Bankless - What Happens Next in Crypto? with Fiskantes & Matti

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

Fiskantes and Matti of Zee Prime Capital join us to share a glimpse of their collective crystal ball into the future of crypto. How does our industry go from bear to bull market again and what does the future of the space look like? Fiskantes and Matti have the answers. ------ Galxe | Explore Crypto’s #1 Credential Network https://bankless.cc/Galxe  ------ SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  ️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across  BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave  NEXO | CRYPTO FINANCIAL HUB https://bankless.cc/Nexo  LEDGER | NANO HARDWARE WALLETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  ️FUEL | THE MODULAR EXECUTION LAYER https://bankless.cc/Fuelpod  ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 7:30 Are We Lost Right Now? 10:36 What Era Does This Feel Like? 17:25 Product Market Fit 23:25 Narrativeless For Now 28:02 Macro 38:00 Are Tokens Dead? 46:50 Bitcoin 54:31 Bear to Bull Market Theories 59:17 Actual DeFi 2.0 1:02:49 Web3 E-Commerce 1:07:48 Tokenizing IP 1:11:16 Web3 Social 1:16:00 Best Advice 1:22:12 Closing & Disclaimers ------ Resources: Fiskantes https://twitter.com/Fiskantes  Matti https://twitter.com/mattigags  Matti's Article https://wrongalot.substack.com/p/the-next-big-crypto-narrative  ----- 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.

Hey, Bankless Nation, exciting topic for you today. The next big crypto narrative. Where is it? What is it? Have we lost the plot? Where's crypto going next? That's what we're going to talk about today. This is a fireside conversation format with Maddie and Fisk. These are two of my favorite investors in the D-Fi space working at an organization called Z-Prime Capital. And we're all going to have a round table conversation on what is next. David, what? Are you excited about getting into in this episode? Yeah, crypto runs on narratives, Brian, as we know. And even when those narratives are very real and very based on fundamentals, sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't, we still have narratives no matter what. And I think post-merge, everyone feels a little bit lost. Like we've run out of roadway. Like, what is the next narrative?

Because all we can really see right now is just a bunch of macro, bad weather. And that's not a narrative. That's scary. And so while we are like going through this bear market together, we're looking. We're searching for what is the next big narrative. And I actually did a layer zero with Fiscanis forever ago that was on like the rotating narratives of the crypto space. And so Maddie and Maddie and Fisk are just two of the best people to talk to about this kind of conversation as to where is? Where is the narrative?

Because we need one. Without one, we feel lost. And so I'm excited for all of this. Guys, before we get into the episode, I want to tell you about our friends and sponsors. at Galaxy because they're inviting you during this crypto bear market to take an adventure with them into crypto and also get rewarded. This is almost like gamified crypto learning, which I really love David. I know both you and I are like big gamers back in the day. I don't have as much time for it because crypto has become my real life video game. It's the game.

Yeah. Because I can win like real coins rather than just like, you know, gold in a world of Wordcraft. But anyway, what Galaxy is, is an epic way, they call it Learn to Earn, to level up on crypto. There are these things called campaigns, which are like task-based things that you do in crypto that different protocols and organizations sponsor, and you could do these things and get rewarded. I'm going to show a few screenshots of this, David. Maybe you could say a few more things about Galaxy. Yeah, Galaxy. It's basically a passport for you, to collect a bunch of digital credentials that show that you did something in the Metaverse. And so there's a bunch of, we use the frontier terminology here at Bankless.

There's a bunch of things for you to do, campaigns to go on the frontier and explore the Metaverse, and Galaxy gives you little credentials for having proven that you have done such things. Optimism Quest, of course, is also one of these things that you could go do. So you go and you sign up for Galaxy, you get your little Web3 passport, you go on some campaigns, you get some credentials, and you prove to the world and yourself that you are a pioneer, and you can do that all with Galaxy. There's a link in the show notes to get started.

What I love about this is it takes you through all sorts of different chains, too. There's like 10 different chains supported, David. So definitely a lot to explore. And once again, click the link in the show notes, and you can start the Odyssey. You can start diving into what Galaxy has to offer. All right, David, one last question before we get into the episode with our guest today is what should people be looking for out of this episode? Yeah, so we're, of course, going to talk about the various new possible narratives that could come about.

And we should all be dubious as to when we propose narratives, right? Because no one proposes the narrative, a narrative finds you. It's like a hypothesis. It's a hypothesis, right. And some narratives are going to resonate with you, the individual, the listener, more than others. Some might be your narratives, the things that you really care about. And others might not be so interesting to you. like are you a frontier ZK roll up low transaction fee defy person that might be that might be an

interesting narrative to you that's different from like the tokenization of IP from the NFT side of things so what narratives are possible narratives around the horizon seem likely and also resonate with you I think is something to consider yeah for me it's not just what resonates with me I want to know actually what resonates with the market because I want to plan my like investment decisions And so at some level, like, if it resonates with me, that's okay, but that's not necessarily the signal, right? And sometimes I can get diluted by that. So I want to find out what the Z prime folks think about this bear market, how we're going to tap into the next market validated narrative and what the fundamentals are behind that. So let's look for that as well. Guys, we'll be right back talking about the next big crypto narrative. But before we do, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible. Arbitrum 1 is pioneering the world of secure Ethereum scalability and is continuing to accelerate the Web 3 landscape. Hundreds of projects have already deployed on Arbitrum 1 producing flourishing defy and NFT ecosystems. With a recent addition of Arbitrum Nova, gaming and social daps like Reddit are also now calling Arbitrum home.

Both Arbitrum 1 and Nova leverage the security and decentralization of Ethereum and provide a builder experience that's intuitive, familiar, and fully EVM-compatible. Arbitrum, both builders and users, will experience faster transaction speeds with significantly lower gas fees. With Arbitrum's recent migration to Arbitram Nitro, it's also now 10 times faster than before. Visit Arbitrum.io, where you can join the community, dive into the developer docs, bridge your assets, and start building your first app. With Arbitrum, experience Web3 development the way it was meant to be. Secure, fast, cheap, and friction-free.

The Brave Wallet is your secure, multi-train on-ramp into Web3, and is built directly into the Brave privacy browser. Gone are the days of managing multiple wallet extensions that put you at risk of fishing, spoofs, and tracking. With the Brave wallet, you can securely manage your crypto assets across more than 100 different chains, including Ethereum, layer twos, salana, and more, all without downloading risky extensions. The Brave wallet is easy to set up and removes the headache of jumping between wallets and extensions. It's lightweight, but packed with great features, like built-in token swaps, buying and holding NFTs with a gallery view, and support for hardware wallets. But also much more than that, because Brave is shipping new features every single month, with the mission to make Web3

easier to navigate for its over 55 million users. Wall extensions are a thing of the past. So get started with Brave's Web3 ready browser today and experience a decentralized web seamlessly without all the clutter. You can download the browser at brave.com slash banklist and click the wallet icon to get started. Nexo is your financial hub for all your crypto needs. NXO lets you buy crypto instantly with your credit or debit card or via bank transfer. They also have an awesome advanced trading platform called Nexo Pro that pays you rewards when you swap crypto assets. And Nexo also lets you earn interest on your crypto in Bitcoin, ETH, or other assets. And they also give you an instant crypto line of credit with as low as 0% APR.

And they also give you access to a crypto-backed MasterCard, of course earning you more crypto when you use it. So enhance your financial life with Nexo, who ensures all credit lines are over collateralized with insurance on all custodial assets. Nexto, the right place for your crypto. So click the link in the show notes to join over 5 million users who are getting the most out of their crypto. Hey, guys, we are back talking about the next big crypto narrative. Are we lost as the big question for today?

Answered, hopefully, by the four of us. Maddie and Fiscanties are partners at Z-Prime Capital. This is a hedge fund VC firm in crypto. I respect a lot of the ideas that these two put forth. if they have kind of independent ways of looking at things. I can't really pin them down into a specific crypto tribe. But I do know they are crypto bulls to the max. And they've got great head on their shoulders when thinking about this space.

Maddie recently wrote a post called The Next Big Crypto Narrative. I think we're going to draw a lot of inspiration from that post as we talk about what the next big crypto narrative might be. Maddie, Viscanties. Welcome to Bankless. Hello. Happy to be here. How's it going, guys? And for the YouTube viewers out there, we have two Anon's here,

so we have their profile pictures instead of their actual video cameras. And so Maddie is the ghost from Pac-Man and Fiscanties. What character is that, Fiscanty's? It's Hizoka from Hunter X-Hunter, this psychopathic Joker, magician, character. But I added, I mean, not me, but some arched. artist on Twitter added a beard to it. So kind of making it my own and stealing this character. Beautiful. Well, Fisconti's in the top right. Maddie is in the bottom left. And so now, now you know. And that was Fiscanti's voice just now. Let's kick this off for the first question.

Maybe I'll throw to you, Maddie, because you wrote the post. Are we lost right now? I wouldn't say that we're necessarily lost. I think that we're just hitting like a peak reset as opposing to the peak ape or peak imitation that we had. And I think it could feel like that. But I think it's time to, you know, we're now dismissing the old ideas. And we're sort of acknowledging that imitation took place. and we do our little witch hunt, you know, dough and the whole there are things, Sue and Kyle and whatnot. And now we're heading into this peak idea dispersion, or at least we should head there.

So some novel concepts should be tried. And because of that, you know, it may feel like we're lost, but, you know, being lost because forking Olympus Dow and dumping on retail don't work, it's, you know, it's not really being lost. I think that old concepts, you know, have been banished now. People don't think those will work. And now the ideas will not come from the masses, from the chatter, but from within the founders. And I think that only those really mean it will stick around and build solutions to the real problem. So we're looking for ideas, I would say, right now.

So we're not lost. I think that, you know, I probably felt the bear market creep in. obviously after the, you know, Tara Luna crash and fiaska, and I was like, okay, we're entering. This is something new, right? You know, something's been burst year and then we had three hours capital, et cetera, right, into the summer. But I think the, maybe the longevity of this potential bear market probably hit me post-Ethereum merge, because it did feel like throughout the summer, at least, we had this one catalyst,

which was Ethereum's going to merge, and maybe something could, even though the macro clouds in the sky are very, very stormy. Like, there is this bright spot of the Ethereum merge. And now that we've had that, right, I mean, we have other things. We have, like, the ZK EVM coming out. There are other developments and such. But, like, the Ethereum merge didn't really move the market at all.

And that after merge, where I saw prices still down, like, eth off $500 from what it was even, like, pre-merge, that's when I feel like I fully capitulated into the length of time of this bear market. And I'm wondering, Maddie, to you, because I know you've been in crypto for a while, what does this feel like? Are there any analogs from the past?

Is this like 2018 to you? Is this like 2019? Is this a whole different thing that we've never felt before? When have you last felt like this about crypto? No, to me, it feels familiar. I would say if I would map it to a year in the past, it would be 2018.

for sure. And yeah, I remember back then, I mean, it's funny. And I wrote about it, is, you know, the merge and narrative and everything. Like we're trying, we're begging the market to recognize the fundamentals where we were happy to ignore him all the way through the bull. So to me, to me and to us at Z crime, we're, yeah, it's a very familiar territory. And I think that we need to feel the pain a little, everyone in the space, kind of remind ourselves, you know, that we need to build more things and more useful things. And yeah, I guess it's a, it's a good reminder, but I don't think this is a new, new, new territory for us. I mean, it's always new, right? Like, the more change, the more the world changes, the more it remains the same. So I guess that

all the cycles are in some way different, in some way they are the same on the top. And the bottom as well. So no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that, you know, that this is, the macro looks scary, but, you know, there's always, there are always things that, you know, make you go sort of very pessimistic, but I wouldn't say that this is something that these are uncharted waters. Fisk, what's your take on all of this? What does this feel like to you? Have you fully capitulated that this is a bare market? Is this like 2018? Have you or is this different?

I mean, I wasn't fully present in crypto at that time, but to me it feels a bit more like 2013 Antigox crash because in 2018, I don't really remember anything that was like fundamental to the market structure break. Right? We had like many ICOs popping up, but nothing really broke, like nothing big and important really broke. And in 2013, MTGox was the pillar that held Bitcoin together as a liquid and tradable asset. And in 2022, like this year we had three arrows and all decentralized entities borrowing three arrows and maybe Luna partially as well, kind of as this like group of centralized entities that in a way held the market structure together in a sense in a very toxic unhealthy way but still um so like fundamentally it feels a bit more like

this sort of crisis of confidence in the market structure a bit more um but the good thing about this is that like defy held on well when it comes to like infrastructure um and how it works how it by it's liquidated to the system. And we were able to move on from this pretty huge volatile couple of events quite fast. Of course, there are still things unfolding in many of the centralized entities, but it feels like we are just building on and moving on much faster than with it in 2013 or even 2018. We speak to many founders who are definitely not lost and have very clear vision. I mean, many of them will probably be wrong about their vision, but they have it.

They don't feel like, oh, I don't know what to build now. I just copy the other guy. I don't think this is the case. So a couple of these founders will be right, and they will find the new gold vein, I would say. Yeah, I think the biggest differentiator is the level of macro pessimism. Yeah, we didn't have that in 2013. We didn't have it in 2018. We have it now with like Twitter, regular.

talking about risks of nuclear war and shit like that. So I guess this is the new factor that kind of influences everything. And when it comes to merge, like, that's kind of funny that it really worked out in the best possible way it could when it comes to the implementation or the tech site. But it's still dumped and I don't know, I kind of, I don't feel so jaded about it because it was some sort of a very seldom use event. And I remember in bear market, even in 2018, even good news were basically bad news. The only good news were no news in the bear market because everyone tries to sell the news and dump and there is on to the other guy because everybody has fear and they want to accumulate cash. So I would say like merge maybe as a narrative, a narrative sort of catalyst kind of failed,

but as a fundamental improvement that will have huge impact on. the price of it and maybe market in general, it will succeed. It will just need a bit more time. The same way as like Bitcoin halvings usually don't really just cause a huge pump right after it happens, but it kind of gradually accumulates this momentum and the reduced supply will kind of reflecting price over a longer period of time. That would be my take. So Fisk, I really like you pulling from past these two different bear market eras. And, you know, I think I maybe gleaned something as you were talking from what you're saying. So you're saying this is a bit more like 2013 rather than 2018, right?

And so 2013 was really the cause, the catalyst of the bear cycle. The reason was we had a major crypto bank blow up. That was Mount Gawks blew up. And you're kind of likening that, I would suppose, to all of the things that went on with Threeers Capital and Celsius and Terra Luna, like, stuff blew up in crypto in the same way. And so you think it's more like that. Now, 2018 to me was a bit more crisis of use case. So we didn't have a central bank blow up, but the whole, we have one app and it's called the ICO. There was really no notion of defy at the time.

There was this, this, I think, internal crisis of, does crypto actually have any use cases besides it's Bitcoin and you can hold it. But like this whole smart contract thing, it seems like the only thing smart contracts are doing, Ethereum is doing, is launching these worthless ICOs. And so we had a whole crisis of use case there. You're not seeing that crisis of use case right now. Are you? Like so, I mean, some people that are not as in depth and not crypto bullish are standing back looking at crypto from the outside looking in it and still saying that you guys aren't really producing any valuable real-world apps. This thing you call defy is just a tiny sliver and niche. And by the way, regulators are probably going to shut that down. And then NFTs, what was that?

Cool. You have JPEGs, like digital pictures of animals. By the way, they're down 99%. Are you sure that we're through the gauntlet of like having identified our actual use cases? Like, do we have product market fit this cycle? Or is this also still? you know, a 2018 style of crisis where we actually don't have enough useful real-world apps. I'm not like 100% sure, but I feel, I don't know, orders of magnitude more confident that crypto has many possible use cases and is here to stay than I felt in 2018. Like in 2018, I was kind of jaded about it. I felt like, okay, there is Bitcoin, maybe Bitcoin already proved it makes some

sense. It's like this permissionless thing you can send to people and store value in it somehow and nobody can stop you from transacting with it and everything else is maybe just like a toy for geeks, if anything. But right now I don't really feel like it. I mean, it's the depth of crypto market. It's like really, yeah, everyone is jaded on Twitter and on-chain volumes are super low, but at the same time we still see people, I don't know, trading on GMX and of course it's just a speculation on but people are trading on GMX instead of centralized exchanges more and more. We see still some people trying to play some games or collect some NFTs, not only because speculation, although granted it's 95% of the use case,

but also because they actually want to collect them and they want to either play this game or be part of this community of, I don't know, penguins and like, you know, share this sort of ownership-tight identity. entity with others. I kind of feel that the use case is there. It just didn't reach the level of adoption that would really validate it in front of bigger skeptics. But yeah, I'm super optimistic about crypto's use case. Of course, prices are a bit different thing. Like, yeah, vast majority of NFTs are world zero. So even though they are now down 99%, they are still massively overvalued. And yeah, that's, that will be true for almost anything. But I don't

no, I don't have any doubt in my head that crypto now has many possible use cases with potentially validated product market fit. It just needs adoption on scale. I think I agree with you, Fisk. And I want people, so a lot of people listening, they haven't been through those previous cycles, right? This is kind of like their first, you know, bear market. And I want people to realize, like, if you weren't here in 2018, 2018 really felt like we didn't have any apps. Like there was no, we had no product market fit at the time. There was no such thing as defy at the time. It was all theory. It was all theory. And this is so much different. So in order to get kind of an accurate view of the crypto world, I think probably, you know, at least based in this

conversation, kind of the most accurate model I can come up with is we've got some 2013, like a crypto banks just blew up. So we got some of that going on. We've got a little bit of crisis of use case where we have to kind of go back and reset, double down on the things that are working. But like, let's discard kind of the, you know, the strange like Ponzi former DFI, things that weren't really DeFi 2.0 and kind of reset the clock a little bit. And then what's different about 2022 versus other crypto bear markets is we have macro. Macro is punching us in the face repeatedly. It was a little bit of this in 2018, but nowhere near what we see today. day. That to me is what our world looks like right now. David, you were going to ask something.

Yeah. And Fiske, you said something that I want to latch on to and hang around for a little bit where throughout 2018 to 2020, like having a narrative wasn't actually like a good thing because it turned into a cell of the news event because people just could not get it into their psyche to be bullish. And so for like a while now, like you know, ether would bounce between $100 to $300, Bitcoin would do the same. And as soon as we got to $300, like, it would just people were like, okay, we're out and selling and it would go back down to $100. And anytime we found something kind of like new to latch on to, it seemed to do that.

And so I'm wondering, and Maddie, I want your thoughts on this too. Maybe perhaps for a while it's good that we don't have a narrative. Maybe we should be okay. It kind of feels like mindfulness meditation a little bit for the industry as a whole. like, hey, let's all be okay with not having a narrative. Like, let's see what happens in a void and spend some time here narrative list while we do some soul searching. That kind of seems like a healthier way for a bear market to progress for all the market participants. Maddie, what do you think about this?

Yeah, I think that one thing that we have forgotten is that the dot-com bubble burst. which, I mean, crypto wasn't around, but I think it's, you know, the crisis of use cases and the macro backlash that was definitely there. Also, the world was on fire in 2001 after 9-11. So that could be also a nice analogy. And yes, it took a while for, you know, Vap2 to emerge after that from fresh. So I think that we have, you know, many instances in the history that are now sort of which, trying to project it onto the future or onto the current market. And I agree with the fact that we need to pause and we need to, as I said earlier,

we need people to come up with better ideas, better applications, better product market fit. And I definitely see a crisis of use case. And we said in 2018 that was in the 5, well, there was maker, right? And it was under pressure at the end of 2018 when each was crashing. with crashing, I think that there were some huge liquidation back then. It wasn't that much in terms of absolute numbers, but it was like 10% of the die volume or something like that. So it's, I think that everything is happening at the same time right now,

whether it's 2013, 2000 or 2001 and also 2018. And we need, we definitely need to take a break to sort of consolidate our applications, our use cases. and we shouldn't, yeah, we definitely need some time. We shouldn't rush it. And those expecting, hey, quick turnaround, I think it's just opium. We need at least, you know, two years or something to go back to the drawing board and improve on what we have already.

And then even the old concepts will be power charged by that. Two years. Yeah, I mean, is that a number that you just kind of threw out there? Or is that like something that you kind of thought about? Yeah, that's how I feel. I mean, it's, I mean, you're starting from when. I don't know. If this is, if we just do it in a very, you know, like one potato two potato method,

if this is 2018, map it to the day to the month, then we got, we got two more years to go. And I, you know, I'm okay with three more years. So, guys, I just want to talk about just really quick on the years, though, okay? So like two years, are you also, like, are you sure that's not crypto-hopium? I mean, I just, you just went back to like the 2000 crash, right? And then we had 9-11 after that, okay? Amazon lost 95% of its value after the dot-com crash, 95% down. And it took seven years, so 2008 for it to reach all-time high.

Yeah, but that's normal markets. Crypto moves faster. Yeah, I said at least two years. So that's, yeah, it's funny that we're also dependent on the on the macro. But I also think that we in crypto, we're sort of even worse in terms of than than traditional finance people in terms of being being various and being sort of just apocalyptic thinking and whatnot because we inherently, don't trust the markets, as in, you know, the traditional markets, the central banks and whatnot. And when we see this, the things are not going that well, we're immediately in overdrive saying,

oh, this is going to hell. Like, we're done. The system will collapse. And so maybe we shouldn't be that pessimistic and we should think about better apps. So the one narrative that people have latched on to is. the Fed pivot, which is an external narrative. That's something that is outside of the control of the crypto industry. It's not something we're innovating on.

It's not some sort of new crypto frontier. It's the macro. And we are just hoping for the Fed to pivot. And I think people are kind of placing their bets as to like, all right, when the Fed does pivot, which assets are going to like rocket out of that bare market once the Fed has formerly pivoted. But that's really the seemingly like large looming,

like catalyst or narrative of a catalyst that we have and it is the macro and so fisky i'll throw this one to you and maddie i want your thoughts on it too is like is it even possible to have a internally native crypto narrative while macro is so overwhelmingly loud like does is this is this silence of the crypto narrative here until macro smooths over and we stop being at war um i definitely think it's possible and I also think that we even today we have some crypto narratives, but they are not narratives that move the prices. These are the narratives that kind of make us argue or agree on what crypto is about. Like currently I would say one of the dominant narratives in crypto is this OFC sanction list and censorship connected to it and it's a narrative that probably won't move the

price directly in next couple of months, but it can have huge impact on markets, on how crypto works and potentially on prices too, in general, in like next two years or more, as Mati said. So I think that we just deal with different types of narratives, the narratives that make us care more, but don't make us as rich as fast. That being said, like, it's funny with Fed Pivot and all of that, how for the last 10 years, mostly Bitcoin maximalist, but also crypto enthusiasts in general, kind of were betting on Fed, not doing any pivot or anything, just like failing. They were betting on Fed failing. They were betting on US dollar, let's say losing its global power and crypto kind of replacing that. I mean,

in retrospect, this ideal feels a bit maybe like childish or naive. At the same time, I still kind of feel that there is a slight chance that in longer time horizon, maybe like one or two decades, we will see dollar not, you know, kind of being as strong as it is today, like in the global scene. So that's for me is probably more interesting question. The less interesting question is what Fed will do in next one to three months or even a year, because that's kind of predictable. they will keep curbing inflation until the economy is hurting too much and then they'll switch. That's like they will tell you the sky is blue and you look up and the sky is really blue and you still try to figure out if we are not lying.

It's pretty obvious. It's pretty obvious what they try to do, what they will try to do, what they will kind of try to influence, but it's not obvious what else will happen that will have probably bigger impact on the market. And one of the question is like, will happen with geopolitical situation in Asia and in Russia and Ukraine. What will happen with US dollar in this world where many big countries are no longer so happy to hold its reserves in dollar?

You know, these kinds of questions are probably much more impactful, but their certainty is much lower than what that will do. And of course, when Fed decides to stop curbing inflation and start printing more money, we are going up. It's not really an interesting question to me or like topic of debate. Matt, do you have any thoughts on this? What was the original question? I got lost when Fiske was speaking.

Does crypto, do we even need to be bothered with producing our own narratives while macro is just so overwhelmingly in the driver's seat? Well, I think that one potential narrative, but it's a macro narrative, is for the longest time we have been talking about uncorrelated asset class and then after 2020, we're like, yeah, this is this is very much correlated. And, you know, if you decouple, you will decouple in the downside, I think. Like when the markets are going down, you know, this is a time for crypto to shine. I mean, this has not materialized.

But if we're able to not fall further, if the, the markets fall down, then we have something that we can grab onto. And it's a, it's a macro thing. But I think that from within, we need better ideas and we need better products, even though it's hard to admit right now, because, you know, for us on the inside, it's it's it's all you know magic but i think that we need to uh yeah sort of have a more impact on on normies like what sort of good did crypto do to to know to regular people outside of like giving them a four year for two months and then leaving in them in debt you know it's we have to be more reflective about you know sort of what we bring um to the world as a as an industry and That's why we shouldn't even care whether macro is doing well or not.

Because on one hand, this should be the time, you know, when the times are rough, you should come up with the greatest idea and then, you know, change it, right? We should come up with an idea that will not make us care about macro at all. All this macro talk is kind of making me feel a bit worried that we lost our independence, right? There was this meme circling around, you know, this meme where the guy is talking to the monkey and it's like, you're such a dumb animal. Yes, yes. And there was one when the monkey was like, you're waiting for the Fed to tell you how much value your anti-establishment digital currency will lose, right? This is not that good.

And, you know, people are saying that they're not worried about crypto that much compared to, 2018, right? Because there's so much money in the space. There's so many developers and whatnot. And actually, that makes me worry more because back then we were under pressure to create. Now we're kind of complacent. You still think we're complacent. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I think we're complacent. Maybe I'm just, you know, being too hard on the industry. But yeah, I do think that we need to. create sort of more than we do. And, you know, I feel that it's getting better now than, you know, a couple months ago because people are suddenly having new ideas because the old ones don't work. But yeah, even though it's funny because when I when I speak to people from traditional finance that are now, say, invested in crypto or have been following in crypto, they're like, yeah, crypto is who just that, 2018, they were like, crypto's gone. Like, this is not doing anything.

Now, they're optimistic about crypto. You even hear guys like Drach, right? Stanley Drac Miller talking about this. Well, I'm more concerned. You're more concerned than Stanley Drucken Miller is about crypto's longevity. Not necessarily longevity, because we have like the high-level use cases, but maybe those really functional applications, that that free that we're talking about like that is something that sort of I need to see more

from people I want to see more creativity on the founder's side I want to see totally new application because I remember 2017 2018 even 2017 like people were even though you know those ideas were crazy because we didn't even have a tech to kind of support that but these days it was you know, kind of, you know, very much sort of, I would say, self-referential token feedback loops that kind of make you feel like, you know, this is value being created, but was it, you know? I think you brought to lay another thing in my mind, Maddie, as you're talking about, that's a differentiator from 2018. And this is interesting because I'd not thought about it in this way before,

but in 2018, I think builders, particularly DFI builders, were hungry. a lot hungrier maybe than they are now. Like the depths of that bare market was just like, you know, Hayden Adams and Uniswap couldn't fund a team. He got a grant for like $80,000, $10,000,000 at first from the Ethereum Foundation, right? It was just him hacking away hungry to prove out an idea. I still think the private markets, like the VC money, is definitely flowing into early stage projects.

And you're right. I don't actually, I've never thought about this, but I don't actually see quite the hunger. Let me ask you one other thing before we do want to get to the bright spots here and what the future narratives might be. And I know you've got a lot of thoughts on that, the two of you do. But one question I had for you is just a particular asset, which is the token.

Call it the defy token. That has gone from troths of disqualts of disqualification. allusionment to like peaks of euphoria, hasn't it? I remember in 2018, tokens are dead. They're all futility tokens. Nobody buy a token. Well, it turned out that was probably among the best times in crypto history to ever buy a particular set of tokens. Synthetics, link came out of that world with massive highs. Once again, it feels like people are fading tokens. And I see the reasons, right? Bad governance. It's killing tokens. There's no value accrual mechanisms. I even think regulatory has a massive effect on this. SEC regulatory threats. Now we've seen in the U.S.

anyway, the CFTC coming after Dow token holders in a particular way. Are tokens dead? What do you think about that? First, I'll throw it back to Maddie and then maybe Fisk. Yeah, I don't, I actually was a After 2018, I called it token minimalist. I changed my mind after seeing synthetics. I think that was a big breakthrough for me personally and for us as an investment firm too. So I don't think tokens are dead. I think that we went through an iteration cycle on tokens. Now we have much more information about what is a good token or what my,

a good token look like and I think that in the next couple of months years will come with better models because it has been mostly a user acquisition tool these days and it's time to change it to bake in more of the value accrual perhaps and and all of that so I I think that it's it's going to get better the tokens the token models will will only get better and as the next iteration cycle ahead of us. So tokens, I think, will stay here for, yeah, it's a new asset class. Fisk, what's your take on tokens? We can have a round two. Yeah, like bearish current model of governance tokens. That being said, most of the arguments you hear about them is that they are basically just placeholders for future sort of token value

capture and kind of deflection of responsibility from deaths to users to be able to say that the project is decentralized in the face of regulators, which I mean, I'm not sure I'm not a legal expert. I would also say that the FI founders in general are much more jaded, not only because of regulatory backlash against DFI, but also because the actual best stuff that happened in last couple of years, like before that when Hayden was building uniswap, it was just this cool thing everybody can use to provide liquidity. Now defy's like this thing, this like minefield where if you built your thing with some buck or something that some like vulnerability, someone will exploit it and your users can potentially use millions of dollars and people kind of didn't know about that back then or

didn't care because it didn't happen but now it happens regularly and I would say that that's why DeFi founders are not as bold as they used to, or it's one of the reasons. I mean, the big visions are definitely moving out of DeFi into some different verticals, which we can talk about later. But yeah, tokens are definitely not dead. They will just, yeah, they will evolve. It's like an evolution. Insect is not, insects are not that.

They just evolve into different types of bugs and flies and stuff that is better. suitable to adapt in new environments. Yeah, and they will always be. And tokens are representation of anything, fungible, non-fungible, social, hardcore economically backed by any cash flow or whatever we might ascribe them to or some like assets in reserve or I don't know what else.

So tokens are here to stay, they will evolve and there will be probably a couple of models that we will have 90% of the use cases, and then there will be long tail of weird use cases. But yeah, definitely, I think I'm more bullish on tokens than ever, just because we see multiple successful models. And yeah, I'm actually most bullish on those that are not afraid to kind of break some laws in a way, because these are the ones that kind of carry the space forward.

If you need to design your token around some particular regulation, I think you are just like doing your community, and your project is a huge disservice because then you are optimizing for the wrong things. And yeah, I know it's hard for me to say and know the founders don't want to end up in jail, but at the same time, innovation kind of needs to move faster than regulation at all times. Otherwise, we are dead. I really like that metaphor of tokens are insects because there's in that whole like part of the animal kingdom does mutate really, really fast.

and that's what we saw coming out of 2017 into the bear market of 2020 is like some tokens mutated and then they pumped like a thousand X like SNX, Link, Lend turned into AVE. And so Fiski, I really like that mental model to latch on to. Maybe I'll ask you a few of these potential tokens that you see doing some good mutations in the bear market. But also, Maddie in your blog post, you threw out some candidate narratives out there that we might be able to latch on to. defy 2.0, Web3 Commerce, Web3 Social, Decentralized Science. And I also want to ask you guys about where Bitcoin narratives land? What is Bitcoin's biggest, like, narrative?

Where is it in the world of latching onto like a purpose? So I want to get to all these conversations and more right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. In all of my years in crypto, I've never been hacked, scammed, or lost money to a thief. And a lot of that credit goes to my ledger hardware wallet. The Ledger NanoX and the Ledger NanoS plus hardware wallets allow users like you and me to secure and manage all of our crypto assets and our NFTs, all with the security of storing users' private keys offline and out of reach from hackers. The Ledger NanoX is the perfect hardware wallet for managing your crypto and NFTs on the go because it connects to your phone with Bluetooth and has a nice big screen for easy transaction readings. Ledger has also upgraded the iconic Ledger NanoS and made the new Ledger NanoS device more Defi and NFT-friendly, making it the perfect.

hardware wallet for beginners. Ledger has truly maximized for both ease of use and security. So discover which ledger device is best suited for your journey by going and visiting shop. dot ledger.com. If you've been listening to Bankless, you know that we're fans of the modular blockchain thesis. The idea that blockchains will separate execution from data availability and consensus, allowing all three to become the best versions of themselves. And Fuel has built the fastest modular execution layer in the industry. By supporting parallel transaction execution, fuel unlocks significantly faster throughput for the web-free world. Fuel also goes beyond the limitations of the EVM,

with its own Fuel VM, which is more efficient and optimized, opening up the design space for developers. And lastly, Fuel brings a powerful developer experience with its own domain-specific language, sway, and a supportive tool chain called Fork. With Fuel, you can have the benefits of smart contract languages like Solidity, while adopting the improvements made by the Rust Tooling ecosystem, letting the fuel development environment go beyond the limitations of the EVM.

If you want to learn more, there's a link in the show notes to see how you can get involved with a fuel network. The layer two era is upon us. Ethereum's layer two ecosystem is growing every day, and we need layer two bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a layer two life. Across is the fastest, cheapest, and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about high fees or long wait times. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by Uma's optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens between Layer 2's and Ethereum. Across its critical ecosystem infrastructure and Across V2 has just launched.

Their new version focuses on higher capital efficiency, layer two to layer two transfers, and a brand new chain with Polygon, all while prioritizing high security and low fees. You can be a part of Across's story by joining their Discord and using Across for all of your layer two transferring needs. So go to across.com to quickly and securely bridge your assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Polygon, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. All right, Bankless Nation, we are back with Mattie and Fis. talking about doing a little soul searching for where we need to be in the crypto world, perhaps over the next six months, 18 months, three years. And I want to start this second half of this conversation with Bitcoin narratives, the Bitcoiner narrative out there for what is Bitcoin in this like wartime macro bearish economy.

So I think everyone realized as soon as like it was November, I think, and the Fed kind of signaled that it was going to start getting pretty aggressive with interest rates. and all the crypto markets just went super south, people lost the Bitcoin is an inflation hedge narrative. And it doesn't really have, it hasn't really picked up anything in its place. So how do you guys think about Bitcoin in this current phase of the world and what its narratives is and what its role is to play in the world?

Has it lost its way like the rest of the crypto industry? Fisk, I'll throw this one to you. Yeah, Bitcoin as an inflation hedge is very, interesting topic to me because I kind of feel that Bitcoin was a good inflation hedge, but it's from trend the inflation. And I think in this regard, like Bitcoin maximalist, at least this Bitcoin Maximarist that are more like Austrian economics educated, they were talking about like how like this monetary policy of Fed and the world we live in when it comes to, you know, you know, you.

using depth as main growth vehicle, how like this can blow up and Bitcoin was growing throughout this the whole period of this criticism going on. And I feel that it was a good inflation hedge just from trendy inflation. It was better inflation hedge than stocks that also went up. But if you held Bitcoin, you would be now, like if you bought Bitcoin when this critic started to point out of this sort of monetary behavior, or is unsustainable, you would now be, like, hedged for life, right? If you bought, like, insubstantial amount. So it just depends how you look at it, but I would say that it's not exposed hedge against

inflation. It's like, you know, front-running hedge or it used to be. I'm not sure what we'll happen now. Narrative-wise, I kind of feel that the big guys are like full-on, full-steam on Bitcoin, Drucken Miller, Ray Dalio, even, who was a huge crypto-sceptic. mentioning Bitcoin as an alternative to like fiat currencies in some of the podcast he does. And these guys have like years of most of traditional finance world. So I would say that narrative wise, these like old powerful smart dudes will kind of leave the crowd

to discover Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is still the biggest crypto brand, right? Like when you ask random or me about crypto, they will tell you about Bitcoin about how much energy it burns. And maybe they know about this other thing called. etteroom or something, but yeah, most of them will still like mostly talk about Bitcoin and ask about Bitcoin even to these days. So I don't see Bitcoin going away narrative wise. What if we steal the argument a little bit though, Fisk? Rather than saying inflation hedge,

because I think that distracts people. It's like debasement hedge. Okay, because CPI inflation is kind of different. It's like a lot of factors that drive that. But like debasement. That is the Bitcoin, you know, bowl thesis is if a country and the fiat systems are printing money, that is the supply of their base money is going up, Bitcoin will hedge over the long run, not over the short to medium term, but over the long run against that disd basement. Do you still think that that thesis holds? I'm not sure because I don't know how much, how big this debasement can be and how much growth Bitcoin has. Again, these big guys like Drew and Dalio think about Bitcoin as sort of a competitor to gold in this regard and they are saying that maybe the reasonable market cup of

Bitcoin is some percentage of market cup of gold, something like 10, 20, 30%. And I would say, I haven't done the numbers, but I would say Bitcoin is kind of close to that already. So I'm not sure how much upside is left from this regard. I don't know, like I feel that Bitcoin saturated in terms of being this investment or like speculation that can give you like 100 or nothing, as it used to be the case a couple of years ago and now it's more, it behaves more like major tech stock. So that's kind of weird space Bitcoin is in right now. But I think like narrative-wise, it can have multiple narratives going on for it in this world where maybe some countries even trust banks or some other governments or the fiat currencies less than they used to.

I just don't have enough insight into this world of global geopolitics when it comes to like settlement of currencies to be able to give you any coherent thesis about Bitcoin becoming some sort of pseudo settlement layer for some international commodity trade or something like that. But I can see that happening. Narrative-wise, I just think that Bitcoin is a great toy for Tratfi, because you cannot really do that much with it in a non-custodial way. So all these custody providers will push Bitcoin.

And they are the ones that's been the narratives in front of their clients. And I can see that happening and kind of carrying Bitcoin a bit forward. But I don't think it's as interesting as it used to be from like this capability of creating new narratives. Maybe I'm wrong and I will be happily wrong. but maybe my imagination is not as great as it used to be, or maybe I'm just focusing on other things. But I just don't see any super new, exciting narrative around Bitcoin happening apart from what traditional finance pushes.

And Thratfi is generally very unimaginative. So there is that. Maddie, do you have any thoughts to add on to what Fiske was saying about Bitcoin narratives? I would just say that Bitcoin at its core is a sort of defensive ideology and a technology that, I mean, I would say the narrative is about way back in the 70s we screwed up and we have to go back and change all of it. So it's very revankless in nature. Whereas the rest of crypto, especially, you know, ETH, Defi and other ecosystems are much more

optimistic and they're not as defensive. They're thinking about the future, whereas Bitcoin is kind of thinking about. the past and what went wrong. So in that respect, like these these two are not the same, right? They're very much correlated in price, but they're not the same. And Bitcoin, all it can do is search for a macro narrative. So it's a very macro reactionary, whereas we should be more independent than the rest of crypto looking to the future. And Bitcoin sort of, it feels like it cannot do that. I mean, probably, you know, liquidity, because liquidity so it will still be a thing it's potential I think Ryan called it the

basement hedge I think that can still be valid but I don't think there's too much to talk about we just have to wait what what the market will do and what they will come up with in terms of their narrative market fit so Maddie in your blog post you put out a bunch of candidate narratives that I think we want to run through but before we do that I want to lead into that part of this conversation with a theory that I want to run by you guys. This is my like surface area theory for bull markets. And if we go back in time back to, you know, when Maker Dow was being built, first there was Maker. We had Dye. It was a decentralized stable coin. That was like something,

you know, cool that we could point to. Then later came compound. Later came Uniswap. Avey got really big. DY, DX came out. Like there was a bunch of just like things that started to happen. during 2018 to 2020. And it was like, it's like laying Tinder. It's like the forest was growing. There's a brush burning up. And just like Tinder was being laid all over the place. And even during this time, I remember being in the Ethereum space trying to shout out to the rest of crypto, not even the outside world, but to the rest of crypto saying, hey, why aren't you guys paying attention to this defy thing more? Like even the crypto industry itself hadn't really like latched on to it. But we had all of these applications that had like so much surface area.

Uniswap was surface area for trading tokens. MakerDAO put out the decentralized stable coin, which ended up being like a very commonly used asset inside of defy summer. Like there was a surface area, surface area, the application layer of Ethereum where this bull market hadn't really happened yet because there's just ICOs had just a bunch of surface area. And so that's kind of like my model for how this next bull market, however it comes out, will look is that there will be a bunch of Tinder being laid over the next one, two, three years.

And it's going to look like a bunch of surface area. And this is why I'm particularly bullish on something like ZKEVMs with like ultra low transaction fees opening up new brand new use cases that we haven't seen. But it's going to, it's got to be in the app layer, right? Because bull markets always start in the app layer, uh, because that's what we saw defy summer was. DeFi summer was an app layer bull market. Then they alt layer one like competition, avalanche, Solana tried to, and also after the NFT, also an app layer bull market and Ethereum, then like all of these Alt Layer 1, Solana, Avalanche, like a Phantom, had these protocol bull markets.

But first, first app layer. And so I'm wondering if you got, if you accept that as like a model. Like first we have like all of this Tinder being laid in an app layer. Something happens. Some catalyst happens. It was COVID. That was the catalyst for the last bull market. A bunch of money printing.

Sadly, sadly a macro thing. But that lit the match. and then like, oh, we had Defy Summer and then that triggered the NFT boom. And that was all on the app layer. And so as we go forward, and the idea to take away from this is, it's as we go forward into 2023, 2024, there's a bunch of new app layers out there. There's a bunch of like layer twos that are supporting all these low, cheap, easy transactions. And I'm hoping that the way that this plays out is like a bunch of just surface area gets built all over the place.

And then one day there's a catalyst and it ignites a bull market. and then we're off to the races once again. That's kind of my model for how these things forward. And Maddie, in your article with all these candidate narratives, I'm seeing a bunch of just surface area that could potentially ignite into a bull market. But before we get into those specific candidate narratives, I wonder how you resonate with that kind of idea of

this is how this bearer to bull market is going to go. Maddie, what do you think about that? So what you're saying is that we're going to build a bunch of the stuff, which will be useful but we'll not get that much attention but once there's a liquidity magic magic touch of liquidity in the markets then we're going to ignite it and it's going to be on fire that's what you're saying right yeah yeah i think that totally makes sense uh even like the fundamentals don't get recognized by the way they need some reflexive action and uh for that we need um sort of better i don't want to say macro environment but definitely we need

We need people not to be scared to invest and stuff and buy stuff. Fisk, any thoughts on this before we go into the actual specific candidate narratives? Yeah, I mean, I would say that the next bull run should be more about a player, like capturing and users. I mean, infrastructure is always moving forward and it's always being improved. and yeah, we will have many tools and many layers that will enable new use cases. But for me, now it starts to be much more about the apps and the things that people will interact with and it will materially improve their lives day to day. So, Maddie, the first candidate narrative that you put in your blog post was actual

DFI. Why is this a candidate narrative? And what is actual DFI? Well, it's actually something new. right? Meaning that it's the next level because I think DFI is is mostly this self-referential token feedback loop, yield and whatnot. And I think that what, what 2.0 could be, it could take it closer to potentially production economy.

It could, we could find a way how to create more sustainable yields. We can we can think about although this is a bit tricky and maybe not a good time to think about this but uncollateral as lending or you know under collateralized lending um i think that we're ready for uh something that uh olympus dow has been trying to do and that's uh sort of fiat independent reserve currency i don't think they're that there yet but there might be other people and other projects building this so yeah i guess that um we need we need more than just tokens to pump to say that this is this is a new era so much more um much more utility for uh for regular people not only crypto heads and defy has been rather um you know just inward looking and we can think about how to make it

more accessible to the real con. The way I go back to kind of defy is like, if we're really going to eat finance, then we have to eat finance, right? And the way we've for a long time captured this on bankless is kind of through different money verbs, like things people want to do with their money. And so right now I feel like defy has,

we have the ability to send it. Now you can send it in stable coin format. Okay, cool. We've got send as a money verb and pay. There's lots of progress we can make on pay. And then we've also done some borrowing and lending. But that's only been like collateralized borrowing and lending. And most of the real world borrowing and lending that you do, say on a credit card, like if you're a consumer, it's all credit based.

So what you're talking about is uncollateralized lending is like bringing credit systems to defy. We haven't even tapped into that. And then the other thing I guess we do in defy fairly well is like trading. We scratched the surface and maybe some, you know, derivatives and that sort of thing. But, like, I think what you're saying with Defy 2.0 is it's not going to be a different, like, more gamified, ponzied sort of scheme to make token number go up. It's not going to be liquidity farming. The new DeFi 2.0 is actually going to be building things that eat traditional finance that real world people want to go do. Is that what you're saying?

Am I on to something there? Yeah, I think that is that is spot on. I would maybe add that we have built tools for finance, but we need also tools for commerce, and that could be a powerful link where if you have actual commerce going on in chain, that gives you much more space to create new financial products that are not just, you know, that could be related to some cash flows and those type of things. Well, let's talk about Web3 Commerce because that was another possible future, narrative you mentioned, getting people to spend money inside of the blockchain seems to be

maybe a crucial element. I know we've long talked about the use case of being able to buy Starbucks with your Bitcoin, right? It's probably not going to come in that form. But I think you've mentioned a couple of other forms it might take, GameFi being one, commerce in GameFi, maybe tokenized IP as well. Can you talk a bit more about this commerce use case? So it's very vague, I would say, at this point. I do believe that Gameify offers a low-hanging fruit in that respect, so purchasing end-game items. We were discussing this maybe 2019 with the team that we can imagine

that you have games built for actual items that you purchase. So you can take an item that you've done. bought in-game throughout different games. So that it's given more powers. And I think that it's something that people would spend money on. Obviously, it's just entertainment. And the question is where we want to just entertain ourselves to death. But I would definitely want to see some potentially a link to World of Atoms and commerce

that, you know, sort of, I don't know how web-free. commerce could facilitate commerce better than the existing one. But maybe I'll leave this to Fiske because he is bullish on the Metaverse thing. And that is commerce for sure involved in that one. So maybe he is an idea. So I mean, we tapped into multiple things at the same time. I would kind of separate them into like payments. It's funny to me that payments was probably the first use case.

everyone thought will be massive in crypto and it never really happened. I mean, we can pay for stuff and we can send money to our friends or even to some vendors, but it's not something that's like big at this point, even 10 years in. And we have stable coins. We have blockchains with low fees. We have all that. And we still are not regularly paying with crypto or with using blockchain as an underlying infrastructure at least. We are not really doing that. And I really wonder why, like it feels that traditional fintech and banking, rails have a huge mold in people's heads, like about how we pay and how we use like cards and payments, which are maybe reversible, maybe, maybe thinking about crypto payments should be thinking in which cases

we benefit from having irreversible payments. And if we don't benefit from having irreversible payments within commercial context. Can we build layers, application-specific chains, or tools to make payments under some conditions reversible? That's maybe one question. Maybe other questions, as is the last mile adoption, like are payments today really something that needs improvement? When we have cards, we have Apple Pay, we have all this.

What does crypto bring to make them 10 times better for people to adopt it? I think there are ways that crypto makes payments better, but I'm not sure how much better. And when it comes to Metaverse, I just think that we need like a regular economy, which is based around digital assets and which is largely non-speculative, meaning that there are many people who want to build, not build, who want to buy and hold these like Metaverse assets and have these digital items, not for speculative. equation purposes, but because they really want to hold them, they want to collect them, they want to use them, they want to flex with them.

And when this economy is created, I think many of generations Z and younger generations will kind of be naturally inclined to start using crypto more and more as financial tool rather than just purely speculative tool. And then it can spill out into other areas connected to physical world, which you'll at them mostly to these young generations, but over the kids, you know, young generations are becoming all the generations or they enter productive age. And I think this is how we get the adoption, not necessarily pushing this mainstream, real world crypto use cancings on boomers, but kind of building the world for the future

generations and kind of making peace with the fact that my dad will probably never need crypto to pay for anything. Maybe we need it. One thing that we definitely are, know that is happening is that brands, big brands, are leaning into NFTs and tokenizing IP very strongly. We saw a job report, job listing for Disney, for Disney to basically more or less pivot the whole entire company into being like token, uh, NFT, enabled, whatever that means. But they have this job listing out there that's asking, like, hey, for this is relevant to like Disney parks, Disney, like media, Disney movies, Disney IP. We need an NFT person to guide the company into like this world. And that's Disney. And like, Adidas is already

doing this. And so I'm wondering, one of the candidate narratives that you put in there, Maddie, was tokenized IP. And also Fisky, I think you were talking about how like so much of of crypto has been like internally facing like, hey, let's build crypto products for the crypto Dgens, which is like fun for us on the inside, but it doesn't reach out to the outside. I'm wondering if you guys think that it's possible that we actually, like the next phase of crypto development doesn't actually come from the inside. And that's actually how we actually on board a bunch of people is that we actually don't have crypto natives building crypto native products.

We actually have normal companies, normal brands, doing stuff in crypto, but building it for their users, their fans, their their foundations. And that seemed to be a much more reasonable way to onboard much more people rather than like, hey, like go put Ether into MakerDAO and borrow die. Instead, it's just like, oh, buy this like SpongeBob NFT. And the on-ramps there seem to be much stronger. So I'm wondering how strong you think that this potential narrative, if you will, but also just like fundamental driver of crypto use cases might actually play out into the future.

Maddie, what do you think about this? So I think it's a powerful way to onboard new users, but they will not come up with new stuff. They will only adopt the ways and the models that we will lay out for them. So it's very important. And we have sort of we came up with a bunch of good ideas that mostly lifestyle brands are using. these days. But I think this cycle will bring, will potentially bring new ones that,

you know, more brands and more companies will be able to adopt and onboard new users into crypto without them necessarily coming into crypto, right? They will never be crypto heads or crypto browser. There will just be users of applications that are of value to them. And that is a, that is one way of putting it. And I think that it's good that we have this wave of adoption. That's for sure.

I think that's such a good point, Maddie, that the established brands aren't really going to innovate, though, here. They're just going to sort of copy the things that the builders on the frontier in crypto are actually doing. And so they're going to notice, oh, that Cryptopunks thing is successful. Oh, bored apes? Really interesting. Now, how can we emulate that for our brand? So they're actually not going to be, like, building kind of the new things. they're going to look to us, the crypto industry, to really lead the way.

One last use case maybe to touch on is Web3 Social. What do you think about this, Maddie? Like, what's happening here? We see things like Lens, for example, that are forging new directions. We also see Meta, Facebook, integrating NFTs into their platform. What is Web3 Social? Do you think that this is a powerful narrative that could rise in the 2022 bear market? I think it's a very interesting idea or a narrative because everyone agrees or everyone.

Well, there's a consensus out there that we need a next generation of social media or we need to improve on the existing ones. And I think that it's when A6 and Z, when they talk about VAP3, they talk about like breed, right? And I think that in social media, it's more like separation of read and write. Because we've created this powerful platforms that probably will be, will be either broken down by regulators or by innovation. And usually it's innovation that kind of gets them. And even though, you know, meta is doing something, I don't really care or Twitter is doing something, I don't necessarily care that much.

So I think that, you know, today you come to Twitter or substack and you publish there, right? They own your graph, your distribution, and users can read on the platform, and you can only write and publish on that very platform. And what I think could happen is that you will be able to write your ideas or produce your content on various platforms that will be competing to provide the best production experience, and then there will be other platforms that will compete to provide the best distribution. So you write an essay, you want to make it an NFD, so be it. you make this essay into an NFT and then, you know, this tool would enable you to write it is, you know, it's a tool, but you're able to sort of make it this NFT thing.

And perhaps there will be other that will have, you know, better, better experience, better graphics, additional things. And once you export it on the spriting platform, you will be able to attach different identifiers to it. You create an on-chain identity for that, for this piece. And it can have various attestations. And so the identity of the piece and the author can be defined by these attestation. And this could be anything like from I'm followed by Vitalik on Twitter to, it can even say

I'm Mati on Twitter. But there might be other sort of playful ones and more sophisticated, like I'm a first 100 user on lens or something like that. And then you have these read platforms that will compete to distribute this, this NFD essay with these atestations. read platforms are basically different relevance algorithms that readers that that readers readers use to sort of search for the most relevant content to them and uh you know read platforms and right platforms they will get a cut from whatever you know the monetization you choose or you know

from the traffic that you get um and and this way you as a content producer are a client of these various platforms and you're not a you know sort of a slave to to one or um or um you're not at a mercy of one. And of course, there will be different platforms focusing on different readers, left, right, Bitcoin, eat, maxi, whatever. The point is that no one owns an exclusivity

to distribute and, you know, no one is banning speech or anything like that. So I guess that is something that I envision. The question is how economic it'll get, what are the incentives, what are the monetization methods? But to me, it's definitely a separation of read and write and indexing this contact through a new novel protocols. That's fascinating.

The separation of read and write, you didn't even mention the own verb there, which is kind of the token verb there. And that's a reemphasis because I think others that have approached Web3 social have bled with kind of token first. Maybe that's not the way to do it. I mean, we've talked about a few interesting possible narratives of the future. And when we say narratives, we don't want people to get distracted by that term because I think what we're talking about is fundamentals that become a price-driving narratives into the futures. But first, you have to look at the fundamentals. I know that's what you guys do at Z-Fi Prime.

Maybe I should kind of leave this as we start to close out with some of the final words in your post there, Maddie, which is. I think maybe the most exciting part. You write this. There may be other narratives that will carry us into the future. As many founders are working on, that many founders are working on that I can't think of. It does not mean that if things failed in the past,

they can't work in the future. It's best when we actually get surprised by the imagination of builders. In the meantime, let's not get overly pessimistic. I love that line. It's best when we actually get surprised by the imagination of builders. We are probably not anticipating the future use cases that will spur on the 2024,

2025, a crypto bull market, are we? I think we will get surprised as we have these crypto investors, crypto journeys in this space again and again. Parting advice, Fiscanties, could you give us your best advice for someone who's listening this episode and they want to stick around? They're a settler in crypto. They're not leaving. What's your best advice for someone looking for the next new thing to bet on?

How can they find the right bets in this sort of environment? Fiscanties, what would you say? I would say, first of all, walk off from Twitter. Oh, that's hard. Because it becomes a huge echo chamber, especially during bear market, when there are less people and the ones there are very jaded and salty most of the time. It's like, I don't remember last time I read really new and like, let's say, non-mainstream idea on Twitter. So yeah, logging of Twitter definitely helps.

And yeah, then just, I don't know, like, for builders, I guess it's just like trying to solve interesting problems that may, that people may have around them even. and for people who just want to like bet or invest, I guess that's much harder right now because when you just go scroll through Coingecode, all the ideas you see there there are all the projects that are either successful or not, but you don't really see any inspiration for something groundbreaking new.

So I just guess, I don't know, like read stuff, read weird stuff that's maybe not even directly about crypto, but about technology in general. For example, and I'm not saying this is something that will bring us any new groundbreaking narrative, but one way to look at crypto gaming or investments into crypto native gaming, which is like one of possible narratives that can carry us, is to not go to crypto conferences, but go to gaming conferences and talk to game designers and gamers there. So maybe doing something like that, stepping out of the crypto bubble and looking around what's happening in the world. I'm not now saying anything about like bearish macro, but looking around in different trends, in different other tech or innovation verticals. Yeah, if there is any, I mean, everyone should have some sort of passion that is not directly

connected to crypto or trading. And I don't know if the passion is health and biotechnologies or something, whether then definitely that's one way to start looking or this can be the lenses for you to start looking at crypto with like. How could I use this weird set of tools that crypto is right now to improve something from these other areas? What could be interesting in that regard? And then I would say like DAOs are interesting in general, not in a way that you can invest in them easily or in their infrastructure. But starting a DAO should be super easy.

I think the most innovative way for non-crypto people to get into crypto is to just like, form some sort of DAO around anything interesting, essentially making a Discord group with some money under its management that can finance stuff or play with it. So like joining any sort of interesting DAO and be collaborative there, I think is advice I give all the time because I feel it's timeless. And I'm not saying that this is something that will make you a lot of money easily, or maybe you will be even, you will become a bit jaded because the DAO will not be as functional as you imagined, because it's to the centralized, there is no leadership, but at least you know how the sausage is made

and then you can have better idea about, you know, what will be the next thing because you see what failed and how it felt. So I guess this, but it's hard. I would say that anything that influences like us even talk about may not necessarily be the big thing, and the big things are almost always something that people don't really expect that easily, but let's see. Log off Twitter, start a dab.

stop listing to all the bears, cross-pollinate, get out of the crypto bubble. That's Fiscanti's advice. Maddie, same question to you. How do people survive the bear market and come out stronger? And how do they find the next big thing during these times? I think the most natural thing is don't try. Just don't push it. I would say follow your curiosity, not the money trail.

Do not let the money trail determine your opinion on things. sometimes it's actually those things that are not under the light, a spotlight that are the most interesting ones or the breakthrough. And I think that it's important to realize that I think Chris Dixon, he wrote this a long time ago. He said that what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in 10 years. and because you're not a builder, it doesn't mean that you cannot become a builder. Everyone can become a builder. And I think that if you see something that should be built,

just build it. And don't focus on resources, but focus on the creativity. And yeah, I guess that's my advice. Well, ended there fantastic advice. And I will say everyone who I know who's been early on anything, certainly been early on crypto, got there as a result of following business.

curiosity, this innate interest for the subject matter. And I think that's the best way to find the next big thing, as it has always been. Maddie Fiscanties, thank you so much for joining us. I think we have some more clarity on the next big crypto narrative, what that might look like into the future. We appreciate you guys. Thank you for having us. Thank you, guys. Action items for you, Bankless Nation. We will include a link to the next big crypto narrative that is Viscanti's post, excuse me, Maddie's post, and it's an excellent on his substack. It's called Wrong a Lot. So it's okay to be wrong a lot as well.

But I don't think he's wrong on this one. A lot to be optimistic about for the future of crypto. Of course, risks and disclaimers, guys, my time to tell you, ETH is risky. So is Bitcoin. So is Defi. You could definitely lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey.

stay curious