Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Aleksandr Bulkin & Jake Brukhman: CoinFund – Crypto-Investing by Community Building

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

CoinFund is one of the earliest crypto-funds to have taken shape, forming in early 2016. The fund is well known for running an active Community Slack, conducting great podcast interviews with cryptocurrency projects and an emphasis on building network nodes / services. We are joined by Jake Brukhman, CEO, and Alexander Bulkin, Chief Alchemist, to discuss their latest thoughts on investing in the cryptocurrency space. We cover a wide variety of themes such as their opinions on the “fat protocol hypothesis,” thesis on value capture in the cryptocurrency space, their efforts to build network nodes; and their effort to build an open source token-less technology that allows entrepreneurs to launch their blockchains. Topics covered in this episode: Coinfund’s history What is a cryptofund? Coinfund approach to investing in the cryptocurrency space Generalised mining – what it is, and how it offers cryptofunds a competitive advantage The ADAPT toolkit – a tokenless toolkit for rapid blockchain innovation Episode links: CoinFund Slack CoinFund interviews The ADAPT project Fat protocols are not an investment thesis Generalised mining CoinFund Twitter Thank you to our sponsors for their support: Simplify your hiring process & access the best blockchain talent . Get a $1,000 credit on your first hire at toptal.com/epicenter. The open, decentralized trading protocol for ERC20 tokens using the Dutch auction mechanism. More at epicenter.tv/dutchx. This episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst and Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/256

This episode of Epicenter is brought to you by TopTal. TopTal is addressing the talent shortage in the blockchain space, connecting companies of all sizes with the world's best blockchain engineers. If you're looking to scale your team, check out toptow.com slash Epicenter. And by DutchX, the fair and secure decentralized exchange platform by Knosis. To learn how you can build DAPS, which leverage DutchX's liquidity pool, visit epicenter.tv slash dutchex. Hi, welcome to Epicenter, a cryptocurrency podcast that interviews academics, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders in the cryptocurrency and blockchain technology spaces.

I'm Meher Roy, and today I'm really pleased to have a new host join me in this interview. That host is Friderica Ernst. Friderica, welcome to the Epicenter team. Hi. Good to be here. So tell us a bit about your background, Fridaica, and how you started in the blockchain space. Oh, yeah, sure, absolutely. So I'm actually a physicist by training.

So I studied physics and then did a PhD on low-dimensional complex quantum systems. And I quite enjoyed science. So I stayed in science for a little bit longer after that. I did a postdoc at Columbia University. And then a second one at Stanford and Slack. but other way I had actually become pretty interested in the blockchain space

so I heard about Bitcoin for the first time over five years ago, 2013 and at first I thought oh this is a load of whatever but it was it was enough to actually get me interested

and I started thinking about what money is and what actually makes money valuable. And the social contracts that actually underlie all of that. And at a similar time, two friends of mine started NOSUS. So I was actually close to NOSIS from the start. And after my time at Stanford decided to join them full time. So I became the COO. This was still before the token sales, so early last year.

And I've been in the blockchain space full time ever since and have never looked back. Wow, that must be quite a switch from low dimensional quantum physics to cryptocurrency. Yes and no. So I was an experimental physicist. I always really enjoyed building things. And blockchain is, I mean, it's a completely different subject matter. But a lot of the things that you do on a daily basis, you question a hypothesis, you build test systems,

you think about what could possibly go wrong. And that's actually very similar as in physics. So Fr Frithica, tell us about some of your interests in the cryptocurrency space and what kind of episodes could the listeners look forward to from you. Oh, I am super interested. in business models that were impossible beforehand. So basically capturing unused potentials in a way by actually making things peer to peer.

That's one of the things. I also love governance and governance mechanisms. And I think governance, you notice, I notice that it often goes wrong in politics, for instance. But then when you actually sit down and think about what could be done better. It's actually pretty hard to come up with a decent system. So in hindsight, I actually have to apologize in my head to a lot of people that I didn't

really say any of those things, but I thought, uh, this is a system that was devised in a weird way. And, um, uh, actually thinking about these things, uh, I find really pleasurable and, uh, and, uh, asking myself, um, how would I design this if, if, uh, if I had to design design this and kind of blockchain. gives you a platform for doing this. I also really like deep tech. So things like scalability and the sort of low-level language that you use for building stuff. Yeah, so I'm interested in just the actual building blocks and how they all fit together as well.

Cool. So I mean, I'm really looking forward to recording quite a few episodes. with you, Friserica. For our listeners, please do drop Friderica note as an iTunes review or to one of our email addresses. So feedback would be really good to get her started on her represented journey. Thank you. So today we are talking to Jake Brookman and Alexander Bulkin from CoinFund. CoinFund is one of the earliest crypto funds to have begun business. And it's been one of the, therefore it's one of the oldest crypto funds. So we're pleased to have Jake and Alex on the show. Jake, welcome. Thank you, Meherr. Pleasure to be here. Thank you, maher.

Cool. So Jake, of course, we've known each other for for a while now. We met at last DevCon and I'm familiar with your story. It's a very interesting story. So for our listeners, tell us about how you came into the blockchain ecosystem and why did you start this fund? Awesome. Thank you. I'm a, I'm a technologist. I worked on Wall Street in kind of the hedge fund world for a long time. I'm the kind of person that is an early adopter of technology. I got my first Bitcoin sent to me by a friend of mine in 2011. And at that point, I don't think I fully understood what it was, but I definitely started paying attention. And then around mid-2013, I, bought some Bitcoin on Coinbase in order to just make a random investment and hold it and see what happened. And that's what really got me engaged in the space. And then, you know, it wasn't really until the Ethereum white paper came out and I started, I read that and I started to think about what does it mean to have a world of many different kinds of digital assets. And I, you know,

along with Alex, kind of said, hey, maybe we should create a portfolio that diversifies the risk across all of these different kinds of assets that are likely to appear, given the advent of a platform like Ethereum. And so that became, you know, basically the basis for coin fund. And, you know, we launched just kind of a proof of concept fund in 2015. Fantastic. So you work at Triton Research prior to that, right? Yeah, so my career is basically kind of in the hedge fund world for about five years, and there was a technical product manager and engineer at Amazon.com working on ad tech products for two years. And then as a CTO of Triton Research, which is a company that did a lot of interesting financial modeling and private technology companies.

Cool, fantastic. Alex, so how did you get into the blockchain ecosystem? system and what made you want to start a fund? Yeah, so I blamed Jake, who, you know, started telling me about crypto in 2015 and then eventually showed me a couple of, at that time, they were extremely new and advanced ideas such as, you know, Ethereum and Auger. And when I combined together Ethereum and Auger in my mind, I kind of saw just how powerful this technology was to, you know, to be able to enhance. real-life interactions between people and provide alternative finance technology.

And so I got completely bought in. That came on the heels of me also studying some amount of organizational and social psychology, which made it extremely interesting for me to think about consensus in both technology space and the human space and how they kind of flow into each other. So I joined Jake in early 2016 and eventually you have golden to the coin fund full time. Cool. So as I understand it, like Jake and Alexander, you founded CoinFund with another co-founder and then like other people joined on board from the community Coin Fund created, right?

Well, we started, there was us and a couple more people who are. who were and still are slightly passive. They were just curious. But then Jake was the first to start and launch the Coin Fund Slack, which I think, by the way, Jake is the best community manager I've ever known and is extremely insightful in creating sort of community spaces, which I think is still our strongest point of Coin Fund. But Coinfront Slack very quickly became a source of information, ideas, people, allies, arguments, and so on and so forth.

So our current partner, Alex Felix, came as a Slack member and many other people we worked with down the road. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I personally appreciate Jake's community management. In fact, I have to admit that while preparing for many of the episodes at Epicenter, I have listened to Jake's podcast because he had the guest first. So I listened to that podcast and then like my epicenter questions were like, you know, like variations on Jake's questions or questions that I think Jake did not cover. So, you know, like actually like thank you Jake for your, you know, like almost invisible contributions to epicenter. Well, thank you very much. That's, it's very nice of you, Meher. But, you know, I think overall, like, if you, if you kind of go on the coin fund Twitter account, it says, you know, the best way to invest in a community is to be a part of it. And that was sort of a little tagline that we had from very early in the game, where we really, you know, figure that, like, in this very early space where it was really quite small still in 2016, you know, especially in the space where you're making investments in teams.

one of the most important things is to engage the communities. And from the, from the decentralization standpoint, a lot of these projects are creating open decentralized networks. And those networks depend on, you know, their constituents, their participants, the governance of those networks. I mean, so as an organization, we've always like been very community oriented. We, you know, we for example, throw regular quarterly happy hours here in New York, kind of get some face time with our community. We try to participate in our community events and also as investors we try to participate in the networks of the projects that we hold in our portfolio and that was by the way one of the things that drew me to

coin fund in the beginning is how easy it was to reach to all these teams doing these projects and ask them questions and pick their brains which is something we still do and and with not a small amount of pleasure. Cool. I think we've segued right into the coin fund discussion. So what would you say makes a crypto fund, a crypto fund? And would you mind disclosing what assets in what amount you have under management currently? We would mind disclosing that.

But I'm happy to talk about, I'm happy to talk about crypto funds. And, you know, ultimately from the very beginning, I thought that, a crypto fund is kind of a slightly different structure. So, you know, I think what we have seen happen over the last couple of years in blockchain, and I think most people in blockchain would agree, is that there's a new asset class here. This is the digital asset class. And whenever you have a new asset class, presumably it has different properties. And when it has different properties, presumably the structure of an investor or of a fund

that's participating in that asset class should be kind of commensurate with the asset class. So there's a few things that set it apart, right? For example, liquidity. Like you can invest in early stage projects, as we've seen many people do in 2017. And you get liquidity much faster using blockchain technology than you would in private equity or other forms of investments. And a lot of people, when they kind of come into the crypto fund space, they try to to put a box around crypto. They say, you know, we're going to do a VC fund in crypto, or we're going to do a hedge fund

in crypto, or we're going to do a fund of funds in crypto. But ultimately, like, we have always thought that you have to create a structure that conforms to the asset class and takes advantage of the features of the asset class that you're investing in. And so we've spent a lot of time thinking about what that structure is. And, you know, in short, a crypto fund, I think, is. is it's a little bit of a hybrid, right, between a VC fund in the sense that you're always, you know, at this stage in the game, you're working with early stage teams. You're really trying to push those projects for get them to production.

And it's very much a venture capital vocation. But at the same time, you're then dealing with assets that are liquid, the trade on 24-hour markets. And that's very much a hedge fund vocation. So at a high level, I think a crypto fund is sort of a hybrid structure between those two. And it keeps developing, right? So now, you know, as we talk about kind of staking in validation, I think the role of crypto funds begins to change even more. And just to add to that, I think if you want to do a good job in crypto investing, it requires you to be, a professional synthesizer in a space where past experience doesn't necessarily inform

a future experience because this space gets reinvented every six months or so. And so, you know, you asked me initially, why do I call myself chief alchemist? That's part of it. It's like, how do you look back and then project a picture into the future? which is a good picture, which is not going to be outdated by the new ideas, which does not prevent you from taking new directions.

As a crypto fund, you always have to be ready to go into a new direction, such as, for example, we're going to talk about generalized mining. That was a direction that became obvious to us early, but not last year, it came this year. And so you have to adjust

and you have to be stature. structurally fluid and you have to be fluid in your thinking. You can't just decide, oh, it's all protocols because that actually changes. Have you ever considered that one of the biggest factors holding back growth in the blockchain industry is the lack of talented available developers? By some estimates, there are up the 14 job openings for every single blockchain developer in the world. That's where TopTal guns in. TopTal is a global network of talent in business, technology, and design. And they pick their members by selecting only the top 3% of applicants. When you work with TopTal, you're getting the chem de la creme.

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To learn more, go to toptile.com slash epicenter, and we'd like to thank TopTal for the support. You're fairly flexible as to what to invest into. So how do you pick projects to invest into? Yeah. So on that point, just like the core principle of coin fund is that we're looking at a technology space that's, first of all, very nascent and constantly changing. Right. So, you know, to paint a quick story in 2015, you know, VC saw teams building the centralized networks. And they said, we want to invest in that.

So they invested in the equity of the teams. but then the value accrues the tokens, right? And that's kind of the high level of like the fat protocol thesis. But then, you know, the technology shifted again. And now we have all these layer two projects. But layer two projects, only a tiny minority of them actually have token models today. And very, very few of them have equity that gives you exposure directly to those projects. In fact, about half of them are open source projects.

And the way that founders tend to monetize that is by building apps on top. So if you're a VC, you know, you're suddenly you're in a position where like, oh, I thought I was investing in tokens, but now the landscape has changed again and how do I find exposure to layer two. So one of the foundational principles of, you know, kind of how we think about structuring exposure to projects is we say we want to be maximally flexible in how we can structure exposure. So that means if the appropriate mechanism is very traditional private equity, you know, we'll do that. And an example of an investment that we've made out of coin fund is, for example, coin list, right, a very, very traditional equity investment. But all the way on the other end of the spectrum, you know, we might be investing in a decentralized network directly. And that might mean, you know, buying tokens on liquid markets.

And then somewhere in between it might mean buying a staff or buying a convertible note or buying equity that may convert to tokens in the future. So that's the first thing to say about kind of like how we structure investments. what we invest into generally falls into two categories. We kind of consider ourselves, first of all, full-stack investors. It means we don't just invest in protocol. We don't just invest in middle layer. We don't just invest in apps.

We try to find the best opportunities in the iterating cycles of how these technologies develop. And we think that, for example, applications that have hundreds of millions of users that can put blockchain in front of their user bases are still very, very compelling. in the same way that protocols are compelling in their kind of adoption case. But we're also not, you know, we're also kind of practical, right? We say like in order for the Web 3 or, you know, decentralized world vision to take place, money has to move from traditional markets. Founders have to have financial services. There needs to be compliance clarity.

Everyone needs to be able to operate and kind of experiment with these different projects. And for that reason, we'll invest in what we call key financial infrastructure. So these are things like issuance platforms. These might be things like secondary trading exchanges. It might be banking and financial services for startups. And in that way, we're a very, like, general investor. Our team is general and multidisciplinary, and we can have. apply kind of our knowledge and expertise in blockchain to select what we think are compelling

projects in both of those areas. Cool. That's super interesting. So once you've selected a project, what kind of support do you offer them and how actively are you actually involved in governance and staking, for instance? So Alex, do you want to take this? Because Alex has worked very closely with many different projects. Also, he's, for example, the author of the stable coin model at Sweetbridge. I am the author of the credit risk model for ether risk, right? And so these are examples of how we deeply work with projects. Yeah, so we really try to be as useful as we can. And I think over time with help projects on many levels.

You know, understanding the economics and kind of product market fit in crypto was one of the big value that we provided to non-cryptomative companies that were coming into crypto and trying to make use of these innovative models to operate. You know, it starts from the very first conversation. with the team, even before we invest, all the questions we ask the team are the questions that everybody should be asking that team.

So, you know, one of the biggest question we always ask projects is like, why blockchain? You know, is that just a publicity stunt or does it actually make sense? And on that, on that trajectory, we always inevitably come to a place where we look for the right integration and balance

between centralization, decentralization, user experience, and crypto economics and so on. You know, we've helped projects build out their kind of investment structures, first and foremost for our own benefit, but then, of course, you know, that then later helps them go to other investors. We have advised projects what sort of help they may need who they should be working with, you know, in this space and who they should be hiring with interviewed people on their behalf. So it's a very broad, it's a very broad space of value that we provide. And I think now that's shifting and continuing to progress.

And this kind of ties into Frederica, your comment about staking. So as the market kind of of decentralized networks develops, what we're starting to see is more and more diverse and domain specific networks. So in the beginning, you know, you had cryptocurrencies. You maybe had some asset issuance platforms like counterparty or bit shares. Then Ethereum comes along and they're like, nope, this is, here you go. This is a general smart contract platform. And those very low-level technologies, that's what we kind of thought of as decentralized networks. But we live a little bit more and the technology continues to develop.

And now we see resource networks. These are networks like Filecoin, which give you decentralized storage. These are computational networks, you know, like Golem, for example, where you can render video. These are networks like LivePear, where you can transcode and stream live video. You see social media kind of content networks and decentralized Twitters and decentralized Wikipedias. And what you start to, you know, anticipate is a world where these networks are ubiquitous. They're globally accessible.

And in some cases, they might even grow potentially, might grow larger than their kind of centralized counterparts, especially if you think about like decentralized storage space, ultimately there's more storage in the world across people's devices than probably Google and Amazon put together. And so in that world of decentralized networks, every different kind of network has to engage third parties to perform services for that network. In the beginning, it was miners who were processing transactions on Bitcoin. then, you know, we went kind of to proof of stake systems and then we had validators and delegators. And now if we go kind of case by case, what we realize is the number of participants in these networks is growing. I was just at the polka dot meetup last night here in New York

and in the polka dot system, they have a participant type of a network called fishermen. And what fishermen do is they go into, you know, they basically submit proofs of wrongdoing about what people are doing on a network to ensure kind of the security of that network. And so in a world where all these different kinds of participants are providing services, it's sort of natural for a fund to say, you know, hey, I might have access to this network because I'm an early investor here. Or this is a project that is in my portfolio. And by engaging their network directly, I can add very measurable, very obvious benefits

to the network. Think about if you're in layer two, a lot of the success of kind of state channel payment networks depends on, well, how much liquidity can I have in the hubs, you know, of the payment network. And if you're a fund and you can kind of make an investment where you're providing liquidity, then that's great for your network, right? Because then you increase the network's throughput. So there's some examples of how funds can participate. this almost starts to touch into this topic that you call generalist generalized mining Jake we'll i think we'll get to that theme later on but and like your thoughts on generalized mining but super interesting that um like with the times like coin fund as a fund has kept changing right

like it started out doing doing liquid investments then it went into like saff like illiquid things and now it's also like building validators and like some of these service providers for these for these networks another key idea behind coin fund is was expressed in one of your blogs in which which was titled like fat protocols are not an investment thesis right in which you talk about like you know coin funds approach to investing but you also like sort of not admonish but talk about some of the downsides of adopting this FAT protocol investing investing approach in the blockchain space. So I'm actually like curious about your thoughts there.

So could you tell us what this FAT protocol investing approach is first? Absolutely. So FAT Protocol is this famous post created by Joel Monegro, who's now partnered placeholder, BC. And, you know, it's sort of described, the view cultivated at Union Square Ventures. And it's actually like a really important piece in the sense that it tells the reality of decentralized networks.

And that reality is overall, at a very high level, very generally, value of decentralized networks will tend to pool in their digital assets rather than in the equity of the team that created the network. And this is like a key early insight into how investors should be structuring exposure to blockchain projects. And so in that sense, it's very important. But what the other thing about the fat protocols post is that, you know, it's one of the earliest attempts to kind of make sense of these things. And it's also not very precise. And I think a lot of people who were coming into the blockchain space as investors, they needed to anchor themselves.

in the space somehow. And fat protocols seem like a really kind of very compelling narrative just to say, okay, look, just like another technology investing in a new space, I'm going to go and basically invest in the infrastructure of that space rather than the apps. And, you know, in the case of blockchain, if those are called protocols. And here's why. It's because the value, you know, will accrue there.

Now, what happens when you start actually spending time. with protocols and applications and basically the decentralization stack is that you realize there's no really clear distinction between like what is a protocol or what is an app? It's sort of like, you know, is the Twitter, is Twitter an app or is it a protocol?

Well, in fact, kind of the Twitter front end is an app on an API that exists and that API is kind of like the Twitter protocol, right? And then people build other apps other than Twitter on top of it. it. Or if you look at Auger, well, Auger is an app, right? It's a prediction market platform. But what it really is is a protocol because someone can come in, they can build another front end on Auger, they can build some kind of other protocol or application on top.

And so you begin to like realize that, you know, the distinction between app and protocol is not quite clear cut. I mean, there's certainly things that are like, you know, like lower level in the stack, things that are higher level in the stack and things that are more user facing and things that are more developer facing. But ultimately, Ultimately, in order to understand where value accrues, you kind of have to understand how that individual protocol works. And then my post, fat protocols are not an investment thesis, is just trying to point out that, you know, very simply that like, for example, if you're investing in ether, because you think some applications are going to take off on Ethereum and thus appreciate ether price, you might not actually be making the correct investment. Because in order to determine whether the value of application usage flows to ether price, you really just have to examine that particular application or that particular protocol, like, in its own right.

And all that post is saying is that, like, you know, you need facts and circumstances, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But if you don't understand the crypto economics, you can't really, like, make the decision of whether this is the appropriate value of cruel that you're investing in. Super interesting. So the way I've kind of thought about, like when I read your blog, the imagination I got was, if you look at like the internet,

like, so you have, you have all of these protocols, TCP, IP and TCP, HTTP, HTTP, then you have like TLS. And let's say like you were a VC, let's say you were,

I don't know, I don't know, Adam Draper's grandfather or somebody like that. And you had a, chance. You, you, you were a VC through the 80s and the 90s. Maybe you were that Tim Draper or Tim Draper's father. And if you think of a career like that, that career is pretty interesting.

Because I'm sure they had the opportunity to invest in some team that was like, I don't know, maybe Tim Bernersley's team building HTTP. But, and they did have the chance to also invest in a team like Google. that was using HTTP to build a search application. The difference is Tim Berners-Lee probably made like 20 or 50 million, whereas Larry Page made 50 billion, right? So that's like a, I don't know, almost like probably a thousand-fold difference in the outcomes. Whereas like you can, it would be hard to argue that like Tim Berners-Lee's contribution

was smaller than Larry Pages. I would say like technologically both are equally valuable, but the financial outcomes for both of these things are so radically different. So like when you do that kind of VC journey, you start to empathize with the VC class in always thinking about where value accrues on this stack. So I think if somebody's a VC, their fundamental question is, okay, cryptocurrency is coming, blockchain is. coming and they'll power all of these applications but and there will be many good technologies

invented but it's not necessarily that every good technology will make people rich so they want to invest specifically in those things that are going to make people rich because investing in those things is what is going to make them rich and so and so like this fat protocol thesis argues that it's the base layer protocols that like Bitcoin and Ethereum that are going to make you rich invest there. But as like your approach is, don't be so hasty about that judgment. It sort of depends on the particular application we are talking about. Would it be correct to say that in your idea, there might be cases in which a wallet makes

most of the money or like some some UI facing element makes all of the money and the protocol layer and even like the application logic doesn't make any do you think a scenario like that could happen absolutely i do think let me give you like two quick examples to maybe illustrate right so so let's say like you want to capture the value of an app on ethereum like auger right you kind of have two choices like you can go into into auger rep tokens if you feel that rep will reflect the value. You could also try to go into ether because you're saying, you know, ether as the base layer technology will accrue the value of auger.

What is the value of auger? Well, a lot of traders, you know, they make trades on the platform and all these prediction markets. And then the platform, you know, on a market basis kind of takes fees. And then it pays some of those fees to the resolvers of markets, which are rep holders, right? And so you have this concept of like turnover. So now it's fairly easy to see that, you know, if you're an ether, then what you're doing is you're capturing kind of the utilization of the Auger protocol or the Auger app. You're not so much capturing the turnover. In order to capture the turnover, you actually have to hold the rep.

Right? And this is because, you know, when auger transactions go on chain, they're sort of, you know, the theory would be, okay, a lot of people want to use Auger. people are then buying ether in order to utilize the auger protocol. But then what you're capturing is the value of utilization of auger, but not the transaction volume of auger. So for that, you probably want to hold wrap in that case.

I'll give you an example from the totally opposite end of the spectrum. Let's say that you're a centralized company and you have a user base of 100 million users. But what you're taking on is a blockchain strategy where you can actually put, you know, some kind of crypto or blockchain features in front of this existing audience. Well, who's more likely to convert, you know, tens or hundreds of thousands of users into crypto? A protocol that has been built, you know, with no obvious utilized applications or an existing company with a track record of converting users and that already has like a measure of, you know, of user trust and market pit. Well, I would argue, maybe they both have a shot,

but the application case is still pretty compelling. And so that's why I think, you know, as an investor, and especially now that there were a couple of years into smart contract platforms and DAPs, there are definitely compelling opportunities where some companies will be able to put applications in front of mainstream users and capture value that way, and there are compelling opportunities where someone might, you know, create a protocol that everybody adopts and captures the value. You know, the Dutch have given us so much.

Orange carrots, Bluetooth, artificial hearts, even donuts were invented by Dutch people. But they also gave us Dutch auctions, which, as it turns out, are great for decentralized exchanges. Dutch X is a decentralized trading protocol for ERC 20 tokens, and it's invented, designed, and built by Gnosis. Current orderbook-based exchanges, whether centralized or decentralized, have a couple of issues. Miners and exchanges can front-run a trade when they step in front of a large order to gain an economic advantage, not to mention issues with securing funds, high listing fees, lack of liquidity and pricing efficiencies.

The Dutch Exchange platform uses a Dutch auction mechanism to determine the fair value for a token, and participants in a trade are encouraged to reveal their true willingness to pay, which eliminates front-running. As a permissionless on-chain protocol, it's useful for business. bots and other smart contracts needing to exchange tokens. And Dutchex also acts as an Oracle for DAPS requiring a price feed. So to learn more, check out the documentation at epicenter.tv.tv slash DutchX. Smart contracts are live on the Ethereum mainnet so you can start building today. We'd like to thank Gnosis and Dutchex for their support of Epicenter. I also personally feel like the question of value capture can be very complex, right?

Like, so you mentioned like the example of auger. Now, if I look at something like decentralized exchanges, that's an even more complicated question. Because like, see like a protocol like 0x. So you have Ethereum, which is the base protocol. Then you have 0x, which is like this decentralized exchange protocol. Then you have these order books, right? So centralized companies can build like order books that run on 0x.

And then then you have this. this UI or wallet layer where ultimately the user, they want to trade Ethereum for Maker, they are in a wallet and they click a button and then that wallet is going to decide whether to use which order book, which protocol zero X or a competitor on which platform. So you have these like four different parts of the stack and it's entirely unclear which one is the one that's going to make the most money. Right. So of course, like all transactions will go through Ethereum, but like Ethereum just get some transaction fee per order. Is that going to be the biggest amount? Or 0x, which is like a

governance token, is government going to get like the most of the value capture? Or does the order book get a lot of the money? Because it traps liquidity. Or whether in the end it's the wallet that makes the money because like if you if you see the best hardware wallet is ledger right so if there's lots of decentralized exchanges happening the way ledger the hardware wallet maker structures their integrations with decentralized exchanges are going to determine what what players win at the order book and exchange level and therefore they'll extract their own commission to root users to these order books so ledger can also make money on on this stack.

And so, like, it's a highly complex question on, like, which part accrues value, isn't it? Absolutely, it is. And, you know, and again, in that example, right, if you're, let's say, if you've transacted 100,000 orders on zero X protocol, right, you could have transacted a million dollars or you could have transacted $100 million. And it's sort of like the actual turnover or order of magnitude of the throughput of that system is not necessarily like off reflected on chain. It's more like a projection of the utilization of that protocol on the chain.

Right. And so in that case, you know, should you be holding ether, should you be holding the zero X token? Well, zero X token is interesting in its own right, right? Because you mentioned that it's a governance token. And I think it's still, you know, we're still learning about governance tokens and exactly how do they, you know, how do they value the ability to upgrade protocols and things like that? But it's certainly kind of a compelling case to say, you know, if a lot of people are using that protocol and they kind of rely on that protocol for their business or whatever activities they're engaged in, then they would want. a stake in the governance. They wouldn't want that protocol to get away from them in some way, right, and present risks to their businesses. So maybe that is a compelling way to value tokens that way.

Cool. So I think we are we are already moving in that direction. In the past, recently you two, Alex and Jake have started speaking about generalized mining. Would you be able to explain to us what that is? Yeah, so as we sort of mentioned before, you know, I regard the generalized mining space as kind of the space of opportunities to provide what Chris Berniske calls supply-side services to the centralized networks. So these networks, they are, if we kind of fast forward into the future, if we accept the idea that there's going to be a lot of these networks, they're going to be very different, they're going to be serving different domains. Some networks are going to be about social media. Other networks are going to be about decentralized storage. Other networks are going to be about registering DNS domain names and so on and so forth. If we live in that world, then all of those things, all those networks, they're not companies, right? They can't hire a hardware and IT department.

They can't hire a compliance department. they have to rely on all these third parties to provide the services that make them function. Many times those services are highly specific to exactly what those networks need to do. If you are a decentralized storage network, then you're looking for storage. If you're looking, if you're live peer, then you're looking for people to build GPU data centers to transcode. video. If you're a social network, you're looking for highly competent curators of content. Maybe those are humans. Maybe those are bots. But the point is that there's all these third parties that have been kind of, you know, if you will, extracted out of these hierarchical,

traditional organizations that we have and now form this cloud that can, they can provide these kinds of services to decentralized networks. The question for us is, you know, how does a crypto fund fit into that? scheme. And the way that we kind of think about it is there's a spectrum of opportunities and some of those opportunities are very hardware intensive and require a relatively little proprietary software. These are things like work mining, right? Here you're building a hundred billion dollar data center and you're competing on your ability to maximize your hash rate. On the other side of the spectrum, you have opportunities that are very software intensive, but but these

software proprietary strategies, you can kind of run on, you know, fairly basic and inexpensive hardware, maybe on AWS. And so an example of something like that might be, you know, market making. You have a proprietary algorithm that market makes a certain market in blockchain. It might be what just happened in the Life Gear Network, which is the Merkle Mine. The Merkle Mine saw a bunch of third-party miners, this basically distribute 16, 63% of the live peer tokens supply to eligible Ethereum wallets. And those miners are doing that because they're getting a little bit of reward in the token. So it's an interesting crypto economic system.

And then if you go into like the middle of that opportunity space in Meher, you will know a lot about this. This might be something like Cosmos. Cosmos is, you know, not something that you necessarily have to write a lot of proprietary software for because the project is kind of giving you. the node software. But as you well know, you might want to write some. You might want to have increased security in your data center. You might want to have redundancy. You have to worry about maintaining century nodes. You have to worry about physical hardware as well, in some sense, because you want to increase the physical security. And so this represents kind of a, you know, staking opportunity, but it's somewhere like in the middle of the spectrum where it's like a little

bit of proprietary software, a little bit of hardware. That's certainly more more expensive than what you would get on a totally commodified hardware side. And where I think crypto funds fit in, they have a natural space in this spectrum, right? If you are looking at the hardware end of the spectrum, well, this is the natural place where proof of work miners are coming in, and maybe they're repurposing some of their hardware for these different kinds of networks that are coming in. If you are on the software side of the spectrum, this is the realm of quants. This is the realm of, you know, smart people who are kind of building models and like trying

to, you know, find the best algorithm that, you know, that gets the best content and steam it up to the top. And so I think that's the side of crypto funds and quants. And then kind of in the middle, you have this staking sort of area of the sky. spectrum where here you're competing on how efficient am I, how secure am I? We've talked to a number of projects of CoinFund at this point, whose product is, you know, one-click deployment of staking nodes on various networks. So this is all about like how fast can you get into this network, how fast can you build

stake, how secure are you, and maybe even how many networks can you be on at the same time. So I think crypto funds are going to go to sort of the more proprietary software side. It's sort of very natural. Funds don't want to run hardware data centers. If they don't have to, I think they'd probably rather invest in teams that are doing that. And this becomes an incredible value add for a fund, I think. And I think we'll see this in the future.

One reason is that you can add tangible, measurable value to your portfolio companies, as we sort of touched the phone before. Another reason is that you might be, this might be a competitive, advantage. If you're doing this and other funds are not doing it, then maybe you're generating returns that are not correlated to what most people are doing, which is long-term, long-only investments in these like Saffnotes. And in a flat or down market, that might be an interesting source of returns for funds. And finally, I think you have access. You have better access as an investor. And so, you know, for us, live peer is like a great case study for that in the sense that

We were never early investors in the note. However, when the network came up about a year later, we were able to use their mechanisms of transcoding and mining to build up a stake in that network, kind of in a single digit percentage size-wise, right? In any case, comparable to stakes of early investors. And we think that's really interesting because it democratizes the access. you know, to ownership of these networks, now you don't just have to be a VC to get that kind of ownership.

You can be a technologically savvy participant. And finally, in summary, what that says to me is that I think crypto funds over time are going to have to get a lot more technological. And then VCs, who are sort of pure VCs and pure equity investors, are going to get a lot more constrained because they can only kind of invest in this one stage of the blockchain company lifecycle, which is the stage where you're funding the early equity, but other folks can choose the stage at which they invest, right?

They can invest in that equity, but then they can also buy the token on the market, and finally they can build stakes by direct participation in markets. So we think that this is like a set of features, like it's an amazing opportunity for funds. Cool, thank you. That was super interesting.

So basically when you speak about generalized mining, you mean that more people actually actively contribute to the upkeep of the network. So how far do you see that going? Would you expect complete laypeople to actually contribute or is it a select circle of people contributing? How do you have to have some sort of gatekeeping? How do you make sure the people who want to contribute are actually capable of contributing? How do you know their hardware, their software is good enough? I think it will vary and it will, you know, again, it will run from highly experienced, very technological companies like, like for example, the company that Meher is working on, which is providing like very advanced technological services, you know, to just sitting on steam it as a human being and kind of like using your mouse to to curate articles. But the point is, you know, even if you're human, like here's an opportunity for you to earn value.

from the network by contributing a valuable service, and that valuable service is curation. So I think there will be all kinds of players in that market, and they'll all be doing pretty different things. Some people would be casual, some organizations will be very serious about a very, like, narrow area. And then other people might be just concerned with kind of scaling data centers, so the centralized storage networks might flow and work.

This sort of brings a different dimension to a crypto fund, right? Like so in the beginning it's like crypto funds are like, oh, I want to invest in the liquid assets that can become the currencies of stores of value in the future. Then like the second generation is, oh, there's going to be these application stacks and I want to invest in that part of the application stack that's going to capture value. And now this almost feels like now coin fund is going to put a new kind of hat in, which is, Okay, there's this new protocol coming and it's going to need all of these off-chain workers. Can coin fund build one of those off-chain workers? And if coin fund does, then is that workers, is there a competitive advantage to building that worker that lasts over the long run? And if you do find that there is a competitive advantage to building a worker, then coin fund would build a sort of a worker node

or a generalized mining node. Do you actually think there can be defensible competitive advantages to generalize mining nodes or worker nodes? Like our experience with protocols like LivePier, Tesos, and even like Bitcoin is that with all of these mining and off-chain services, the market ends up highly competitive

because there's free entry. Anyone can enter and build one of these world. workers. So there's going to be, there's probably like thousands of miners in Bitcoin. There's already a hundred bakers in Tesos. It's probably going to be, you know, hundreds of transcoders on life beer. Do you think there will ever be a protocol in which building a worker makes sense for a crypto fund from a competitiveness and long-term perspective? Yeah, actually, so I have a whole range of thoughts about that. But most importantly, is the fact that as the number of networks

that need this type of service increases, the networks will always compete for attention from different staking companies. A staking company has a limited amount of resources, both engineering and hardware and cognitive cycles,

to contribute to every specific project. So all of the staking companies are going to always choose the best ones. And so networks that need this type of service, they will always try to create the best incentives. This is a little bit unlike the mining, the hardware mining space,

where the costs, the profits, the minor profits will always gravitate towards zero, because in the staking and generalized mining space, there is an upward push on the mining rewards from the networks that compete with each other. So, you know, you as a company can stake TASOS or Cosmos or LifePier, right? Which one are you going to choose? And so there's this natural two-sided competition, one between the staking companies

that want to provide the best service and one between the networks that want to get the best staking companies. And so if you're a company as a crypto fund, you get a very, natural early entry point to all of these opportunities. And so the competitive advantage for a crypto fund doing this is that the crypto fund is usually aligned with a network from the very beginning and has these dialogues early. And so for us to set up a generalized mining operation for a specific network is very natural. I think long-term defensibility is a great question, but we don't mind doing generalized mining

in the short term. It's always the same discussion as which network do we invest in, which network do we spend time on, and so on. So like the trade-off space for a fund like coin fund almost appears to be, okay, there's these new networks that are coming up. Either we can build these service nodes or generalized mining nodes ourselves. Or we could delegate to other people that are building those nodes, right? And so imagine like there's two, there's two parallel universes, one in which Coin Fund adopts the approach,

hey, we'll build generalized mining nodes and protocols we love like Life Beer. And there's another parallel universe in which, like, Coin Fund says, hey, we are not going to bother like building these generalized mining nodes. Let's just delegate, right? let's just delegate to the to the people that are so in these two universes like coin fund's performance over like five or ten years is going to be different and coin fund is building generalized mining nodes so you have chosen this universe where you do build right what do you think is the long-term advantage to coin fund given that like generalized mining is so competitive so yeah yeah so

again, this goes back to kind of my assertion, right, that the space of generalized mining opportunities is actually much that much more vast than the space of staking opportunities, right? So like if you look at, you know, most companies in the staking space like Alex was kind of getting at are not funds, right? And so their business model kind of depends on their ability to leverage third party delegation and kind of take a commission on that. on that delegation. But of course, that's a limiting factor because not all networks

will have opportunities that are staking opportunities and not all staking opportunities will have delegation, right? So at least on protocol delegation, right? So if you take a first example that comes to mind is New cipher network, right? New cipher doesn't,

you can actually delegate stake in new cipher. You have to run a note. And so the competitive advantage for a fund, I think, is not so much in competing with the highly commoditized market of staking companies and people who are competing on efficiency. It's more like competing in the kind of hard to replicate market of proprietary software. And here you're kind of competing on how smart you are and how good of an algorithm you might build. So let's take SteamIt is one of my favorite examples here. Today, there are a bunch of bots on the Steamet network where users basically send them a little bit of Steam, and those bots upvote their article, and their article goes up higher on the Steam website,

and so they earn an ROI in Steam because Steam articles are compensated in Steam by the system. And in many ways, this is exactly the advertiser model. It's like I go out to Facebook. I pay Facebook some money. Facebook distributes my ads to men over 35 who recently have been divorced, et cetera. And then they buy my product and I get an R-O-Y. The same way I can pay a Steam bot and get an R-O-Y. Now, which bot is going to give you the best R-Y?

or which bot is going to earn sort of like the best reward. Well, it's the bot that can most effectively identify indeed what is the correct content. And today, most bots on Steam are really, really stupid. They are like, whoever pays them, they'll just get upvoted. But then eventually someone is going to come along and they say, I'm going to use kind of a database and a machine learning algorithm and some other technologies, right, to actually identify and try to predict which steam posts are going to go viral in the future. And if you can do that on Steam, then you're going to earn a much better return.

And because that's a proprietary algorithm, nobody knows how it works because you made it up. And so you're going to earn a better return than others. And I think that's really the competitive advantage of funds versus kind of going to these more commoditized networks or networks in the future might be more commoditized, like Cosmos and Tezos, and really like anything that has staking. For those kinds of networks, I think in the long-term funds might be happy

to delegate to other parties who've spent a lot more time on security and efficiency and things like that. But in the proprietary software space, I think this is where the really interesting stuff that's going to certainly get competitive but not commoditized is going to happen. Just to follow up on that, a lot of staking tokens today, in effect, when you stake them,

it's a lot like getting a hidden dividend, right? Do you think general mining is going to move into that space and take a big cut of that? Or do you think these staking models where, in effect, you get a hidden dividend, are a thing that will exist in the future? Well, I think I think generalized mining opportunities like from staking to proprietary algorithms to kind of hardware mining, like they're all different forms of getting dividends. I think as Alex touched upon, you know, I think in today's world, whenever you choose to engage in this activity in a particular network, that is still an investment decision. right? So like, if you look at, you know, staking that works like Tesos Cosmos, you know, you can try to calculate and estimate what is the token denominated return that I might get if I stake a certain amount of tokens. And then you might get a number like, I don't know exactly what it is, but maybe you'll get a number like 10% or like 20%. But I think a lot of the people that are engaging in this activity is not because they want to make 20% return on tokens. It's because they, they, believe they're actually speculating on the success of the network or these particular networks and becoming like large multi-billion dollar networks. What they're really doing is they're

speculating on the fiat denominated return, but then they're trying to maximize it by also getting that 10% of tokens on top. Right. So it's kind of funny. Like there's a there's a number of for example like lending platforms in crypto right now where you could put your ether and then you can earn a little bit of ether kind of by lending it out, right? But the amount of money that you earn in ether is like 70 cents, but the volatility of ether is like thousands of dollars in your position, right? And so, a lot of times in today's market, it makes sense to still sort of speculate on the future success of these platforms rather than so much worry about what is the dividend, how much percentage of the dividend am I getting?

I think that's going to get to be a lot more important down the road when these markets become a little bit more efficient. Do I think that who takes a cut of that? So I think like in the commoditized area, like when you're talking about specifically staking networks, then as Meherr was saying, like, yeah, this gets like really, really commoditized. And so the companies that are provided,

these services are going to be competing on fees. And it's always like kind of a race to the bottom. I don't think it ever gets to zero because these companies have to operate. But again, whoever can operate the most efficiently can have the lowest sort of fee and then aggregate delegation and stay there. Do you have any thoughts on that, Alex? Yeah, I think it's hard to distinguish and classify this space today. I don't think of it as necessarily easily separable into, you know, staking, delegation, generalized mining.

You know, it's very easy to fall into the trap of imagining that, you know, once you've seen one network, you've seen them all, that's completely untrue. the opportunity to make returns on contribution to various networks is very broad. And so, you know, you can say, well, the funds can just delegate to other stakers and very quickly find out that that's not true. You know, you can say that staking is a way to, you know, you can say that staking is a way to, distribute rewards and then very quickly you find out that that actually requires you to pay a tremendous amount of attention and provide a good service. And so it's not just rewards, but it's rewards for something else. So I would be very careful drawing kind of black and white lines between these areas. I think of that as providing services to networks according to

the rules that they set up. Networks are very immature and the way that these rules get created is often, you know, very quickly becomes clear to be not ideal and mistakes in that very quickly become obvious and new networks try to fix them. And so this is very fluid. And like I said, as a fund, we are trying to position ourselves where we're agile and able to respond to these developments very quickly. Thank you. That was super interesting. So you said that the networks, they're kind of immature. A way that you two are trying to mature them is by building, by helping them by supplying them with a toolkit that you have started building named Adept. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So I started in blockchain working with projects very early. And I very quickly realized a number of limitations that projects face when using existing technology.

So let me give you an example. So one project I worked with before, you know, was trying to create a very advanced financial system. And they were trying to use Ethereum for that. And they very quickly realized that it's very hard for them to create the user experience that they want to. to create for their customers using Ethereum because, you know, Ethereum transactions require paying Ether. And so all the users, you know, who need to transact on their network are going to have to hold the wallet, manage their keys, and hold Ether.

And, you know, it became obvious to me that in blockchain, and this goes back to our discussion of Fed protocols, to which I have a slightly different answer right now, you know, these fat protocols like Ethereum, Eos and such, they are in fact designed to capture value. Of course, that's true. You know, the teams have to, you know, ensure that their currency has value and has, and that value increases. And what that almost always means is that their networks will compromise, on the possible user experience of people who are trying to build and use products on top of them. And so I started to think about adapt

as a kind of a generalization of blockchain on many levels. The main premise of that is that even the network in which our application runs has to be customized to your applications use case. Generalized networks will inevitably, compromise user experience and the choices that these networks made will inevitably make things more complicated for at least some use cases. To give another example, you know, Cryptokides was built on Ethereum.

Ethereum was a network that was built from kind of came out of the Bitcoin thinking of sovereignty of money and radical decentralization. But Cryptokides is a game. They don't need radical. centralization. And the moment you realize that, you realize that Ethereum is the wrong platform. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to enable people to experiment and create smaller, much more customized networks for their users. Right? Does that make sense? Thank you. That made perfect sense. So what kind of tools do you actually provide the project

with in this Adapt framework? So, Adapt is platform technology, but it's not a platform network. And that's a distinction which would have been very easy to make in 2005. It's very hard to make in 2018 because everybody thinks of networks as platforms. But if you go back to 2005 and look at, you know, Wiki, GCC, Linux and so on, you kind of quickly understand that platform is software. And so adapt the software, it's a software to build and launch networks, and it's modularized software. So it basically is structured as a programming language on top of a very general data model that allows you to develop nodes, build consensus algorithms, and then also develop the smart contract infrastructure on that network and the business logic.

And so as a toolkit, it looks like a star, where in the middle you have the compiler of the programming language, that above that it has modules in that programming language, and below that it has the primitives and the data structures and the networking components that can be accessed from that language. And the language is basically the glue that makes the toolkit work. So using the toolkit, the idea is that they, basically you can first load and use, you know, all the necessary modules that somebody else has developed

for things like wallets, tokens, you know, voting, governance, you know, TCRs, you know, whatever generalized components that can be built in decentralized space can be developed and reduced. And then you would add some business logic to your specific project. and then you would launch that as a decentralized network that is specific to your specific project. Very interesting. So to me, like because I'm building a validator,

a commodity validator for the Cosmos network, I tend to think of adapt as, so the vision behind Cosmos was like it allows entrepreneurs to build their own spoke chains, their own blockchains, and have those blockchains handle their own application. And like that blockchain is tailored for exactly that application. So you know, like this vision of application-specific blockchains would have,

for example, augur build its own blockchain network, nosus build their own blockchain network and so on. And so adapt to me is is a very similar vision, but with a different technology stack. But the key difference is one of incentives, right? So in Cosmos, they have this token, the atom, and they want to create a platform around the atom.

So when somebody else builds a blockchain application, some of the value of that blockchain application, they wanted to leak into the atom token, right? And so, like, Cosmos, the project has, like, launched this atom token. And their incentives are geared towards leaking some of the value of these blockchain applications into the atom token. What's special about Adapt from this perspective is, you don't want to create that central atom token or the central Ethereum token

to which the application value should leak into, right? And you want to keep build just like this open source stack that anyone can use to build their blockchain network. Yeah. So at Cosmos, to me, is probably one of the best things. in blockchain, and it's actually, like you say, is very similar. What Cosmos is doing will naturally happen in a debt, because you do need a hub, you do need a trading center, you do need infrastructure services for the entire ecosystem of these

small to medium-sized networks, right? The difference, I would say, is not in the value capture process, but more in the amount of freedom and the amount of sort of high-level tools that developers get when they want to create their own network. So, for example, Cosmos is completely based on the tenderness process protocol, which has, you know, fast finality and some really good properties. However, it's not necessarily clear to me that that's what you want for all use cases. Cosmos uses fast finality because they want inter-blockchain communication.

They want to move tokens from one zone to another. I don't think that's correct. I think that's too limiting because in some zones you can implement tokens using different code bases that don't even exist on the other zone in the other network. So it's not clear to me that moving tokens from one network to another makes sense. What's clear to me, nevertheless, is that you need, for example, a decentralized exchange to live kind of in the middle of the ecosystem. And it's likely that that's where this will go.

But I want a lot more freedom in every zone. I want zones to be able to choose their consensus protocol, and if they want probabilistic finality, they should have it. If they want their zones to be not interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem, they should be able to do it. Adapt is much more high-level than go-lane in terms of developing code because it hides away data modeling, and it provides high-level tools for organizing data

and creating reusable security primitives inside your database. So I claim that it will be a lot quicker to develop an adapt network than Cosmosone if you want to be sufficiently different from the rest of it. Thank you. That was super interesting. So does ADAPT have a business model? We're working on it. At the moment, ADAPT is fundraising on donations because I'm really sick and tired of seeing projects raise billions of dollars on a white paper. And I have a very principal objection to that because to me that creates really, really bad incentives that will basically destroy the space in the long term.

but we are in discussion internally about how we can structure this effort because to us it is painfully clear that the kind of subtle shift in perspective that I'm offering that we are sort of trying to put together is really important for this space. We want to do this as a fund because we are also tired of projects coming to our us and painting an unrealistic picture of how their adoption and how their base layer technology will work because we've seen so much in this space and we've thought about it for so long in terms of real world use cases and real world adoption that we can very quickly point out what will be a blocker for these projects and that's what we're trying to solve.

We're trying to create a mechanism for people to build the next generation of blockchain technology where each application can be customized and their network and their, you can say protocol, but it's a overused word, will be customized to their users to an extent where it will stop being a toy and will become a real world too. So think about questions such as governance, recourse, validator incentive, transactions economics can your you know

can your social networking application built on Ethereum today have free transactions you know can your miners of your network

also be your oracles also be your service providers on many different levels to your application the answer is you know

life peer is running on Ethereum Ethereum Ethereum has miners, but LifePier has to enlist a whole new group of people to help them with their Merkelmine share draw. Ideally, those would be the same people. This feeds directly into our discussion on generalized mining because, you know, and this takes me to the topic of initial witness offerings where it's very explicit that early supporters and investors in this project in a project should,

also be service providers and the miners that are highly aligned with the mission of the project. We don't have that today. We don't have that level of alignment between early supporters and later service providers. And that's what I'm trying to create because to me that's more important for the long term of this ecosystem. Cool. Alex, we really look forward to seeing the development of the ADAP project. perhaps we should have an episode on the Adapt project when part of the protocol is released

and the first application blockchain network start building on it. So that brings us to the end of this show. Alex and Alexander and Jake, thanks for joining us today. Thank you, Meherr, Frederica. So happy to be here. Thank you, Meher.

Thank you, Frederica. So thank you for all that listened to this episode. As you know, like we release episodes of Epicenter every Tuesday or Wednesday. So subscribe to us if you like the content. You can also watch a video version of the show on YouTube.com slash Epicenter Bitcoin. And you can chat with all of the host and the community members at epicenter.tv. If you like this recording or you didn't like it, leave us an iTunes review. as it helps people find this show and it makes us happy.

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