum. And most of these debates were very technical or there were maybe some traders who were posting charts. But I'm not sure if you notice, but with NFTs or like NFTs becoming a thing that's popular, suddenly you saw very new, interesting class of people joining crypto Twitter, like artists. Some people who are maybe not very technical, but they are good at branding and they are good at like social. it's like, let's say,
Starting point is 00:22:05 NFT influencers, some of them, like pretty influential in the space. And these people started to have very different types of conversations at what we used to. Even girls, like there are now so many girls in crypto, and I think it's mostly thanks to NFTs.
Starting point is 00:22:19 We had much less girls before. So it kind of, it created a whole new social layer that now changed everything, changed the discourse. Now, like everybody is talking about Yuga Labs and like cartoon monkeys on the blockchain, right? which was like five years ago,
Starting point is 00:22:35 it would be silly to just discuss if this thing can be huge because it doesn't even like do anything with decentralization or like financial infrastructure of unbanked or anything like this, right? So it's just very different thing and people just jump onto it, even though maybe these people may not even realize how blockchain works anymore.
Starting point is 00:22:55 So this is very, very new and this is very different sort of meta that wasn't here before. And when it comes to NFTs, specifically, yeah, I don't really, I'm not very versed in like specific NFT projects right now. I'm not really focus on that that much. I much rather
Starting point is 00:23:13 invest in underlying infrastructure, but yeah, I definitely notice multiple submetas, like there was like art blocks, generative art, which I really like. I think it's very interesting. Now it's kind of down. Like it's not really as popular. Now like all these cartoon pictures are
Starting point is 00:23:30 these like PFPs are still popular. Yes. anime is definitely interesting meta, but anime was always like simmering in the background of crypto culture. It just seems that right now with Azuki as like first pseudo anime, so to speak projects, all the others are trying to get traction. But this is like fast fashion to me. It's something that change is so fast.
Starting point is 00:23:50 It's not something that you can really like focus on a long term with some consistent one unchanging thesis. You either invest in the infrastructure or just need to jump really quickly between modern trends and I mean there will be people maybe even outside of crypto who will be much better at this than crypto natives like people who are maybe into fashion into brands or into like online marketing
Starting point is 00:24:13 sneaker heads or whatever yes yes yes so I kind of feel that this is not my turf so to speak I play with it I made a lot of money maybe more by luck than by like skill but yeah I feel that there will be a couple of things that may have some like longevity to them maybe some historically important termed or fully on-chain for like this hardcore enthusiast of this kind of pure on-chain art
Starting point is 00:24:37 pieces but I would say most of the value will keep moving very fluidly between different trends and even when you see someone like I don't know Justin Bieber buying board eight or something and flashing it on his Twitter like next month he will have something else or best case scenario for him will be that he will create his own sort of collection and start flashing that I mean it's just too fast. You cannot really... I mean, maybe there are people who are good at this,
Starting point is 00:25:05 but it's definitely not me. And this will be the thing that will keep changing the fastest from all the crypto matters. Right. You talked about the NFT layer as part of the social layer
Starting point is 00:25:15 of the crypto industry. It's mainly on crypto Twitter, right? Because it's like where everyone congregates. And even like the defy people who are just like not really into NFTs still talk about NFTs.
Starting point is 00:25:27 Like Ryan Sean Adams, for example, he is not an NFT person at all, but he still has had three NFT profile picture picks over the last, like, year or so, like the turtle, the MFer and now the moonbird. And so even the DFI people play along with this whole like NFT like conversation just because like, I don't know, it's easy to look at JPEGs, especially on Twitter. Do you think like this whole NFT meta is like a permanent layer of the crypto industry or do you think it's just going to be like the shelling point for what we talk about on the social layer?
Starting point is 00:25:57 Or do you think it's going to eventually kind of fade into separate cultures and you have the NFT people elsewhere who have the NFT profile pictures and like the rest of the crypto industry? I don't know. I kind of think that there will be a couple of NFT like trends that will be more crypto-native and that will be closer to the current, let's say, city crowd. But I expect NFTs to kind of branch out to capture sort of mainstream audience. Maybe that will be even more centralized or something.
Starting point is 00:26:25 but they will capture mainstream audience, even though that these people may not even consider themselves like crypto users. They will be just holding some pictures somewhere. I mean, I met a guy in Las Vegas, an Asian guy who was, like, let's say, ultra-rich. And his Instagram is basically full of, like, super expensive cars and his photos in private jets. And one of the Instagram stories he showed me was just his bored ape. And I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't even know that there is some sort of ape,
Starting point is 00:26:54 Airdrop or Discord he could join. He just somehow figured out how to buy Bort A because he saw maybe Justin Bieber or someone else flushing it. And he just wanted to include it in between his Instagram flexis about his wealth. So these kind of people, I mean, they will keep coming. Some of them will be like super rich. Some of them will be just someone who wants to maybe play some MFT game or do something else with MFTs.
Starting point is 00:27:19 But they won't be necessarily connected to crypto culture at all. And this is all reflexivity, right? like monkey C, monkey do. Exactly. Like, no pun intended with the actual like monkey board eight actual pictures. We're just seeing like NFTs were able to make their way into the mainstream by like being reflexive enough to like inject that energy and like, you know, launch that out of the crypto industry and into the mainstream.
Starting point is 00:27:40 And now like crypto is cool enough to the point where people start like just copying what we do without even knowing it. Yeah, definitely. And I think I said it somewhere. NFTs to me are the purest form of, let's say, speculation. on attention or it's like the purest like market representation of attention you can have because like usually NFTs are nothing else than just these pictures that are maybe cool because someone is wearing them or someone is shilling them or using them somewhere or flashing with them and other people
Starting point is 00:28:10 just pile in and then like as you can see sometimes this attention veins very fast and then they jump up to the next thing I mean of course it happens with like tangible tokens as well but it feels like and it is just are more purified because with most of them there is no promise of building some new interesting like product some sort of financial infra layer or anything they just here is the 10,000 pictures if you own one you are part of our community or club and you can flash it as your profile picture and you know maybe if you buy it now maybe it will go up in price because a lot of other people you want to flex with it too so yeah it's like purest form of attention tradable attention that I know of.
Starting point is 00:28:52 And maybe like, okay, so one tangential point would be that Bitcoin itself, for me at this point, is sort of, and not like NFT, but something similar, because it has very strong culture behind it. It has very strong set of values and signals you are signaling with it, but it's not accruing any other value. It's basically a pet rock, right? But it has such a strong, like, narrative around it. But it's actually maybe closer to some NFT collections than it is to like proper, let's say, financial layer. Although, you know, maybe there will be, you know, some other use cases to it, like settlement for big financial transactions. But still, like many people are actually flashing with their Bitcoin culture, like they would be like crypto punk, let's say.
Starting point is 00:29:38 I want to ask your opinion if you ascribed to the notion that part of like NFT culture and also what you said with Bitcoin culture is. a part of just like the cultural zeitice of the world at large right now like there's something maybe you disagree so I want to get your opinion on this but like there's something about the whole like Robin Hood GameStop movement that seems to be aligned with like
Starting point is 00:30:01 NFTs where like there was like we just like the stonk I like the stonk and it's like oh yeah like looks rare like I like the NFT looks cute it feels like the same kind of thing and like I think if I put on my Bitcoiner hat I would say that like all this money printing and the inflation and the devaluation
Starting point is 00:30:17 of the U.S. dollar has created some sort of, like, demand to, like, obviously, buy Bitcoin, like, that's the whole point. But also, like, play in these NFT games where there is no real value. It's pure memetics. But, like, when we have an inflating, like, money supply, all of a sudden, like, playing in these weird NFT cultural JPEG games seems a lot more, like, normal and permissible. And I'm wondering if you see, like, our NFTs, they're just, like, weird, like, niche of the crypto industry that somehow caught traction. or is it like also just a part of a larger story of like the global changing world order? A very interesting question.
Starting point is 00:30:54 So like one point that I kind of felt from what you just said is that you mentioned some sort of financial nihilism. Like nothing makes sense anymore. So we'll just buy expensive pictures of monkeys, right? I just trade them and like dump them on each other's head. So that's probably a smaller part of larger trend that's already happening for a few years even before crypto. And I think someone, I'm not sure who, but someone called it speculation, is eating the world. Like, people want to speculate. People want to bet on things, even though they may not be like sensible, you know, undervalued investment, so to speak.
Starting point is 00:31:31 People just want to speculate. It actually started with like Forex or widespread Forex trading or brokers that were suddenly targeting retail for a Forex trading. So even before crypto, this was actually a thing with crypto, you just, you know, on steroids. And yeah, so let's say Bitcoin is a huge part of or was a huge part of counterculture. And now when we see how much it correlates with stocks, it kind of feels like this counterculture movement was assimilated into the mainstream. And the people who own Bitcoin are also the ones that trade or own stocks. So it's basically now the same thing, risk on asset as technological stocks. And then like GMT and these other meme stocks, I would say, okay, so part of the reason why,
Starting point is 00:32:16 this was a big thing was that okay people said I just like the stock I want to support the company but there are also very smart people who figure out the rules of the game the fundamentals of like GMT stock were not about the company financials anymore they were more about
Starting point is 00:32:32 how the positions of these big funds are structured you know that they are like shorting too much and yeah they have unsustainable books so I mean there were some very smart leaders in these Reddit communities Wall Street bets that figured out these dynamics and then of course they
Starting point is 00:32:48 would lean into this meme stock narrative and coordinate some masses to kind of jump into the bandwagon. So I mean there are definitely, there is this nihilism. I like the stock. I just want to buy it. I like Elon Musk. I just want to buy Tesla. I don't care how many Tesla cars are being
Starting point is 00:33:04 sold. But then there is also this other part to this which is like let's screw up the big hedge funds that are, you know, value extractive. So yeah. So there are two parts to it's financial nationalism and then counterculture that is not nihilistic, it actually has values and the values are kind of opposing the current world order, as you said.
Starting point is 00:33:23 One interesting thing about NFTs in this context is, like, as I said, Bitcoin is kind of being co-opted, you know, all the big financial institutions are now basically on board and they are maybe trying to provide some Bitcoin services or at least, I don't know, they are maybe buying them for their clients or something. But you cannot really do that this easily within like traditional finance with NFT. because they are like non-fungible right so it will never be i mean on aggregated it will be huge probably but any individual nfti collection will never be as big as some fungible financial instrument or financial asset like bitcoin but you know that will enable these smaller players
Starting point is 00:34:05 to just play with these assets without big guys coming in and just pouring the fun so i think that maybe nfts will be this important shedding point for counterculture to kind of resist even though it's somewhat failed in larger like crypto assets. But the other point, maybe my counter argument to my own thing I just said would be that I haven't seen any NFT collections or NFT projects that would have some strong set of values behind them. Like when I buy Bitcoin or eat, I represent some like movement. I have some set of beliefs usually or at least originally these people who were original
Starting point is 00:34:44 Bitcoiners, they had some set of beliefs. and now when I buy Cryptopang or Ape, I just want to be cool, I just want to follow Justin Bieber. There is no particular set of values that I am following. I'm not signaling with my board Ape that I am against banks and for decentralization or anything like that. I'm just signaling that I'm rich enough to afford a ape. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use Defi and NFTs. Over 300 projects have already deployed to Arbitram and a defy and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Some of the coolest and newest NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home,
Starting point is 00:35:19 all the while Defyreux protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity. Using Arbitrum has never been easier, especially with the ability to deposit directly into Arbitrum through all the exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Whobe, and Crypto.com. Once inside, you'll notice Arbitrum increases Ethereum speed by orders of magnitude for a fraction of the cost of the average gas fee. If you're a developer who wants low gas fees and instant transactions for your users, visit Arbitrum.io slash developer to start building your DAP on Arbottes.
Starting point is 00:35:45 Arbitrum. If you're a Dgen, many of your favorite daps on Ethereum are already on Arbitrum, with many moving over every day. Go to bridge.arbitrum.io now to start bridging over your eth and other tokens in order to experience defy and empties in the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free. Maker Dow is the OG Defi protocol. The Maker Dow produces die, the industry's most battle-tested and resilient stable coin. Using Maker, you don't need to sell your collateral if you need liquidity. Instead, you can spin up a Maker Vault. and use your collateral to mint dye directly.
Starting point is 00:36:18 With Maker, the power to mint new money is in your hands. The Maker protocol is extremely hardened and operated by one of the most experienced Dow's in existence. They've been here since the beginning, they've seen it all, and so you can mint dye with the assurance that your collateral is safe. Soon, Maker will be present on all chains and L2s, so minting die can take place on oasis.app,
Starting point is 00:36:37 Zerion, Zapper, or any other defy protocol that you use. Follow Maker on Twitter at MakerDAO and learn from the oldest and most resilient Tao in existence. AVE is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol, and now AVEV-V-3 is here. AVE-V-3 has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of D-Fi, including isolation mode, which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types, and also efficiency mode, which allows for a higher loan-to-value ratios, and of course, portals, allowing users to port their Avey position across all of the networks that Avey operates
Starting point is 00:37:11 on, like Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, optimism, and harmony. The beautiful thing about AVE is that it's completely open source, decentralized, and governed by its community, enabling a truly bankless future for us all. To get your first crypto collateralized loan, get started at AVE.com. That's AABBE.com. And also check out the AVE protocol governance forums to see what more than 100,000 Dow members are all robbing about at governance.com. Okay, this has put a lot of thoughts. So kind of the meta question I want to ask is, does the counterculture of crypto always move towards the periphery? Right? Like if Bitcoin's at the center of this whole industry because it started this whole thing, but now Bitcoin is becoming institutionalized. It's becoming a shared portfolio asset with many tech stocks. And it's no longer the frontier, right? It's no longer the counterculture. And so people have moved on to like the new meta. The new meta is also the counterculture is a question. And so like right now, maybe it's like the 10K ENS club. That's the new frontier where people are buying like four digit ENS names like 7462.E.
Starting point is 00:38:15 And it's not really a statement of like any values or purpose or missions, like you just said. It's just like, no, I just want a four-digit number because I think it's cool. And so when you tell me like the frontier, the counterculture is moving away from like the mission-driven stuff, I kind of feel like the image of those like goth punk kids in high school who like it's cool to not care about anything. So like, you know, I'll just, f it. I'll just buy like an anime pfp or I'll buy like 7482.e as my EMS name. And so like, you know, the frontier is always going on and that's where the meta is changing. And it's also where the counterculture is.
Starting point is 00:38:50 Are all of these things tracking in your brain? Yeah, it's something I strongly believe in. I mean, this is just my opinion or subjective thing to say, but I always feel like frontier and countercultures are much more interesting and provide much more opportunities, especially for smaller players or users than what is already established or like here long enough. So a good example is Uniswap version 2 versus Uniswap. version 3, where despite the fact the Uniswab version 3 is much more efficient and all that stuff, clearly Uniswab version 2
Starting point is 00:39:22 was by far one of the biggest innovation within B5 or maybe crypto in general, because enabled long tail of assets to boost liquidity very easily without any hassle. Anyone can jump in and become a liquidity provider.
Starting point is 00:39:38 Uniswab V3 is already defeating this purpose somewhat with all the complexities of MEV and like adversarial flow where you as passive liquidity provider in V3, in most cases you are losing money if the tool is not incentivized enough or if the assets are
Starting point is 00:39:54 not correlated. But this is something that now attracts most of the volume, is more efficient. Of course, like big players are happy. Maybe something like central order books on some more efficient layer like zero knowledge or I don't know, maybe Solana will be even more efficient.
Starting point is 00:40:10 But that's already just, you know, it's already settlers coming in and settling what's being like conquered by conquistadors before. I'm much more interested in the quirky, weird, maybe smaller sort of frontier where all the magic happens. And I kind of feel the main meta purpose of like crypto in general is to enable as many new weird frontiers as possible. And whenever the frontier moves away and the order is already established and big players come
Starting point is 00:40:41 and start providing professional market-making services. Of course, it's like the total addressable market of this thing will be much bigger. For the majority of big assets, it's better to be listed on more efficient exchange, but it's not that interesting anymore. It's already something that we already somewhat know from the old world, and maybe it will be co-opted by big players,
Starting point is 00:41:02 and the frontier is always worth the magic effort. I always rather be on the frontier and make a bit less money, just having more fun, discovering new ways how to do things, then compete with bigger players in some already established meta and trying to figure out how to make trading for big institutions 20% more efficient. Right. Okay. This is really, really interesting.
Starting point is 00:41:22 I absolutely love this. So the idea here is that, like, the frontier is like people are exploring the frontier. There's builders, innovators, people tinkering always on the frontier. And they're discovering new things. And then they'll discover something that is like, cool. They'll find like, I don't know, a small gold rush, small pile of gold. and then the meta will change for all the individuals who are on the frontier to go to that gold rush and then extract all the gold. And that was like Uniswap V2, where it was a long tail of assets exploring like new possibilities.
Starting point is 00:41:51 But then that gold rush was just proven to have a bunch of value. So the institutions came in. Like the bigger people came in because it was a proven use case. And so they came and, you know, settled in on it and established, they just boomered it. They like they took it in and they added like professionals and experts and well-capitalized, well-resourced players. And then that pushed away the speculators. It pushed away the frontier because people on the frontier, the individuals on the frontier don't want to compete with the professionals, right? They don't want to compete with the institutions. Plus, it gets boring. And so they go and find, like, the new frontier, the new meta, and they try and explore the new thing. And it would make sense because, like, as crypto gets
Starting point is 00:42:31 mainstream adopted, like first with Bitcoin, not later with Ethereum, and it becomes, like, institutionalized, it just pushes the explorers further out, right? Like, we're always going more west because the frontier always benefits the individual, right? You don't have to compete with the large players if you're on the frontier. And so, like, as crypto becomes more mainstreamed, the frontier also expands because it's pushing people further and further out into, like, crazier and weirder and more niche, like, things to investigate. Yeah, I'm imagining it as some sort of very like amorphous organism
Starting point is 00:43:05 that grows slime mold like slime mold yeah yeah some mold that kind of spreads out and some branches of it maybe go in ways
Starting point is 00:43:13 that don't make sense and they die out but some of them will like tap into some new resource and grow much bigger and yeah it's very it's very organic
Starting point is 00:43:23 and like it's so organic just because it's programmable right like you cannot really you can't really have this organism if you only have something like Bitcoin.
Starting point is 00:43:31 Bitcoin is a very simple thing that, of course, it works and it probably will keep working, but it will never be as organic as like free-flowing and just tapping into new, weird, obscure frontiers as you have with something like Ethereum and smart contracts. Right. So, yeah. Right. And this is, of course, where the power of pattern recognition, coming back to the poker metaphor, is really, really powerful where, like, you know, there's a leg, an appendage of the slime mold can grow off in a direction. in an attempt to find some resource, to find some food so they can keep on growing. And, like, good slime molds will go and find the right food.
Starting point is 00:44:08 They will route around the environment to discover the next resource, the next value. And then if they do, that becomes, like, the new epicenter. And then, like, new things can spin off from there, and that, like, version of the slime mold can propagate. And then the bad slime mold will go off and find nothing and then it will die. And this all, I think, depends on, like, pattern recognition, right? Because there is no way to fundamentally understand anything. in the crypto world on the frontier. Like, it's all got to be pattern recognition,
Starting point is 00:44:35 pattern recognition, pattern recognition. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, yeah. And like coming back to poker, like there were basically many poker players, many types of them, but like two basic types of poker players where like one was more inquisitive, someone like me was rather trying to play different types of games
Starting point is 00:44:52 and kind of move and see what's out there. And some poker players were just trying to figure out how to be best at one type of game. And these people usually, even if they had some crypto because the first poker players didn't have crypto because they wanted to speculate. They just wanted to play on illegal Asian poker rooms for Bitcoin because there were no other ways of payment. And they had Bitcoin quite early, but they usually just didn't like it because it was volatile. But some of them, similar, like maybe me, started to figure out what this Bitcoin thing is about. And then we actually came from this small meta,
Starting point is 00:45:25 which was poker. And actually, like, many things from poker are very similar to this crypto. There There is this like Digen culture that is very similar to poker. I have many stories that would be like hilarious even within crypto context. But some of these people actually brought this culture from maybe poker or some other areas. And usually these people, you know, they were not very employable. There were no types of people that would find the job easily because they spent all their youth just playing cards. And crypto for them, when poker was kind of static to fade away and die, it was some sort of a salvation. that they could utilize their skills and they found very similar culture where they could try.
Starting point is 00:46:04 So coming back to that, it's like the mold. When you imagine people as part of this mold, some of them actually came from different types of area to discover crypto and push it forward maybe a bit more. One line I like to say is one of crypto's best exports is its culture. Like, you know, the meme of working for a Dow where you don't have to work for your nine to five. It's very freeing. You get to do what you love. You get to work for your friends. I'm wondering if you have just an opinion on a more like sociocultural opinion on the state of the world and also what it takes to be a part of that slime mold.
Starting point is 00:46:37 Like the average person is not ready to be like an entrepreneur, right? An average person is not ready to explore the crypto frontier if they even were magically able to like understand everything about crypto to be able to do that. But I'm wondering like maybe is the last like 40 to 50 years of the world and of America just like baked into this whole like nine to five corporate like. culture and like this is just what you do you go to work you don't explore you don't like innovate you just do your nine to five and in your eight hours a day you maybe get like 90 minutes of work done and now we have like something completely different where like eight hours of day in in the crypto if you're exploring the frontier is eight hours of progress for you the individual and i'm wondering if you just have any like grander like sociocultural thoughts about like is the zeitgeist
Starting point is 00:47:22 of crypto like product market fit like are people of the normal world pre-crypto world looking for like this adventure or do you think this is just only for like a select few niche parts of the population no i definitely believe i strongly believe that this new paradigm of work enabled by maybe not just crypto but like online coordination tools in general such as discord it will like bring a big shift to how we like work and it's not just because like this is obviously let's say more enjoyable for i would say most fairly intelligent people than just go to work and, you know, dip your card and, you know,
Starting point is 00:48:00 then just spent like a couple of hours there just pretending you do something and then going home and thinking about your life. It's not just like, I would say, more fulfilling, especially as hopefully we will see more automation in like physical space, so we won't need as many like workers in the world of atoms. But I also feel that it's somewhat more natural
Starting point is 00:48:21 to human beings similar to, I don't know, I don't want to spread too much into it, but like some sort of hunter-gatherer, modus operandi, right? When you were hunter or gatherer, you weren't just bashing into something for six hours at home. You went out and then you were looking for opportunity. Sometimes you saw a mammoth. Sometimes you just saw a rabbit. Sometimes you had to pick some roots and berries and you had to be very flexible,
Starting point is 00:48:46 but on average, hunters, gatherers worked much less. And they had more time to socialize to be within their tribe and just, I don't know, sing around the fire or something like that. And this, okay, this is not like a one-to-one analogy, but it feels very similar in crypto where you can, like, one part of your day spend like looking for new investments or speculations to make. The other is chatting with your friends in some Discord community group. The other is maybe you, part-time you are doing some design work or some coding for some Dow or a crypto project. And you can like very fluidly switch between these things during the day and it works out well. of course it requires much more ownership
Starting point is 00:49:27 on your part but I would say people in the past had this ownership they were like wired this way and only with more like industrial age we were kind of forced into cubicle so to speak so I kind of feel we are kind of okay the digital
Starting point is 00:49:44 thing is definitely new studying into our computers is not you know something that our ancestors would do but like on some level it's very similar with more like fluidity with more independent and discovery of new opportunities more often than just finding a job once in five years. Right. Yeah, we are the hunter-gatherers of the metaverse, right? We're still sitting in front
Starting point is 00:50:05 of our computers for like 12 hours a day, so we're definitely not doing it in real life, but of the metaverse, like we are exploring a lot, and it's also in tandem with socialization because everyone's in like the shared discords and there's like Twitter. I actually want to pick your brain on that because Fiskear, of course, in Anon, Tuscanties, I'm imagining it's not your actual name. And you're, of course, can't. camera off. And so I'm wondering, like, do you do real-life crypto-socialization, or do you scratch your crypto-socialization itch through just like online memes like Discord or Twitter? I was very conflicted about it, and for a long time, I was very adamant about my real-life
Starting point is 00:50:41 privacy. But it kind of changed last year in Lisbon, where after two years of COVID situation, I was able to meet many people that I interacted with for a couple of years in crypto. And of course, at that time I already had a larger following. So many people I kind of knew who I am from online world. And I could have basically two options, either pretend I'm not me and just have this bland debates where I just kind of avoid anything specific about what I'm doing or figure out some like fake story about me, which would probably, you know, be much less interesting for me to kind of engage in or just say that, you know, okay, it's me.
Starting point is 00:51:22 This is my fate. right and just let's talk and after some time i actually gave in and chose the second route so now many people actually know how i look so i'm not definitely like complete anon but it gave a very new dimension to all my like crypto city life and experience because i met many people in person and this is something for us who still have like hunter-gatherer brains is very different when you meet someone in person and you can like share ideas and you know body language is important part of communications. Suddenly, people you spoke with online are very different in real life and we kind of get very different sort of information out of them when you speak, like, freely in real life.
Starting point is 00:52:02 So I'm definitely not Anna and I gave in and I don't regret it. But I remember at the beginning, like I met Stefan from FlashBots and we spent a lot of time talking online. And for like, the first evening I met him, I pretended I'm just some random guy. He doesn't know. And I was just asking him about FlashBots. And, you know, it was like, it was a okay conversation. but it was obviously like, you know, we are both introverts, so it was like more like forced conversation, you know, like, okay, so what are flashboards, blah, blah? And then the next day I met him and I actually like told him I am fiscay.
Starting point is 00:52:35 And he was like, oh my God, and we had very different conversation, much more human and more like personal. So it makes a difference and I rather give up a part of my privacy for this than like be very anal about like not showing my face. Right. Do you find that you have a different persona when you are Fisky, the Anon, versus, I'm assuming you call yourself,
Starting point is 00:52:58 I'm Fiscanties in real life rather than using your name, but in real life, do you have like a different persona? Like, either on purpose or on accident? Definitely. Not even on purpose or on accident. Like one thing is that everyone is free to craft their online persona more easily. You can use profile picture. You can, when you write something,
Starting point is 00:53:15 you can think twice about what you write. It's kind of different, especially for, like more introverted people who need to spend more time thinking about what they're going to say. When you ride, you have much more time. So it's like more comfortable to craft your persona. I picked this like Hisoka Joker character, which is very like chaotic evil sort of thing on purpose. I wanted to be more like edgy chaotic.
Starting point is 00:53:38 I want it to be online, someone who is very like cynical sometimes and like have all these like sharp jokes, which kind of, I mean, sometimes it falls. This mask isn't always on even when I'm tweeting online. but I usually kind of come back to it but in person I'm very different I would say and I feel kind of weird where people are like oh my God you look so different
Starting point is 00:53:57 you know we imagined you being this like Joker very like skinny sort of guy or something and then yeah I'm yeah I think I'm very different person and it's not by design it's like just how we form our identities online and I find it very interesting in this world that you can have multiple identities
Starting point is 00:54:16 disconnected from your real persona online and some people I know some people have multiple auto egos or out accounts on Twitter. I can't imagine that. I don't have time for that, but some people can pull it off. So yeah, that's definitely crazy. And also another paradigm shift, which maybe in a way connects to the future of work online,
Starting point is 00:54:35 that you can actually have multiple identities for multiple work purposes. And it has a huge downsides as well, of course. You can have all kinds of people masking themselves behind some new online identity. but I think it's very interesting sort of vector of human evolution, which we will see in next decades proliferate more. I actually want to dive into the online version of socialization. Is there like a discord that you live in or a telegram that you live in? Or is there like some sort of online room that you consider yourself like a part of where you get your online socialization itch scratched? I'm actually much less active in like this popular online groups than some other people.
Starting point is 00:55:16 I'm online very often, but I usually spend most of my time with my team because we have like not only one, we actually have a couple of teams that are all branching out to different directions. One team is more focused on games and gamefi. One is more into like defy or general like crypto infrastructure things. So I spend a lot of time with my own team within like our entities such as E-Prime. But I have a couple of like private chats with like let's say maybe up to 100. people from like defy or like nfti and there are like two or three that i'm more active in but over time i kind of figured out that if you kind of scale the group above dumbar number it starts to get noisy and when all i mean i mean like i'm being added to all the telegram groups and some discords
Starting point is 00:56:06 and over time i kind of feel that they all converge to the same topics like to everybody is talking about you on mass buying twitter or everybody is talking about documents Quone or LFG buying another half billion dollars world of Bitcoin. So it kind of, it converges to be more uniform and only the small groups that are focused in some specific direction, either groups of teams of people or Dau's that are building something specific as to kind of differentiate it enough for me to care. So I'm less active in the private groups. I'm very active on Twitter,
Starting point is 00:56:38 though. On Twitter itself, it feels it's very interesting space. It will change a lot, I would say. I think crypto Twitter will be much less influential over crypto landscape in general in a couple of years, but it's one of the weirdest spaces I operated in. The homogenization of like the big groups fits into the whole idea of just like as something becomes more mainstream, it just becomes more professionalized or like there's no alpha in like groups that are larger than Dunbar's number, right? Because like you said, everyone starts talking about the same thing. It's no longer the frontier. The frontier has got to be when you're down to like a group of people that's like that you know everyone in that group,
Starting point is 00:57:17 right? It's just like five, 10, maybe 15 people. And like as soon as a group gets to like 150 plus, it starts to, like you said, sound like every other group that. And so like there is no alpha there because the alpha doesn't get shared in the meta groups. And I think Reddit also has the same structure. Like there's many, many critiques of like Reddit old timers where like the massive subreddits, like our picks or like our news are just like homogenous. Right. There is no like unique thing about those homogenous groups anymore. And so it's always like the frontier subreddits, the smaller subredits, where there are there more niche experts is where like the quality Reddit content is.
Starting point is 00:57:52 But then as people discover, that's where the quality content is, they start to float into those subredits and start to homogenize them and scale them out. And so I'm seeing similar patterns here as to what we were talking about with like the frontier and where the alpha is. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, there are a couple of smaller groups that still like keep being interesting enough, but they need to be kind of consciously adamant about not letting the group become too big or not
Starting point is 00:58:18 diver discussion. Like people, especially in crypto, people find it very hard to resist to post charts or like intradate rates or like stuff like that even in groups that are specifically set to like discuss, let's say, long-term fundamentals or something different. Like there are a couple of topics that are just irresistible to people. and if you don't have enough contrarians that just don't care about this thing, just keep talking about bullshit of the day or uptick of the day or like daily candle or whatever, then it just deteriorates really quickly.
Starting point is 00:58:51 So it's a process that either you are very hands-on with moderation or you just keep jumping between small groups or, yeah, just have your tight-knit group of people or tribe that you are very intimate with and you work very closely with. And then one other thing is within these groups, I think it's hard to measure. But if there was a way to measure it, I would like to see some dashboard for it. It would be the level of trust between crypto people. And I actually remember one old, very old Skype group between online poker players from all over the world. The only way how you could get into this Skype group was to be invited by some already established poker player who was there. And each poker player that was there, I mean, it was OTC group for crypto actually.
Starting point is 00:59:37 like 2015 or something, poker players were trading Bitcoin for cash and how would they do it? They would basically either like use some PayPal or some like Skrill or some other payment system for smaller amounts, but for big amounts they would actually do cash transactions. So for example, I got into that group and I had some euros. I wanted to buy Bitcoin. I had them in cash. At the time, it was fairly large amount for me and I guess for like almost anyone who is not like a millionaire.
Starting point is 01:00:05 and I got connected to this poker player who was actually playing in the same city that I was there was some tournament in local casino. I came there, you know, this was this guy. He was already asleep because he fell from the tournament. And then he went down to the casino lobby only in his pink pajamas. And it was like 20 year old German guy. He was like sleepy. And he came with his laptop.
Starting point is 01:00:29 He opened up Krakken. It was, I think it was 2018. He opened Krakken account and he basically transferred Bitcoin to my husband. address. Then I gave him money in like an envelope and he started to count it. The money just dropped on the floor. So he just picked them up in front of a lot of people. He didn't even count. He was like, okay, bye. And he walked away. And this was the level of trust that was among these poker players. Whenever someone knew was invited, the guy who invited him had to put some sort of collateral for the new guy that was there until the guy proven himself as like reliable.
Starting point is 01:01:01 And there was a huge spreadsheet with all the poker players there and how much they successfully traded with other poker people. So there were a couple of guys that had like millions of dollars of turnover over their lifetime. And this was some sort of a trust corridor that you could ascribe to these people. I would like to see something similar within crypto. Because with a level of trust growing within some sort of tribe or like digital group or Dow or crypto group, you know, things get so much easier. When you have like five people that you can trust, the day will hold one million dollars for you
Starting point is 01:01:33 and you don't have to sign any contracts or whatever bullshit. It's very different than when you have 100 people that just share some alpha, meaning they will shoot you with their NFTs, they already bought, and then they will dump on you or something. It's a very different level of coordination. So I'm bullish on these types of groups, but there is obviously not too many of them, and there is no – I haven't seen a tool that would track this as well as the poker player as did it is on Skype with a spreadsheet.
Starting point is 01:01:58 Right. Well, I mean, if a tool was developed, it probably would mean that we're no longer on the frontier, right? So people are doing Skype on the Excel sheet. that is some frontier level shenanigans going on. Have you read the article called Squad Wealth by the other internet group? No, I haven't. I know about squads, which is like these tribes of online people who work together somehow.
Starting point is 01:02:18 Yeah. Is it different thing? No, it's about the right vibe. I know about this concept, yeah. Yeah, it goes back into the whole, like, future of work thing where, like, the new paradigm is just making money online with your friends. And so, like, this squad has to be a small group of people, like not even close to 50. Like we're talking like five to ten people where like, no, it's your actual squad.
Starting point is 01:02:38 Like if you were in the real life, not in the Metaverse, you all would be going out to like the bar together on a Friday night. But instead you have like the online squad and, you know, maybe you can scale that up. But the point is like there's not a single person in the group that you aren't familiar with. And so like everything in this chat is highly curated, it's highly intentional. You know the personalities of everyone. And it leads to a lot of trust. Even though like, you know, we've never shook hands. we just exist in the Metaverse and we just work together to make money.
Starting point is 01:03:05 It's like the new paradigm is making money online with your friends. And it sounds like this poker room was like an early primitive of this whole entire like squad wealth movement. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a very good way to frame it. I would say that we have something similar with Z prime. I mean, it's still an entity that has legal, you know, like set up somewhere in Gibraltar. And like, you know, it has all the formalities. But I really feel like it's more about this sort of digital making money together and doing cool stuff together. Then it is about, oh, having LPs and having an entity somewhere and making
Starting point is 01:03:37 P&L. So I kind of feel that we will have many of these movements kind of being maybe formalized at the start, but then branching out maybe more to digital space. And of course, we know each other personally. We meet quite often, you know, in some retreat somewhere and like work together face to face. But I mean, it's important, but I feel that maybe for next generation, it will be much less of views to just meet in the midspace. Is the Z-prime Discord? Is that like, do people socialize in there, or is that strictly for getting work done? No, no.
Starting point is 01:04:07 We don't have Discord. We have a couple of Telegram groups. But it works very similar. We socialize, we close memes. We have fun. We do all kinds of stuff. But yeah, we also do work. So, yeah, it's very tribal.
Starting point is 01:04:17 We make a lot of cool interactions even outside of work on text. Right. Yeah, the bankless LLC Discord is kind of the same way. There's about like 15 people in there that are in there, like, every single day, like, engaging, and then there's some other people, too. But, like, we've started to generate, like, our own language, our own, like, particular memes that we enjoy, our particular reaction emojis that we use the most. And I don't know, it's just a fun place to be. And, like, there's the way, as time progresses throughout the day, like, the mornings are for work, and then
Starting point is 01:04:48 the evenings are for shit posting. And so, like, people start to, like, transition as the day goes on, people start to, like, we get to tie up our daily duties. And then in the second half of the day. We all go into what we call it our hood rat shit where we just post hood rat shit. Like this is the NFT I'm minting or so like people are out in like the podcast telegram or the discord or the newsletter discord but then everyone ends up in like the alpha channel or the hood rat shit channel. It's like watching this like social dynamic like for this social pack of animals like migrate around the discord as the day progresses. And it's like this it's got like a ritual. It's got like time of the day. It's just an interesting dynamic. Is that anything like that that you see at the Z prime capital?
Starting point is 01:05:26 more or less, we have structure in a way that we have some weekly calls and we have all of calls with founders and then we talk about it within our groups. We don't have like this GM sort of rituals every morning every one post GM. We don't have that but we have all kinds of like
Starting point is 01:05:41 internal jokes and memes and some of them you actually see spilling over to Twitter if you check like my or Matigax account specifically between two of us. There is like a lot of banter that like internally you know makes a lot of sense and then we also argue a lot on Twitter,
Starting point is 01:05:58 which sometimes is funny. Sometimes it's internal humor, but we have this kind of dynamic setup, which is very similar. And yeah, as you said, it's a ritual. It's something that, you know, tribal societies gathered around fire every evening, right? So this is something similar.
Starting point is 01:06:13 Yeah, certainly. Fisky, if there's one piece of advice or one, like, rule of thumb that you follow that has served you well throughout your life that I could ask you about, what would that be? Okay, so like one thing that I kind of, feel that served me very well.
Starting point is 01:06:28 I'm not sure if it's very easily transferable, but I just got so comfortable with volatility with the way how I don't care about plus minus number up, number down. For me, it's just non-event. It makes me so much more calm, focused and happier. And then I'm also having a lot of fun seeing all the Twitter guys just flipping out about prices when,
Starting point is 01:06:55 especially now in the market. markets are down. So if someone can get to the state of like not caring that much, of course, you also need some sort of a sensible bankroll management, which is probably another advice. I would give like always have sensible bankroll management, meaning, you know, like divide your portfolio into multiple parts and just have some sort of a backup. If things go down, always have some cash, et cetera, never go all in, you know, risk only X percent on every farm or whatever. But with this like comes so much more fun. Like I just have so much. much more fun when I don't have to stress about, you know, now daily Bitcoin candle going minus
Starting point is 01:07:31 10% or something. It's just amazing. So this is probably, yeah, so this is one thing and the other thing is this is what I struggled with. I was more like an individualistic sort of a person during my poker playing career. I was just doing everything myself. I mean, I had some poker playing friends, but I was playing on my own. And only when I kind of gang together with my tribe with different people who are good at different things and we kind of made it work together and increase the level of trust between us into our unparalleled levels like my quality of life when it comes to like business or career like 10 next instantly so probably these two things like if you can like i don't know meditate read stoicism or books from stoics and then find your tribe of
Starting point is 01:08:19 people you can really trust and work with and scale your effort and focus and everything you do within crypto will be so much more easier and enjoyable. Timeless wisdom, of course. Thank you, Fisky, for coming on, Layer Zero and chatting with me. It was amazing to be on this podcast. Thanks for you mind me. Cheers. Cheers.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.