Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Ryan Zurrer: Dialectic AG - A Decade of Crypto Ventures: From BTC mining to P2E gaming

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

Considering the abundance of cryto projects launching constantly, making sound investment decisions requires both ample experience in the space, as well as a reliable network. Predicting future trends in such a volatile industry is a skill very few possess, especially since narratives evolve at a rapid pace. Ryan Zurrer is one of the OG participants and investors in the blockchain industry, with an experience of more than 10 years and an impressive portfolio of investments. From BTC mining to ICOs, DeFi and more recently NFTs & play-to-earn gaming (P2E), Ryan has witnessed all the major cycles in crypto.We were joined by Ryan Zurrer, founder of Dialectic AG, to discuss about the crypto investment landscape and the evolution of the industry from BTC to P2E gaming.Topics covered in this episode:Ryan’s background, from BTC mining to ICOs and P2E gamingKeepers in blockchain networks explainedAxie Infinity and the evolution of play-to-earn gamingWeb2 vs. Web3 gaming and the importance of communitiesNFTs in art, culture and blockchain gamingTraditional vs. digital fine artDialectic’s investment strategiesMEV & market efficiencyGeopolitical climate and crypto investmentsPsychedelics & MAPSEpisode links:Ryan ZurrerDialectic AGVine VenturesMAPSThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst & Meher Roy. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/490

Welcome to Epicenter, Episode 490, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Quichu, and I'm here with my trusty co-host, Felix Luch. And today we're talking with Ryan Zura. He is the founder of Dialectic and also a super early epicenter listener. He's an OG epicenter listener. What a few that I've stuck around all these years and was on the podcast, believe it or not, 250-ish episodes ago. so about half of the life of Epicenter. But yeah, so today we're going to be diving deep into a whole bunch of topics,

including NFTs, psychedelics, and maybe talking about some investment strategies a little bit. Beyond that, we'll also talk about Defi and what he sees coming down the pipe in the future. Hey, Ryan, thanks for joining us. Thanks very much for having me. And, you know, as I mentioned before, very sincerely thank you for all the work that you guys have done over going on a decade now. I remember that Epicenter became an outlet for me, I think around the 2014 era,

in recognizing that like, ah, this Bitcoin community wasn't really the thing that I was after and that there were other people who were thinking about things beyond Bitcoin and how this technology could be used. And you guys were really the leaders in going beyond Bitcoin. You know, at that time, it was called Epicenter Bitcoin. And then you generalized that. And that important ecosystem building, you know, I can't overstate how fundamental that has been to the growth and the education of the space overall. I'm so very grateful for this work that you've done over all these years.

Thanks. Thanks for saying that. And yeah, I mean, it has been almost 10 years. years, it is sometimes difficult to fathom how long you guys should throw like a huge party for the decade and like have, I don't know, all kinds of guests come or something like that, do a big live like multi, you know, like multi person podcast or something. It'd be great. It's important, right? The work that you guys do is really important. No, thank you. Yeah, but so you were on in 2018 on episode 249.

So maybe for our listeners who aren't familiar with your work or, you know, who haven't been listening for as long as you have, can you give us a bit of background about yourself and, you know, how you got here? Sure. Actually, in November, I celebrated a decade in the game myself. You know, early investor in Ethereum, MakerDAO, Pocodafoin, divinity file, or Solana near Rari Capital. Axi Infinity, many others. I came into polychain capital in the weeks after OLAF founded the company

and led a lot of the early stage private investments at that time. We created a document called SAFT, and that was a really good mechanism that we use and I continue to use. And so at this point, I think what I'm most known for in the space is having been at the eye of the state, storm of all three major cycles. So mining in 2012, 2013, you know, ICOs and SAFs in 2017, and then Plater and Gaming and NFTs in 2021. I've been grateful to just be in the mix and be doing my thing all these years. Just love it and couldn't imagine anything else. Crypto's a strange addiction. Yeah. How did you, I don't remember the story that with. How did you meet Olaf and and become a partner at Polly Chain.

I'll tell you the real story, which I don't think I've ever mentioned publicly. I was talking with Pantara about putting investment into them. And I said, I'll make an investment in you guys if you make an Ethereum fund rather than a Bitcoin fund. And this is in 2015. And they literally scoffed at me. They're like, and I was just like, you know what? Like, I'm going to go do this. And so the Dow came up and I participated very expressly in the Dow.

I was fortunate to be to be called by by Jordy Belina on a strange day to contribute to the Dow white hack attack. And then after the Dow blew up, I was like, okay, well, I was going to work as a venture, you know, partner for the Dow. This didn't work out. So I went around and looked for who are the smartest people doing. venture style crypto investments because I had been doing some angel stuff I had already written a check to MakerDAO and and obviously put into the Ethereum crowd fund a bunch of others and and met all off and we we hit it off right away and and we got going with with polychain and you know that that's an example of something that what you look for in startups is for what I call a company getting

slippery where it's growing at a pace that you kind of can't keep up with. And we felt like that in polychain. There was this one moment, I think it was actually the Bank Corps ICO, where we had just passed 100 million AUM. And it was just two of us in an apartment in San Francisco. And these guys raised $100 million. And we looked at each other. We was like, geez, this is probably five people in an apartment who just raise all this money. This is crazy. Then we kind of looked at each other and realize like where we were of what we were doing. We're like, oh, okay, back to work. And so, yeah, it was a really fun time.

We remain good friends. But I'm happy to be doing what I'm doing with Dialectic, you know, automating yield in market neutral and just taking a very programmatic approach to investing in the major categories of crypto here in Switzerland and being here in Switzerland, I think, is starting to pay off as an important strategic decision. Yeah, we definitely want to get into that a bit. I think for me personally, one of the first things I think I read from you was around like keepers in in blockchain networks.

I see you like sort of evolved that topic over time. Can you maybe explain to us a little bit, you know, what, what you were thinking about there and maybe also how your view has changed since I think initially you were thinking about just like in 2017 and obviously we're like six years later now. So yeah, curious what your current thoughts are. So originally we were thinking about that in terms of MakerDoubt because I, I co-rewrote the white paper with Roon and Amanda and Nicolai. And shout out to Nicolai who we tragically lost last year.

He was so important for our space and I miss him tremendously. And because we're generalizing beyond just Bitcoin and mining, I started to think about it in terms of, okay, there's a resource provider layer that provides some important resource. And then there's a user layer that uses this resource. One of the better examples or cleaner examples to describe is Filecoin where that instead of mining or transaction confirmation, it's storage that is the resource layer. And that's like the keepers. And in defy, it wasn't called defy at that time, but in liquidity networks, in financial

networks, the key resource is liquidity provision. So people who provide the market making and liquidity are kind of like the miners of a, of a liquidity network. But we didn't really want to call them minors. So keepers became the term that came up in a long late night conversation. between Nikolai and I. And that and really it was just about describing these networks as the resource provider layer and the user layer and the user layer is subsidized by the inflation that the resource provider gets over the bootstrapping era, which we're kind of coming to the end

of in in Bitcoin, but we can see we're still in the bootstrapping era of many other resource networks. And this can be applied to many, many things beyond just, just, you know, financial transaction verification like in, in Ethereum and Bitcoin, you know, file coin with storage, but I think there's a good argument that it could be done with ISPs, with energy networks, with, you know, anything that was a marketplace can be turned into a protocol with these two layers where the user layer is subsidized. And that's ultimately the concept of keepers is that there's a resource provider that subsidizes the users to get the service for free or nearly free.

how is your thinking evolve then like from when you wrote those first articles which i believe is a couple years ago has that thesis changed over time now that that resource providing networks are a little bit more mature and and also since these networks are no longer operating in isolation and increasingly operating in a sort of network of their own right with interoperability I think like if you broaden the definition enough, we actually see it continue to replicate with fairly high fidelity. So for example, the newest types of networks that we see are in play during gaming,

where the resources, incidentally, are eyeballs playing a game. And they are subsidized by inflation of an underlying token with that game. So the first example that we saw of that with success was Axi Infinity. And generally, I just think that that's a really powerful, like, fundamental mechanism of crypto, is that we can use inflation over a period of time to bootstrap network effects. And then once network effects kick in, we can modify the, you know, the economic tradeoff such that transaction fees are, are more. paramount and it's less about inflation. So I think as games evolve, what we're going to see next is we're going to see zero sum, right, which I've actually been wanting for a while. So today it's

inflationary. So if I play you in a in a play during gaming context, you know, and you win, I don't lose, you just win and the cost is socialized across the whole network via inflation. where it's going to flip is you win I lose. Now, there are some questions of whether that runs into gambling and gaming regulations and things like that. And I think, you know, we'll sort those out over time. But I'm actually quite encouraged that the general concept of keepers continues to, you know, be relevant in the space.

There's been, you know, I see it be used all the time, which is really heartwarming. like there's been like DAO is called Keeper Dow and Keeper This. And so it's been nice over time to see that and see other things that that I've tried to make a contribution to the space and be relevant and be used by by folks. And so it's great. Right. I think, I mean, yeah, maybe it would be curious to hear. I guess, you know, like actually, Infinity was successful, I guess, for a little bit in the

boom market and then sort of the engagement, I guess, dropped off. Do you, so you think that's going to change in like future, future, iterations or like sort of where do you do you think maybe these first play to earn games sort of failed or what's what's what's what's there to improve yeah so I think the lesson learned that we take away from from Axy is um and just be clear it's like it's a lot of the same lessons that we that we've had in previous you know iterations in crypto is that that crypto economic design um is really important. and changing it in the middle of the road can be catastrophic.

You know, the allegory that I would use is that in layer ones, the crypto economic design of the initial team distribution and how rewards are doled out over time, either to validators or to team or to community or to investors, those decisions can be catastrophic to a project. I was part of the debate around Ethereum's choice where they ended up going 9.9 to team, 9.9 to foundation. And I thought that that was a great precedent. But then we saw many other projects deviate from that precedent over time and really do themselves a gigantic disservice. You know, they started to be calling VC coins.

They lost community from that. And, you know, and ultimately these things rest on on a community. With Axi, you know, we didn't know how these things would evolve. And then the change, I think, created somewhat of a mistrust. Because I think we underestimate the fact that like very literally millions of people were doing this as their job. And there was this narrative of like, oh, no, they'll play the game because the game is fun. And I was like, no, it isn't.

Like, they're playing this for a job. And guess what? That's fine. Financial incentivization is okay. And if that means that they're playing a game that they otherwise would not, that's fine because you get to bypass the hundreds of millions and even billions of dollars that it would require to acquire customers, to acquire eyeballs in Instagram ads and TV slots and all these other things. You just go rate to the customer and you say, hey, we'll incentivize you. you to pay this game, play this game. And I think that's the powerful thing, not how great the game is. And so what I look for today, you know, we get tons of pitches of like, we're going to make a AAA quality crypto game. I'm like, A, no, you're not. And B, you don't need to. You can make a pretty breakbones game and just build community, bootstrap that through the financial incentivization. The other thing is I think games will get more elegant in their crypto economic design. So you have to balance the like you can't have pay to win where I can just like pay to have like the greatest swords and just like be running rough shot through a game like I'm some kind of monster.

Right. So the game play has to be has to be high fidelity to talent and skill. however you can have economies that kind of support the game in you know whether it's like like providing resources or or like reups of energy or various things like that where you can make for a more epic experience that is supported by an economy and again that's where you have like user layer and keeper layer right a keeper layer could be like the providers of of resources swords wood whatever it is and they're going around and mining that in the game and consolidating it and selling it in their shop, whereas the warriors, the game players, they, theirs is one based solely on skill. I haven't seen a model that has completely solved that,

but the good thing is there's lots of experiments and I'm very confident that we'll solve it as a community over time. So one of the reasons why I wanted to get you on was because, you know, you're so plugged into say like the NFT space and also the gaming space. And this is, these are verticals in crypto that I don't have very well-form theses about, and I'm sometimes a little bit skeptical of. And you just said something that sort of opened my mind to this concept that I think, you know, it overlaps with a lot of other verticals in crypto, and that is that intermediary elimination. So essentially with gaming, you know, as you said, a game developer can bypass, you know,

the intermediaries that they would usually interact with. So like marketing, for instance, in order to or like these intermediary costs in order to attract players, but by directly incentivizing players, they don't have to have sort of that like intermediary actor or cost center to attract the players. They just attract the players directly. And so it's sort of like eliminating the need for that intermediary,

that middleman in the same way that, you know, Bitcoin or other cryptos, eliminate the needs for other types of intermediaries. With regards to gaming, what do you think is necessary for, say, like, this style of gaming to have its kind of mass market moment? I ask you this because I'm, you know, I know folks that works at Ubisoft or, you know, I've talked to, say, innovation departments there that are looking at crypto. And from the perspective of like traditional game.

designers or game studios. There's this, I think, this notion that the crypto business model doesn't make sense for the economics of building mass market games that costs millions of dollars to produce. Is crypto gaming fundamentally orthogonal to the traditional way that we think about building games? Or do you think there's a middle ground here that we'll achieve at some point? I would say my observation in these interactions with like Epic and Ubisoft and certainly like the drama around Discord and things like that is more that, you know, the innovator's dilemma continues to prevail. and that very rarely the incumbent will be the leader in the new, like in the new up and coming category. You know, this is true across technology in so many fields.

And so I don't think that, you know, Ubisoft or AAA game manufacturers with armies of teams and the corresponding drama and politics that are inherent in those size of teams, will be the ones that that catch fire here. I think that there it's easy to dismiss some of the core tenants and the power of of crypto communities until you see it unfold. And I think that that's what's going to happen. And so like, you know, they say, well, you need all these millions of dollars and and upfront cost and you know, and you have to build, you know, mass market user base. It's like, well, you could actually kill two birds of one stone and get, you know, like by funding it through the crowd and getting your community on board, both as users, evangelists, as well as, you know, asset holders, that's a great way to bootstrap all of this together. And so crypto

uniquely enables that. The other component of this is, I think it would be important. to set a parameter for what is like mass market adoption. There is a point in 2021 where there is about 480,000 daily active users of Ethereum addresses and about 410,000 daily active users of Axi Infinity, a Ronan addresses. And, you know, it's really inspiring. In fact, being in the space as long as I. I have been. There's two stories that I find the most inspiring in the history of the space. The one is all the people in the Philippines who were able to replace their job by playing Axi Infinity during COVID, right?

You know, there was no, you know, there's no government bailout or handouts during COVID. Like they had to figure out a way to survive. And they were able to replace their job that they lost in tourism or manual labor by playing this game. And it became so culturally ingrained that like people were. would buy houses in the in-game currency and like the like cities were operating using this crypto asset. And I think that that's really important, especially as we see AI ML, you know, take the world by storm. We're going to have to get real about alternative approaches to, to effectively UBI. And for me, these games could affect a best first attempt at UBI.

And we've had glimpses of that happen. And so just to conclude, the second really inspiring story, and I think that this may be the next topic that we can discuss, are these artists, these digital artists who for so long didn't have a way to commercialize their work. Because if you bought a piece of digital art and somebody copied it, you didn't know who had the original, who had the copy. And so there was no scarcity of it. There was no collectability there. And with the advent of NFTs, these digital artists were able to commercialize their work for the first time. And that was really amazing. Like we saw all these rags to riches stories that in an industry that had been broadly based on the speculative use case until now, this, I found these two stories to be really amazing that artists and then it,

individuals in emerging countries could bootstrap themselves and and and sort of you know take a step forward and be able to provide just a reasonable income um it you know in the case of artists mike uh you know more commonly known as people he he jokes around that the highest he ever got for an every day before nfts was a hundred and ten dollars right and that's like shows that like crucible moment of digital scarcity conferred rarity to his work and then that conferred collectability. And that then conferred value. And ultimately for an artist like Mike conferred really life-changing value. And those I just find to be really inspiring stories and where I want to spend my time in

my capital. So yeah, let's maybe talk about NFTs a little bit. And again, you know, this is a space that I've sort of, oh, dabbled in a little bit, like within crypto verticals, you know, like defy and FTEs, gaming, et cetera. And, you know, I, there are moments where I felt like, yeah, like, this is, this is like super empowering for artists, et cetera, right? You know, like, this, this narrative that you, that, that you just expressed. Then there's other moments where I'm like, this is a hot shit show and there's nothing good will come out of this. And, you know,

most of this will go to zero. Can you break, break down your thesis for, how NFTs are fundamentally like a game changer in terms of how artists express themselves and how do we reason about what is actually of cultural significance and what isn't? I guess one thing I think about a lot is with the 2016-2017 cycle 2018, ICOs were a big part of the narrative. And what came out of that, I think, you know, are things like SAFs or more structured, regulated funding mechanisms like... Coinlist? Coin list. Yes, thank you.

So I think that, you know, from that exuberance came out like these interesting funding mechanisms. Now, with NFTs, I don't know that we've yet... Maybe I've missed it, but like, I don't know that we've yet really seen. like what will we look back on and say, oh, this is what the NFT summer produced, right? And so yeah, maybe if you want to expand on that. It's interesting. I think as venture capitalists, we're at peace with a cycle where 90 something percent of something writes to zero because that few percent that survive,

often go on to be incredibly valuable. And so whether it's ICOs, which is a really important funding mechanism, or whether it's, you know, NFTs, which is a really important representation of digital scarcity for a variety of use cases. And I'll talk about the taxonomy in a minute. I recognize and have gone on record like in the height of the, the bull market of both of those saying, yeah, of course, 95% of these will go away. And that's fine because the 5% to survive will create such extraordinary value that it won't matter. Nobody will care.

And so I think it's really important to separate the taxonomy of NFTs because as a technology, it has such wide sweeping applications, right? Like today it's being used for, you know, digital art and gaming and and some like social clubs and and, you know, different things, different things like that. Tomorrow it will be your house deed, you know, your, your university diploma. NFTs will encompass eventually all capital assets. But for, for today's taxonomy, what the way that we. we separate it is we look at digital art. That is somewhat, and so within digital art, there's some subcategories. So you've got Algo art like Rafiq Anadol, you've got pop culture

art like people, you've got generative art. Generative art is kind of cool because that's where a platform, a artist, and a user come together in a critical moment to create something that they've all participated in. That creates a certain bond. between the collector and that outcome. And then, you know, you can kind of go down, down the list from there in art, but that is different. So find digital art is different than, say, gaming assets that are supposed to have utility. And that's also different from what we consider to be social clubs.

So something like board apes in its current iteration is more like a social club, right? People are signaling to the world that they, you know, can afford to spend six, six figures on a on a on a monkey jpeg and in over time it will it will evolve into being a gaming asset we we we think we hope and so those are those are very very different categories and then you know we'll see music nfts which there's been some early experiments on and and and i think there will be some more we'll see full feature films um you know especially like choose your own adventure films where like you can compose like six nfts to get one outcome and compose like, you know, 13 to get a totally different film outcome than

you otherwise would have. Right down the line until, again, all capital assets are NFTs. In the digital, so we, with one of one, our, our collector pool, we focus just on fine digital art. And not only that, we focus just on fine digital art that we can interface with museums because our mission is to help digital artists find their rightful place in art canon. Because again, digital artists have been completely dismissed in the art world and art canon for generations, in part because there was no collect, in large part, because there was no collectibility of their work. And that has changed.

And so that's kind of the interesting thing in the digital art category. And from there, you know, my friend Amy Capoleto has a, this very famous. I've been spending a lot more time in the art world because just got, you know, hurtled face first into it with purchasing both the Rafiq Anadol MoMA piece as well as as human one by people. And I, you know, met some just unbelievably brilliant people in the art world. It actually caught me by surprise how many thoughtful, remarkable people spend most of their their time and capital and art. And my friend Amy Capiletto told me this one piece of advice.

She said, look, in all categories of art across the ages, only about five to maximum 10 artists survive a decade and matter. And everybody else basically writes to zero. And I was like, that's interesting because that's kind of like venture, right? And so I take a venture approach to art. But what we see is that upper crust will survive, right? That those very important, these like cultural monocers, these, you know, these things that we identify as representative of our time, they will survive and be very valuable.

I'm cautiously optimistic that both the works of Rafiq Anadal and people will be a among that that discussion, but I don't know. And that's why I take a portfolio approach. And we've got more than 50 artists, including 20 female artists in the, in the portfolio. And I find that that just is really exciting that very clearly digital artists merit being represented in art canon. Very clearly, they have not been properly represented in art canon until now. And that will change.

And we can benefit. and you know and capture growth in that regard do you think there's like a also maybe like a a generational component to this um i'll give you like an example that something that happened recently like i was in amsterdam and i went to this this this art gallery it's this place called the moco museum and they had a bunch of nfts there actually i sent you a picture right there was this there was a people there and i sent you a picture of it and uh and so i was you know i was a My fiancé and I were like, by far the oldest people in this museum. We're like, you know, we're in our late 30s.

And so, and there was just like in the NFT room, everybody was like clamored in the NFT room trying to take pictures of the NFTs. And then we had a very different experience at the Ricks Museum, which is like this, you know, this world famous kind of sort of fine arts museum in Amsterdam where, you know, it's an institution. But, you know, nobody's like clamoring to take, you know, pictures of, you know, Van Gogh or something, or maybe a little bit. But like not as much as like this people. So I wonder if there's this, if there's like a very kind of generational cultural significance that this digital art has to a generation of people that associates more with like this digital component and this sort of very modern contemporary component. Absolutely. I think this definitely resonates with a millennial and Gen Z audience much more than traditional art.

Now, one of the interesting things that have come out from that is museums, major global institutions are recognizing this far faster than we think, far faster than I imagined. Like if a year ago today, somebody would have told me that we'd have a piece in both M-plus and MoMA. And by the way, the one in MoMA, the Rufiq Anadale is shattering records, has completely broken the record for the longest period of time on average that people spend in front of a work at the MoMA. I can think about it, like, this is the MoMA, like, ever. Like, this is in front of starry night in front of, you know, water lilies, in front of all

the Picasso's, all of everything, ever. The Rafiq Anadal is tracking as, you know, as having the highest engagement. And, and, you know, museums are waking up really fast to, to the fact that this matters. Because post-COVID, museums are having to get, I think, more, more creative about how they get people back to, to museums. And, and as a result, like, I, what I'm seeing is, Again, I can't speak broadly across NFTs, but in the fine digital art category, major institutions are filling the hole where the crypto community has, has sort of like lost, lost the narrative and kind of, you know, are sort of missing the forest for the trees, right?

Like, we're, too many people are worried about like floor prices and air drops and utility. And we got Pompe do lack mom, you know, M plus, like all these global institutions acquiring fine digital art NFTs. Like this is a really big thing. And again, if I would have told you this a year ago, you would have said categorically impossible. Like if you know, if you know the art world, you said no way Pompe do is going to announce

a major like collection overhaul or the MoMA is going to announce the sale of $70 million worth of their all-important art collection in order to lean into digital. Right. Like that's a huge, huge movement. And so again, like that's kind of the thing that I find the most compelling and most interesting and that will survive and thrive and create great value over time. Right. I'm actually sort of curious.

I think what you mentioned is super interesting that, you know, we're worried about these air drops, floor prices. Do you think there's some sort of like? like, I guess there's a big difference between, you know, bootstrapping a keeper network, let's say, and the way to incentivize and like the kind of crowd you get. And maybe in the NFT space, like how you become significant is probably like a different mechanism. Do you, or do you see like some overlap of how you would like sort of bootstrap these different communities through the incentivization? Or is it like something totally different?

Yeah. In the fine art, it's fundamentally different because it's not about like creating network effects because you have like scarcity that drives the value and and you know, you actually don't want like velocity in the in the network. It's like let's look at, you know, let's look at a great collection, which is both very high quality fine art and, um, and also has great. community in digital art, which is squiggles, right? Snowfro, creator of this idea of this generative, you know, um, Trinity that comes together where collectors feel a really deep resonance with that.

There's no velocity, but you can't, you know, you can't get a, uh, a rare skiggle. Like you can offer whatever you want. You just can't get it. Like there's just no, like, people are like, no, this is mine and it's always mine. And that is kind of what you're looking for. and finer, that's a bit, that's very, very different than what you'll look for in like gaming or in, in other categories. And that was, you know, I started out like, being like, okay, I don't know what is going to be cool in NFTs. So like, let's experiment in all the different categories. And then from a collection perspective, kind of narrowed things down over time to focus on find digital art, even though the fund continues to do a lot of a lot more things in

I think, you know, the size of the gaming space will dramatically eclipse the size of the fine art space. Like, you know, gaming will be multi-trillions where art will will stay well into the, well into the like low billions. And so those are very different. I think you will see like these interactions of bootstrapping and inflation driving things in gaming and fine art. It's a fundamentally different mechanism. the art is the utility, right?

Right, thanks. Yeah, we definitely have so much to cover, like, topics and, like, verticals. So, like, we're going to try to make, like, a bit of a hard cut here. I think I read, like, on the Dialectic website, it's, like, says, Dialectic is a machine that solves ciphers to unlock exceptional value for our members. Can you expand a bit on what that means? So we are a group. built by crypto natives for crypto natives.

So the vast majority of our members, member families or LPs are, you know, entrepreneurs that I've done well with over the years or friends in the space. And, you know, and there are a set of challenges that that you face managing significant crypto wealth. And so everything we do is very crypto native, you know, on chain. and we look at the architecture and portfolio construction from a crypto natives view with an understanding of the nuances, the difference between investing in crypto assets that have, you know, shorter timeline to liquidity, higher volatility, some advantages, some disadvantages that you can manage. And then we take a very technical approach to those.

And so, you know, one of the things that I think I'm most proud about and is very emblematic of what we do is our market neutral fund. So all of our vehicles are named after Swiss watch complications and our market neutral fund chronograph, which as of today is yielding 18.36 annualized. I think that's probably around 4x outperformance of our peers. And the way that we're able to do that is that we have this software suite called Medici that automates harvesting, compounding, it automates a bunch of the analysis of like how to balance pools, how to balance between, you know, what we've done is we've stacked, taken regular defy, and on top of that stacked delta neutral, and then on top of that stacked MEP.

And MEV isn't like traditional market neutral, but you can make it market neutral. And it, it sort of pops once in a while when you hit a strat. And that's like, you know, winning a lottery every day for, for a week until it gets arbed away. But it's still good. And the combination of these things and then having a software suite that that delivers more security and delivers a programmatic approach of balancing, you know, when defy is down, we balance more into Delta neutral. When Delta neutral is not available because of a variety of things, maybe we're at more. MEV and more in DEFI and then we diversify across a wide range of of pools and having that long tail exposure allows us to put small amounts of money into like high risk and degen stuff

which can have really high yields without risking going below zero percent in a month so we still remain market neutral up every month but you can go and take like deacon risk on some things if you're if you isolate it enough and if you have the right infrastructure around you. And so that's like, you know, that's the kind of stuff that we do that's very crypto-native. It's very technically driven and we're really satisfied with the returns. Right. Yeah. It's super interesting.

And I guess I wonder, is this something that you have to do like proprietary or is there also like a way to like sort of build this also fully on chain or are there like elements that you just, because of the, I guess, MV nature of it, you can, like, build this into like a network type thing? Or is that something you thought about? So there are parts of it that we do feel compelled to maybe in the not too distant future release to the world for community support. So, for example, like, you know, we have this thing like bridge watcher and also like pool watchers where what they'll do is they'll watch for specific signals and it imbalances in a pool or bridge and then automatically remove capital should any of those signals occur. And does it in multi-sigs on chain. And like the amount of

money that would have been saved by people in exploits over the last year if, you know, if the bridge watcher was widely available, would have been really significant. You know, we've seen it play out for ourselves where we've been able to get out of a pool. when it was showing these signs and and you know a lot of other people got got burned um so i think there is a moment where we we open source some of this because it's just important infrastructure but then we have to balance it because like you know we're not like we're not a foundation we don't like we make money by making money for our members and and and ultimately we have to do that first and foremost and and while these things are producing

really compelling outperformance on the yield, you know, we're, we feel pretty good with where that is, especially in a really highly volatile market, right? Like people running, you know, like hedge fund strategies of liquid tokens or even venture strategies, I can empathize with that this is a more, a very difficult market to say fundraise in as well as deploy into because of volatility and uncertainty around a whole bunch or different topics like regulation. And so our market neutral feels like just like home base, right, where we can like revert back to.

We know we make great money for our LPs. We know we return great money to our shareholders as a result. And that just feels really comfortable right now in these uncertain times. Tell me a little bit more about this bridge watcher. What kind of things are you looking for in order to, detect, you know, these signals, like what signals are you looking at to detect when, like, there's a bridge hack going on? And what have, what have you learned from that in, in terms of how these exploits go down? I mean, there's some really, like, simple ones,

just like capital imbalances that you can take. There's a bunch of social signals that you can also be drawing on. There are, you know, There's a range. I suppose I shouldn't get too far into this, but some of it is sort of a what would be called like a defensive MEV. So you're kind of like MVing the bridge to not be MEVed. And that like that, you know,

MEV broadly is, I often refer to as like inception for crypto. It's like math Olympics. and so that that goes right down the rabbit hole. But there's a bunch of MEV strats that that have second order implications and indications that that are certainly important. And then capital imbalances, social notifications, and a bunch of things like that. Because again, like if somebody is draining from the bridge,

it's always going to be like one side of the bridge it drains, right? And so if you see a delta in that very quickly, and it's to the negative, right? It's not that somebody's come in with new capital. It's like someone has taken off capital. Then that can be a first order, certainly a first order signal. And then you can compare it with all of the other signals to then automatically execute the multi-sig transactions to remove capital from that pool.

Okay. So how are you guys engaging in the NED space more broadly? I mean, you guys have been a pretty prolific participant in that. ecosystem. What what types of things are you are you doing to engage with the M.EV space? So my co-founder dean spun out a separate organization, which we, you know, which we ceded and incubated called Project Blanc. And together with a bunch of math PhDs, they run MEV across a number of different networks. And that is about sort of like building infrastructure that goes beyond the simple sandwich attack.

And he will literally shoot me if I get too deep in the weeds on his strats. But what I, you know, what I would say is that I think it's really interesting because what we did internally. So he had spun that out. That's been spun out for over a year. And they do, and they do really well. It's a cash flow business. It's less of a venture thing.

But they've run great cash flow. And then the funny thing about MEV is every new layer one and layer two that pops up presents a new set of MEV opportunities. Right. And so people are like, ah, well, you know, you're going to get you're going to get arbed away in MEV. And that may be true in Ethereum. And certainly with like UniV4, I think I think MEV and Ethereum will be certainly a full house at best and probably. just like, you know, done. Maybe not done, but a very full house, very competitive environment.

But the thing is there's so many new layer ones popping up every single day that like you constantly have green fields where you can reapply infrastructure in other categories. And so we really like what they did. You know, and then what we do is we use some of their data and their infrastructure to do this defensive MEV and our market neutral. And that helps just like pop, pop the yields and take them from, you know, like mid teens to mid-20s in this environment when things are going well. And overall, I think it's, it's an interesting category. You know, when I explain MEV to people who have no idea about crypto, I often say like, have you read Michael Lewis as Flashboys?

It's kind of like Flash Boys for Crypt. And if you take a, to the second and third order implications, you know, the advent of flashboys and Algo trading at that time ended up making for more efficient markets. And I am firmly of the belief that MEV makes for more efficient markets in crypto, even though. And the funny thing is today in the MEV space, I'm gonna preface this by saying,

this is speculation and not confirmed rumor, But our understanding was the top sort of four players in this base were Alameda, CZ Binance, who may or may not have been doing very heavy MEV on their own chain, which I think there will be a long discussion about that, if that does end up being the case. Justin's son and jump. And the three of those four are now gone, right?

They're out the door. And AmyV is something that accrues to the, and so we're kind of like number five, number six sort of thing. And it's one, it's a thing that accrues to the, to the upper crust like many things. And so like top two capture the lion's share on, on a given network. And now that you have the most, like the largest, most resource intensive players out with a game, it's really like, you know, it's a very interesting new day in MV, I would say. Actually, I want to like sort of take it back also to what we said about gaming and like the

woodstrap networks. And do you sort of see a world where like these sophisticated actors, I guess like, you know, MV participants being like sort of more automated than, you know, like a person playing a game? Do you, do you see like an issue there where maybe, you know, all the players end up being bots instead of, like real players and how how does that future look like or is this something that's just like inevitable or how can like projects kind of defend against that let's say or so i do think that that will be you know that will be a thing there's a really interesting project called altered state machines that makes autonomous agents for plater and gaming games and there are a bunch of other people

thinking about that what my hope is on the other side is that played and gaming will represent an opportunity for effectively universal basic income and so people will play against the bots to like to earn you know to earn income and and then like more sophisticated operators will operate the bots and it makes for this like human and bot interaction that like you know like MEP and like other things where greater levels of sophistication are driving towards efficiency, you will have checks and balances in over time. So like games will have their version of UniV4 that is like bot resistant, but then at the same time,

there still needs to be some bots because there needs to be enough players to play against the people. And the people need that because, again, that's going to be universal basic income. or it's going to be like one of the options for universal basic income. I always am firmly of the belief that the future that we occupy will be much more inspiring and frankly better than than the present. And as these things evolve, we will find solutions for them and it will just be better for everybody. Yeah, I'm also quite quite optimistic that that will be the case.

I think that I think it bears. reminding ourselves sometimes just how early we are. And I know there's sort of a meme that says like people say like, you know, that about about being so early. But we are really fucking early. I mean, there are many people that have interacted with crypto today as there were people on the internet in the late 90s. You know, we haven't crossed a billion users yet.

We're far from it. And, yeah, I mean, there's like just so much more ahead of us. But I think it's, for those of us who've been in it so long, it's difficult to remind to like sort of remind yourself that this is still a very, very early space. I want to take a step back a little bit and maybe bring it up a little bit more high level. You know, given the current global geopolitical climate, how has that affected your your thesis about crypto and something that I'm really interested in is how has that affected your, how you look at investing in crypto. I'd start this by saying I would love your view on this as well, you know, because you've been a super smart investor in the space for a long time.

And I really respect your opinion. So I would love your view on this as well. Generally, I think for the dream of why most of us got into crypto in kind of the 2011, in 2012 era, seems to be coming to fruition, right? We got into it because we believed ultimately that the world was going to suffer through a high inflation moment, that the U.S. dollar is maybe the most overvalued asset in the history of the planet and was going to go through a significant devaluation. And in that environment, deflationary assets were going to matter much more than they ever had. This sort of like return to a version of the gold standard once again. And we see

this playing out, right? Like this is like happening in front of our eyes in this moment. So like broadly I'm leaning in to the into the market and and very confident that we're up into the right from here. Like you don't when when we start a polychance, I used to go around saying that by 2023, no self-respecting hedge fund on the planet would be without exposure to crypto. And by 2025, no self-respecting capital pool of any kind, you know, pension fund or otherwise would be without exposure to crypto. Think of a little precipitated on maybe both of those. But by like a year to tops, I do think that we're hitting the knee of a curve that we've, long been waiting for. And, and that's really interesting. However, as venture capitalists,

what that means is that our scarce, ETH and Bitcoin that we are then giving to an entrepreneur has to perform even better because we know that, like, I know ETH has a 10x in it. I bet the farm on that. Right. So that means for the entrepreneur that I give money to, because my, like my opportunity costs as an ETH, he's got to go out and deliver, you know, 100x or more. And so it has been, you know, it's been making, causing us to to pause somewhat and, and seek like a more consolidated portfolio of a very high outcome, um, possibilities, I would say. Um, on the venture side, but on with respect to like liquid tokens, I mean, I think I don't, I don't, a collection of just like thoughtful, like high quality liquid, you know, liquid assets like Cosmos and Eith and Polygon and wormhole and a few others. Uh, it just like so obvious right now in my view. Um, and I don't know, maybe I'm, maybe I'm just a hammer and all I see is nails.

But I think it's like I'm more excited in this moment than I think I ever have been in the space, ever. But what's your take? Like how are you thinking through this from perspective of like the tectonic changes in geopolitical landscape and how and how that's affecting you as an investor? Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't be starting an investment fund if I didn't think that we were up into the right from here. So that idea very much resonates with me. We're also approaching our investment strategy with a very concentrated portfolio strategy, which is why we started with a fairly reasonably small-sized fund because we need to deploy it.

And we also want to deploy it in really high-quality projects that can generate 100x returns. because, you know, because we are, you know, our investors are crypto investors. Our LPs are our crypto-LPs. And so for them to deploy their, you know, their ETH and their Bitcoin and these high-value assets in a fund, they also have to, you know, to have that conviction that the fund will outperform. So that resonates with our strategy. with regards to where we're at and the types of things that we're looking at, I think that there still remains a lot of infrastructure to be built.

And I feel that the next cycle is going to be heavily infrastructure focused. So, you know, we've got the initial building blocks of crypto infrastructure in the form of you know, blockchain networks with like a decentralized value set that allows you to settle and this sort of thing. But the way that that will look in, say,

five years is going to be very different. And I take a lot of, I take a lot of lessons, I think, from the way the web has, has sort of abstracted the different layers of its stack. And I see that happening in crypto as well, where in the early 2000s,

if you wanted to run any website, you know, like you had to buy physical server space, install an OS on there, run a web server, and you were essentially operating all of that infrastructure in one machine, which is sort of what blockchains look like now. But as things went on,

basically the layers of abstraction between an application and the hardware, There's like, you know, perhaps dozens of layers there. And I think that's also happening in crypto. What we need to keep sort of the, you know, our eye on is decentralization. And this is why, like the reason we built, the reason we're building this is because we want centricer-sip resistant, scalable applications. And we've been, I think, I think the space for a long time, the narrative has been that

we need to keep blockchains decentralized and scalable and usable. That doesn't really matter. We've had the R on the wrong thing. What we really need is decentralized, scalable, usable, usable applications that are decentralized. And so whatever the stack looks like underneath, I think doesn't really matter so much, as long as the applications retain those properties. It's the applications that are going to matter. And so we need to be careful about what kind of stack we're building.

And one of the things I look at here, for example, is like the fact that most RPC providers are centralized, right? Like, that is, that's a centralizing point that we need to address. But if every layer of the stack sort of maintains those properties, to some extent, then the applications will also maintain those properties. So, anyway, that's a sort of long-winded way to say that I think, like, infrastructure is a big part of what will play out in the next cycle and certainly something that Interop is, like, highly focused on investing in. And where I think a lot of value will continue to come from, right? Like infrastructure has been over the last five years, like sort of the outside of like NFTs and sort of things like the infrastructure has been one of the highest returning verticals or say, yeah, in crypto.

And I think that will continue to be a case. Oh, absolutely. I mean, no, no, no doubt. Yeah, without question. And you could just boil it down to the conceptual decision tree on infrastructure. People outside the space always ask me, like, why do like dozens of blockchains are worth tens of billions of dollars? And I say, because the decision tree on it is a monumental payout. Like you're talking about being the financial substrate of the modern world.

That's a multi-trillion dollar outcome. So even if it's a 0.01%, the net present value of that's, you know, $10 billion. That's why these layer ones and some letter two's are efficiently priced at this value. It's not it's not incoherent. It's not irrational. It's actually very rational because you're talking about literally like the financial substrate of, of the world and beyond over the next, you know, however many decades. You know, I often say there's never been an industry on planet Earth as profitable as programmable money. And within that, the infrastructure layer is where naturally all of the value accrues.

Or not all the value, but the lion's share of the value accrues. If you look at the top 10 most successful venture outcomes in the space, I think I think Axi is the only one that's not a lot. layer one or layer two. And I think that that's a really smart investment strategy, especially in a concentrated fund. I'd actually like your feedback on the way that we look at at early stage investing in a slightly different approach in that we have these buckets. So we go conviction, thesis, exposure, generally as buckets.

And then we create this long tail across. the different buckets. Conviction buckets are larger bets. We've done really deep due diligence. We know the team. They have traction. All these things that you would look for. And that's, you know, that's that's kind of like your traditional venture plays. You have thesis, which, you know, maybe there's like one red flag in there. But you like the team. Team is always a hard box check in that one. And, and the outcome can be really interesting. And then, differently than most venture funds, we have this long tail of exposure. It's going to be like angel checks, you know, kind of 100 to 300k, that usually rest on,

is the technology interesting? Like, is this conceptually a massive outlier outcome? Or do you really like the founder in question? And we leave sort of single digit percentage of the portfolio in our venture book, which is called resonance, available for these long tail exposure bets that are somewhat experimental and often allow you an option on making a conviction bet later on. So like at the at the precede, you maybe make this exposure bet because it's a party round and they're only raising a million dollars.

So, you know, you write the 200k check. And that's really to like get the information to to then later on make a eviction bet. And in crypto, different from venture. So traditional venture would tell you, that's a waste of time. But in crypto, because you have shorter timelines to liquidity and because you have much higher deltas in the return profile, right? Like things go very rapidly into the hundreds of X. Those exposure bets are actually, in our view, in our analysis, the exposure bets are are actually an important part of a coherent crypto portfolio. Because you don't know, you're like, you can't, I'm constantly Italian team.

Like, don't think you're that smart. You don't know what outcome will be a big outcome. And those can be really fast turnarounds and exposure bets. Yeah, like, I love how you think about this. Because as a, as a new manager, right? Like, I guess, yes. these are things that we're trying to sort of, you know, construct and like put down on paper. I mean, what is our strategy?

And I think when you're investing as an angel, you make investment decisions that affect you and no one else. And when you're investing LP's money, I think it forces you to have a little bit deeper thinking around how you're constructing your portfolio, how these allocations, what portion of your portfolio is allocated with these convictions or these high exposure things. And yeah, this is an interesting way to look at it that I'll certainly take back and probably, you know, integrate or in some form

into the way we're constructing our portfolio. But I think, you know, when we haven't like sort of expressed it that way, but it does, I think, resemble a lot of the way in which we have been thinking about how we want a construct our portfolio. We have these things that are super high conviction. And then we have a smaller part of the portfolio that we've sort of labeled like these high risk, more like high risk bets and something in the middle there. So but yeah, it's cool to know that you're also thinking about it this way.

And so built your portfolio press strategies around it. I'm happy to send you some analysis that we've done on this. Fantastic. To just look at it. Because again, it, you know, it's not, it's not like normal venture. Like this flies in the face of a lot of the long held tenants of normal venture. Yeah. So we had so many other things to discuss here, but I just realized we're way over time.

But I do want to talk about your work in psychedelics a little bit. And I know you've been wanted to talk about this as well. So you're also one of the founders of Vine, VC, which is a VC firm that is focused on health and wellness and consciousness and certainly psychedelics. You know, what are some of forward-thinking things you're seeing in this space? And what's your involvement with MAPS, this multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic? Yeah, science.

Yeah, science, yeah. It started, just very quickly, it started when I went with a friend of mine to Peru. He was dealing with a really debilitating addiction problem. And I saw the transformation that he went through and I kind of went like, okay, like something's going on here. This isn't just people tripping out in the forest. You know, mental health is a massive, is the largest pandemic that mankind faces before the pandemic. of one in five people suffer for mental health problems. I think post-pandemic, it's probably close to maybe 40% of the globe.

So this is a problem, and SSRIs are not doing the, are not a solution. And I think, you know, for many people who have tried a psychedelic therapy of any kind, you realize that it's, it's a wonderful experience, both for curing the sick as well as betterment of the well. And so I just kind of wanted to like learn more about this. So I spun up a very small, separate experimental fund in Vine, which is now kind of, it got really slippery and took on a life of its own. And we've been fortunate enough to back some really interesting things in mental health. So like you should try other ship if you can if it's in your

area. It's a community. And people in crypto would really resonate with other ship using holotropic breath work and hot gold therapies to plus community to like take a new approach to mental health but the most sort of the highest conviction bet that we made certainly was in MAPS so MAPS is the multidisciplinary association of psychedelic science 37 years as a nonprofit led by Rick Doblin to bring MDMA over the line of FDA approval they will get that FDA approval by February, March of next year, and then they can actually legally sell MDMA in North America for PTSD. But very quickly, I think you'll see the domino's fall for depression as well as couples therapy. MDMA for, I funded a study in couples therapy a couple years ago, and the results are

shocking of how effective it is for for couples going through various challenges. Um, you know, generally I just like I, I didn't look at this as like a for profit thing because again, like we work in the most profitable industry on the planet. Right. Like if I want to make money, I'll go for crypto, right? Like, you know, nothing's more profitable than program of money. Um, I just looked at it as kind of an exploration, uh, project that where I wanted to be a good custodian of LP capital. I'm very grateful for the LPs that have supported Vine and very, very, um, you know, very happy and very optimistic about the returns that they, they will have. But, you know, ultimately just playing around on the capital model because these are, you know, this is the largest problem that mankind faces. And MAPS is unquestionably the leading organization. They've been a nonprofit and I would like them to be able to stay a nonprofit because I think the social experiment of a nonprofit leading.

a novel pharmaceuticals category is really important. I think if we could prove to the world that you don't need these 20-year patents and pharma margins and the whole farm industrial complex to deliver life-changing therapy, I think that that really matters. And so I designed a SPV for Maps last year, which I led. And we would raise a bit under $50 million. dollars and and what that was was a revenue share so you could as a for-profit investor you could you could make money as METO MAPS has has increasing revenues but then there is a reciprocity

component to it so as you make more money as you go you know 2x and 5x and and 8x mo Ic on your return you give progressively more back to maps the organizations that can stay non-profits that can fund other research and other philanthropic entities. And we're kind of coming up to maps needing to do another fundraise to get to the point of sustainability. They would need probably around another 60 to 80. And I have started to think about, you know, how much overlap there is in crypto and psychedelics.

Like these are my two life's two passions. and I've constantly tried to keep them apart and not have any interaction between the two areas. But we saw a glimpse of how much the two communities love each other in the Christie sale last year where we did a digital art sale with Christie's for the benefit of maps and all. It was just amazing the artists that showed out for that. And that kind of got me thinking of like, okay, are there things that we could be doing to have the crypto community engage further. And I think this would be an important moment for crypto to support a company like this,

in part because we have a narrative problem in crypto right now that the outside world thinks that all we are is a bunch of like Ponzi scammers, you know, profiteers that are just interested in the speculative use case. And so supporting something that really matters, that really moves the ball forward for mankind, solving, you know, arguably the largest problem that mankind faces, the mental health pandemic, I think could be really, really compelling. And then the joke that I've made with Rick is, you know, when we originally designed the regenerative financing vehicle last year for maps, it was like 40 pages to have this reciprocity pledge in the actual company. in the vehicle. And I was like, you know, this is like a few dozen lines of code in a smart contract. Like, you know, in crypto, this is like, you know, refi and DCI. Like these things are like native and natural to us. Where in like the traditional pharma industrial complex, they're like,

this is crazy. Like you're going to like give profits back to a different organization on a program basis. I'm like, yeah. Because if you just ask somebody at the end of the day to give a philanthropic, after they've made 100 X on investment, the redshut 25K check and tell you to go fuck off. Right. And so you have to program it in. It has to be like baked into the incentive model. And that's trivially available in crypto. So I've been trying to think around, you know, there's, I'm not here announcing anything.

I'm just sort of like thinking through like, okay, what could be a, a model that provides cash flows to investors, like provides a really. compelling venture outcome, but has this reciprocity baked in, you know, could we draw on the crypto community to support this, this fundamentally important organization that has done the most to push psychedelic therapies forward across the world? And, you know, and then could we kickstart regenerative financing as like a new defy summer, but have refi summer and we're doing more, you know, more good for the world, um, outside of, of, of, of, of just pure, pure profits. Um, could we kickstart real, like, decentralized science and in supporting something like this? And I feel like, you know, not to be too hyperbolic, but I feel like crypto needs maps and maps

needs crypto. And the two belong together, even though I have tried to keep them apart for as long as I've been involved with both. Um, so that was a bit long. with my apologies. But, but yeah. No, it's super cool. And I mean, certainly, you know, the psychedelic space is one that I think, yeah, I think you're right. Like there, there are a lot of synergies with the crypto space. And certainly people in crypto, I think, are more likely to have done psychedelics than most other people in most other industries. So I think it makes sense that the, that maps and crypto sort of, you know, come together. some in some form or fashion, it seems quite natural.

And yeah, I do also agree that the mental health pandemic, as you call it, is, it feels like it's getting worse. And I think COVID accelerated it, but also what's going on in the world right now, I think, is certainly not helping. And any way that we have to come back from that is good for. in that positive for humanity. Yeah, a lot of the things that are happening in the world that are terrible for humanity are functions of mental health.

Like, why is Russia in Ukraine? Because Putin sat in a basement for two and a half years, you know, only allowing people to sit on the other side of a 30 foot table from him in his own, you know, in his own thought cycle, just stewing away until he can. convinced himself that he was going to like reunite the the former USSR. Like that's a mental health issue. And you go right down the list of so many other things that are like world leaders have us have us on these like insane misadventures and they come down to mental health problems.

Right. This is a this is, you know, with the exception of death, this is the largest problem that mankind faces. Maybe for a different time. We could dive in. Yeah, I think we'll need to do another one, like deep deep into maps and psychedelics for Epicenter's spin-off podcast about psychedelics. So broadly, I'm looking for feedback right now from the community. Like, you know, is this something that the community wants to get behind?

Like, we do need to come through for maps. Like, somebody's got to write this check. Like, there's no way we're going to let this 37-year journey of Rick Doblin, like, die at this precipice moment, right? or even have like a, you know, a pharma VC come in and own it in the end. And it's like all this was for not. That doesn't seem like the outcome that we've been waiting for. And so I do think, I am optimistic that there's an important synergy to be realized between crypto and maps. I haven't cracked the nut of what that is yet.

But we just love the community's feedback. Cool. Well, Ryan, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a pleasure. with you on all of these topics. I'd love to have you on again at some point. Maybe not in 250 episodes, though. You know what?

The important thing is, I know that you guys are going to be around in 250 episodes because you do great work. You're as good as gets in a space. And we're super grateful for everything you do. Thanks, Ryan. Cool. Well, thanks again. And I do want to plug one thing before we go.

just because we didn't have any sponsors today, so it feels fitting. So Nebula Summit, it is happening and it's happening in Paris on July 24th and 25th. So Nebula Summit is the Interchange Builders Conference. It's two days. It's going to be epic for anybody who was there last year. And I know Felix you were there last year. So I know you can vouch for this. That Nebula Summit is probably one of the best events in Europe for interchained builders.

So anything related to cosmos, interoperability, Cosmos Defi and Cozumwasum, staking, etc. So this year we're doing it again. It's going to be two days. It's happening at this place called Albert School in central Paris, which maintains, is larger than our venue last year, but it tries to keep the very cool vibe that we had at last year's venue. And tickets are on sale.

So the early bird tickets went on sale on Monday, April 3rd, and we still have some available. So I think by the time this goes up, there'll probably be some. Very few early-bar tickets left. So if you plan on being at ECC this year, you should definitely get a ticket to the Nabilitar Summit. It's going to be great.

And we've already got something like 15 speakers lined up and probably will go up to 70-80 speakers. So yeah, that's happening. And we'd love to see all of you there if you can make it. So thanks again for joining us this week. And we'll talk to you in the next week's episode. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week.

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