Bankless - Fiskantes Predicts the Next Meta | Layer Zero
Episode Date: May 10, 2022With 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
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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
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
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,
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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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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,
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,
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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,
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,
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.
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
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,
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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,
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
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.
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,
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.
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,
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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,
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
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.
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?
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.
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,
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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,
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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,
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,
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.
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
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
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,
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.
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
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,
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,
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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,
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.
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.
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,
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
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
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.
