Julian Dorey Podcast - #29 - Cole Kennelly

Starting point is 00:00:00 We're going to create a system that works and we're going to do it in a way that takes out human error. Bitcoin being the best example, by setting things like not just a transparent ledger, but by the way, this is going to be a monetary system that has a fixed supply. You can't fuck with it. No government can ruin it. No guy who has to win elected office or save his ass can say in the short term, like, all right, we're just going to print money and solve the fucking problem and leave it to the next guy. There's no kicking the can down the curb. Yeah, you know, Bitcoin's not a bubble. Bitcoin is the pin that pops the bubble. That's like a kind of an idiom in crypto.

Starting point is 00:00:43 What's cooking, everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by my friend Cole Cannelli. Cole works at a company called Staked, which, let me put this in English for you. You most likely have U.S. dollars if you're listening to this, and you may put said dollars in a savings account at a bank, and it earns interest, and it probably makes like a penny on a hundred dollars a year because interest rates are nowhere and you make no money cole does that except not with u.s dollars he does it with you ready for it cryptocurrency yeah we're going

Starting point is 00:01:18 there today so cole has been in this space for a long time he was there when before it was cool when it was cool after it was not cool and when it's apparently like kind of cool again. He is somebody who is – I believe he says he started really in this in the beginning of 2016. I think he talks about that today. Total genius. Very smart. And by the way, Staked is not his only project. It's not.

Starting point is 00:01:39 It's one thing. His other thing, he's a founder on, co-founder with one other person, and I believe his title is CEO. And it's called Volumex.Finance. And it is a volatility index that you can invest in built on the Ethereum blockchain. And I just watched, I didn't watch, but I can imagine the eyes on your faces just glazing over, your ears ringing, and you going, what the hell did he just say? We do talk about that today, but that is not at all the focus of this conversation. You will at least understand what that means, though. Cole is somebody I wanted to bring in here to talk about the space in general. This is important.

Starting point is 00:02:15 It is a weird time, a tragic time in many ways right now going on in the world with the pandemic and everything around that. But we have also watched the continuation, in fact, the nuclear bomb of the trend that's occurred not just in our country, but around the world, especially since the global financial crisis in 2008, 2009, of governments printing more money and us not knowing anything about what it actually does to the value of said money, or most of us don't. And it's something that I spent a lot of my life clueless about and really only started paying attention to in like 2017, 2018, when I started to become aware of crypto. My belief is that crypto is very much here to stay. It is a way of the future and it is a path to financial freedom. Now you say, all right, that's a lot of buzzwords, a lot of rah, rah,

Starting point is 00:03:03 okay, whatever. Cole is here to actually make some sense of it and to open up the conversations. And look, it's a complicated topic. I've talked about it before. I've told you that one of the big problems with the crypto space is that they haven't found a way to bring it in English to the general public, including guys like myself. And it's true. In a lot of ways, they haven't. And there will be times today where we ramble. And there will be times where we went in little circles and times where you're like, what the hell did Cole just say? However, I talked to Cole before the podcast, and he encouraged me to cut him off when he was getting a little bit too complicated to try to define things as he went along along so i don't like interrupting the flow of conversation but you will hear me do that sometimes today just to keep it honest i will say that there are a few times where maybe we didn't end up coming back to the original point of the conversation just because we went deep on a whole bunch of rabbit holes and there will be sometimes where you're probably like i really didn't get

Starting point is 00:04:03 that that said i wanted to bring him in here for two to three hours just to make sense of some of it. And if we could get a half hour out of it that was really valuable for people to feel like they understand and how this stuff is actually conceptualized into everyone's reality, then it would be a success. So I hope we did that. Cole did a phenomenal job. He's huge on Twitter, by the way. And this dude, he's subtle and he's humble, but he is one of the greatest Twitter networkers of all time. This man has sat with some of the smartest people in the world when it comes to cryptocurrency and blockchain and other things strictly by networking and meeting them on Twitter. And I can verify a lot of that.

Starting point is 00:04:43 I mean, it's pretty crazy some of the meetings he's had. So he is legit. He's a young killer. And I look forward to having him in here again. Hey, guys, very quickly. Cole and I recorded this episode a couple days before Christmas. So two relevant notes I just wanted to add in here because I did the intro right after we recorded the episode. Number one, the Bitcoin prices you hear us discuss, which is only a couple times. Obviously, they've changed a little bit because Bitcoin's ripped since then. And number two, we did not really discuss Ripple and XRP very much, but there was a five or 10 minute area where we did. And this podcast was recorded hours before the SEC filed their lawsuit against Ripple. So when you don't

Starting point is 00:05:25 hear any mention of that lawsuit, that's why. It hadn't happened yet. Anyway, back to the intro. Other than that, if you're not subscribed, please subscribe. If you're not subscribed on YouTube, please subscribe there. I'm dropping clips almost every day. Pretty excited about that. I think that gives a good feel for what the show is all about just in little bite sizes and keep those five-star review on apple podcast coming you're doing an amazing job thank you to everyone who's done that that's a huge help they're really incredible i i really really appreciate the people who do that that's amazing and finally started this a few weeks ago but if you can share the podcast with one week. Can you tell I'm a little tuned up?

Starting point is 00:06:07 It was a long day. I had a long conversation with this guy. I've been facing a little bottle of wine here. Don't sue me. Anyway, let's try that again. If you can, please share the podcast with one friend who you think might like it. And obviously to everyone who's already done that and has continued to help me build this audience, thank you so much. And that said, you know what it is. I'm Julian Dory, and this is Dreadfire. where's the news you're giving opinions and calling them facts everyone understands this but few seem to do it if you don't like the status quo

Starting point is 00:06:53 start asking questions what's cooking brother hey man thanks for having me on this is great to be here dude i'm glad you came down excited to have you on this is a very interesting time to be talking to a man like you so i've been looking forward to this one but dude what's going on with bitcoin you know bitcoin's uh it's going to the moon right now it's uh it's at 24k uh it's all-time high or 20 23.8k or something like that yeah uh you know uh market's looking really good there's uh happy to get more you know get more into it but that's at a high level uh bitcoin is doing super well right now yeah i think a lot of people are very you know they hear bitcoin they hear cryptocurrency

Starting point is 00:07:39 and they're still very scarred from 2017 when everyone and their mother was jumping in on the bandwagon. They knew nothing about it. And then everything crashed in 2018. And so a lot of people just kind of left that behind and said, oh, we don't talk about that. And now here we are in the midst or towards the end, obviously, like very end of 2020, which has been a hell of a year in all the wrong ways. But we've seen a complete reintegration of the space into our public sphere and we see a lot of people talking about it again and my question for you is as a guy who's been in this space consistently since before 2017 even what has the

Starting point is 00:08:23 vibe been this time around that makes you think like, hey, adoption's actually here? And that doesn't just mean for Bitcoin, but just like in general for a new way of looking at money. Sure. So the primary difference between what's going on in 2020, bull market in crypto from 2017 is there's largely this institutional buy-in this time around. You have folks, legendary fund managers like Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, Bill Miller coming into crypto, basically eliminating any reputational risk for any other fund managers that come in after them. So that's certainly big.

Starting point is 00:09:01 And you're also seeing companies like MicroStrategy, a publicly traded software company that's buying Bitcoin with their balance sheet. You're talking about the guy Michael Saylor that we're seeing talking about this like every day on CNBC and Bloomberg and Twitter, right? That's right. Michael Saylor. Got it. He runs that company. CEO of MicroStrategy, right. So, yeah, at a high level this time around, there's been a large institutional buy-in from both institutional investors as well as different companies in the markets that have kind of gravitated towards crypto and are now entering the market. With Ethereum, there's been a ton of growth with a number of applications that have been built on Ethereum, largely around finance. So there's kind of a movement going on called decentralized finance or DeFi. So basically what's going on is there's these financial applications that are being built on Ethereum. They're open source and publicly available, can be verified. They're provable.

Starting point is 00:10:12 And they can be used together. So you can think of them like a common analogy is Legos. So people call these protocols money Legos. So a lending protocol can be used with an exchange protocol. And these protocols together can be used to create a third protocol and so on and so forth. So a really powerful concept there happening with applications on Ethereum. And at the beginning of the year, there was about $500 million locked in these DeFi applications. Today, there's north of $10 or closer to $15 billion.

Starting point is 00:10:46 So it's grown by orders of magnitude this year. So overall, there's a ton of developments happening in both Bitcoin and Ethereum and a lot of other related areas. So I think it's a super exciting time in the crypto space. All right, let me back you up because you just dropped like four or five bombs on us there. So let's take them one at a time. The first thing you were going through was the institutional buy-in to Bitcoin, and I think this is a really important point. I think you mentioned Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, some of these big hedge fund guys, obviously, Saylor and what MicroStrategies is doing as a company. To be clear, I think when you said their balance sheet, they're putting it in Bitcoin, they've basically taken, I think at this point, maybe like a billion dollars worth of cash

Starting point is 00:11:36 on hand and invest that in Bitcoin. Is that correct? Somewhere in that neighborhood? So I believe the initial investment, Michael Saylor had made a personal investment first. He disclosed that properly to the company. But afterwards, I think MicroStrategy made a, I believe it was $325 million Bitcoin investment around, if I'm not mistaken, it was around $10K. With Bitcoin at $10K. Yeah, so Bitcoin's at 10K. So fast forward until a few weeks, you know, in the last few weeks, MicroStrategy, excuse me, they announced that they were issuing a convertible note to buy more Bitcoin. And we're doing, I think it was like $600 million financing. So all in, they've purchased.

Starting point is 00:12:34 They have, I think, more than a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. So it's certainly a material bet for them. Now, that's one company. But we've also seen Square run by twitter ceo jack dorsey take up positions there we have seen wall street also come out and we've seen some positions like mass mutual took 150 million i think i'm forgetting some of the other ones but i'll put them in the show notes there's been several but we've seen a lot of quote-unquote old heads on Wall Street come out and suddenly be like, yeah, no, I get it. Like I'm in.

Starting point is 00:13:09 So back in 2017, again, to bring it back to that first time around, yes, you had some guys like Peter Thiel out in Silicon Valley take a position. You did have some hedge fund guys actually buy into it. I know Mark Yusko was one of them. Guys like Tim Draper, Chamath from Social Capital and formerly Facebook. Those are some of the bigger names. Naval. Naval, certainly. But the point stands that now those are early stage tech investors and now we're seeing folks like MassMutual. It's super interesting. The powers that be. It is super interesting the powers that be

Starting point is 00:13:45 it's it's basically the traditional powers that be coming in and saying okay all right we at least publicly saying we get it and and we're in and i want to start with the simple part of bitcoin here because again a lot of people hear this stuff and their eyes glaze over and look i think part of it is it's two things number one we have a lack of financial literacy in this country and their eyes glaze over and look i think part of it is it's two things number one we have a lack of financial literacy in this country and around the world for that matter and this is more finance and it's a little more complicated too and number two because everything in the crypto space so to speak in that stratosphere touts itself as transparent and it is with what you can know about where it exists what's on the blockchain

Starting point is 00:14:26 all that stuff that some people are like what the hell is he talking about but basically you can go look at this stuff in ways that you can't look at it in a traditional banking system but because of all that when people go to look at it they're like what the fuck because it's so much and they're like i don't get it and that's been a big resistance point. And I think that the crypto space, one of the things that they seem to be getting a little better at, but they still have a long way to go, is that unlike Silicon Valley, who, when that was really growing, found a way to match the marketers with the genius and then take it to the everyman. In crypto, all the genius is there. That is so clear but the messaging to take it all to the everyman has not been as effective as silicon valley eventually got it it's still early here but when i look at this like you we were talking about ethereum i don't know if that

Starting point is 00:15:18 was on the podcast or right before but then you start getting into things like that and people are really like all right and you're losing me. What is it? So with Bitcoin, let's just completely start there right now. Sure. This is something that was created on October 1st, 2008 by Satoshi Nakamoto. And then I want you to take it from there and kind of walk through just the beginnings of it and what the general concept was for people to understand. So Bitcoin was created in 2008, 2009 by a pseudonymous creator named Satoshi Nakamoto. The title of the Bitcoin white paper is Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:15:53 a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. So from the get-go, the premise has always been send anyone anywhere in the world any amount of money at a low cost. So if you're sitting in New Jersey or New York, with Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, folks can send funds around the world with no permission, no authorization

Starting point is 00:16:16 required from any third party. Bitcoin was the only one at first though, right? Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency. There's actually been attempts to create other cryptocurrencies before but bitcoin was certainly the most uh most the first you know let's say popular cryptocurrency um there's other attempts called you know uh uh by david chom called you know uh hash cash i forget if that's the right

Starting point is 00:16:40 name but that was in like the 90s yeah there's been all these you know there's been a kind of cryptography movement since the 80s or so, there's been a kind of cryptography movement since the 80s or so. And it started getting applied to money eventually. So basically, Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency. It's also the first application of blockchain technology, which is effectively a distributed ledger that a number of participants in the network maintain.

Starting point is 00:17:06 Okay, let me stop you real quick. And sometimes, like today, we're going to do this just because it is a little more complicated. I don't like breaking up the flow of Convo, but I just want to make sure we define stuff. So with the blockchain, that is, for all intents and purposes, for a third grader to understand it, it is computer code that is unhackable and it creates a ledger as you said it creates a record to use another word of transactions that happen in this case with bitcoin involving money which is bitcoin that then cannot be changed and they are there as without any third party interference. That's right. So it's a cryptographically or mathematically enforced system where the blockchain is maintained by a number of distributed nodes.

Starting point is 00:17:55 So in order to change it, you would need to change the copy of the blockchain on all these different nodes, which is really impossible. So through this distributed network, it's able to kind of maintain itself. And yeah, it's certainly immutable. You know, blockchain cannot be changed. I think of blockchain a lot like the internet or electricity, where the blockchain is like a thin technology that can be applied to a lot of different industries. So think of blockchain can be applied to finance it can be applied to logistics can be applied to uh the music industry a number of different industries you know early now now in the early days it's finding some product market fit with uh you know finance applications and things that involve money and things like this uh but we'll likely see more applications gain steam in the coming years how could could you apply it? I mean, it's hard enough understanding the money part.

Starting point is 00:18:47 And I understand this aspect of it, but for the average person listening, how can you apply blockchain to, say, one of the examples you gave, maybe music or whatever example is easiest for you to explain? One of the applications that comes to mind is Axie Infinity. It's a crypto-enabled game built on Ethereum. So basically the way they leverage blockchain and crypto is they use Ethereum for storing these in-game assets. kind of you know inspired by pokemon they have these little little uh you know creatures in their game and the way that you know the the place that they you know these little in-game

Starting point is 00:19:29 in-game assets live is you know on chain so they live on the ethereum blockchain so uh no no uh centralized you know no game developer um you know no third party can take these you know creatures away from from the players and uh you know they're they're able to you know no third party can take these you know creatures away from from the players and uh you know they're they're able to you know own and you know and can you know provably know that they uh have control of these uh of these you know assets so that's just one way um at a high level you can think of the blockchain in the music industry how it could be used to automate uh you know revenue shares between artists and uh you know other other other participants uh other you know players in the in the industry so basically like being able to track statistics on how far music spreads so

Starting point is 00:20:20 where right now we have traditional legacy music. The music business is basically certain people control how the cuts are taken, and now the artists themselves would also be able to see everywhere that happens, like on a high level. Sure. Yeah, no, definitely. And there's actually some example I have that's in production today and is being used on the network, on Ethereum today. So there is a concept called nfts nfts are actually related to axi which I was just talking about which they use nfts but nft stands for non-fungible token it's basically a crypto collectible so think of a baseball card

Starting point is 00:20:57 that has a digital digital representation on the blockchain so there's a there's a number of initiatives with these NFTs today. You actually have partnerships with the NBA, MLB that have started delving into this space and there's a lot of interesting work being done. What about classic art? I'm just thinking about the same application. So like you have all these paintings that people supposedly own and now they can prove it.

Starting point is 00:21:22 So yeah, so there's this NFT art coming around, um, on a number of different platforms. Um, and what I'm getting at is, uh, they're automating, uh, basically attribution with NFTs. So every time the art trades, uh, the artist is paid a certain amount. So I think they can set it when they kind of, uh, you know, publish it or kind of create the art, but, you know, they set it, uh, you know, 5% kind of create the art but you know they set it uh you know five percent or ten percent and they can always receive uh you know some sort of you know revenue from this art that they've created so it's super interesting concept it's a tracking signal basically yeah certainly so then there's the crypto art market you know if we had a computer

Starting point is 00:22:00 we could pull it up there's some good trackers um uh let's see so i think it's look up crypto art um i'm not sure if we can add it a little bit uh crypto art see what comes up nope and i can toss some stuff in the notes after let me find it um anyways there's a tracker that has the most expensive artwork sold um and you'd be surprised there's there's some pieces of art uh crypto art that have sold for uh hundreds of eth um so that's like you know hundreds of thousands of dollars um so super interesting there's there's really uh passionate community and know, interesting community forming around NFTs. You know, there's folks that are, you know, willing to buy NFTs at, you know, at a certain

Starting point is 00:22:53 price. And what does NFT stand for again? It's a non-fungible token. So it's basically a unique collectible on the blockchain. So think of the baseball card on the blockchain or a piece of art or this type of stuff. So anyways, this is kind of an application that blockchain can be used for. I'm happy to talk about DeFi as well. Let's get there.

Starting point is 00:23:16 We just went down a rabbit hole already. And guys, I knew this was going to happen. Cole, we'll get to some of his background organically in here at some point. But this is his world. He knows all this stuff inside and out. This is one of the people I go to on pretty much any question in the space. And he's responsible for a lot of things I know as well and have researched myself. So fuck if I appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:23:41 But to go back to the original start of that which was talking about the application of blockchain as it relates to like bitcoin and what else it can be used to used for sure after bitcoin was started as the original or the first adopted cryptography we're talking beginning of 2009 it starts trading and so as you stated and explained it traded on the blockchain before there was any other type of cryptocurrency be it ethereum or xrp or litecoin or whatever all these ones are right so the idea was that this was going to become a currency it was going to become an exchange that we trade around the world like we trade trade dollars. And one of the things that interests me a ton about it is the fact that it was that white paper that you discussed

Starting point is 00:24:30 was released on October 1st, 2008, because that was two and a half or three weeks after Lehman Brothers crashed in the United States. And we were in the midst of spiraling down into this global financial crisis. And one of the offshoots – well, two offshoots were A, you had all the elites, say the banks around the world, basically, the entire system would fail and there'd be a worldwide depression that maybe we never come out of. The governments had to create a lot of new money. And so they had to print. They had to get the presses out and they had to say, all right, more euros, more dollars, more whatever. And these are cycles that had already been happening, but they got exploded right there. And then they've continued to explode in the decade plus since.

Starting point is 00:25:21 And so with Bitcoin, it came out at a time where trust was at an all-time low in these systems and satoshi whoever he or the group of people was and we don't know looked at it and said okay this wealth is being taken from people and people around the world don't realize it because they don't understand that if in one place you had two dollars and now you have four those dollars are worth less and bitcoin and this is my favorite part about it is something that has a set amount so can you talk about that part next like how many there are and sure yeah it's it's super interesting that uh bitcoin came out of this 2008 era where uh there was so much you know um you know havoc and i suppose uncertainty uh you uncertainty in the financial system.

Starting point is 00:26:06 And as I'll get into shortly, Bitcoin has a lot of certainty and that's one of the great things about it. So there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins if the fees aren't material down the line. What does that mean? So without getting too far down the rabbit hole, Bitcoin, once the block rewards subsidy, once all the bitcoins are mined, we'll have to see what happens if the fees are, at that point, they're all mined, if the fees are material enough to keep the miners mining. There's no inflation rewards

Starting point is 00:26:54 at that point anymore. There's no subsidy. There's no block reward subsidy. So the fees will need to be material enough for the network to sustain itself. So if they're not, then there could be kind of a hole in the game theory where you know why are the miners securing the network if there's not material fees

Starting point is 00:27:11 and there's no rewards that doesn't make any sense so and when you're saying miners because this is another thing people get lost on the whole concept of bitcoin that was defined in that white paper was that you needed people to adopt because you needed coders around the world to be able to create the next bitcoins and be incentivized to do so meaning they are going in and i'm going to whitewash it and say they're coding away to confirm what's on the blockchain and then as a result they are paid a predetermined number of bitcoins or amount of bitcoin i should say per time that they do that so you need coders to actually do that and what you're saying is that if there isn't a price that says

Starting point is 00:27:50 this is worth it like i can actually make money doing this coders aren't going to want to do that what i'm saying is once all the bitcoins are mined and there's no more uh like inflation and no more you know kind of subsidy that the fees for the, the fees on the network will need to be material enough where the miners are making money and covering any costs that they have and that it makes sense economically for them. Why would you need miners once all the Bitcoins are mined by, and it's year 2140?

Starting point is 00:28:20 They'll be done, right? Well, the miners secure the network and they verify the network and they, you know, verify the network. So, you know, I guess largely the question is just around incentives for miners once all of the Bitcoins are mined. So it's a really interesting topic that actually doesn't really get talked about a whole lot in the Bitcoin community.

Starting point is 00:28:40 Let's go. Sometimes comes up in the Ethereum community, but overall, it's an interesting concept. So back to the original question, there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins kind of according to Satoshi's spec. And there's, I think, 18 million or so right now, and they'll all be mine in the kind of coming years. A little over 18 and a half. Right. So the market cap of Bitcoin today is about, I need to check. It's like, call it 400 billion.

Starting point is 00:29:08 We'll call it 400 billion. So, you know, it's a large, you know, asset, but not large by, you know, traditional finance standards. You know, gold for comparison is a $9 trillion asset. Pull that mic in a little bit. Pull it closer. Testing. So yeah, that's kind of regarding the supply.

Starting point is 00:29:31 And then the inflation is all transparent and codified and completely predictable. So no surprises, no money printing you know 60 this year in Bitcoin you know it's it's all predetermined and and you know provable so yeah and that's the other thing when we don't I kind of mentioned this a few minutes ago but as an example when Corona hit and we had the big stimulus come in big being a whatever work but it did cost a lot of money and they didn't just take three four trillion dollars out of a vault they put it on the dollar ledger they said all right now there's three four trillion more dollars and so people haven't thought about that and they look at the stock market which is back up you know to where it was and forget all the things going on in the stock

Starting point is 00:30:23 market with the dispersion and all that just the overall value of like the s&p and the dow are those dollars really worth what they were in january hypothetically no yeah that's that's how a lot of people in the crypto space are thinking about this um you know the money supply has grown by uh you know a material amount um this year um yeah i think a lot of people, you know, COVID is a really hard thing for a lot of people. And this has been a tough time for a lot of folks. But I do think that, you know, COVID catalyzed a lot of the stimulus, obviously, and, you know, money printing. And I think it woke a lot of some folks up saying, hey, wait a second. Is my purchasing power being impacted by this? What implications does this have for my business? For example, Michael Saylor, he's saying, I'm sitting on all this cash, but it's- That's the CEO of MicroStrategy. Strategy CEO, yes, Michael Saylor. So, you know, he's saying, you know, I'm sitting on all this cash, but, you know, it's depreciating.

Starting point is 00:31:27 You know, it's getting basically diluted away with inflation. And, you know, yeah, it's, you know, cash is trash. So I'm going to buy Bitcoin with my treasury, and this is a better, you know, use of our, you know, of our, of our balance sheet assets. So I think that, um, you know, it's, it's interesting, um, though, uh, I guess some comments can be made about the size of the bet, um, relative to, you know, their, their overall assets, you know, for example, uh, so there's this website, Bitcoin treasuries, um, that shows the, uh, Bitcoins held by, uh, different companies. So they have micro strategyrategy as the largest holder, Square. I have it up here right behind you.

Starting point is 00:32:10 Oh, awesome. Galaxy Digital Holdings is number two, Square is three. Yeah, so you can see that MicroStrategy took a pretty big bet. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot on here. Have you seen this before? And you didn't see this three years ago this was not happening no this is not i've not seen this before no and i think there is there's some like like mass mutual it's not on here um not yet i guess they're they're not you turn back to the

Starting point is 00:32:36 mic for me yeah sure so so for example uh microstrategy um they uh you know started entering the bitcoin market uh shortly after you after all this money printing and stimulus started. So it's certainly not a coincidence. And there's something to be said about these type of folks entering given the kind of status with the dollars being printed and whatnot. So, yeah. Yeah. The other thing here, though, is whenever you have something that is such a bold new idea, and this is, look, in the context of money, this is still a new idea. I mean, people say, okay, it's 11 years old. Think about how long trade systems have been around with currency as we know it and how long we've accepted the fact that governments are at the center of this type of thing.

Starting point is 00:33:30 What Bitcoin and the entire space is doing is they are basically taking a giant firecracker or dynamite and blowing up the entire thing and saying, no, no, no. Now the people are going to control it and the people are going to be backed by the power of the internet who's going to have this code called the blockchain that is able to verify everything that happens and take away all the bad actors that can happen in places like banks and most importantly in places like governments who control the vaults, so speak and control what is printed what i think is a very interesting topic that is not talked about enough in this whole thing though that gets lost sure is how money like paper money as we know it around the world not just here but back especially in the 19th century and then in america up until or 1972, paper currency was backed by gold. So governments would have X amount of gold in their quote-unquote vaults, and they had the option and it was it had a clear value and eventually all these governments especially around world war ii or world war one in europe went off of the gold standard and then the united states went off the gold standard in the 1970s and basically what they were all saying is okay you see this paper currency we're going to tell

Starting point is 00:35:02 you how much it is we're going to tell you how much of it we print and we're going to tell you what it's worth and don't worry it'll take care of the rest and bitcoin basically says all right that's human error we're not going to let that happen this is what it is this is the total amount notwithstanding some of the potential that you were saying is at least whispered in some communities like it won't stop at 21 we'll talk about that later but this is what it is take it or leave it and by the way this takes away the inflation risk certainly um you know bitcoin is a it's a non-sovereign store of value uh monetary store of value so no country owns bitcoin um and uh you know you know it exists without the permission of any country um and that's certainly a big part of the innovation here.

Starting point is 00:35:46 I agree a lot. Is there anything a government can do, though? Is there anything they can – because I know we're starting to see regulation pop up in the U.S. What is that? What's the story there? So, candidly, I haven't looked as closely into the regulation that recently came out from the Treasury yet, but this is yesterday actually. But it regards self-hosted wallets,

Starting point is 00:36:11 and I'm kind of digesting these threads from lawyers on Twitter and whatnot and trying to understand and get a better understanding. But to answer your question, I think what governments can do to kind of hinder cryptocurrencies is kind of squash or put pressure on the on-ramps and off-ramps. So ways to turn dollars or other types of fiat currency into coins or cryptocurrencies. So places like Coinbase or Square. So potentially putting pressure on these types of institutions that are on-ramp, off-ramp

Starting point is 00:36:51 for turning fiat and crypto into vice versa. So I think that's probably the main thing. Or just some sort of arbitrary, harsh regulation that is just designed to hinder cryptocurrency. But I think kind of putting pressure on the on-ramps, off-ramps is probably the first thing that any government jurisdiction is going to do if they want to make a point of it. You bring up the fact there that in particularly they're looking at going after wallets. And that's another thing because everyone knows what a wallet is, but they hear it around crypto and they're like, all right, I don't totally get that. So my understanding is that there's two – and I say my understanding because I never want to assume I know everything about any of this stuff because who the fuck knows? You do.

Starting point is 00:37:38 But my understanding is that there's basically two potential levels of that. The first level is the one that you mentioned, like a Coinbase, where it is a company. Coinbase is a company that hosts – I'll jump in here in a sec. Yeah, go ahead. I'll let you finish. Go ahead. So I would break the wallets up into two buckets, and a lot of folks in crypto do the same thing. So let's call them – common kind of nomenclature, custodial wallets and self-custodial

Starting point is 00:38:05 wallets or non-custodial wallets. So a non-custodial, so the kind of, you know, important thing to know about crypto is it's a bearer asset, meaning- A bearer asset? Bearer asset. So, you know, you have a, so if you have a self-custodial wallet and you have a private key, that's basically the secret that can access the funds, has the ability to spend the funds, can send the funds around. If you lose that private key, you've lost ownership of the crypto. And we, by the way, estimate that as much as 10% of Bitcoin is gone forever because people lost their private key in various ways, whether it be a fire to their hard drive or like they threw it out by accident or whatever, right? Right. So, yeah, so that's kind of the, you know, if you're using a non-custodial wallet, you own your own keys. You have that, you know, private key, you can access

Starting point is 00:38:57 it through your ledger or your software wallet, but you own that and, you know, you have the ability to, you know, move that around and transfer that know, you have the ability to, you know, move that around and transfer that and whatnot. Um, on the other hand, you have the custodial wallets and custodial services like, uh, Coinbase and Square and, you know, most, most every, you know, institution, centralized institution. So, uh, when you have coins or, you know, uh, tokens and whatnot in Coinbase, you don't have a private key. So it's kind of there's,

Starting point is 00:39:31 you know, not your keys, not your crypto. So if, you know, hypothetically, if Coinbase, you know, had some huge, you know, catastrophic event happened to them, or, you know, maybe we only use Coinbase as an example, we use Widget Exchange as an example. If Widget Exchange has some, you know, horrible, you know, catastrophic event some horrible, catastrophic event, there's been some examples over the years. You have exchanges that have not been solvent and went under Quadric or CX. So yeah, the folks- Mt. Gox. Mt. Gox is the biggest one. So yeah, if these exchanges go under, you don't necessarily have access to the coins so

Starting point is 00:40:05 uh with these self-custodial non-custodial wallets you know folks have uh physical ownership of their coins and you know they they own you know they have complete control over them um and not that you know it doesn't work the same way if you have a custodial wallet so yeah i'm an idiot i have a i have a custodial wallet but yeah this is this is something keep going on this because this is something that people need to hear, because you want to take away, you're already taking a lot of responsibility for yourself by getting a currency outside the system. But you also don't want to, you don't want to add more risk to your situation and then be able to potentially lose it through no fault of your own? Yeah, I think, you know, this is something that a lot of people get hung up on with custodial versus non-custodial wallets. But candidly, I don't know that, you know, maybe some of the institutions coming in that will, their mandate doesn't allow them to do self-custody generally. So they need to use a third party custodian where they can put the coins, you know, folks like Coinbase custody or, you know, BitGo or other custody providers. There's a number of them. Fidelity. So they can, you know, custody the coins with them.

Starting point is 00:41:14 And then just hope that they don't get hacked. Hope that nothing bad happens. As you mentioned, a run happens on one of those companies and then they can't – they don't have the assets to be able to give you your Bitcoin. I guess my point there was that a lot of these institutions that are coming in, like probably they can't self-custody and they probably don't even care about self-custody. Like they're in crypto to make money or generate returns, generate yield. So I think that this kind of self-custody topic might be kind of overblown with or thought of as really important with kind of the early movers, but the kind of next wave of folks that are entering the space, maybe they might not care as much. So it's interesting concept. But my understanding is that the new regulation from the Treasury has to do with self-hosted wallets, a.k.a. non-custodial wallets. It's designed to somehow impact.

Starting point is 00:42:16 Have you read Ben Mesrick's book, Bitcoin Billionaires? I actually have not read Ben Mesrick's book, Bitcoin Billionaires, though i think very highly of the winklevoss twins and uh i want to read it yeah it's i mean you can read it in a few hours it's it's not long and i think it's something that if if you are at all interested in this stuff and you know nothing about it that's a great place to start because ben mesrick people that don't know he's the guy who wrote the social network he wrote the book that became the movie 21 where the mit students went out to vegas and like actually bet for real he's written a whole bunch of other stuff like he's got a long long list and he's an incredible writer but he wrote this book, Bitcoin Billionaires, I guess last year, 2019, that was an unintended spinoff of the social network, actually. As you mentioned, Cole,

Starting point is 00:43:13 it involves the Winklevoss twins, who some people remember from the movie where Armie Hammer played the two of them. They were the guys who were claiming that they had been a part of the invention of Facebook, and Zuckerberg said no no and Zuckerberg ended up winning out. And they were very easy to make fun of in pop culture because they were these tall, good-looking men of Harvard, all that stuff, whatever all that bullshit was. And so they did get made fun of a lot, and then they were the enemy of the most powerful guy or one of the most powerful guys in tech technically after they ended up settling the lawsuit they had against Zuckerberg back in 2008. But this book where Mesrick went back and covered them takes you through the years immediately after that settlement in 2008. So they settled – I think it was for $65 million 65 million but they took 45 million of it in stock in facebook stock and they took all this public making fun of them and and everything just

Starting point is 00:44:11 completely took it on the chin no problem and they ended up through a whole bunch of trap doors getting into the bitcoin community just on a total off chance very early on like maybe 2011 something like that yeah and so they realized what the power of this was and they looked at it like oh my god we were there and we felt like we got fucked out of being a part of running the first real social network but now we're there for the other social network that has actually been around longer than than anything else which is money and when you go through this stuff and see what they did i mean i assume you're very familiar with their work in the space obviously

Starting point is 00:44:50 yeah certainly so uh i think uh as i just mentioned i think very highly of them and i think they're uh super interesting folks but um yeah from my my understanding of watching a few interviews with them as they entered the space um started buying a bunch of Bitcoins around $100 or maybe high single digits, I think. Yeah, they made a concerted effort to buy a ton of Bitcoin. And yeah, it's obviously appreciated materially since then. They also have an exchange business called Gemini. And that's specifically involving all crypto, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:45:27 So Gemini is a crypto asset exchange. It's actually, I think it's a New York trust company. So it's one of the more regulated exchanges and thought of highly for that. But yeah, it's an exchange similar to Coinbase or Kraken or a number of other exchanges um but uh yeah you know they also they own a ton of bitcoin um and i you know i think their thesis largely is around digital gold so they compare bitcoin to uh to gold um and i

Starting point is 00:45:58 think you know my understanding is that they uh have been comparing bitcoin to gold for a number number of years it's kind of always been their thesis. And they kind of stack up Bitcoin against this $9 trillion gold market cap. So if you do some quick math, so if you have, I guess, we're at $400 billion right now for Bitcoin and then it's $9 trillion for gold. So it's still early ball game in that scenario. Yeah, so if you kind of use gold as a comp, then Bitcoin has an order of magnitude or so more upside. So that's kind of how I think that camp of folks is thinking about things. But I think that they've done a lot of great work for the space.

Starting point is 00:46:41 And there's certainly, it's a small space. You know, it's early. The market cap's only 400 billion only. But, you know, it's, you know, if you compare it to, you know, the internet or something like that, the growth, you know, trajectory, I think it's still very early on. So I agree. We'll have to see how the next few years unfold. But I'm very, very optimistic. Yeah. And I think one of the big supporters of your argument that it's very early on is because people who are now still sitting at home nine months later, 10 months later into coronavirus

Starting point is 00:47:17 are looking around looking for the next stimulus check. And I don't blame them. I mean, you know, we got the little bump up front. What's $1,200? the next stimulus check and i don't blame them i mean you know we got the little bump up front what's twelve hundred dollars and they're still looking at it like oh the dollars are gonna kind of come in and save us and again don't blame them but that just kind of goes to show you there's not enough people who are looking and going wait hold on a second i'm still being told to sit at home by the government here maybe i lost my job i don't have money coming in what is my money even worth at this point did i lose my house at the like a lot of people are thinking that like all right i might be out of the house i was in all these basic things are happening to

Starting point is 00:47:52 them that are pulling their whole life down and they're still not realizing that like hey part of it is the fact that whatever number is still left in my bank account ain't worth much or it's not worth nearly as much as it was so when you say it's early days here yeah i mean there's a reason why there's still crypto twitter right there's still bitcoin twitter there's still ethereum twitter there's still all these quote-unquote little communities because it's like for every i'll throw out a random number that's not real but just to make the point for every hundredth person you know maybe that's the person that actually is somewhat aware of this stuff. Well, there's 330 million people in this country, to say nothing of the world, and 330 million people do involve on

Starting point is 00:48:34 trading money. So you can't just have one out of a hundred aware of this stuff for it to actually be mainstream and to be an accepted form of currency. So when you say like we're early ballgame, we are because no one's looking at it that way but the second level to it is the other point you make about looking at bitcoin as gold and so we know i think we talked about this earlier too we know that like gold itself is not used as a currency but historically when it was at its best for what it's supposed to be used for, it was used to back the currencies. So we need something that's easier to go around. So what I want to move this to is stuff you've already floated into a little bit that I pulled

Starting point is 00:49:16 you back into Bitcoin just to keep it simple, but you keep on talking about Ethereum and this is your world. Now, obviously Bitcoin's your, too. But you focus heavily on DeFi, which is decentralized finance. I think you said that, too. But explain to people first what Ethereum is. And then the second part, also explain how it integrates in a world with Bitcoin. Or does it have to be one or the other? Sure. So great question. So Ethereum is a platform, a smart contract platform. So what that means is it's a platform for creating autonomous and unstoppable applications. So once an application is deployed onto the Ethereum main net, it's there forever. And how do you do that? You can do that a number of different ways, but basically by taking some Solidity code, which is the smart contract language,

Starting point is 00:50:17 Ethereum smart contract language. There's also another one called Viper that can be used. And take the Solidity code and use an IDE like Remix or another tool to deploy that to the main net. Can I pull this back to English real quick just to keep us on track? Yeah, sure. So if I know a coder, I'm a normal guy. You know, so yeah, so crypto is and a lot of other softwares are open source um so there's a lot of great examples out

Starting point is 00:50:47 there already so you can find on github or pretty easily with a google search uh the code that you'll need to deploy a token for example so once you have that code you can you know maybe tweak a few different parameters so maybe change the token name the symbol a few other parameters. So maybe change the token name, the symbol, a few other things. And with a limited amount of changes and pretty, you know, basically a copy and paste, can deploy this token onto Ethereum by, you know, using this IDE, which is Remix. So using basically a tool to deploy to the network and paying a small amount of ETH for the transaction fees.

Starting point is 00:51:27 And that's called gas? Yeah, for gas, yeah. So for every transaction in an Ethereum network, a user or some anywhere in the world can deploy an application that's powered by smart contracts with just a little bit of Ethereum and a it, it could be something like, let's say it's you and me. So Julian and Cole are going on there to write a smart contract onto the Ethereum code or blockchain. It could be me saying, Cole, this contract, I'm going to agree to pay you $50 on the first of every month for 12 months. We're going to code that in and then once it's on there, that is the agreement and it's set and it can't be changed and it's publicly accessible to be able to say that it happened. Exactly. So, yeah, so let me explain how that kind of contract

Starting point is 00:52:40 could work. So, say you had, you know, $1,200 and you said, okay, Cole, I'm going to pay you $100 for the next 12 months. So I'm going to pay you on the first day of every month, $100. So after 12 months, I'll have paid you all of $1,200 I have. So Ethereum smart contract developer or you, whoever, could write a smart contract that says there's actually a protocol that kind of does this already but you basically could deposit or user could deposit their uh twelve hundred dollars into a smart contract and basically uh stream the money um every every first day of every month so every certain amount of time that happens on the chain uh the money will get sent on the roughly the first day of every month so every certain amount of time that happens on the chain uh the money will get sent on the roughly the first day of every month so um yeah basically you know kind of codifying

Starting point is 00:53:31 uh you know these uh you know different you know interactions with smart contracts so um so once once you you or a user put the money into the smart contract, it could be streamed to another user or myself. So that's kind of a simple example. Now, to push back on that, some people may say right away, why can't we just do that on our own or do it through a bank like we always have? What is the upside there to having to go code something

Starting point is 00:54:04 on the Ethereum blockchain and using Ethereum, using ETH along the upside there to having to go code something on the Ethereum blockchain and using Ethereum, using ETH along the way as well, just to do it? Sure. So there's a protocol out there. It's a pretty well-known protocol, but called Sablear protocol. So this basically can be done already with something that someone else built. So it's kind of an application that someone else built that can enable this type of transactions I just described. But say you want to pay a contractor that's in another country. Say they're somewhere else around the world and they don't have access to Chase Bank or

Starting point is 00:54:44 TD Bank or something. So you say, okay, I want to send you PayPal. I'm going to send you $100. But they say, oh, wow, there's like a $4 fee. I just lost 4%. That's not great. That's 4% of my earnings from what you're paying them for. So you say, wow, that kind of sucks. Only if there's a better way. Well, there is a better way. of my you know of my earnings um you know from you know what you're paying them for so i say wow

Starting point is 00:55:05 that that kind of sucks um if there's a better only if there's a better way so that well there is a better way it's crypto and bitcoin and ethereum and stable coins so um yeah so you know uh the the advantage is that you know users can send money to each other and it's instantaneous the fee the gas in this case as we called it is significantly less than four percent it's like usually actually i don't want to speak out of my ass but it's low right generally yeah generally generally low and you also point out the problem and people don't realize this especially in this country we don't think about this as much even though there are some that this applies to in this country unfortunately but there's i believe last statistic taken it's like there's 1.7 billion people around the world

Starting point is 00:55:50 who do not have access to a bank account so that's you know you got seven seven and a half billion people in the world that's a significant number and it presents a lot of problems for them to be able to transact in a modern economy when in fact a lot of these people do have access to the internet right that's what i was just going to jump in so a lot of these folks that don't have access to bank accounts they do have access to mobile phones and other things so uh they can very easily have a ethereum wallet or a bitcoin wallet um uh while it's you know big, big lift to get a bank account. So, um, yeah, you know, at its essence, you know, Ethereum and DeFi enable, uh, you know, financial services for, for everyone around the world. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's super, super amazing. You use that Sablear example though.

Starting point is 00:56:38 And one of the things I don't understand about them and to be clear, Sablear, how would you define that? Is that a protocol a protocol uh so it's a protocol built on ethereum um the way they kind of frame it is like a is like streaming money so is it a is sablier a company uh it's more like an app like it's kind of like an open source app that um i don't think it's monetized like to uh yeah i don't think that i don't know how they monetize it it's kind of just like software but the thing that i wasn't fully sure of there i get it in the sense that it allows instantaneous payment when a lot of payments especially international can take a week two weeks whatever you have currency risk when you do it you also have more fees i get all that part of

Starting point is 00:57:18 it but there's also they talk about the concept of like a minute-by-minute payment. So like if I'm a contractor and I say I'm going to do consulting work on X for you for two hours, if I only do 90 minutes or something, then I shouldn't be paid for two hours. And so something about Sablear tracks that. That's what I'm confused on. It's like getting paid in real time via some smart contract that's kind of streaming money pro rata in real time. So that's kind of the concept going on there. There's definitely some ways that folks can play devil's advocate on with this, saying like, saying like, you know, why can't I just send money? But I think, you know, it's predictable. And, you know, it's just kind of an example of, you know, how smart contracts can be used. How long has Ethereum been around? So Ethereum was conceptualized in 2013, I believe it was 2013 the main the uh token sale or fundraiser uh

Starting point is 00:58:29 took place in 2014 and that was for eth right um for eth yeah actually i need to i need to double check those dates uh the years i always forget actually um but anyways ethereum pops i'm here for the uh uh i don't know why you know work full-time in the space for a number of years but i always forget uh the exact timeline you've forgotten more in about a minute than i've known in my entire life so we'll take it so it was proposed in 2013 by programmer vitalik budarin now that was the next question so So this was, we know who created this, and you've met Vitalik, I believe, right? and he realized that Bitcoin, the programming language for Bitcoin and just Bitcoin largely was not expressive enough to build the type of things that he thought that he could build.

Starting point is 00:59:33 So basically Vitalik went out and said, okay, well, I can't build these awesome things I want with Bitcoin, so there needs to be something else. So that's kind of the advent of Ethereum. When he says build, I just want to make sure. Yeah. So he was basically trying to build applications that, you know, involved, you know, maybe something that looked like a smart contract, uh, something like this, but Bitcoin, you know, the, you know, infrastructure of Bitcoin and just what you're able to do with, you know, Bitcoin script, which is this programming

Starting point is 01:00:03 language around Bitcoin, um, was not expressive enough for him to build these type of applications he wanted to build. It was kind of limiting and basically needed a more generalized platform like Ethereum with smart contracts. So that's kind of you know the origin of it right because bitcoin is is basically strictly the bitcoins that are created that are literally viewed as some sort of value that people agree upon is going to be x value in this case it's traded relative to dollars that people can see as far as like the main currency that they can judge it against and so when it comes to other things like creating derivatives lending out money and writing code to be able to do that insurance uh creating investment products which derivatives are investment products but i'm saying like actual exchanges uh etf like things you can't do any of that on Bitcoin.

Starting point is 01:01:05 So Vitalik looked at this and said, okay, I want to make an ecosystem where you can do all of this and underneath it, it's backed by its own quote-unquote currency, which would be a cryptocurrency and it'll be Ethereum. Now, my question is,

Starting point is 01:01:18 does Vitalik, I definitely saw this somewhere, but I can't remember right now. Does Vitalik still believe in Bitcoin as well? Does he think they can both exist together? Yeah, it's interesting. So I think – I can't speak for V, Vitalik, but I think that – You're on a first-name basis with him. I love it.

Starting point is 01:01:40 Not really, but he's V. So I think that – personally, I think Bitcoin and Ethereum definitely coexist. So I can basically point to one example that really stands out. So there's something that's popped up in the last year, last two years called WBTC. So WBTC is short for wrapped Bitcoin. And what wrapped Bitcoin is, is it's basically, uh, a token on Ethereum that's backed by Bitcoin. So it's, it's a collateralized Bitcoin on Ethereum. Uh, it's a token that's collateralized by Bitcoin that is on Ethereum. So, um, so there's now about

Starting point is 01:02:19 $3 billion of wrapped Bitcoin, um, on Ethereum. So there's, that's, that's basically one, that's around 1% of the supply of Bitcoin. So that means that people came in with Bitcoin and they put it onto the Ethereum blockchain and then they used it, they borrowed money or loaned out money in a different form.

Starting point is 01:02:48 Kind of. So it's more like they uh they go to um so there's like i think the way wbtc did it was they had like these merchants that basically could take bitcoin and you know wrap it into wbtc i think they had some uh maybe some regulatory um you know those those merchants kind of went through some onboarding process and whatnot. But yeah, basically folks took Bitcoin, vanilla Bitcoin that kind of just, you know, exists, you know, maybe in their whichever wallet and they took it and they wrapped it on Ethereum. And then from there, the Bitcoin that's now on Ethereum, now WBTC, it can be used in all of these different DeFi applications. It can be used as collateral to borrow stable coins. It can be used as, you know, you can use that Bitcoin to provision liquidity to an exchange. You can use the WBTC to, you know, do a number of different things so uh i think wbtc has a lot more utility than btc um and it's it's actually pretty interesting um that you know uh yeah there's three billion dollars of wbtc now and

Starting point is 01:03:54 uh i think that's uh only going up um i don't see you know there's you know you can earn yield on your bitcoin because one of the one of the problems with Bitcoin problems, quote unquote, is that because you need miners to confirm the transaction, there is a limitation on speed as far as like how quickly you can transfer it. Now, is it better than – like I always use the example if I'm a car company and I have a plant in Mexico City and a plant in South Korea. Moving a billion dollars between Mexico City and South Korea is a bitch. I mean, it could take, even if you're a powerful company, it could take five days. You've got to bring in Wall Street to hedge against the inflation risk, or not the inflation risk, the currency risk. You've got to bring in banks slash Wall Street to actually execute on the middle. You've got to bring in governments who

Starting point is 01:04:45 have full view into all transactions and decide to take their piece all that stuff but with bitcoin even though it may be faster than that it's still not like it does not settle at the rate and precision that things like on ethereum can do so uh there's an ethereum block every six minutes or seven minutes what does that mean an ethereum block i know what that means but let's just define it so it's uh you know it's basically a uh you know uh a new block that's new copy of the the ledger that basically um you know all the new transactions have you know been added to that block so anyone that coded on the ethereum blockchain and put a smart contract on there like we talked about is a part of that block whoever did it over a five minute or five hour whatever it is span that that block took part sure so yep yep any new transactions any new contracts deployed all that type of stuff would be included

Starting point is 01:05:39 in a new block and that's basically recorded in the blockchain. So any new block is kind of a new, you know, piece of history, new, new recording in the blockchain, um, on the blockchain that's, you know, getting added to this, this permanent ledger. Um, so basically what I'm getting at is that Ethereum has, uh, you know, produces blocks more frequently than, than Bitcoin. Um, so as I say, it's, uh, it should be faster., Ethereum can get congested at times. There's a lot of users. Yeah, so I guess it depends on the amount of usage on the network. But overall, yeah, Ethereum is generally faster than Bitcoin. And there's a lot of efforts around scaling it even further. So you have things like Layer 2 scaling solutions. And I'm getting really down the rabbit hole here.

Starting point is 01:06:30 It's okay. Keep going. Layer 2 scaling solutions are basically a solution to scale Ethereum with kind of a different approach. I guess it's a lot of semantics at this point but like state channels or plasma or uh zk roll-ups optimistic roll-ups so so that's a lot of a lot of jargon but basically uh these you know solutions to make ethereum faster um and you know you know allow it to have you know uh you know greater throughput these type of things so yeah ethereum is is definitely capable of being faster and largely is capable largely is faster than than in bitcoin and i have a question on this and before i do that i do want to i feel like i should do this

Starting point is 01:07:18 i do want to disclose when it comes to my crypto assets i only own own two. I own Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I'm about 94% to 95% Bitcoin and about 5%, 6% Ethereum. So obviously my knowledge and scale of bet is clearly on the Bitcoin side, and Ethereum is still something I'm reading books on and learning a lot about, and it's very, very interesting to me. But you talk about the idea

Starting point is 01:07:44 that you get this continued adoption continued use that also then has smart minds coming in there and building new smart contracts to basically solve for previous holdups and holes that occurred as you were getting adoption so maybe things weren't settling fast enough and guys come in and specifically write code to be able to then settle things faster in the future. Basically plug any holes in the boat. I get that. Where Ethereum certainly has a downside in my mind, comparatively, just in how I can picture it, is the fact that there is technically no limited supply.

Starting point is 01:08:16 So you don't have a cap like Bitcoin has a cap. They create a literal value of it's not going to go past 21 and i know we talked about the one scenario where it could but for all intents and purposes of the argument it's that's not going to happen it's written in ethereum doesn't have that yeah so while ethereum doesn't have a cap um there's this initiative happening um and i'm kind of getting a bit granular here, but called the EIP-1559. And what's going on with EIP-1559 is that it's basically a proposal so that every time Ethereum transaction occurs, that a little bit of ETH gets burned.

Starting point is 01:08:58 So basically it's a value accrual mechanism that's going to be added to the Ethereum protocol. So this is really promising because if there's a lot of transactions happening on Ethereum, a lot of ETH can get burned. And this could actually result in a negative issuance for Ethereum if there's enough transactions and whatnot going on. So in that case,ereum can become more scarce and

Starting point is 01:09:26 more deflationary than bitcoin and you also think though that scarcity doesn't necessarily imply value that was something that was an interesting point to me because you don't hear people say that much they say the opposite they're like the more scarce it is the more i want it which in theory is correct but what do you mean by that sure so you know anyone can mint a token that's that has 10 million tokens or a thousand tokens and you know it's certainly scarce but there's no network effect and nobody knows about it it's not valuable so that's kind of my angle there um you know just because something scarce like does not imply value um you know bitcoin got sold for two people someone sold 10 000 bitcoins for two pizzas back in 2010 so yeah it had a day where it had no network it was

Starting point is 01:10:13 a joke on on deep web internet feeds and it and had no value and eventually and we talked about it doesn't have enough adoption yet which is true but it got it it actually started to get people in different places around the world to be like oh i get it i'm a part of this i'm in this community so you built up a big enough base that now you have i i'm pulling this from my photographic memory as best i can i think it was there's like 70 million people around the world who own at least some bitcoin at this point so you have some network effect there so that scarcity then creates value whereas to your point if if i just create a token right now and say there's only 10 000 of them i gotta get people to fucking buy into it yeah so

Starting point is 01:10:56 you know scarcity matters when there's like you know network effects and demand but if there's no demand then scarcity is just not really, you know, important. But yeah, so certainly scarcity is one of the definitely the value propositions of Bitcoin. You know, it's, there's only 21 million and, you know, it's provably so. So, you know, I don't think scarcity is, it's certainly important and, you know, interesting. I just think that you know a lot of folks uh kind of get caught up on it maybe too much and think less about you know you know payments around the world or you know uh store value that you know uh non-sovereign store value like these things excite me more than um than that well this also you talk about like people who

Starting point is 01:11:44 pay attention to one thing in this case scarcity and look that's a that's one of the most common champion thoughts in the bitcoin community obviously sure but you're also wading into a territory that's important which is the tribalism that's been created in this so when you look at the fact that throughout the 2010s for most of them until maybe 2017 where you got a small level of awareness and adoption you had a long period of time there where there was only certain individuals who were in the know and who were in these communities and they were the earliest adopters right and we're still in an early adopter mode right now,

Starting point is 01:12:26 but these are like the earliest of the earliest. And so as other ideas started to rise up, whether it be Ethereum or XRP or Litecoin or all these, and then all these shit coins that came up that were trying to solve for inefficiencies that they identified on Bitcoin, in some cases where they wanted to take out Bitcoin, in other cases where they wanted to maybe support it and be another value add. As this all happened, you created all these teams, especially obviously online, where people pick their squad and they live or they die

Starting point is 01:12:55 with it. And so especially on Twitter, it's the best example to use because it's where a lot of people within crypto go to communicate, but you could say reddit too you see these communities on crypto twit as an example which is like its own big space but then within it you have bitcoin twitter and ethereum twitter and even like xrp twitter sure and stuff and all these people who live in these echo chambers and just yell bang bang bang bang bang about their currency and then they i mean it's not even like a discussion with other tribes. It's not like you don't see as many people, like you're a guy who legitimately is just all about the space. It's a beautiful thing. It's why I like talking with you. But

Starting point is 01:13:33 there are so many people who are like, yo, fuck Ethereum or like, yo, fuck Bitcoin or like, yo, fuck XRP. And there's no ability to hear anything else. And it's scary because then you have to remember there are people who are just coming into this space who are trying to look at a new way to do money. And they're they come in and they're like, wait, why are all these people fucking fighting about this, you know, I think that there's still a lot of building and, you know, interoperability between these different protocols. So I think, you know, a lot of folks realize that we need interoperability between protocols. of Gmail and Yahoo, or something like that, like Gmail and Hotmail, AOL and Hotmail, if these email clients could not communicate, the network effects would not be nearly as significant. So if you could not send email from Hotmail to AOL or AOL to Yahoo, the impact, the network effects,

Starting point is 01:14:43 and just the overall scale of this would just not be the same. you know this the impact that you know the the network effects and you know the just overall scale of this would just not be the same so i think similar thing think similarly about crypto is that you know value flowing from these different blockchains um different networks um it'll be good for for them to interoperate and probably necessary so uh you know while there's like this kind of tribalism like online now, we're all working towards this kind of like, you know, you know, sovereignty and, you know, the bigger picture. So, you know, day to day, I think folks can get caught up in the tribalism. But the bigger picture is that we're kind of all on the same team and, you know, growing this you know ecosystem i think there's a big thought in there of people you know taking the peter teal zero to one concept of monopolies are good and and that's what there needs to be there needs to be and that's there's a lot more detail to that i'm not going to go down

Starting point is 01:15:36 there but the basic definition was that like competition is actually bad if like someone's not winning because there needs to be a clear main winner of value. As an example, obviously Google is the clear main winner of value when it comes to search engines and among other things. And you even pointed out like Gmail versus Yahoo. There's a lot more people with Gmail now than Yahoo because Google created a better product, at least in the eyes of a lot of people. So I think within – when I look on – like I love being 3,000 feet or 30,000 feet in the air with like the crypto Twitter. I look at all of them and it's just funny to me. But when I see these people, I think they're so worried about the fact that it's like, oh, well, if we don't win all out on whatever it is our team is, whether it be Ethereum, Bitcoin, XRP, the link mafia, like all these people, it's like then we're not going to have anything. Like there can only be us or nobody else and that's where especially ethereum and that's why i asked about this

Starting point is 01:16:31 earlier that's where ethereum is just so interesting to me because again you said you didn't know where vitalik stands and i don't know either but he's just a creator he created this open source product to me it looks like it can be something that is built with bitcoin in the ecosystem and then taking that to the next level because bitcoin is such a it is a a one-dimensional idea which i think is what makes it great by the way it creates that whole concept of like oh is bitcoin just a way better even more scarce gold with mass adoption where people really believe in it and then again when i see like 70 million people around the world owning it it's like and you know that i think the numbers above as of like a couple months ago the numbers near 70 of people have held their bitcoin for at least a year yeah i mean that's a beautiful thing because

Starting point is 01:17:22 that means people are like oh i'm viewing this as not just like a hedge against inflation, but I'm viewing this as like a long term asset that I want to accrue to be able to protect myself against bad actors among humans, which happen in governments more than anything. Sure. Yeah, I think you make bunch of analysis on like how frequently Bitcoins move and similar analysis for Ethereum. And I think that analysis is very interesting because you can get a sense of the long term holders and, you know, how many of them there are, Delphi Digital about, you know, kind of like these kind of like, I think they were calling them like huddle waves or something. So like how long folks were holding their coins for, which I find that research really fascinating. But yeah, you know, yeah, it's certainly, you know, a space that that is growing. And I think we'll see Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to to hit back on the other point. We'll see Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to, you know, kind of coexist. And, you know, we're together. I think all this Bitcoin on Ethereum on WBTC and, you know, a large amount of that is in DeFi applications. Like this is really powerful. And I think, you know, this is just getting started. So it's hard to say how early we are in DeFi. But, you know, if I had to compare like where DeFi is and its growth to Bitcoin, it's got to be like, you know, 2012 or 2013, something like that. So I think it's got to be like you know 2012 or 2013 something like that so i think it's it's you know it's obviously early for crypto as a whole it's super early for d5 um and ethereum so um

Starting point is 01:19:12 i'm more optimistic on the space about the space than than ever before it is amazing how quickly this is happening in in in context I mean to your point even seeing something like ethereum have the overall adoption it has now what's it at like in the collateral side alone it's like one point something billion locked in or two point something billion locked in yeah so now on the DeFi side of things there's uh uh we can checkFiPulse.com, but I think there's like 15 billion locked in DeFi apps. And the market cap of Ethereum now is like – That's all DeFi apps though. That's all DeFi apps.

Starting point is 01:19:51 Right. The collaterals though itself, like meaning people putting up money in like the 2 billion handler or something? So, yeah. I mean – no. So it's putting up collaterals like is synonymous with the DeFi app. So basically, all that $15 billion is effectively collateral in different apps. Some of it is collateral exchanges. But yeah, yeah. So pull up defipulse.com.

Starting point is 01:20:17 Yeah, all right. I totally missed the boat there because I thought that when we're looking at things like some of the some of the um like investment vehicles on there for for example pull up defy pulse and we can go through that like that could be a good exercise i thought that that was a separate count so i didn't know it got that high it really exploded this year yeah so wow 16 billion defy yeah sorry I misspoke big time. No, no worries. That's why we check this stuff. So the number one is Maker. Number two is WBTC. And what's Maker again? So Maker is the DAI stablecoin system.

Starting point is 01:20:53 So it's basically the synthetic dollar, aka DAI. Okay. Let's talk about that. That's collateralized by ETH. Yeah, sure. So Maker is one of the earliest Ethereum apps, or DeFi apps. It's kind of started before the word DeFi was like, the term DeFi was like even kind of even a thing.

Starting point is 01:21:12 So they've been going for a while, but basically what they've built is the system kind of like asset-based lending system. So their system allows users to post collateral. So they can post ETH, WBTC, which we just talked about, a number of other different types of crypto assets. And they can post that crypto as collateral to the protocol, and they can borrow stablecoin DAI against it. So basically, the users, they always need to maintain a sufficient collateralization ratio that's slightly over collateralized at like roughly 150%, 130% so that the value of their debt does not exceed that, you know, collateralization ratio. All right, two questions. questions first you said that die

Starting point is 01:22:06 is a u.s dollar back stable coin so let's first say what that what that means sure so so so die is actually not uh a fiat collateralized stable coin meaning there's not dollars in a bank uh that correspond with the die die tokens um die is actually backed by ETH. So through this mechanism, DAI, so basically DAI is backed by ETH, but it's pegged to the US dollar. So it's a synthetic dollar. So there's other stable coins out there like USDC, the Paxos stable coin, Tether, that are actually backed by US dollars know us dollars and cash equivalents so uh those are those are you know fiat collateralized stablecoins uh die as a crypto collateralized stablecoin and uh it exists entirely on chain there's no bank account um that

Starting point is 01:23:01 you know dot that usd is deposited to and uh the corresponding die is minted. Okay, let me pull this back for a second because I don't want to go too deep and lose people. When we're saying collateralization, let's use an example that a lot of us can understand. If I agree to take on a mortgage, right? I buy a house. Maybe I put some equity in and I put a down payment up front and maybe I put a 20% down payment and then there's 80% left and that becomes my mortgage. That mortgage, the bank having paid for the house up front in order to get paid the mortgage with interest over time, the collateral is the home because if I don't pay it, they take my home. So on the Ethereum network, let's talk about collateral.

Starting point is 01:23:49 So let's use a home equity loan as an example. So if someone has a home and they want to borrow some amount of money against their home to finance something or something like that, they can go to, I guess, a lender, like a bank or another lender, and they can say, okay, I'm using my home or whoever issues these home equity loans, but some agency or something. So they can go to these entities and say, okay, I'm going to borrow against my home with this home equity loan. So I guess it's a similar concept you know with crypto so if someone was to say okay I want to borrow against my

Starting point is 01:24:31 Bitcoin or I want to borrow against my eat so you know home is an example I'm using but I guess any asset that can be posted as margin or collateral somewhere could fit this bill but yeah that's that's kind of what I mean by posted as margin or collateral somewhere um could fit this bill but um yeah that's kind of what i mean by posted as collateral so basically when i say posted as collateral a user is depositing those tokens or that bitcoin or that eth into a smart contract on ethereum and can substance subsequently do something with you know this this uh you know they can borrow against it or do something like this so So if they borrow against it, they are able to access the funds they receive back. And we started this example with DAI in that case.

Starting point is 01:25:12 But they need to have up front 150% worth of what they borrow. So maybe they get – I'm just using round numbers. Maybe they put up 10 ETH and then get seven. And I know this isn't the exchange rate, but they get seven DAI back. They only now have access to that seven DAI. So what is the need for them? What is the impetus for people to want to put up collateral? Yeah, sure.

Starting point is 01:25:38 So the impetus is that someone wants liquidity and they don't want to sell their underlying collateral. This could be for a number of reasons so they might uh you know they might you know want to be long that crypto they think it's going up they don't want to sell so they you know can draw some stable coin against it borrow stable coin against it and um do they can get liquidity that way um uh that's probably you know in one way or another, getting, you know, just getting some sort of liquidity is kind of what's going on. Whether they're using that liquidity to actually buy something, say someone has, you know, $100,000 worth of ETH and they want to buy a car, they can, you know, they could put that ETH in a maker, you know, CDP,

Starting point is 01:26:22 also known as vault, and they could, you know, borrow a die against it and go purchase something with it. At the same time, they could also borrow die and swap that for ETH and basically get levered long ETH. So then there's a number of reasons someone would want to use maker or another similar service. And I will say all this stuff can be done on Ethereum with no third party, no permission, no authorization from anyone else. So, you know, these financial products are publicly available on the blockchain. And yeah, it's a really interesting concept. Now, the second layer to it is the value of doing this over doing it in traditional systems. So in a previous life, I was a banker, as you know. And so with some of our clients, a very common thing I would do with a lot of guys was what was

Starting point is 01:27:19 called a loan management account. And the way it worked was, it was basically a bridge loan for as long as they wanted it. And it operated at LIBOR plus or prime plus a couple points, depending on how many, how much assets they had with the bank, how much in assets they have with the bank. And I'll just use an example to explain how this worked. One guy guy he wanted to he bought a home in california and the cost of the home was like 18 million and then he immediately wanted to knock it down and build a new home and the entire project to do it was going to cost like 24 or 25 million this guy was worth hundreds of millions of dollars so no problem he could pay for that but had a lot of money tied up in in businesses right because he he owned some rather large companies and so he

Starting point is 01:28:13 didn't want to just pay the 24 million or he didn't want to take a traditional loan on it as the other side of it so what he said is like i'm thinking of just paying this eventually, like when I want to, but can I draw against assets I have and just get like a bridge loan? This is where the LMA comes in. So he needed, call it a $24 million bridge loan, said, fuck it, I'll pay half up front, pays 12, leaves 12 left over. over so we take an account where he's got say all stock holdings in it right all equities u.s equities and it's worth maybe i don't know 15 20 million in that particular account we take that allow those investments to still exist and we collateralize it and so we say you're going to put that up as guarantee of payment meaning you also can't have the stocks fall below a certain level level otherwise you're going to have to pay back into it as well to to whatever and in the meantime you're just going to pay a monthly interest rate until you pay this back so maybe the interest rate at the time is like he did it a really low time like maybe it's two percent or something so he just pays

Starting point is 01:29:20 on an annualized basis whatever two percent divided by 12 is a month and then one day maybe nine maybe nine, ten months later, he called up and said, all right, I'm paying it off. Done. And it's taken away. It's pretty easy. Now, he's also very wealthy. It's easier for wealthy people to get access to vehicles like that. But what is the value of going to do this on the Ethereum blockchain versus, like, just going to do that through a bank? And trust me, I'm not the guy that's arguing for banks.

Starting point is 01:29:44 They're fucking sausage so yeah so there's a number of reasons someone would want to do this uh you know on the blockchain versus around ethereum versus you know using a traditional you know financial services business so uh first things first like let's just you know use an example there's a crypto whale they have you know you know, $50 million in ETH. You know, they have other assets, but like their ETH has appreciated so much that it's majority of their, of their net worth at this point. They, they leave it in ETH because, you know, they want the upside of, of, you know, they think ETH's going up. They also don't want to sell for, for fiat and, you know, incur these huge capital gains and whatnot. So this person says,

Starting point is 01:30:27 okay, I have all this ETH, but I need some dollars. I have some stuff to buy. I have obligations. So yeah, I mean, they can put this in a CDP or another DeFi platform. CDP? So it's basically the old terminology for the maker like maker position so it stands for collateralized deposition but uh they're now calling it vault it's more uh you know the more cute name one more time maker you've said this like twice now i i just want to make sure it's officially defined so maker maker dow or also known as Maker, is effectively the DAI stablecoin system where the stablecoin DAI can be minted against a collateral that's posted to the protocol. Okay, so it's a digital autonomous organization that operates exclusively within the Ethereum network.

Starting point is 01:31:22 Yeah, so it has DAO in the name, but there actually is a foundation. Decentralized. Yeah, yeah, sure. So it's not fully decentralized at this point, my understanding, but, you know, it could be in the future. But yeah, so it's honestly very similar to what you described with your previous customer.

Starting point is 01:31:46 It's very similar, but it all happens in a trustless fashion. It can be crypto collateral instead of spider. So yeah, there's a number of reasons, but how long did it take for you to do this deal with your – No, that's the other thing. How long did it take? We did it fast, but probably about a week turn around sure so someone with the right so i'm gonna make a point here so someone with uh all this crypto um can can get this loan uh stable coin loan in a matter of minutes for any any amount of money it's a really mind-blowing concept where not only financial services are now available to the kind of crypto economy, they're also instantly available and no third party is required to give permission to use this. So it's definitely the first time in history

Starting point is 01:32:47 that there's been this kind of instantaneous liquidity that's able to be generated or drawn against crypto collateral or other types of collateral. So there's a number of reasons someone would want to use you know maker or another protocol to finance something versus you know a traditional bank but there's also probably an argument that can be made for why someone who has an existing you know banking

Starting point is 01:33:17 relationship and whatnot might want to use that versus a d5 protocol so i think there's two sides of the coin here um i guess it depends who's looking to borrow. If it's someone who has a ton of crypto and doesn't have these real-world assets, maybe it makes sense to use Maker. But if you have tons of SPY or something in the legacy financial system that can be posted as collateral,

Starting point is 01:33:42 maybe you want to use like uh you know uh you know uh kind of a normal uh you know banking and that's that's what crypto as a space does and and by the way I should just mention this some people differentiate and say crypto for the entire community and then call Bitcoin something else and I get that but when just for sake of when I say it I'm just generalizing and saying everything in in this space that started quote unquote with bitcoin officially i guess but there's the concept within it that the rich get richer in the legacy financial system and it takes money to make money everywhere and so the idea of crypto is to take power of money to the common man take away that same power we talked about where governments kind of fuck over the common man and the common man is going about life and doesn't realize it through things like money printing and stuff like that. But also when you're talking about being able to transfer money fast, being able to access it, being able to do it without a central banking system. So yes, you point out that there are people like the example I gave who are already established elites in society in that case, and already have these accounts at legacy financial

Starting point is 01:34:51 institutions and have the ability to get things through and be able to get systems that allow them to continue to make money on their money without giving up their positions and things like that through stuff like LMAs. But crypto is opening up the doors to everyone and i don't want to get lost in in the shuffle here the sense that even that guy who has access to all that stuff could be helped with with crypto sure type ideas as far as like speed of transfer ability to leverage technology without the third party meaning in this case the bank, and just a general better system? Yeah, I think, you know, DeFi is a step function improvement to the legacy financial system where DeFi is orders in magnitude better than the legacy, that's, you know,

Starting point is 01:35:38 what came before it. So, yeah, I think, you know, all the points you mentioned are certainly valid. And, you know, this is a better, you know, faster, you know, faster with layer two, maybe not on Ethereum mainnet today. But, you know, it's better in a number of different ways than, you know, the legacy financial system. So it's certainly really, really exciting. Yeah, and we had talked earlier about some of the tribalism with some of the individual teams within crypto. But this is a concept that relates – it's not a concept that relates. It is the concept of groupthink, and that's where the danger is in the crypto community. But the far greater danger, in my opinion, to groupthink is within the crypto community but the far greater danger in my opinion to groupthink is within the legacy financial system because the legacy financial system is tied to the highest end of it which is literally the governments and the governments say what goes they regulate they do everything they tell the banks what to do and then when you look at the banks around the world the big ones the ones who actually matter they're enormous corporations and i'm not faulting them

Starting point is 01:36:42 that's what they are though. They employ hundreds of thousands of people at each of these places. And so there's this guy who reports to that girl, reports to this guy, reports to that girl. I worked in this stuff. I see how this goes. Everyone's there. They're a little node on a machine, right? And they all have their little job and they're self-interested in making sure they do it and don't fuck it up so they don't get fired. And so there's very little ability for creativity or thinking outside the box on the contrary when you give anyone access and power anyone with an internet connection access and power to be able to see how these systems work and be a part of it and operate within it the way that they want to that also

Starting point is 01:37:21 then can be a vehicle to put food on their own table which is what this long-term process is supposed to be for the idea of crypto as a currency right you now take away that group think because you take away the institutions who control this stuff who are living in a cya cover your ass society that's the beauty of this to me and so when i hear you talk about like defy as an example within there, and I see all the applications that dApps have on Ethereum, it's like, all right, I could see that in the sense that you are allowing all this talent from around the world to come in there and say, okay, we got an idea for this. So let's just do it, and let's do it on the thing that everyone agrees to, anyone who can access it at any time, not just people in an institution, but the schmo sitting behind his iPhone in his living room can access and see how this works. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's really interesting. I don't want to be repetitive, but it's a zero to one innovation. There's a lot of different angles where it's improving. It's more transparent. It's accessible. It's provable.

Starting point is 01:38:25 It's all of these things. So I think it's certainly the thing that excites me the most about crypto right now, DeFi, and that I'm paying the most attention to and that I think has a really bright future so uh yeah i think that uh you know it's early days um you know i think we'll see a few uh you know huge protocols emerge in the next few years um if i had to guess who it will be you know one of them is probably uniswap which i'm happy to talk more about it's basically yeah yeah actually please talk about them they're're very interesting. So it's an exchange that uses this kind of, you know, this formula to maintain its price and kind of maintain its, you know, the whole system. So it's an exchange with no order book. It uses this constant market maker function, y times x equals k to kind of maintain, you know, the equilibrium on the exchange. But

Starting point is 01:39:23 if I were a third grader and I said, what do they do? What's the value to me? What would you say? So the way Uniswap works is there's two parties. There's the traders and there's liquidity providers. So what liquidity providers do is they take two tokens, so let's say WBTC and ETH, and they supply them to Uniswap. And one thing to point out is the guys or the guys and girls who wrote the Uniswap code, once they deploy the code,

Starting point is 01:39:56 it's, you know, it's up forever. And they don't have any, you know, ability to change it. So they basically can, you know, deploy a new version and a new version and publicly say, okay, everyone should use version three or version four, but they don't actually have the ability to backdoor the code or they don't have any control over it once it's kind of out of their hands. So yeah, so there's these liquidity providers and they provide liquidity and the traders can, you know, swap through the platform. So basically through this, this Y times X equals K formula, Uniswap's kind of able to provide, you know, pricing and, you know, automated liquidity, you know, that's kind of always there and, you know, you know, transparent and all of these things. So it's basically democratizing market making in a sense.

Starting point is 01:40:45 And it also makes trading really simple. And so there's kind of two things going on. I'm kind of all over in this answer, but there's – It's okay. Keep going. Yeah. allows folks to passively earn fees from traders on their crypto assets by providing them to the protocol. So anyways, Uniswap, it gets a lot of use and the protocol generates a lot of revenue on chain for itself effectively. So every day, there's roughly a million dollars spent on fees on Uniswap. So there's a website,

Starting point is 01:41:29 I think it's cryptofees.info. And you can see this and it's actually a lot of the times there's actually more fees spent on Uniswap than there is in Bitcoin. So Uniswap is super active application on Ethereum. It basically, the amount of fees spent on different applications and protocols every day, it's basically Ethereum's number one or maybe Bitcoin's number one. And then Uniswap's always either two or three. So, yeah, it reminds me of like the early days of Facebook, whereas it's kind of like really interesting and kind of like, you know, game changing technology and application. And, you know, everyone knew it was going to be big. You know, the market cap and whatnot hadn't blown up yet. But I feel similarly about Uniswap that the market cap of the coin is about $3 billion today.

Starting point is 01:42:26 I think it – my personal opinion is that that can grow orders of magnitude in the next few years. And yeah, I do own some Uniswap, full disclosure. Yeah, thank you for that. But the thing about Uniswap though is they also – the organization that runs it or built it operates out in New York City, and they opened up a new Pandora's box. I don't think like just as far as Ethereum goes but as far as the system of crypto as a whole and what it's supposed to represent goes and i think this was maybe a couple years ago or something but the people who run uniswap are based out of new york city so they are then held to not just us but new york city sure regulation and so there was something with kyc like know your client and stuff like that where uniswap had to block access wow you did your research in certain countries yeah i saw i saw this a while ago so explain this and how they

Starting point is 01:43:31 got around it yeah so so there's two things here so uniswap the smart contracts are publicly available on ethereum right those have been deployed and they're they're publicly available uh the uniswap team has also built a website or a front end to interact with those smart contracts. So someone who has a good understanding of Ethereum can use the command line or more. Command line? Command line is like the manual way to interact with the code. So they can use a more involved method to interact with Uniswap without using Uniswap's front end. Um, what most people do is they,

Starting point is 01:44:12 they do use Uniswap's front end. They, you know, Uniswap's built a really pretty interface to, uh, to interact with the smart contracts, makes it really easy to, to interact with them. So what happened here is Uniswap's front end, uh, wasn't geo-blocking like some countries that were, uh, I believe sanctioned. So, um, that's Uniswap.org. So basically, uh, Uniswap, uh, geo-block those, those countries. Um, you know, folks, I'm not, you know, saying this is a good or bad thing. Now, folks in those countries, though, they can still use Uniswap. The protocol is an autonomous piece of software. It cannot discern someone.

Starting point is 01:44:53 That's what I mean. So they got around it in a way. They blocked it on their front end, but the actual protocol, they cannot control. They have no control over that. So, I mean those those folks in those countries technically can still use that and i'm not you know i'm not you know endorsing that or anything but i think that yeah i mean that that's basically what's going on here is that they blocked it on their front end but the the contracts that are on ethereum those cannot be modified so that

Starting point is 01:45:19 those cannot discern right now and again like we kind of are hopping from some things to some things here and trying to hit some interesting points and when you're going off about stuff like that i just want to go down into it so if there are some things that i'm saying in this podcast for people listening out there where it's like oh we didn't go back to that i apologize that that's going to happen it definitely has happened already. I just want to, you know, when Cole goes with something here, I want to ride the wave. So with that, though, Uniswap being an example of something that's built on Ethereum. Again, we come back to the two entities here. And they're not entities, but I'm just going to call them entities where you have Ethereum, which is the protocol, the blockchain, blockchain right and then you have ethereum which is the

Starting point is 01:46:05 eth which is the the currency that you use to transact on all smart contracts of that blockchain sure the currency itself is an investment to people or i'm just using that term because people do buy and sell it who have no fucking idea what ethereum is and including right but people go on to robin hood for example and they can buy bitcoin and they can buy ethereum and so right now the space is hot because bitcoin obviously has a lot of attention around it and people are just trying to buy in and you wonder about things like do you have at some point in 2017 all over again where things go off a roof with ethereum there are a lot of people buying it who have no fucking idea what they're buying they there's a lot of people buying it who have no fucking idea what they're buying.

Starting point is 01:46:45 There's a lot of people buying Bitcoin who have no fucking idea what they're buying. But Bitcoin is at least, it's simpler and it's older and it's more legacy in the sense that more people are at least somewhat aware of how it works. With Ethereum, especially given the fact that we already covered where they do not have a cap supply on it, when you add that to the fact that so many people as far as like in 2017 myself included back then have no fucking idea what it is how are we creating a price for it like how is it trading at five six seven hundred dollars and how how do you actually value it moving forward i know how you do because you are in the world you understand it inside and out you see its application but how is a general public like joe blow who's investing in it on robin hood which is the worst place to do it but or coinbase or

Starting point is 01:47:29 something like that how do they say like yes i know this ethereum is worth six hundred dollars and here's why so yeah this is something that's you know uh valuation with cryptocurrencies is certainly a interesting topic um so you, there's no central pricing for cryptocurrencies. Like the price you see on CoinGecko or CoinMarketCap or another data provider is basically an average of a number of large exchanges. So, you know, maybe they're pulling from Coinbase, Binance, you know, Hobi, Kraken, you know, Bifinex, and all these big exchanges.

Starting point is 01:48:10 So, you know, they can basically point to the ETH USD or to the BTC USD pair or another pair at a given time and say, okay, you know, based on the average of of these exchanges like this is the price right now um so that's regarding the uh you know the kind of you know how things are priced basically the market is pricing it and it trades on all these different you know venues uh it's basically a much different concept to you know the stock market um where things trade on basically one venue or a few venues. Um, so yeah, so basically all these exchanges around the world are, you know, they all have their, you know, they're all have their own tech and basically they all have their own traders and liquidity and the market's kind of doing its thing and finding equilibrium. Um, regarding how people

Starting point is 01:49:01 value Ethereum, um, certainly, uh, you know, there's a ton of transaction fees. I don't know off the top of my head, um, you know, how many they are, but if you were to use those to build some sort of model, I'm sure you could arrive at some sort of, uh, you know, value. Obviously there's some assumptions that need to be made and these types of things in a model like that. But, you know, there's probably a number of ways.

Starting point is 01:49:25 I know in 2017, people like to use this network formulas and whatnot to measure how much a coin might be worth based on velocity and supply and these type of things. But I think like with financial models for VC or P or investment banking or something like that. It's more, it's an art. Um, there's no one, you know, perfect way to do it. There's a number of different ways to do it. So it's, uh, you know, it's hard to say, but, um, I don't know how exactly someone should model it, but you know, I think the transaction fees and like the amount of money

Starting point is 01:50:01 being settled on it, um, you know, the amount of it that's locked up it's not moving you know these are all things i think that folks should take into account but it's there's no problem there's no per uh perfect uh perfect answer here yeah the art on the bitcoin side seems to be boiled down to and i'm simplifying here but it seems to be boiled down to scarcity and adoption it is boiled down to the fact that it was the first and it's the most known and it's been picked up by more and more people and now has tens of millions of people around the world who are not only aware of it there's more than that who are aware of it but all these people who are literally invested in it yeah and then you add to that that

Starting point is 01:50:45 it has a capped amount of supply at 21 and by the way not all those 21 aren't going to be out there forever as we pointed out earlier there's like five ten percent whatever it is that are gone forever because it was burned on a hard drive or whatever so you have a small amount. It's even more perfect than gold where gold they mine approximately. They adjust gold inflation for like 1.5 or 2% annually. They expect to mine that much more. And that's been very consistent over time. I think the highest it went in the last 100 or 200 years was like 2.5%. So gold is considered this inflation hedge and this very trusted asset, but Bitcoin is even more so that because we know it's going to be 0% very soon and it's already at 18.54 or whatever million total that have already been mined with only 2.5 million or so to go.

Starting point is 01:51:41 So people have that valuation there and Ethereum has had a shorter life and people maybe don't have quite that valuation. But when you add into the fact that Ethereum doesn't, as we've said, seven, nine, 12 times now, Ethereum doesn't have that cap on supply and it doesn't necessarily have the awareness and adoption and the level of knowledge on an average per human basis that Bitcoin does it's like you're sitting there and and maybe it's that ethereum is kind of bitcoin in 2017 now crash notwithstanding right because that hasn't happened but you know where people are like all right i get it uh i understand like this exists but like i'm not really sure yet you know like like there's not

Starting point is 01:52:20 really that awareness um i've thought about that a number of times basically uh the market cap is a bit different but like comparing bitcoin or ethereum to where bitcoin was like right before 2017 like at the end of 2016 right so like bitcoin was at like 700 um you know it did this huge run up to 20k um and then it crashed down but you know ethereum could be in a similar spot where it's around $700 and maybe it sees a huge run-up to several thousand or something like that. But yeah, but certainly doesn't have

Starting point is 01:52:55 the level of awareness Bitcoin has yet. But I think that will come in due time. And I do think that a lot of the applications that are powered by Ethereum, I don't think users necessarily need to understand that it's Ethereum powering it. They can understand if they'd like to, but I don't think that normal users, they don't understand how Wi-Fi works or how the PC works. They just use it.

Starting point is 01:53:26 And the complexity is abstracted away. I think we could probably see similar things with Ethereum and crypto generally where people don't really, they're not aware that it's crypto on the back end, but they just use it and they like the service. So I think Ethereum is building up it's uh you know it certainly has a lot of mind share in the developer community um there's tons of developers hacking on ethereum um these hackathons uh that that haven't been they've kind of been halted by

Starting point is 01:53:56 covid but um and conferences are really wild um i was at uh ethereum denver um in in February, kind of like right before COVID. And it was amazing. There was like thousands of people, a thousand plus people there. The, you know, energy is insane. You know, there's so many developers and cool projects being hacked on. You know, all the teams, all the crypto projects are there, all the founders, all the teams. So it's really incredible. But, you know, I think, you know, Bitcoin obviously has done a lot, you know, gained a lot of mind share and the overall, you know, investment community over the last 10 years or so. And

Starting point is 01:54:36 Ethereum's, you know, only been around for roughly, you know, five or five or so years. So, yeah, I think, you know, it's building up the mind share. But I think it's making great progress. This is another important, I don't know if it's a distinction or a point to throw at you and see what you think. You talk about how there is people are going to get behind it without maybe fully understanding it like they did other things like parts of the internet and stuff like that there's a difference here in my mind and you don't have to agree but let me just toss it out there and see what happens when i look at like the social networks for example sure when someone goes on instagram for the first time let's say they went on there five years ago for the first time. They open it up. Let's say stories were around then. They weren't, but let's just say they were. They open it up.

Starting point is 01:55:34 They see at the top, once they follow people, all these little circles that have lights around them that they can very quickly realize their thumb hits it and something comes up and they realize it's from that person's account. They come out of the stories. They go, they scroll through the feed and the feed is vertical. There is a heart right below the picture, and then there's an area that says add comment, and you see any pre-existing comments that were there. And they realize once they click add comment, and it pops up, and their keyboard pops up, that they're allowed to do that and press enter and put it in. And they realize that when they hit that heart, or God forbid, they even just double tap the picture, that makes it red, and that means that they are a part of a public like on that post.

Starting point is 01:56:05 It's very easy. In that sense, I've seen 85-year-old little old ladies figure this out. And, you know, maybe they're not great at it, but they get it. When they do these things...

Starting point is 01:56:14 But they don't understand how the HTML works and how the whole website works. That is exactly my point. When they do this... That's the same thing for the blockchain. It's like they use a wallet. Great. It works for their purpose. They're able able to send money they're able to like their friends

Starting point is 01:56:28 posts but they don't they're not understanding like what's going on in the background like they don't it's not relevant to them like two big differences though this this is what i want to toss out number one it's money yeah it affects it affects we're talking about it in the sense at the highest level here as new money, as a potential. But do you know, do normal people know how Stripe works when they use their bank? They don't. They don't know how Venmo works either, but they just know that there is a third party on it and that this is the way things are.

Starting point is 01:56:58 It is backed by the FDIC, it's handled by the government in that way. The banks have to give them their money. It's a record right there they can call up somebody on a 1-800 line for their bank and be able to settle things if it's a problem it's a pain in the ass but they know that's all there when it comes to cryptocurrency they realize whoa this is outside the system this is not backed by the government or the fdic or whatever this does not have a bank that we can call up and handle this stuff. This is taking responsibility in our hands. And the second level to it is the transparency. And I believe this, the transparency, which is a positive, huge positive, the entire crypto community is used against them. Because when Instagram came out and coded how to do the heart

Starting point is 01:57:40 and coded how to do a DM mailbox and coded coded how to do stories they didn't say hey here's the source code of what's on our server that we use and by the way every time you double tap you can go click the source code and figure out exactly how it works they just said double fucking tap and you'll figure it out later and that's just what it is actually you'll never know with crypto they say hold on you just double let's call crypto instagram now you just double tap that heart here's how we did it and then people they're curious they go in and they're like what the fuck and then they get confused so in a way that honesty I think sometimes is used against it that's my point yeah you know I think a lot of the folks in the space now are early um and they're interested in that type of stuff but

Starting point is 01:58:20 we'll have to see like if that gets abstracted um with time but i i personally don't think a lot of people care um they're just trying to use uh an app or a service that's 10x uh better faster cheaper than the you know than the other service so if it is then they'll use it if it's not they they won't use it if you know if it is they they may not they may not care how it works um but yeah you make some good points and uh yeah it's it's interesting dynamic yeah well i mean look we're we need time we need to see how it develops but once again i actually want to pull it back to you i think i've said that a couple times and we never ended up doing it because you've been in this space you were early this space period but now i mean you're a long time veteran of this space and i remember

Starting point is 01:59:13 i remember you know meeting you and you were this curious kid it was like you knew i was going to work at a bank and everything you want to to know everything about it. And you understood the stock market and the legacy system inside and out. And at first, like this is years ago, like you never talked about crypto with me or that kind of stuff. And I know towards like the second half of college, you really started taking the initiative on that and learning the culture, I'll literally call it, and understanding why people felt strongly about this stuff and how it applied to things. And then you started to apply your own abilities, be it, you know, literally as like a connector in the space or somebody who can also do some coding and somebody who understands some of the more complex stuff about it. You started to get yourself into these circles by networking with people who were really smart there and building up your

Starting point is 02:00:04 Rolodex of not just knowing people, but knowing why these people are important and what they do. And so can you just walk us through a little bit your journey here beyond what I just said and how this kind of how this ramped up and when exactly it started and what that was like for you to stumble upon this? Yeah, sure. Happy to. what that was like for you to to stumble upon this yeah sure happy to um so i heard about bitcoin uh 2013 or 2014 um like a lot of people and kind of dismissed it you know uh i think i heard about the

Starting point is 02:00:35 time mount cox blew up so um maybe that's a hell of a time yeah so uh one of my friends had told me about it. He's a super bright guy, now doing great things out in SF. But he had told me about it. And let's see. So yeah, I kind of looked into it. I told my dad about Ethereum. So it was kind of like the end of 2016, second half of the year. And Ethereum was kind of gaining some momentum online and whatnot. And at some point, I saw something about this Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. And I saw, oh, wow, like Microsoft and like these other companies are dabbling with Ethereum or however I was mispronouncing it then. So I thought that was super interesting. I started looking into it more, asking around, people said, oh, you know, I've heard of Bitcoin, you know, this and that. But, you know, not that many people were thinking about it. It was like an investment. It was just more of like a, you know, Bitcoin was, you know, Bitcoin and, you know, you know, no one really

Starting point is 02:01:45 knew about Ethereum. So, yeah, I started following it really closely at that point, you know, kind of followed it through the, you know, through 2017. You know, that was obviously really crazy with, you know, giant run up, you know, in Bitcoin and Ethereum saw a huge run up with all the ICOs and all these things, which... ICOsos can you just tell people what that is yeah sure so that was uh initial coin offering basically people were selling tokens on ethereum um in exchange for ether or other uh other excuse me other coins so yeah basically i followed the you know through the run um in kind of mid 2018 i kind of stumbled upon defy um and uh i think it was maker first that i had seen um and kind of got interested in what was going on there

Starting point is 02:02:37 how'd you find that um i think i saw the white paper somewhere saw the maker twitter and kind of was like oh this is this you know stable coin you know that's backed by you know uh crypto and that's super interesting maybe it was they got an investment from andreessen harwood something like this so i kind of started paying attention maybe that was the next year but i started paying attention to a defi um around the same time i was kind of uh of working crypto Twitter, trying to meet people, trying to grow my kind of – grow awareness of what I was working on and whatnot. So I connected with this guy actually named Rick Burton, and I still keep in touch with him. He's a great guy. And I went to his place in Brooklyn, and I was supposed to have a meeting with him, which we did have a meeting.

Starting point is 02:03:27 But when I went to his place, I met a few people that kind of changed how I was thinking about the space. But namely, one of them was Hayden Adams, who's the creator of Uniswap. So I met him really early on in kind of his journey. And when I met him him there was only seven several hundred thousand dollars of youth and whatnot locked in uniswap and now there's several billion dollars locked in uniswap so it's really early um and this is 2018 this is a this is in like november or december of 2018 yeah so at this point i kind of got like really interested in DeFi. Um, I started writing about it and then at a certain point I was like, well, um, wow, there's no like meetups around DeFi in New York.

Starting point is 02:04:13 Like this is really weird. Um, I'm so surprised there's no meetups around DeFi and looking back on it, like it makes sense. Like it was pretty early and whatnot, but can you tell people what meetups are? Yeah, sure. So meetup is just like a, uh, you know, kind of like a, you know, a gathering between, you know, folks that have like a common interest. So, you know, there's, could be like a, you know, a meetup for, you know, Ethereum, of course, or, you know, DeFi, or there could be a meetup for baseball cards or, you know, people that have a certain type of dog or something like that. So anyways, um, yeah, so I, I was like, wow, there's no DeFi meetup in New York. Like this crazy. So I was like, well, you know, I should make one. So I made something called DeFi NYC, um, which is basically

Starting point is 02:04:55 a meetup group. Um, and, uh, had, had our first meetup with, uh, MakerDAO, um, uh, Staked, Balance, and Uma. So had this really interesting first event where I was at a hotel bar in Manhattan around Times Square. And basically there was more than 100 people that showed up for the first meetup. I was like, wow, this is really crazy. All these people showed up to learn about DeFi and hear what people had to say. So we had a number of other meetups and had Uniswap at the next meetup. Hayden talked about Uniswap, had a number of other folks, did presentations, did panels. So, you know, started, you know, networking really, you know, aggressively, I guess, in New York, you know, around DeFi and having these great meetups had, we had roughly, you know, 12 or so meetups until COVID kind of, you know,

Starting point is 02:05:57 stunted the in-person meetup. We haven't really made a transition to, to like Zoom meetups. It's on my to-do list, but, you you know i'm working on in-person meetups so yeah obviously covet makes that hard but around the same time i started define yc i also started working with uh with staked um so staked is a infrastructure provider in the crypto space where uh stake largely helps uh institutions and larger holders of crypto earn a yield on their on their coins so basically staked is uh you is running servers on different proof-of-stake networks, actually more than 40 different networks, which is really wild. But yeah, they make it really easy for funds, exchanges, custodians to stake

Starting point is 02:06:39 or build out functionality for staking on their platform. So yeah, I started working with Staked. I joined the company about two years ago as their first business hire and early employee. I think I was like employee number four or five. So I helped them kind of on a lot of business efforts, wear a bunch of different hats, and help them grow, you know, their business, you know, by signing on crypto funds, you know, and other other businesses. So yeah, that's been really great. I'm still working with staked. And I've also been hacking on a another project called volmex.finance. And volmex is a kind of in development project. But what do you mean? By the way, you've said this a few times, but just to define it.

Starting point is 02:07:26 What do you mean when you say someone's hacking on the Ethereum train? So when I say hacking, I just mean just experimenting, building, these type of things. So there's hackathons. It's basically when you build a project over a weekend and submit it and can win a bounty, win a prize, get recognized. But yeah, hacking can be associated with like malicious hacking but like when I say hacking I more mean like building building yeah but just there is there is like black hat hacking which is like you're hacking you know to to you know do something harmful there's also white hat hacking which is like you're hacking to find bugs and surface them so they don't get exploited by black hat hackers but when i say

Starting point is 02:08:08 hacking i'm just talking about building um so yeah so i started uh hacking on volmex uh on nights and weekends um and basically we've built a volatility index for eth so think um vix for crypto so we're calling it yeah so we're calling it ETHV index, or it's called ETHV index. And it's a index that measures the, you know, the volatility of ETH over the next 30 days. So it's super interesting that we, you know, you can check out the website at volmex.finance, V-O-L-M-E-X.finance. And yeah, there's, you know, some info there. You can join the Discord group, read the intro blog posts. We're, you know, we're... You're active on there right now?

Starting point is 02:08:51 Yeah. So working on that in my free time on nights and weekends. And yeah, actively working on that. So yeah, it's super exciting. But yeah, there's... And then, yeah, I mean, you know, just continue to stay active on Twitter. Try to continue to meet interesting people. Just keep my finger on the pulse via Twitter.

Starting point is 02:09:19 Telegram is a big channel for crypto. Stop for one second. I actually want to go back to your to your project i don't want to just let that go that that's that is really fucking cool that you're doing that and i want to make sure people know this so when you say the vix which is on the legacy financial system to explain that to people the vix is basically it measures it is a bet that people can buy into they can buy it as an etf so yeah yeah so vix is a bet that people can buy into. They can buy it as an ETF. So, yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:46 Yeah. So VIX is an index first and foremost. There's also derivatives that are – that use the VIX as like a reference, like futures and options. Yep. But basically what VIX is doing is it's measuring the 30-day implied volatility of the uh the s&p 500 and the way that it does this is with a number of um a number of options that it you know uses this data to price the index all right let me let me pull that for you back into english so what he means is that let's say the s&p i'm going to use fake numbers let's say the s&p is trading at 3 000 right now now. It's more than that, but let's just use a round number. When I buy into the VIX and I then raise the price of the VIX, let's say I raise it from

Starting point is 02:10:32 15 to 40, which is a big move. That is, and it doesn't work this way. It is, as Cole said, it's implied volatility. It's like a guess. It's like a hypothesis. That means that the hypothesis of the general market, if VIX is trading at 40, means that they think that the market can flip 40% in either direction from where it is. And usually when it's high, it means implied volatility of Ethereum, the currency itself there. That's right. We'll be publishing a formal white paper and all that. We have the index is live today. The documentation could be a bit built out more. Your TLDR is perfectly right.

Starting point is 02:11:36 It's VIX, or it's calculated in 30-day implied volatility of Ether. It publishes this to the blockchain every time it's queried. A user can pay a small amount of ETH and query the index and it will publish to the blockchain when you say query the index when I say query I mean that they can interact the smart contract via ether scan which is like a block Explorer but they could also do it via like a website that uh you know our dev team builds or you know we built um but yeah so basically you know they're able to send a small amount of

Starting point is 02:12:11 cryptocurrency ether um to the volume to the eth vix uh contract and it will spit out the current implied volatility for them or the current uh eth i should say so uh yeah it's it's super interesting um yeah again i'd say like volmex.finance uh on you know this url and uh we have a discord and twitter um come hang out ask questions um you know happy to happy to answer you're so low-key about this i love it yeah you know that's the deal it's like i just fucked around and building options exchange on my day off it's cool it's whatever you know it's it's uh it's we have a lot to do and a lot to build but it's a uh first and foremost we've built an index and you know a protocol for adding new indexes uh so um yeah we're really excited about it and we'll we're excited to share more but yeah it's

Starting point is 02:13:06 you know we haven't published a formal white paper there's no official documentation yet but looking forward to sharing that with the community and sorry for being a little cagey no no no all good I understand like it's obviously earlier on here we haven't open sourced anything

Starting point is 02:13:22 but we plan to you're going to right okay I'll i'll leave that there um switch it up for a second on to something i was i was thinking about that i definitely want your opinion on just to make sure we yeah we get it out there and actually i say i want your opinion on it but the reason i want to bring it up is because you're someone who who operates without an opinion on this which i think is great but it's the controversial coin out there that depending on who you are you call it a shit coin or the next great hope and that is xrp and xrp i bring up just because so many people are aware of like ripple they call it wrong because the company ripple is the one who produced xrp so they call xrp ripple but it's controversial and i'm going to really broaden this in the sense that it is a coin

Starting point is 02:14:11 that is created by a company where as i said ripple which also controls i think like 80 percent of the circulating supply so they are completely in control of it and their value add very broadly highest level is that they are going to existing institutions and implementing xrp among other things at these institutions be it big banks um enormous companies whatever and allowing for the value of xrp which is quick transactions no middleman none of that bullshit whatever that existing banks have and saying all right we're going to implement that within the existing ones to make you get it get out in front of this so people in the crypto community who are all about decentralization the whole concept of bitcoin was to go around institutions

Starting point is 02:15:03 many of them dislike it a lot like they hate it and they think that it's a sellout and a total shit coin and bullshit and it might be but you are a guy who does not say that oh it's terrible or oh it's great you just kind of operate here and obviously you're much more interested in ethereum and much more interested in bitcoin but what is the the, like, besides the very simpleton view I just put on it, what are the possibilities you see with XRP, both terrible and great? And why does it matter? And why do people talk about it so much for the average person who doesn't really know much about it? Sure. So this is a loaded question. It is. I'm gonna do my best um first off i would say there's a lot of folks that know

Starting point is 02:15:47 about xrp a lot of retail folks that like are aware of it and like have bought it or like you know know about it they have family or something friends that have bought it so i find that really interesting that there's like this awareness of xrp which has something to do with 2017, like, uh, you know, just XRP going up, you know, a lot. Um, and in general, but I think the problem that there is my understanding is that the problem that XRP and ripple, I'm going to use them like synonymously that they're trying to solve is that they want to build a better, uh, Swift and Swift, uh uh at a high level is like the you know banking uh you know bank uh transfer system so you know it's it's interesting um i don't have a good sense of like their you know penetration and like how well they're doing um with that what i can say is

Starting point is 02:16:40 that it has a huge market cap and like it's the third largest cryptocurrency or maybe it's a third or fourth i don't forget if tether is bigger but you know i find that interesting just from that it's you know been so successful it's kind of interesting that you know what it's been able to do but i'm not i don't have a real educated uh viewpoint on like are they doing a good job at replacing swift like it's interesting it works i suppose um you know i i think anything that works is good um so but we'll have to see what happens with it um yeah so like the market cap's like really rich already it's hard to say like what the price of xrp will look like um what I will say is that there's a ton of retail traders

Starting point is 02:17:26 probably trading it, and it's probably a good speculative trading instrument, but I haven't traded it. Yeah, and it's a messy one to touch. As I said earlier, I don't own any of it. I don't have any plans to either. I have significant reservations about it because of the fact that look you are run by your early adopters and it's not the xrp doesn't have

Starting point is 02:17:54 adopters it absolutely does but the space of crypto and the space of decentralized currency the early adopters of that adopted again because they believed in a system that operated outside of the current power system that be right the governments the institutions and when you see xrp actively integrating with those institutions they're basically the way i view it saying we're going to meet you halfway we're going to bring a better system shit's going to settle a lot easier you can move a billion pesos from mexico to south korea now using xrp in three seconds as opposed to like five days with all these middlemen but we're gonna do it through the systems that we know and trust and that's a very bastardized way of putting it and some people say that's completely uneducated

Starting point is 02:18:39 but at a high level that's how a lot of people in the space see it so i look at it like hey regardless of how i feel about that which look if I wanted this to go the way I wanted it to go, I would want none of the institutions to be able to have any level of that control they already have. I don't want them to maintain that. I want people to actually take back money and the power behind it, which is what the whole system is set up to do. That said, assuming that I have no say over it and just looking at it unbiased maybe that is the way people go what it seems to me though when not just the price action from where it fell from and what it hasn't recovered to but when you see people who are the earliest

Starting point is 02:19:16 adopters of the space talking online and the communities they're building it seems like a lot of people are like not fucked at we want it pure or we or we don't want it at all um yeah i mean candidly there's some sort of animosity towards xrp in the crypto community um i'm not exactly sure like when that start well yeah i can't i'm not exactly sure like the origin of that i think it has something to do with like the pre-mine and there was a lot of uh pre-mine like the fact that the team owns so much of it um and like early on in the bitcoin community that like that that has become more common as more like tokens and stuff icos it's become more common and it's actually there's a different type of launch coming about now but and most of them are immediately written off as shit coins now because people have seen that movie they've seen that movie in 2017 2018 well let me say something so i think there is a big uh kind of animosity maybe towards pre-mines and stuff early on but

Starting point is 02:20:18 i think it's becoming you know people think uh you know now people realize like developers need to get paid like they probably need to keep some amount of tokens to be properly incentivized and whatnot. But yeah, I think that's probably why there might be some animosity towards XRP. Maybe the centralization or I don't know. They have a really aggressive Twitter army and whatnot. But I think it works. I think it works. As far as I understand, it works.

Starting point is 02:20:49 And like I said, I'm a fan of things that work in this crypto world. There's stuff that doesn't work. But it seems that it works for sending money around cheaply. I can't speak to how many banks are using it and whatnot like uh i think there's some you know you know their ceo brad garlinghouse talks about that type of stuff so you know maybe check out an interview with him but yeah i think it's overall it's uh you know i think it's interesting um i don't really have a super uh you know opinionated thoughts on it though taking taking the middle ground i appreciate it i one one thing i will say on it that personally hit home for me that put up some red lights

Starting point is 02:21:31 and that is i you know as i mentioned i used to work at a bank and so i i worked in merrill and merrill was owned by bank of america in light of the global financial crash and that deal that happened in in 2008 and bank of america ruined merrill lynch think what you want about banks or whatever merrill had a certain culture and over time bank of america ripped that fucking thing away and it was very sad to watch it happen and i was there watching it happen and watching that sausage factory mentality just completely take over any ability to do anything for people that worked at Merrill within Bank of America, neither here nor there. The first time I really noticed

Starting point is 02:22:11 Ripple, though, operating in some ways where I was like, this ain't it, was on some very hidden things at Bank of America. So I had access to all the company research, which have all the little disclosures, all the internal research and everything, you know, at the bottom in the small print that no one reads. two and a half years ago, three years ago, talking about how XRP, how Bank of America was working with the company Ripple on the implementation of XRP for blank, blank, blank, doesn't matter what it said, but it was talking about like transactions and things. And I looked around and I looked at my desk where there was a 2009 HP monitor, carpets that below me that hadn't been replaced in 30 years, and a system that was operating using Internet Explorer that blocked Wikipedia some days. And I looked around the rest of the office, and I looked at any of the technology we used,

Starting point is 02:23:17 and I wouldn't even call it technology. And I also knew how serious our team that I worked with was as far as the amount of assets we managed and the types of people we did my boss dealt with people who run society so to speak right and i'm like okay let me get this straight this company gives us these quote-unquote resources and claims to like they weren't even they weren't even letting people use zoom when covet happened like that they weren't even letting that happen i mean COVID happened. They weren't even letting that happen. I mean, that's how tight this was. And they basically treat everyone at Merrill like mushrooms, feed them shit, keep them in the dark.

Starting point is 02:23:53 But on the back end, they are, at the time, Bank of America was globally had the fourth highest investment in blockchain technology of any company on planet Earth. And they're filing patents like nothing left and right and this and and so i went deeper because i'm like oh and and they're integrating xrp but we're not even allowed to talk about bitcoin with our clients let alone trade it we're literally not allowed to talk about i'm like that's interesting so then i went digging online because all these answers are somewhere and i realized that bank of america even like on linkedin had all these crazy roles on the technical side of the business that were that was what for xrp or oh they didn't say that i thought you meant they had like an advisory role for ripple yes they did but here's how they

Starting point is 02:24:37 sold it they'd have these long name titles right on linkedin like looking for a engineer in the blank blank space of technical malfeasance or whatever and then i'd go in i'd read the description and they'd pack the whole top of the description with the basic bullshit like you know looking for somebody who's motivated has five plus years of experience but then you go down and suddenly it goes to this role will be working directly with the company ripple to implement the xrp ledger within our system to do blank and it would have all this shit and i'm like this is not why this stuff was created this was not created to keep bank of america growing as a sausage factory here but that's what they're

Starting point is 02:25:14 doing with it and so again i don't have the full context there because i'm an idiot going in and looking that shit up i'm not somebody in this space who can truly understand all the nuance of it but when i look at that they're not saying we're working with the fucking company bitcoin to implement the bitcoin on the ledger for all our clients because there is no company bitcoin but they're working with this company ripple that controls 80 or whatever it is it's a big percentage that they still control the xrp currency and they're working with that to be able to implement it as if to get ahead of all the people who they need as clients to continue to exist that's scary to me yeah you have an interesting point um enterprise blockchain is uh something i'm not too close to actually but um i think it's interesting but it's it's hard to

Starting point is 02:25:58 say like like investing in like private ledgers and i don't know like experimenting with bitcoin or uh well let's say like experimenting with hyper ledger which is like a or a private blockchain or um quorum which is like a fork of ethereum that's like permissioned um or like xrp like we'll have to see like how these enterprise uh these enterprise blockchain efforts are like, what happens with them, if they amount to anything. I'm not sure. I'm more close to the public ledger stuff, less enterprise, more just publicly out there, not permissioned uh you know blockchains but you know i think this this tech has a place uh in these companies and i just think they're trying to find what it is so they're doing a lot of r&d probably these different shops different companies um trying to figure out what's working

Starting point is 02:26:58 throwing shit at the wall hoping it sticks so but yeah i think uh we'll have to see what happens with these enterprise blockchain initiatives. Like, I do see what you're saying. Like, it's not really in the same spirit as crypto because it's like, you know, it's, you know, they're using this tech to further their institution. But we'll have to see what happens, right? Yeah. I mean, it's time will tell on it. No doubt about that.

Starting point is 02:27:23 But it's just that's something I think about a lot because I don't know what I don't know. Interesting insight. Yeah, there's so much I don't know. But, you know, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it's usually a fucking duck. So it's just, you know. But going back to the higher level here. Because I think our last area of of conversation here going through some stuff we we really should focus on the things that most people are aware of so i i really appreciate

Starting point is 02:27:51 taking a deep dive on ethereum today and that may come up in in this context again at some point but when we're looking at bitcoin everyone's now in prediction mode right even people who have no fucking idea how it even works or what it is they're just looking at the price action because they're like oh i can make money you know you have and these guys actually do know some stuff because they do at least study it but you even have the the big institutions like i talked about earlier like guggenheim and all them coming out calling price action and saying like oh bitcoin is going to be four hundred thousand dollars by 2025 and you have every asshole on twitter saying i see bitcoin at 80 000 by the end of october or whatever

Starting point is 02:28:29 and no one really knows for sure but what people are trying to measure is the supply and demand and they're trying to say that like hey throughout its lifetime 2017 being the most recognizable one because more people were aware of it then but throughout its lifetime bitcoin has gone way up and come back down and then struggled and then worked its way even up higher and then come back down and gone through these little cycles and they're usually two to three years so now we're two to three years into this new cycle here that hit a enormous low obviously comparatively speaking at like 35 3200 in in December 2018 off the $20,000 high. But we've only just crossed that $20,000 and we're up at $23,000, $24,000 now. And so a lot of people are trying to say like, all right, I think this one could now get the price up times four, times five.

Starting point is 02:29:19 I don't put a lot of stock into, no pun intended, into what any of these people are pontificating. What I try to do is i try to say where is bitcoin in 2030 where is it in 2035 and not just where is the price that's just a byproduct of it where is the actual concept and what do we look at it as and what is it how much bigger is the adoption do you have any opinion on that or is it just totally open open space for you yeah you know we'll have to see what happens um let's see so you know i think it's timing the crypto market and uh price predictions are like next to impossible um you know it's hard to say like what the price will do, obviously. Um,

Starting point is 02:30:07 hopefully at that point, there's lots of retailers accepting Bitcoin. Um, you know, lots of businesses using it, um, you know, folks using it as a savings technology or, you know, to save money, um, putting a lot of wealth there. So hopefully it's just like widely accepted as money. Like it's just like widely accepted as money like it's starting to um but like hopefully at that point like you could just say to some someone like else like hey like don't worry man i'll send you that that dinner in bitcoin and it's not i'll send you the money for that dinner in bitcoin it's not just uh you know haha man like you know bitcoin like you're still doing that like yeah so maybe just a more widely accepted uh medium of exchange that could be one thing um let's see um but yeah it's

Starting point is 02:30:54 hard to say like exactly what happened and obviously i do think well not obviously but i think ethereum um has a good chance of being larger than Bitcoin. Certainly not impossible. I think the, like, if you compare Bitcoin to gold, Bitcoin is, you know, the gold market cap is $9 trillion. And, like, that's maybe a reasonable comp for Bitcoin. It's much harder to say, like, what the Ethereum addressable market is because it applies to, like, what we were talking about before. It's, like, a thin layer of tech that applies a lot of different things yeah it's hard to say like exactly you know what the addressable market is there and like how much value ethereum can accrete but what i can say is that with like something like the eip

Starting point is 02:31:37 1559 if that was to get implemented um what is that that's like when they burn the small amount of eth for every transaction that could result means what which basically means the supply is reduced and therefore like should be like value accretive and maybe price goes up deflationary yeah so like as there's more apps and more people building on ethereum and more eth is more transactions um you know hopefully you know eth accretes value from that as it gets burned so all right wait fuck it right down the eth at rabbit hole i'm with it let's do it so we're gonna we're gonna pull back to mostly bitcoin but this sparked my interest when you

Starting point is 02:32:16 burn that eth what who loses where does it go so basically the someone whoever's initiating the transaction like it's a portion of their transaction fee that gets burned so um so like they're spending money to push the transaction it's part of the gas yeah it's part of the gas yeah yeah okay so that's hopefully going to go live soon i believe there's a pull request or like a, uh, you know, an update like request out there, um, for, to, to, you know, kind of implement this, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's not live yet, but, um, hopefully it will be soon. But, uh, yeah, I think Ethereum has a good chance of being larger than Bitcoin, but it's really hard to tell. Um, obviously Bitcoin has a headstart, but, um, I just think Ethereum solving solving a larger problem.

Starting point is 02:33:07 Just trust on a bunch of different levels versus Bitcoin, which is really great, really cool. But it's kind of like a one-trick pony, in my opinion. What do you mean with trust, though? Just automating all these different uh you know applications and industries so uh just the fact that the smart contract acts as a middleman or a counterparty um and uh you know it's basically automating trust um you know automating oh i understand there's no bank required there's no you know there's no human component. The third party is a piece of software. So that's what I mean by trust.

Starting point is 02:33:50 And you're saying that comparatively speaking, and we said this earlier, but I just want to clarify. You're saying comparatively speaking, Bitcoin doesn't do any of that. Bitcoin is just literally this store of value. It's that one, and I mean this in a nice way, it's that one trick pony, whereas Ethereum allows you to integrate all different levels of society into the blockchain that then has the currency below it. Yeah, that's basically it. Yeah, I mean, Ethereum has functionality Bitcoin doesn't have. But I think Bitcoin is a big innovation in itself.

Starting point is 02:34:18 Like a, you know, monetary network, community-owned monetary network. One thing I will hit on is i'm kind of jumping around here go for it we've been jumping all day i love it let's go tokens on ethereum are like the best uh coordination and like incentivization mechanism like ever like like that's like why statement so they they they you can incentivize like user, or you can use them to acquire users. So there's this thing going on in DeFi called liquidity mining, where basically users who have coins

Starting point is 02:34:56 will provide liquidity to a protocol in exchange for their protocol token. So a common example is Compound. So they're a borrow-lending protocol, one of the largest protocols, and they introduced their comp token earlier this year. And they said, okay, moving forward, everyone that's a user of the protocol

Starting point is 02:35:18 will start earning comp tokens. So basically they're incentivizing growth of their protocol. So it's just this new type of incentive engineering that's really innovative and rewarding users and basically resulting in a community-owned network. So tokens allow for community-owned networks and coordinating communities and incentivizing them. So I think it's a major innovation on that front. And that can be applied to so many different things. So there's some sort of app. can you know if they have a good you know they can have a token that governs the platform and they can distribute that to users and effectively move to a community-owned uh you know protocol or network so it's a kind of powerful concept but people should be very careful with uh tokens

Starting point is 02:36:15 that you know they're immutable they cannot be changed if you fuck up or excuse me uh if you mess up you say whatever you want here if you mess up your token distribution like there's no going back it's it's uh one way one way uh so yeah you know i think uh tokens are a really incredible uh tool um and uh we'll have to see like what folks continue to do with them um but yeah i mean there's a lot of stuff happening on eth. But I think it's, yeah, overall, it's an exciting space, exciting times. What a time. Now, you saw, though, in 2017, and you alluded to it earlier, one of the big problems was the ICOs, the ICOs. Because everyone and their mother was like, I'll do a fucking token for this or, you know, for that.

Starting point is 02:37:01 And we're going to create this on the blockchain. And a lot of them were written on ethereum no yeah pretty much so i actually did some research uh in 2018 with a columbia professor uh and fordham professor uh named paul johnson and we wrote a paper which you might remember i do remember this one yeah tell people and uh yeah we wrote a paper called money for nothing and we kind of analyzed like all these ICOs and basically, you know, how a lot of them fail, delivered on their promises, all this type of things. But yeah, like it was like 95% or something like that was built on Ethereum.

Starting point is 02:37:38 So to answer your question, most of the ICOs were built on Ethereum. So probably your next question is like what happened to them a lot of them failed um you know they raised money for some ambitious uh you know project and they like couldn't you know there's like execution risk they couldn't ship it um you know they something went wrong like they built it they couldn't get users like there's some successful projects that came out of the ico era like maker dao maker what we're talking about a lot today or oops um you lost the volume you good no i'm good yeah maker uh yeah basically like the community

Starting point is 02:38:19 kind of uh you know saw these projects as i don't know like there's this perception of like they raised the token or sold the token and like didn't really deliver anything valuable um this is an issue so the sentiment now is like let's build and then start centralized and distribute a token later on to the community so uh yeah explain that so that's kind of the liquidity mining thing I explained. So like the development team, they build a protocol, basically has like a kind of, I'll call it like a backdoor where like the developers can like kind of have the ultimate authority and, you know, kind of early on. So if something happens, you know, they use their their admin key to like you know kind of resolve that um but basically these these protocols transition to like a community-owned uh protocol where they kind of eliminate that backdoor that admin key and kind of transition

Starting point is 02:39:16 to like a something that's owned entirely by the token holders so distributing that token um kind of like is a transition to a community-owned network. Community-driven. The concept of these things being built across a global community of the people. That's what it all comes back to, and we've hit on it a million times today. But I can't help but think of this book I read pretty recently that drives home a lot of this point and what's happening right now i think i talked with you on the phone about it a couple weeks ago but the book the fourth turning did i mention that yep and you hadn't read that right i have not no

Starting point is 02:39:56 okay but we talked about it briefly right so the very high level view of the fourth turning without going all the way through it i I'll review some of the basics. It was a book written in 1997 by two guys who were historians slash sociologists, and they basically read history over call it the last 1,000, 2,000 years. And they broke down history into what's called a seculum. It's just a pattern that occurred over and over again, and a seculum, I think, is a Latin word for like 100 years or something like that. And what they realize is that especially since, say, like 1600 or 1700, we have operated on, instead of a full seculum of 100 years, it's been about an 80 to 85-year life cycle across civilization. And what that means is that the life cycle refers to the generations within those 80 to 85 years. And to bring that down another level, they were saying

Starting point is 02:40:53 that each generation runs on an approximately 21-year range. And that would mean that, for example, millennials, as we may call them, would operate over a 21-year birth history, and Gen X, a 21-year birth history, and boomers and all the way down, which is a little off and it's literally full 21 years so the the and sometimes they vary a little bit like the boomers they view as like early 40s to very early 60s and gen x they view early 60s to early 80s and so on and so on and the reason this is all important is because they realize that this shit occurs in patterns and by patterns every generation what they meant is every generation matches some form of life. So there's childhood. There's coming of age, which is like age 21 through 42. There's midlife, which is where the generation is in power in society, which is I think like 43 to 63.

Starting point is 02:42:19 And then there's elderhood, which is when, you know, a nicer way of saying you're on your way out. And that's 63 and above. And when each of these generations, the prophets, the nomads, the heroes, and the artists reach each of those points, there is a specific thing that happens over and over again, patterns in society. And so long story short, right now, this period from, say, the mid-aughts to what's going to be 2025, 2030, is a period that's called a crisis. And this occurs every fourth generation. And a crisis involves economics, sociology, geopolitical events, wars, stuff like that, you know, and it just occurs over and over again. And what these guys hypothesized in 1997 was instead of being like every other historian, sociologist ever who tries to read history and then change it for the future because apparently they know more and doesn't just subscribe to the fact that history does in fact repeat itself. These guys just said history is going to repeat itself and without going exactly into how it's going to happen, here's what's going to happen. And they literally broke down that there was going to be a major economic crisis earliest being like 2005 but latest being about 2010 so that happened in 0809 they nailed that and they broke down that throughout that next period which was this

Starting point is 02:43:35 full crisis period there was going to be a massive societal uprising and change so i then look at it and i i start to measure out when some of these things happen. So they're telling me, for example, that a crisis happened or is going to happen and that if it happens every fourth generation, that would mean according to their numbers, the last crisis was 80 to 85 years ago. So when you measure that over that period of a 20-year crisis or so, go back 80 years. 08-09, we have our global financial crisis. 80 years before that, we had the stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed. So instead of a Great Depression this time, we had governments come in and print money

Starting point is 02:44:15 and then save some things, but what did they do? They created the biggest wealth gap in history throughout the 2010s that then just got a big button pressed in 2020 with COVID that just made it even way worse. So Great Depression, wealth gap. 1940, 1941, last time, we see World War II breakout. And that ended up being this big crisis. So we're in that period right now, 80 years later. But the question is, like, is corona a precursor to some of that? I don't know. That gets a little above my level. and by the way i should just say what was 80 to 85 years before world war ii civil war 1861 to 1865 what was 80 to 85 years before that revolutionary war 1776 to 1783 this shit is

Starting point is 02:44:58 happening in cycles and you can draw it across the entire cycle but I really focused on and had my own little epiphany with the economic side of a crisis period and some of the parallels to what we saw with recently the stock market, recently, I say the last one that happened before this, which was 1929 into the 30s, which was the stock market crash and the Great Depression. How did the Great Depression get fixed, quote-unquote? The New Deal. Exactly. You had FDR come in, and FDR comes in and inherits the worst blank deck you could ever get with the Great Depression post-stock market crash. And in order to save America, he implements all these systems, these government-sponsored systems that had all these downstream effects, including, by the way, the fact that they didn't help out minorities at all.

Starting point is 02:45:50 They kind of left them out and created systems that still exist to this day. And he started things like Social Security and, I believe, Medicaid and stuff like that, which didn't take into account population growth and longevity of life. They created exponential systems that are just ticking time bombs to eventually blow up, which, by the way, we're statistically not far off that happening. Throughout that time, he also then outlawed gold bullion. In 1937, the government did an enormous recall on gold bullion. People don't know this. And immediately upon taking it back from citizens by force, they then repriced it and created a new price on it

Starting point is 02:46:29 and basically got the government richer and took away the world's most precious asset from its people. And so that didn't include like jewelry, but it included people who actually own gold. And so all these things pointed to more government growth and more government control and taking power away from the people and creating a system that was designed to eventually fail. Now I come back to the present day and I look at a system that did fail for people in September 2008 when it started to blow up where all these banks had taken all these bets and suddenly boom. And citizens are left to pay for it with their tax money. And all the trust is gone from the system. And so Satoshi comes out and creates Bitcoin on October 1st, 2008. That is not lost on me, that irony.

Starting point is 02:47:14 And no one knew what it was for years or very few people did. But throughout this 2010s period, it grew. And the distinction I make there, and it might not just be Bitcoin. It may be the entire space of crypto itself but the distinction i make is that in a sense if we're looking at this parallel history that these guys laid out you essentially had the new deal and now you have the new new deal and the new new deal is instead of the government coming in and solving things and creating systems that are fucked the people come in and say you fucked that up last time this time we're getting it right and we're going to

Starting point is 02:47:47 create a system that works and we're going to do it in a way that takes out human error bitcoin being the best example by setting things like not just a transparent ledger but by the way this is going to be a monetary system that has a fixed supply you can't fuck with it no government can ruin it no guy who has to win elected office or save his ass that can say in the short term like alright We're just gonna print money and solve the fucking problem and leave it to the next guy There's no kicking the can down the curb. Yeah, you know You know Bitcoin is not a bubble Bitcoin is the pin that pops the bubble it's that's like a kind of an idiom in crypto i think but um yeah you know i think bitcoin is

Starting point is 02:48:27 and crypto is probably a solution to a lot of a lot of issues going on in the world uh and should be transformative for society can make the world a better place and uh enable you know a lot of different things so uh but yeah i think uh there's definitely parallels um i need to think about it a bit more but it's certainly interesting topic yeah um i know you've thought about it a lot so that's cool yeah i just laid that one on you sorry pal but i i just like it's so clear to me and it's like we're at that frontier and and this this might be it and and seeing how the how the space has risen up in the face of 2017 and all the bad branding that happened at at the when that started to go wrong

Starting point is 02:49:12 and and how much it's it's turned around and people are now using a crisis time a covid time to see the value in this it it's a pretty crazy thing so yep you know listen i i i really appreciate you coming in here and running through all this shit you're working on, man. Thanks for having me. This was amazing. I'm looking forward to, uh, you know, next time and seeing this online and, and, you know, seeing the, yeah, listening. So, um, it's really great being here and having this, you know, discussion with you. Um, this is really awesome. Thanks, Julian. No problem, man. Anytime. And I look forward, like, and subscribe to try to fire. Thank you. I look forward to having you with you. This is really awesome. Thanks, Julian. No problem, man. Anytime. And I look forward... Subscribe.

Starting point is 02:49:46 Like and subscribe to Train to Fire. Thank you. And I look forward to having you in again. And where can people get you on Twitter? Because you are

Starting point is 02:49:52 a king on Twitter. Oh, man. That's flattering, but please, no. My Twitter is ColeGotTweets. So C-O-L-E GotTweets.

Starting point is 02:50:09 I'm also on LinkedIn or whatever else uh but yeah hit me up on twitter send me a dm i'm uh i'll answer you i will put that link in the description of this episode so you have it cole is followed by a lot of prominent people he's going to be too humble to say but he he has he has a very good network ability on on twitter and is and is in the middle of a lot of shit very cool shit so thanks man anyway this has been awesome thanks for coming in we'll have you again and awesome everyone else give it a thought get back to me peace

Julian Dorey Podcast - #29 - Cole Kennelly

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