TBPN Live - Crypto Day | Brian Armstrong, Balaji, Chris Dixon, Katie Haun & More

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're watching TVPN! Today is Wednesday, May 28th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. But today is the trenches of technology. The domicile of DeFi, the mansion of meme coins, the capital of crypto. It's crypto day on TVPN. We started early. We're talking to people from all over the globe.

Starting point is 00:00:20 We just talked to Balaji. We've actually already been podcasting for hours. We cut it down for you. We have our first three interviews. They're going to play over the next hour. Then we're going to hop back on and do a whole bunch more live interviews. So stay tuned. But we're kicking it off with Balaji. Let's go. Let's go. Big news, we have Balaji in the studio. We're gonna bring him in, talk to him for about 45 minutes, take his temperature on what's going on in crypto. I want the update on what he's up to and really just take us on the whirlwind tour. We're gonna get to the bottom of what happened in 1971. We're gonna get the final answer.

Starting point is 00:01:02 It's been hotly debated. We're gonna figure it out right now. Let's bring in Balaji. How you doing? Good to see you. Good to see you guys. It's amazing having you on the show. Can you give us just the update on what is your day to day like? I'm familiar with some of the prehistory, but what are you working on? What are you most excited about right now? Sure, so I actually, can I project here?

Starting point is 00:01:26 Yeah, please. Is it possible? Yeah, you can show your screen. All right, so, in Q4, we just opened something I'm calling Network School. Can you guys see the wedding day shot there? Yep, so that was the kind of ribbon cutting. And this is something that combines a bunch of things

Starting point is 00:01:45 that I care about. Here's like the site is at ns.com. And actually- Great domain, by the way. No way, no way. Fantastic domain. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate that you guys are connoisseurs also.

Starting point is 00:01:56 Yeah, we have a four letter domain. You're kind of destroying us at the two letter domain. You mocked us. Well, well, we will, you know, I still, you know, you're in the four commas club or something, I guess. Yeah,, I still to you know, you're in the the four commands club or so I guess I know Characters club, right? Yeah Break it down. I saw a hundred k fellowship. I also see a school

Starting point is 00:02:16 Typically I have to pay for school. Are you paying me? How does this all work? Right? So this is essentially there's several things that are happening at the same time Sure, like obviously traditional academia is basically over as we know it. Yeah, it's about ten different things hitting it at the same time and it's you know, lost trust and credibility and so on and You know what we've got here is we're doing global meritocracy anybody from anywhere. Obviously Americans are welcome But anybody who's what I call internet first is welcome, right? So if you're, you know, pro Bitcoin, if you're pro cryptocurrency, smart contracts, and so on, you're pro AI, you're pro biotech, pro nuclear and whatnot. And those kinds of people

Starting point is 00:02:54 exist all over the world. And, and so we're bringing them here. And so global meritocracy, basically. And there's there's Vitalik, there's Brian Johnson, can you see the video? Yeah, incredible. Yeah. So this is basically It's on screen. Yeah, incredible. So this is it. Basically, we're actually doing the Startup Society. So that's what Network School is. There's much more I can say about it, but that's the idea.

Starting point is 00:03:12 Okay, so walk me through the actual experience of joining. Is this cohort-based? A lot of these new education initiatives, very few of them have just jumped straight to, we're gonna replace a four-year experience. And I don't know if that's because the four-year experience is fundamentally broken There's a lot of things that are potentially broken about higher ed but what is your view on just the length of time that it takes to

Starting point is 00:03:37 Get whatever you need to out of academic academia or schooling generally. That's right. So well, very good question It's a long long topic, but just to level set, I actually spent 10 years at Stanford. I was an undergraduate graduate. Got my MS in chemical engineering, BS, MS, PhD, electrical engineering. I taught computer science and stats there. I'm a research scientist.

Starting point is 00:04:01 I have 5,000 plus citations, blah, blah. Did genomics, taught computer science and so on at Stanford. So I know academia fairly well, and in fact I thought for the first 10 years or so of my adult life that I was actually gonna be a professor, and then I started a genomics company and basically became, you know, gone to tech.

Starting point is 00:04:19 And my view is, there's many things I can say about the four-year college education, but one issue is it's like front-loading all the cost to the beginning, and then there's zero budgeted for maintenance over somebody's life. So it's as if you paid $200,000 for a car, and then zero for oil or gas or wheel changes

Starting point is 00:04:43 or so on for the rest of your life. And so people get this expensive education, and they forget all of it just a few years later. I'm sure if you gave test, retest, you know, stats and looked at what percentage they actually retained, we know all this stuff about space repetition. We know forgetting curves and so on. So basically, the education is gone.

Starting point is 00:05:01 And what you really want is something that's like continuous education over the course of your life, where, you know, then like, for example, VO comes out or some new API comes out, but you want us to be able to quickly load that into your brain, be productive and to have some budget every year in a continuous sense, as opposed to, you know, like a, like a upfront upfront forget everything sense. That doesn't even get into the fact that unless you've been in the world of work,

Starting point is 00:05:28 you don't actually appreciate how amazing it is to have just time to purely study, you have to learn everything on the job. It also is something like front loading the vacation and getting all these kids at age 18 into like a lifetime of student loan debt. There's many, many things wrong with it, but that era is ending.

Starting point is 00:05:42 And then what's next? Like my view, why am I doing this in part because, know how well actually get right into it. You know how America started loosely Actually America was started by the tech and the bro forming a texture. Let me explain okay, so Okay, here's why so Massachusetts Massachusetts was attack. Yeah, Massachusetts was the tech, and Virginia was the bro. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:08 There we go. There we go. Okay. So, for those who don't know, like Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that was the Puritans, they founded Harvard in the 1600s when, you know, it was actually just a one-room schoolhouse based on a one-room place, right? It was a very, very small thing, very modest at the beginning. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Starting point is 00:06:25 was founded about 200 something years later, but basically Massachusetts has always been the center of like higher learning, education, and so on in the US. In Virginia, the Cavaliers, they were the bro. They were muscular, they were on horseback, and they liked to shoot things and so on. And actually Virginia was the most important state during the American Revolution.

Starting point is 00:06:45 And a lot of the early American leaders came from Virginia. That was like the founder, CEO, archetype. Right. And both of these were actually different factions at different times, won and lost in the English Civil War of like, you know, 100 something years earlier, the Roundheads went to Massachusetts. That was like the left of England and the Cavaliers were like the right and they went to Virginia. Anyway, so they basically when the right and left were working together, that was the tech and the bro, right? And that's what made America really great when they were working together. Now of course, not as much.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Let's say you have a husband and wife and they have kids and they have and one of one of the adults, you know, wants to participate in the network state and the other parent is like well sorry the kids are in preschool and you know that feels like a large part of the people that you would want to recruit over time and I and I can imagine exactly what your kind of answers to that would be but I'd love to hear it from you. Sure so so first of all um you know like my vision in that, which is definitely family friendly. With that said, who moves and who moves at what times?

Starting point is 00:07:53 So typically, people move for education or employment, and they usually move in their 20s and so on and so forth. And once they're anchored in territory, they tend to only move if there's like a job for both husband and wife, for example, or if they're like refugees, like things get blown up like in Ukraine or, or in, you know, Middle East or what have you. Or if they're like refugees from, for example, blue states where the policy gets so bad that people just uproot and move and there's like muggings or,

Starting point is 00:08:22 you know, something like that syringes, etc etc like a lot of people left blue states or last you know five years as you're aware because of that in part and i know some people say things are getting better but like you know at least in some places but i think in general that that exodus is still there um that's also actually how the us itself was populated at the beginning there's two different forms ways of founding star societies and they're complementary the first is the wild West frontier kind of thing, where you have single men coming out. But the second actually, the Puritans had quite a few married couples coming out, but because because they had an ideological or religious motivation. And then you also had waves of refugees from Europe, there's all

Starting point is 00:08:55 kinds of crazy wars in Europe, like the revolutions of 1848, or, you know, famine in Europe, like the Irish potato famine. And that also brings, you know, like, like people out right but So so the answer is like um there's only so much you can do at the beginning in a sense You know how dropbox started as an individual product and then it became a product for small teams and then for enterprise Yeah, right so in the same way like you first kind of have to build a product that works for like the individual remote worker Then maybe the couple where it's a two-body problem Then like you know the early family then the scaled-up family then like the whole community of people who are moving together

Starting point is 00:09:31 Or the whole startup there's no together And so it's just like think of it as kind of going from individual to SMB up the ladder like that So you definitely want families and we actually have a lot of people who brought families um But the product for families is itself a product, just like Apple has a family plan, for example. There's new permission structures and so on, account structures and stuff you need for families. It's all in the program.

Starting point is 00:09:52 That's something. I like how you explain this in product-led SaaS terms. That's great. That's great. I'm on the Tech Bros podcast, so I'm speaking. Yeah, no, no, no, it's perfect. No, and I totally buy that it's OK for these to initially be frontiers and sort of establish Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, in. The interesting story that I've been toying with with Bitcoin is that the narratives have

Starting point is 00:10:27 shifted. Bitcoin promised a few things. It didn't deliver entirely on all of those. It wasn't entirely anonymous. It wasn't entirely used for transactions, but it's become a fantastic store of value. And that's kind of where it landed. Do you think that that's the correct story of Bitcoin? And do you think that crypto projects, is there a pattern of this like, shoot for the moon, you'll land amongst the stars. It's okay to kind of build towards like a three pronged amorphous future because if one of them hits,

Starting point is 00:10:58 you could still wind up with a fantastic power law outcome. Oh yeah, I mean, like I think, I think it's the only way of doing things. In the sense of, it's kind of like people Who there's some people there's one guy who remain unnamed who like critiques like Elon's self-driving schedule It's like he promised it an X date and it only arrived like like a year later. He sucks so much and I'm like You know like I think you want to sing like Tesla or you know, space because they turn impossible into late

Starting point is 00:11:27 Yeah Right. Yeah, you'll take that every single day obvious in my view obviously, right? The I want to answer to your point So the way I think about Bitcoin is maybe the obvious way, but it's digital gold, right? That's to say it is infrequently moved on chain, it stores large amounts of value. And it actually serves some of the purpose of gold reserves where, like you sort of want to show on chain that you have it, it's almost like, meant to be public in some ways, right? And then the various kinds of features that people have wanted to add over time to Bitcoin, The problem is that gold should be as immutable as possible and mutability is in conflict with, I mean, programmability is a good value

Starting point is 00:12:12 and immutable is a good value, but those are like fire and water, they don't mix, right? There's, you know, you want a drink of water and sometimes you want a hot fire to keep you warm, but you don't want them in the same thing and then you get nothing, right? So immutability, Bitcoin's immutability, its stability, and its predictability, think of it as locked, right? And then what happened was privacy went to like Zcash and

Starting point is 00:12:34 zero knowledge, you know, tornado cash was now legal again, and so on. And zero knowledge is booming. Zero knowledge is one of the big things that people are under pricing, I think. Cool. Bytec, arguably another and so on. Then number two is programmability with smart contracts. That went to Ethereum and Solana and whatnot. Number three, transactions, you know, as digital cash, that went to stable coins, USTC, USDT. And then other kinds of things like storing data on chain and you know like like using it as an Oracle that went to other stuff like chain link and other kinds of things and then You know basically other other functions like on chain data is

Starting point is 00:13:14 NFT is just like on chain code of smart contracts that went to NFTs So all of these things that were initially contemplated did happen just happened on other chains that tolerate the risk Because you know you have success and failures then and Bitcoin Couldn't tolerate that risk Bitcoin is locked. Yeah. Yeah well With the zero knowledge stuff. I I haven't been tracking it as closely most recently Are you waiting for? Engineering challenges to be hurtled. Are you waiting for Just more code to be written. I understand that it's incredibly complex code,

Starting point is 00:13:48 some of the hardest programming software, right? Or is it more on the customer adoption side, we're ready for on ramps of kind of the masses, but it's just going to take time for people to build the the bridges to actually make these new ZK products just lovable and like, you know, well, first, just to explain what zero knowledge is, your knowledge arguably is, and the tax ultimate analogy, ZK arguably is to crypto with the transformer is AI, in the sense of it takes a bunch of things that were previously special case stuff.

Starting point is 00:14:20 And it puts it into kind of a common framework where you can, like, lots of special case subroutines can now be general case to very to oversimplify. And what that means is you can develop ZK protocols that, for example, you know, ZKYC, where they just prove what is necessary for a government to be satisfied that this is a real human being and nothing else, right? And that's necessary because look at these, you know, these KYC attacks on like, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:53 Raj of salon and other kinds of people, right? Like the modern form of KYC is where governments force companies to store giant honeypots full of sensitive information. And then the governments themselves are often hacked, like the OPM hack and so on and so forth. So that's one aspect of where ZK can come in and be the solution. Another thing is that ZK is actually used as a compression technology. So, for example, ZK rollups, not just a privacy technology. And so this stuff is actually

Starting point is 00:15:21 already there and it's being deployed and it's working those EK chains and so on It's it's one of those things where is it consumer visible? Maybe not But I think I think it's just a really important technology might never not to be consumer visible is what you're saying That's right. But but what it does basically mean is there can be sort of magical things where? You can prove what you need to prove without giving up anything else. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 00:15:49 You can prove you are a... I mean, that's the way a lot of KYC stuff works right now. I scan my ID. Most people don't know that there is a machine learning algorithm with computerization in there that's reading the ID and checking it with a database. People just know, hey, I scanned my ID and I got KYC'd. It could be a lot easier and it could be more resistant to hacks and leaks, right?

Starting point is 00:16:07 Well, you want, we want to something like SingPass or Estonia's digital ID, where it's like an app on your phone and that's your ID card. And then that can do is your knowledge handshake with something else, right? As opposed to like a piece of paper, like physical card. You know, how are you feeling about stable coins these days? How are you feeling about stable coins these days? How are you feeling about stable coins these days?

Starting point is 00:16:26 I feel like there's an immense amount of energy and excitement, but they always feel a little bit misaligned with the folks who are like, let's get off the dollar, let's, you know, you know, we don't, we wanted to move away from that system and we're kind of maybe rebuilding it. How are you feeling about stable coins? Are you optimistic?

Starting point is 00:16:46 Is there, do they play an important role in your vision of the future? Yes, though I think, well, so let me actually show you guys something, ready? Here is a fun video. Okay. Can you see the screen there? The stable coin video is dropping right now, let's see. Oh, coinbase and circle announced launch of USDC digital dollar. Yes, October 23rd 2018

Starting point is 00:17:10 And so guess who's there were you behind this? That's amazing Lore this is good. Yes. I remember this video. Yeah I remember thinking like oh, I don't really understand this but now I do so you were Yeah, this is a long way of saying you were early and right you were super long stable coins But I heard it's hard to make money Just underline here is the market cap of USDC, which is now 60 billion dollars. Yeah, wow October 3rd this if I can get the cursor bang. What's up? Let's say October 2 2018. Can you see that? Yeah, I can't see that but I can see the broad chart, but

Starting point is 00:17:50 Congratulations for being early. You're always early where we're going in the future with stable coins How important are they going to be because it still feels like there's a little bit of tug of war with like we're staying on the dollar We're not really and new these few, future global currency. And new and legacy financial institutions, seeing that we're in a friendlier regulatory environment, seeing the product market fit of stablecoins now wanting a piece of the action. Like when the Wall Street Journal reports

Starting point is 00:18:15 like the dollar fell in value, like the stablecoins also fell in value, right? And so it solves some problems, but not all of them. So what's your take? Right, so, well, the term stable coin obviously is historical because it was stable relative to Bitcoin. Sure. I think you could sort of separate that out

Starting point is 00:18:31 into two things like a fiat coin and a flat coin. Totally. Like a fiat coin is something that's an on-chain mirror of fiat off-chain. And a flat coin would be something that actually retained its purchasing power over time. And that's much harder to do because you'd have to maintain its stability

Starting point is 00:18:44 against bread and PlayStations and whatever. And if there much harder to do because you'd have to maintain its stability against bread and playstations and whatever. And if there's an actual shortage of those things, then price might increase for no reason other than actual physical shortage. But keeping the historical name, stable coins are... So first, why are they useful? Well, at a minimum, they're better international wire transfers. That alone justifies their market cap. That's like tens of billions of dollars in market cap because they just save you from $25. And more importantly, banks are only open

Starting point is 00:19:17 like nine to five weekdays, right? So like from 40 hours a week uptime to 168 hours a week, which is 24 seven uptime, that's worth a lot. Imagine if websites were only up 40 hours a week uptime to 168 hours a week, which is 24 seven uptime, that's worth a lot. Imagine if websites were only up 40 hours a week, right? So just that alone, the ubiquity internationalization, then you add programmability and so on. When people say, oh, why just put a dollar on chain? That's why, right? That's why they're valuable, right? And the space is partitioned in an interesting way. And I think many other things will partition this way into like a US and a global

Starting point is 00:19:46 Right like the usdc coin or the usdc asset is like us regulated and then usdt is like intentionally non-us regulated Right sort of like there's like coinbase and there's like global exchanges and so on. So I think that'll be a common partitioning of many kinds of markets um And so, uh, so that's that's justification for why I'm bullish. But now onto your specific questions. I think that one of the things once you've got something on chain, it can just be easily swapped. Right. And so now that USDC is there, you're going to have probably every other fiat currency up there and what have you because it's become

Starting point is 00:20:22 so mainstream and whatnot. But when that happens, you get an interesting thing, which is similar to launch of Google News in the mid 2000s. As you may recall, all these newspapers put their newspapers online in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then when Google News launched, it suddenly showed that the Des Moines Herald and the San Francisco Chronicle and NYT, WAPO Miami Miami Tribune, whatever we're all Basically printing the same stuff. There was some custom stuff that they had in their own markets But most of it was just reprinting the AP the news right? News right and you can see this on Google is it's like a hundred and seventy three other outlets printed this story

Starting point is 00:20:59 It's all the same story every time. Yeah. Yeah, and that's because those newspapers They had trucks and they had you know You used to say never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel now never listen to a man who still buys ink by the barrel long right because You know, are you buying any ink? You know, I mean I actually like pencil and paper to write but not print right? That's really not early days. We went through a lot of days never fight with a podcaster who live streams for 20 hours a week Something like that exactly is beat you on exact That's right

Starting point is 00:21:30 So point point being though that they had these geographical monopolies at something they put their stuff online and there's a delayed reaction And suddenly they realized wait a second every newspapers in competition every the newspaper And so of course all the local ones not any just all died. And only the national ones survived. And they became much more ideological. And the new partitioning of information space was on the basis of ideology, not geography. So you've got the Jimbrows, and you've got people who are interested in,

Starting point is 00:21:58 I don't know, various political causes, you've got crypto causes, you've got things sectioned by vertical rather than geographic horizontal, ideology rather than geography. Okay, so the same thing is gonna happen with assets. And the reason is, first, you've got these fiat currencies that are put on chain.

Starting point is 00:22:16 And then we're nearing something which I call the DeFi matrix. The DeFi matrix starts with the observation that fiat fiat can be swapped like Forex, but fiat crypto can also be swapped like USD BTC and crypto crypto can be swapped like BTC ETH. And of course crypto can be swapped for NFTs and all kinds of this crazy man entry of digital assets

Starting point is 00:22:36 is now out there. So you visualize this giant square of every asset that can be traded for every other asset. And there's amazing numbers of crazy financial machinery out there now that will basically do the complexity of finding buy and seller pairs, you know, like Uniswap and MarketMakers and so on behind the scenes for this swap. What that means is that whatever asset you have, you have less need to get into a fiat currency, you can just hold that asset. Then when you want to, you just liquidate it for whatever other

Starting point is 00:23:03 asset you want at some fee. Okay, what I mean by that is, what do you want to, you just liquidate it for whatever other asset you want at some fee. Okay, what I mean by that is, what do people call it? What's the hybrid way of saying when you sell your company, you get a liquidity event. That's right. That's another term of talking about cash. Cash is liquidity. Cash is universal barter. Cash can be traded for anything.

Starting point is 00:23:20 But now anything can be traded for anything, which means there's less need for cash, right? And so all these countries will wake up one day and they'll find, wait a second, just like the newspapers, we had a geographical monopoly on our fiat currencies, but now we don't and we're competing in this global marketplace of all these other cryptocurrencies as well as really big fiat currencies, right? And then they're going to have to compete just like, you know, the information environment, you compete on ideology rather than geography, then in the transaction environment, you have to compete on features, not on places, right?

Starting point is 00:23:57 So for example, privacy coins or smart contract coins and so on and so forth. You compete on the vertical as opposed to the horizontal of France coin, is a fronk and Japan coin which is JPY right? Yeah, and it's a funny way of putting it But that's what that's like what they are, right? Yeah, so I'm not saying there isn't any utility to geography So especially given that so many of these things, but are people done all these countries have gone cashless, right? Yeah cash physical cash was actually something that Tethered people to geographical area because you needed to actually hold it and it was issued there and redeemed there and so on and so forth. Once you go digital, you don't have to use cash anymore.

Starting point is 00:24:31 And many people have, for example, crypto cards where they can hold in one currency and spend in another. And it just Apple Pay or whatever just works, you know, that people don't know. So stable coins are an intermediate form that facilitates this transition from the fiat world to the pure crypto world, kind of like putting newspapers online was an intermediate form. And just like there was a whole battle in the 2010s where newspapers at one point felt threatened, oh my God, I mean, they still feel threatened, but they fought this whole battle of the bulge counterattack on social media, tried to take away your voice, my voice,

Starting point is 00:25:02 everybody's voice, but they lost. You know what I call when Elon took over X, you know what I call it? What do you call it? X day. It's like D day, right? All the good guys amassed $44 billion for like the Normandy landing. Boom, right? Like this, you know, because all it was still technically illegal.

Starting point is 00:25:21 They were like, if you want your own company, Why not build one or whatever to get free speech back? Remember those kinds of lines of argument prior to it, right, Transway 2? And then Elon basically gathered the forces and every tech guy, like some Marvel movie, put in a mill, a bill, five mill, whatever they could afford, pass the head around. I mean, $44 billion in cash is like a non, go ahead.

Starting point is 00:25:44 Yeah, no, no, it's just funny passing the hat around and Morgan Stanley puts in 13 billion in debt. It's kind of classic. Yes, so every center right, center left in some cases, person who just piled it, because Elon obviously was the man, but so many people backed him, right? And this was something where like,

Starting point is 00:26:03 Thor landing with a hammer, or boom like this, right? All of these communists just fly back against, you know, the walls, all these books just defeated like this and X day, right? Now, what that actually also meant was a tower of Babel kind of moment because Twitter no longer exists. There's X, there's truth social and Gab and whatever all on the right. And there's Blue Sky and Macedon and Threads and TikTok on the left. And there's the crypto networks like Nostr and Lens and Farcaster and so on, right?

Starting point is 00:26:34 So you have a tarot-bale moment where Twitter has been shattered. Anyway, this has been fantastic, Balaji. Thank you so much for stopping by. You're welcome to come on and screen share with us anytime. Yeah, this is great. Awesome, great. Maybe I can be your Kramer special guest. And thank you for kicking off. You're welcome to come on and screen share with us anytime. Yeah, this is great. Awesome, great.

Starting point is 00:26:45 Maybe I can be your Kramer special guest. And thank you for kicking off. Yeah, I would love that. We have, I think, 10 plus other exciting crypto entrepreneurs. Yeah, it should be a big day once again. Welcome, how are you? There he is. What's going on?

Starting point is 00:27:01 Hey, how's it going, guys? A pleasure to be here. Welcome to the Temple of Technology. Can you kick us off with a quick introduction on yourself and the company? And your PFP too. Got to get the backstory there. Absolutely. I think not too many people are familiar with the PFP, but to start with myself, I'm Alan. I'm one of the co-founders of PumpFun. PumpFun is a launch pad where anyone can create their own coin and it's based on the Solana blockchain. And my PFP is Remilio.

Starting point is 00:27:32 It is an NFT based on Ethereum. Very cool. A little crossover. Yeah, crossover. Pulling over some Ethereum. Not pure Solana. Why don't we start with, we have a primarily sort of traditional tech audience. pulling over some Ethereum. Not pure Solana Max. Why don't we start with,

Starting point is 00:27:45 we have a primarily sort of traditional tech audience. Why don't we start with the origin story of Pump? I know you have had a crazy time, even fundraising went through a couple pivots to get to the launch pad that is today. So I think it'd be great to hear the backstory. Yeah, absolutely. So my background, I mean, I've been in crypto for a while.

Starting point is 00:28:08 Before we built PumpFund, and myself and my two co-founders were building a bunch of different ideas in crypto, consumer crypto, in NFTs, and social fi, and a bunch of different random corners of the space. Nothing really stuck. I mean, I think we built for around a year or so before we got any semblance of traction. Ultimately, we weren't really building for ourselves. And I think once

Starting point is 00:28:32 people started trading meme coins on Solana is when we first saw that there's a problem or a few problems that we can solve that would actually be addressing some of our issues because we were trading on the side. We've always been trading meme coins and NFTs and all that different stuff on chain. And we noticed that there's a whole bunch of different problems that we could solve by building a launch pad where anyone can create their own coin, standardizing the way people launch these things in a more secure and safe manner, as well as in a way that is more user-friendly for people so anyone can get involved and you don't need to be highly technical to launch your own asset.

Starting point is 00:29:09 So PumpFun, I would say was the first product that really allowed for mass tokenization and it's something that we're gonna continue doing. So I wanna give a little bit of backstory. I'm sure you can't talk about numbers, but Pump is one of the fastest growing companies in history. It's why we're, you know, one of the reasons we were interested in having you on the

Starting point is 00:29:30 show. I believe we'll have to make some type of chart at some point, but I believe we'll probably be one of the fastest companies ever to a billion dollars in revenue. How quickly when you guys started the launchpad, did you feel like you were? Did you kind you feel like you were, did you kind of realize that you were onto something? Was it kind of immediate PMF, or did you even have to iterate

Starting point is 00:29:51 from that initial launch of the launch pad? Yeah, when we first came up with the idea, we were pretty confident that it was going to work, especially compared to some of the other stuff that we were building. On our launch day, we got quite a bit of buzz around it. I mean, the MVP that we shipped was so incredibly shitty that everyone came and then they had to leave because it just wasn't working. But that initial buzz and the feedback that we got made us realize that we were onto something

Starting point is 00:30:20 for sure. It was only a matter of iteration. It was a matter of finding distribution because ultimately what we offer is a marketplace. It's a launch pad where you're connecting people that are creating these assets and people that are potentially interested in buying and selling them and trading them. So it was a matter of distribution. It was a matter of iteration and make and polishing the products. It took us around two months after launch to actually get it off the ground. There's a lot of, you know,

Starting point is 00:30:49 make it work, but eventually it, uh, it played out and obviously, you know, we were confident that it was going to work, but we had no idea that it could blow up and then actually generate so much revenue and become this great business. Um, how do you actually make money? Yeah. So, um, two different, two main, it's, two main, it's all really the same model. It's a small fee on each trade. So whenever a coin launches, the platform takes a 1% trading fee and each time the coin

Starting point is 00:31:18 is traded, once it graduates, I mean, a graduation is basically when a coin gets to a certain market cap, it grows in size and so on. Once it graduates, there is a, it's the same fee basically, but just a smaller one that the platform charges. And is that supply designed so that you don't get dissimilar mediated or you don't get outcompeted by other platforms? Like, are you thinking about that? And, and because I feel like there's this narrative in crypto where like somebody builds something amazing, has a great business and then there's like an open source fork of it or something like that. Is that, is that a risk that you're thinking of and like planning against?

Starting point is 00:31:52 I mean, of course, you know, when you build something successful, I think in any industry, you're going to expect some copycats. Um, I mean, something that we've been expecting is something that we saw historically. We saw that a year ago. We saw it six months ago and we're continuing to see it. Um, I mean, obviously we're continuing to see it. I mean, obviously, we continue to monitor the markets and kind of see what user feedback is

Starting point is 00:32:09 on different approaches and models. But ultimately, we have our own solutions. We speak to our own users. And we kind of stand our own way in that regard. Talk about the branding. It's extremely chaotic. It feels extremely internet native. And but I'm curious what your kind of like framework

Starting point is 00:32:28 to making decisions around everything kind of design brand. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think when we first started, Pump actually wasn't the name that we came up for this product specifically. It existed for like a few different products that we launched because we honestly thought it was like

Starting point is 00:32:45 all the products we were building were for people in the trenches, so to speak. So people that were trading on chain and so on. And we felt like that whole ethos, that whole branding just kind of aligned with, I guess, with the culture of people trading on chain and really this culture of people trading on chain and really this deeply internet native crowd that we were addressing. I think definitely contributes to how we think about it today. The way we think about it is we don't necessarily want to, I guess, we want to pay respects to kind of where we came from and we want to grow our community rather than removing and making our brand like, I mean, there's a big difference between making your brand more accessible or your product more accessible and kind of moving away from the brand that you've built. Right.

Starting point is 00:33:40 So I think a big part of why Pompous succeeded is that it has really built a community of people that are trading and hopping on every single day and so on. And a part of that is being in touch with them and continuing to interact. And that also reflects in the design. Like if we changed everything all of a sudden and it was extremely, I guess, looked like your average product

Starting point is 00:34:05 and AI or something like that, then I think there'd be a lot of eyebrows that would be raised by our user base. Yeah. Can you talk to us about VC? I mean, have you raised any, I'm sure people who grow fast, they're beaten down your door. I think the story is you raised from a six man, right?

Starting point is 00:34:24 Is that correct? Dudutis is fun. That's correct. I can't give him too many details on the whole, I guess, life cycle. Yeah. But I have a question that, that I, that would be fun to answer. What's the craziest thing a VC has ever done to try to win allocation? Cause I know you guys, not a mess. Revenue is just rocketed to such an extreme degree. You guys, for every dollar of venture capital, I'm sure you've generated, at this point, an obscene amount of profit. But do you have any funny stories there?

Starting point is 00:34:57 I'm not sure if there's anything in particular there, but definitely there are so many stories where, not just for VCs, but I guess influencers in the space and stuff as well, where we DM them multiple times and got received introductions and didn't get any responses, only for the exact opposite to take place once the platform has gained traction.

Starting point is 00:35:19 And yeah, this has happened many times. Can you talk to us about the livestream product that you guys have? I mean, we're live streamers ourselves and so super interested in what's going on there. Yeah, and you recently brought it back and made a number of changes to it. So I'm curious how it's evolving.

Starting point is 00:35:35 Yeah, absolutely. So the live stream feature is pretty simple. When you launch your own coin, you can also launch a live stream alongside it to engage with your community, talk to them, do a whole bunch of different things. Obviously, I think a lot of your viewers are going to be familiar with the previous live stream product that we had, which kind of, I mean, it gained a lot of mindshare late last year and ultimately needed to shut that down for a variety of reasons.

Starting point is 00:35:58 But we decided to bring it back with much, much better moderation, as well as just an improved product overall. And the reason why we think that our live streaming product can genuinely change the whole creator landscape and actually compete with some of the biggest live streaming platforms out there, is that it completely flips the incentives that creators are currently facing. As a creator, I mean, I'm already seeing this

Starting point is 00:36:22 with relatively few users compared to the biggest platforms. As a creator, when you're starting out, it's pump fun. Live streaming is the easiest place in the world to get your first 50 to 100 viewers. Why is that? The reason is because users are directly incentivized to find people early. Because if they find your live stream early, they see that you're interesting, you're entertaining, you're funny, et cetera, and they buy into your coin. If your coin gets more attention, then that presumably can yield profits, obviously, not financial advice, et cetera, et cetera. But that's oftentimes what ends up happening. And because of that incentive structure, it makes it so much easier for creators to get traction. And that's the biggest problem that creators usually face when they start out.

Starting point is 00:37:06 That's the first thing. The second thing is that, with a few recent changes that we've made, creators don't necessarily even have to sell their tokens to make money. They can monetize instantly with no middleman through creator revenue sharing. So whenever someone makes a trade,

Starting point is 00:37:21 a small percentage of that goes directly to the creator. So they monetize immediately. There's no percentage of that goes directly to the creator. So they monetize immediately. There's no approvals that they have to go through. They don't need to reach any milestones. They interact directly with their audience and they don't necessarily need to appeal to any advertisers and so on. As long as their content is within,

Starting point is 00:37:41 respects the terms of service of the site, they're going to be able to monetize. Talk about why you chose Solana early on and why you're continuing to double down there. And if you're looking at opportunities on other chains at all. Yeah, so we love Solana. I mean, we, I mentioned Ethereum early on with my PFP.

Starting point is 00:38:03 So that's, I guess, kind of where our background is. We built on Ethereum for many years in that ecosystem. Eventually, because we were building products and we're getting, I guess, increasingly desperate to get users, we saw that, especially for this, for meme coins, people were starting to trade them on other blockchains, specifically Solana. And that was gaining a lot of traction back then.

Starting point is 00:38:25 So we wanted to go to where all the users were, right? Because that would maximize our chances of succeeding. So we went to Solana, obviously after we gained success, we got a ton of inbound from other blockchains and so on. And people were asking to get their favorite blockchain added. But ultimately our goal is to bring tokenization to the masses. Our goal is to kind of expand this universe

Starting point is 00:38:53 and really break into the mainstream. And I don't necessarily believe that going into any other chain would contribute to that. Solana as infrastructure has improved so significantly over the past year, year and a half since PumpFund has been live, that we're very confident that once I guess that critical mass has reached,

Starting point is 00:39:16 the infrastructure will be able to support to support the activity on the platform. And more than just that, there's so many ecosystem applications that utilizes, pumps marketplace infrastructure and so on that actually contributes, not just to the bottom line, but contributes to the overall user experience.

Starting point is 00:39:37 People can use whatever interfaces they like to get the best experience possible. So all in all, couldn't be happier being on Solana, and we're not considering leaving anytime soon. Very cool. Fantastic. Thank you for jumping on. I know you don't do a lot of interviews,

Starting point is 00:39:52 do a lot of media in general. So I appreciate you coming and telling the story. I legitimately think there will eventually be a Harvard Business School case study on what you're building because it's completely unprecedented, the growth. I think we'll probably just start to see this year people realizing how big a business Pump has become in such an incredibly short period of time.

Starting point is 00:40:19 So thank you for jumping on and sharing and we'll talk to you soon. Absolutely, appreciate it soon. Absolutely. Appreciate it, guys. Cheers. And that Harvard Business case study will be tokenized on-chain. I'm sure it will have a meme token rounded.

Starting point is 00:40:35 I'm sure it will get 20 meme coins per case study. Maybe a meme coin for every paragraph. HBS class should just be live-streamed on PumpFund. They could fractionalize the case study every every word You can just get a word Yeah well It's interesting that the the I think meme coins were working on a theory

Starting point is 00:40:56 Yeah, but the the gas fees on a two-hour so high or something You know you couldn't make a trade for $100 because somebody would be like, are they gonna pay $50 in gas to make a trade like that? Speed and price, you increase the speed, you drop the price, you always just see more activity. And so, yeah, fascinating. That $1 billion revenue number, is that something that you can just inspect on the blockchain

Starting point is 00:41:25 if you just add up a lot of transactions? Is that possible? Yeah, it's visible. I had seen a post as of maybe last week that they had passed $750 million in revenue. And when did they actually launch? It seems like it was like a year ago. Is it like roughly a year ago?

Starting point is 00:41:43 Wow, impressive. So one year to $750 million in real, and it's not marketplace. That's like their- That's not GMV, that's actually their take on- Net revenue. Net revenue. Anyway, next up we have Katie Hahn

Starting point is 00:41:57 from Hahn Ventures in the studio. Welcome to the show. Katie, thanks so much for hopping on. We're excited to talk to her. Welcome. Welcome. Hey. Hey, guys.

Starting point is 00:42:10 Good morning. Good morning. How are you? Wherever you may be. I think you're at the conference. No, we are not. We are in Los Angeles. We're in Hollywood, the future of media.

Starting point is 00:42:18 Yeah, we're bringing media back to Hollywood. But thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with just a little bit of an introduction? and how are you spending your day to day these days? Oh my gosh, a little bit of an introduction. Well, my name's Katie Hahn. I founded Hahn Ventures, which is,

Starting point is 00:42:34 we're investing in blockchain technology through an early stage fund and a later stage fund. And we're about three and a half years old as a company and as a fund. Do you do liquids or all of those? How many decades has the last three and a half years felt like? Oh my gosh. Well, you know what, guys, I've actually been in the space over a decade. Yeah, over a decade.

Starting point is 00:42:53 So how how many years has that felt like? The last three years have been wild, but I'm really excited. You asked about how I'm spending my days. I'm really excited about this particular moment in crypto because we have a lot of the fundamentals coming together. And as I said, I've been in this space a long time and we've had different fundamentals working at different points, but it finally feels like all these fundamentals are working all at once.

Starting point is 00:43:16 Break down those fundamentals. I imagine it's regulatory, it's community, it's collective belief. It's like scale of the actual chains, maturity of the code. But how do you think about it? What are you thinking about? Well, here, you guys do it.

Starting point is 00:43:28 I can question you. It's a great job. No, so the first thing is institutions, like you said. Institutions, the institutional story has been around before in crypto, in different cycles. And we had some early adopters for institutions, right? We had Fidelity. If you think about folks like Abby Johnson,

Starting point is 00:43:44 she's been in the space for as long as I have, maybe even longer. We had folks like Metta. I mean, I was on Zuck's original VM project board. He saw stable coins coming years ago. So we had Metta leaned in as an institution kind of early. And then we had other institutions, folks like BlackRock. I think Larry Fink is actually a great exhibit A

Starting point is 00:44:04 for someone who really changed their mind on crypto. Totally. Larry was against crypto, not against, but he was certainly not a fan of blockchain technology. And a few years ago, he said he had really changed his mind. And now you have BlackRock running a tokenized money market fund, Biddle. So that's some of the earlier institutional adopters. But now we have some of the later institutional adopters,

Starting point is 00:44:26 folks like JP Morgan, Charles Schwab and others, and you'll see other announcements coming out soon from other institutions. So the institutional story is one fundamental, but I wanna talk about three others. You mentioned one regulatory, but before I get to regulatory, cause it's not the most exciting,

Starting point is 00:44:42 is the technological progress. We've had different kinds of levels of technological progress over the cycles that make up the crypto industry. Cycles, we always talk about the bear and the bull cycles. And really kind of the last bear market when folks were really declaring the space dead, as they do by the way, every single cycle. It really felt, I remember when aetherium was touching $800 after the FTX crisis and I

Starting point is 00:45:09 was like I don't know where the bottom is here this feels like the most toxic asset that was like I basically start a fun right well yeah I had just started our fun no and in hindsight and hindsight, I was like, the moment that I thought this was over, it was completely over, was like a perfect bottom tick. Perfect bottom. Guys, another time, another story for another day, remind me to tell you my Solana buying story in New Year's.

Starting point is 00:45:36 And when I thought it couldn't go any lower, it even went lower. We got in when it was pretty darn low. And to a lot of assets, you asked if we do liquids. Absolutely, we do. We believe hugely in tokens. We believe hugely in equity. But let me get back to the fundamentals first, because this is where we're spending our day,

Starting point is 00:45:52 thinking about stuff like the technological progress. If you think about post-FTX, that era you're talking about, ETH is at $8,000, or thereabouts, Solana got down to it, like what, $9? Bitcoin's hitting like 17, what, $9, Bitcoin's hitting, like, 17, 16, $18,000 levels. People were declaring the space dead pundits.

Starting point is 00:46:12 Sorry, I know you're not pundits, but everyone was saying, God, terrible idea. You started a crypto fund. And here we were, 10 of us, like, no, this is a great time in the space. And I think one of the things we saw is there's a market story to crypto and there's a technology story to crypto. And what we saw on the technical progress, and by the way, Fred Wilson and I authored a blog post probably about a week after FTX saying, hey, the technical story here has not changed, folks.

Starting point is 00:46:39 And instead, it's only changing for the better. We had things like the Ethereum merge, the largest software upgrade in history. You know, totally the founder of Solana recently said that we're no longer talking about block space for one of the first times in this industry. Stuff is scalable, stuff is cheaper, instead of paying, you know, multiple dollars for a stablecoin transfer or an NFT transaction, it's sub one cent. And that's due in large part to the builders that were building through these bear cycles, including the last painful bear cycle. So that's the second fundamental. And I think the third fundamental, as I think about it, is product market fit.

Starting point is 00:47:16 You talk about things like product market fit, Bitcoin, hello, product market fit exhibit A. I debated Paul Krugman in, was it 2018 or 2017, and he told me Bitcoin has zero use. I debated him and I said it will find product market fit. At that time, I think Bitcoin was trading around three, four or $5,000. And lo and behold, fast forward these years later, I think it's clear it has found product market fit as a digital store of value. But also we have things like stablecoins have found clear product market fit. And I hope we can talk about stables. We'll dive deeper later in today's session because stablecoins are the story of the day

Starting point is 00:47:55 that folks in the mainstream are now talking about. So we have product market fit and other product market fit, kind of I would say we're on the precipice of, we can talk about that. But then you mentioned the fourth fundamental, which is regulatory. And I think the thing I heard for the last decade from builders, by the way, from enterprises, from institutions, from LPs when I was at my prior fund, is regulators aren't going to allow this though, right? This is all going to get shut down.

Starting point is 00:48:22 What was your answer then? Was it like, the obvious rebuttal is regulators are going to make code illegal. Like, it's pretty hard to ban code, right? Anybody can kind of create it and put it out on the internet. I'm sure you were always confident that it wouldn't be made illegal. But at the same time, the sort of US regulatory regime was making it pretty difficult to exist as a crypto founder in the US, which had the same sort of effect

Starting point is 00:48:53 in some ways. Yeah, you know, fun fact, since there's the conference going on today, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, I was asked probably around 2012, 2013 to help shut down Bitcoin for the US government when I was a federal prosecutor. So it's just crazy to think about. I mean, yeah. Hey, Katie, little project. I don't know if you have time this weekend

Starting point is 00:49:14 to look into it. Can you shut down? Open the case, Fennu Lanu, first name unknown, last name unknown. Wow. You know, somewhere in the Tenderloin, San Francisco 450 Golden Gate said file of Fionula New. But look, I realized early on that this was a really powerful technology. And regulators,

Starting point is 00:49:32 by the way, and we've been saying this for the last decade, regulators should love this technology for its kind of permanence, right? All of the things that make a block team great for a lot of things. Also, by the way, make it, look, as I always said, when I was a criminal, I hoped that criminals would use this instead of cash or wires, which I don't know how many banks anyone has ever subpoenaed. I've subpoenaed a lot of them. Good luck getting compliance with a subpoena. But at the same time, I really do worry about the erosion of financial privacy.

Starting point is 00:50:03 And not just now that I'm in the crypto industry 10 years later I talked about this when I was a prosecutor and the kind of reach of the Bank Secrecy Act and we can go really deep On that I think there are parts now under the third party doctrine that if it went back to Supreme Court today I think you might have a very different result than the last bit time The Bank Secrecy Act was challenged was in the 1970s And of course the velocity of payments has just skyrocketed since then. And now, unlike in 1970, where I couldn't glean too much information about you from your maybe couple payments or people writing out checks back in those days, now if you

Starting point is 00:50:39 think about if I have all access to all of your payment information, I could probably like predict where you're going to go every day, just about, right? I mean, it's a really great almost in that way. And this is not crypto. This is just all financial data, right? Every time you use your Apple Pay, you're doing a credit card, you're using stable coins. I mean, this is something that we should talk about at another time. Talk about, talk about your kind of early stage investment framework philosophy. What are you, I imagine there's investments

Starting point is 00:51:10 that you get the opportunity to make that you believe will be successful, but maybe aren't the best use of your capital if you have this sort of broader vision of where the asset class and the technology can go. But I'm curious how you think about opportunities and even kind of your moral framework for investments. I've never heard it described as a moral framework,

Starting point is 00:51:34 but that's an interesting framing. I mean, I think, first of all, we start with the founders. Like any other venture investor, it's all about the founders and the market opportunity, right? If you think about founders that I've previously kind of known in my gut, this is an amazing founder and exceptional person who's going to build an amazing business. I mean, the first instance of that, as far as I was concerned, coming into crypto was Brian Armstrong and Coinbase.

Starting point is 00:52:00 And I think one of the things that makes Brian so remarkable is he had a huge business going just spot trading Bitcoin and then aetherium and adding all of these other assets But he was never content to just rest on those laurels as an exchange It was always about diversifying the business and the web 3 economy and he was thinking about things like stable coins many many years ago, obviously USDC was a partnership between Coinbase. Yeah, we had Bology on earlier, and he showed a video of the launch, the web page for the launch video.

Starting point is 00:52:33 And he's like in the first five seconds. He's seven years younger in that video. I remember that. I remember that. Did he have a bowl of cereal with cream or something in that? I think so, yeah. I remember those days with Bology well,

Starting point is 00:52:44 with the USDC launch happening. And I think, again, I remember being days with Balaji well, you know with with the USDC launch happening and I think again He I remember being in the coin based office by the way the day The day that Bitcoin first hit ten thousand dollars for the first time imagine by the way if we were having this conversation You know now we would be like, oh my god ten thousand dollars market correction Well, you sure it years ago that was like cause for celebration. People couldn't believe it was $10,000. I was in the office. The euphoria was kind of everywhere, except Brian had his eyes on what's happening next.

Starting point is 00:53:15 We're not going to get comfortable with this. We're building an open global financial system for the world. Where are we taking our revenue lines next? And he's been thinking about that day, the S1, day the direct listing happened in April of 2021 at Coinbase. So I was so excited to be a director of that company for almost eight years and see that company through a remarkable series of events.

Starting point is 00:53:39 And I still am so excited watching from the sidelines about what they're doing. So I think the first thing we look for is we look for an amazing exceptional founder. And that, you know, Brian's a great example, right? So we're just trying to find the next Brian's. But also the market opportunities and the space, as I said, the asset class is so broad.

Starting point is 00:54:00 So it really, we're talking about, what are we talking about? We're talking about prediction markets. One thing, that's an area we're very excited about, but we kind of think about it as where will this evolve? Not the current state of innovation, but more of the end state of innovation or the midpoint state of innovation. And in the case of prediction markets, I'll tell you, one of the things we think about is, um, think about like Netflix.

Starting point is 00:54:23 Netflix did, um Netflix was very centralized. It curated content. And then all of a sudden YouTube came along and then unleashed even more content globally at scale. I mean, exceptionally so. So for prediction markets, when are we gonna get that user generated equivalent or the YouTube moment?

Starting point is 00:54:41 I think that's really interesting. And I think what makes crypto special in that story is the programmability That people around the world 24-7, you know the internet internet operates 24-7 and anyone with a smartphone can access that so we think that's exciting Yeah, so we're looking for you know, we're looking for exceptional founders Job just find ten more Bryan Armstrong's and you're great I believe it I believe in you Thank you for doing the work to surface the Brian's yeah the world yeah, we're talking later today

Starting point is 00:55:18 We're very great. Well, I'll tune in for that also. I think though you mentioned moral I think one of the things we've done. No, I think I know what you mean. The context there is certain traditional VCs will have a vice clause, where they say, we don't do defense. We don't do recreational cannabis. We don't do this. And I could imagine crypto funds bifurcating to some degree,

Starting point is 00:55:42 where some of them say, we're going to do these types of deals, and we're not going to do those types of deals. But maybe that's wrong. That happens already. You saw this during the last run up, the last full run in 2021. We had many folks, traditional VCs, many of whom are friends of mine, decided they were going to get into crypto, but they weren't going to touch tokens. They were only going to do equity businesses. And although we love crypto equity businesses, they missed out on a lot of tremendous opportunities.

Starting point is 00:56:10 Like imagine if you had said, we're not touching Solana. I mean, Solana is a huge market opportunity. Ethereum, huge market opportunity. I mean, Bitcoin, huge market opportunity, right? These are just some blue chips I'm naming. Of course, there are plenty of others. We said we are crypto maxis. We're not going to be religious zealots about any particular token, but nor are we going to write off entire segments. Rather, we're going to focus on the founder, the bona fides of the project, the metrics of the project. And we really want to know here, by the way, do they have a plan for regulatory compliance, realizing the times were uncertain in those moments? But do they have a plan for it?

Starting point is 00:56:52 Or is there a plan to launch a token and then, we say leave the US. That's got to be the most nervous meeting a founder has in their round, is pitching you on their regulatory plan. Because a lot of other VCs are like, great, he's got a regulatory plan. You're like, well, here's the 10 reasons

Starting point is 00:57:11 why that is not going to work. Yeah, but you know what? I think that actually we like to think that we can be helpful in that way, even with clarity. I was talking to probably one of the most legendary biotech investors in the world a couple of months ago. And he told a group of our founders, he said, you know, I'm in a regulated space, we've got plenty of regulatory clarity, and believe me, we still need to kind of navigate.

Starting point is 00:57:34 It doesn't just go away just because we have legislation passed, which we think is really important in clarity. You still got to comply with it. And we always said, I always said, look, you got to have a plan for it. You don't have to have it all figured out when you're raising a seed round, when you're raising your Series A. Coinbase was great in this regard, but look, they did not. They've obviously made a lot of progress as a company on that front across the different iterations of their company, like one would expect, like is reasonable.

Starting point is 00:58:00 So my touchstone is what's reasonable. And you got to build a business too, right? And I think we realized that and we're pragmatic partners and we like to work with founders. Tell me a founder who says, I have no idea what to do here. I don't want to break the law. I don't know what the law is. But we'd love your help. We'd love your thought partnership. And we love those kind of founders. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic conversation. Thank you guys. Thank you for having me. We'd love to go way deeper. I'm sure we're going a lot today.

Starting point is 00:58:28 This is good. Okay. Talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we have Chris Dixon from Andreessen Horowitz. But first, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to get started. Ramp. And very excited to talk to Chris. Obviously, extremely storied investor, top of the Midas list, early Coinbase investor, continual Coinbase investor. We got Brian Armstrong coming on later to tell his, the founder journey of Coinbase,

Starting point is 00:58:58 but Chris has been all over the place in crypto for a decade, 15 years, 20 years. I think he invested in Bitcoin back in 1994. Right. Yeah. A lot of the people that we're having on today were early and right. Yep. Yep.

Starting point is 00:59:11 Yep. Good thing. So Chris, welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm great, John. Good to see you. Good to see you. I'm an early, uh, silent investor.

Starting point is 00:59:18 Yes. Yes. Um, already good to see you guys. Congratulations on all the success with the show. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun. Um, where good to see you guys. Congratulations on all the success with the show. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's been a lot of fun.

Starting point is 00:59:25 Um, where should we start? Can you give us a temperature on the crypto markets? It's been, um, up and down. Let them take a victory victory. Lab. I feel like, I feel like you get, I know the job's not finished, but they always twist you and twist your arm into doing podcasts when the market's down and saying, Oh, you got to hold you accountable. And then, and then, and then where is Kara Swisher doing podcasts when the market's down and you gotta hold you accountable and

Starting point is 00:59:46 And then and then where is Kara Swisher calling you when the markets up, you know, that's the point. That's a good point Oh, wait, can you guys hear me? Okay? Yeah. Yeah, you said great. Okay, great Yeah, good. I mean, it's it's yeah, it's been a it's been a long journey as you guys pointed out I think that you know, we had a lot of challenges the last four years I think that we had a lot of challenges the last four years, regulatory challenges with the last administration and that looks like it's trending much better now with the new administration is sort of more pro-tech and I think we have a lot of momentum in Congress and that's a big deal because that created a lot of headwinds. So that's great.

Starting point is 01:00:21 And then also like the kind of core infrastructure and I don't know if you guys want to talk more about it but like so for example, one of the things happening right now are stable coins are really taking off So like last month it was something like two trillion in stable coin volume Which is more than trill with trillion with a T, which is more than Visa And so, you know quite a lot of volume and that a lot of that's due to the fact that the infrastructure So Solana Ethereum and so forth has gotten really good So you can now send an arbitrary amount of money anywhere in the world for under one penny and one second. But that took years and years of work, investment, founders, technical folks doing a lot of work. So that's great. And so there's a lot of good things.

Starting point is 01:00:59 I think that there's a lot of challenges too, but overall it's been fun. Do you think that the narrative around stablecoins is still going to morph into micro payments for the internet? Ben Thompson was talking about this with MCP. It's not in the standard, but you can easily imagine that getting worked into the second version of the standard. At the same time, obviously just global remittances has always been a huge category. It is the one category that I used stable coins four years ago.

Starting point is 01:01:28 And it felt very real in that moment, even while people were saying, oh, this is useless. It felt like, okay, this is the value. But I'm interested in like kind of the next application of stable coins and then the one after that. Yeah, great. So I think just maybe briefly, the way to think about stable coins is today, we don't really have a global payment system or global financial system. We have 195 countries, each one has many different banking systems.

Starting point is 01:01:50 When you send money to another country, like I say, you wire money, like actually we've had this experience at the firm where we wire investment, and it ends up going through a bunch of humans and paperwork. It's really just a mishmash of systems. And so the way to think about stablecoins is similar to how, for those who are old enough to remember, text messaging was like this, like in the 2000s. You would send a text message and you would say, you don't have a plan to send to Canada, you got to sign up. And it was all these different systems. And then WhatsApp and FaceTime came along and they built this sort of what they call over the top global network, right? So think

Starting point is 01:02:20 of sort of stablecoins and blockchains as an over the top network. It's from day one global, low fee, credibly neutral, programmable payment system that just sort of works everywhere. That's kind of the simple way to think of it. And so as you mentioned, one of the obvious benefits is just cross border. And that's where a lot of the uses are right now. And so for example, like SpaceX has a program where they move, they'll sell a Starlink and I think it's like some South of Brazil or something and then they'll immediately use stablecoins for so-called

Starting point is 01:02:48 treasury management. This is one of the kind of growing use cases that folks like Stripe will talk about. Remittances, you're sending money back home from the US to whatever some developing countries where the currency is volatile and they want access to dollars or euros. And then as you mentioned, John, the idea that because, and actually I encourage those who are interested to go listen to the Collisons, they were an all in podcast a few weeks ago talking about this.

Starting point is 01:03:14 What they're actually say they're really excited about is less the low fees and more the programmability as you just described. And so you can do, so this is like one obvious thing is invoice fraud. So people will send these faxes type things. That's a really old fashioned where they'll say like, here's my wiring instruction. And you know, if you guys, if you've done this, you'll say like, please make sure you call first. But of course calling doesn't work in an age of AI because it could be a fake voice.

Starting point is 01:03:38 And so, you know, what, what Stripe was excited about is because blockchains are programmable, they can have a full kind of reputation system on top. So they know like, this is a valid place to send money to for your invoicing system, right? So you can program it as you mentioned, micro payments, right? Now that you can send money for one penny that unlocks a whole bunch of use cases.

Starting point is 01:03:55 So machine to machine payments, every time you're doing an AI API requests, as you mentioned, MCP, right? So like watch MCP, I would expect would have down the road a payment standard, right? And AI agents. So you imagine a world, which I think we're headed to pretty soon in a couple of years, we have all these different AI agents running around. I'm hey, I'm advertising, I can program, I can write your essay for you, I can do your

Starting point is 01:04:17 homework, whatever, and they're all sort of advertising their services. And then you sort of imagine other agents coming along and negotiating and and you know Penny's getting transferred back and forth and this big kind of you know economic You know kind of mishmash like kind of collection, you know on top So the web moves from like these kind of signup forms to agents sending money automatically And we think that would be powered by most naturally powered by a global, you know low fee programmable system like blockchains. Yeah, yeah. How has, I'm super curious to understand how your guys' lobbying efforts have evolved over

Starting point is 01:04:55 the past six to 12 months. We went from, you know, a sort of a large coalition of people trying to basically block crypto from getting real adoption and traction in the US to suddenly ETFs being approved and things like that. And I imagine that's kind of changed your guys' strategy on the Hill. So I'm interested to hear how that's evolved. Yeah. So that's a so I've been doing, you know, we sort of I saw Mark Andreessen on you guys. It was a week or two ago. I watched that and he was talking about a little bit. I've been doing, you know, we sort of, I saw Mark Andreessen on you guys, I think it was

Starting point is 01:05:25 a week or two ago I watched that and he was talking about it a little bit. Mark and I have been very involved in this and by necessity originally like four or five years ago. And then over time realized just how important it is to engage. They say in Washington, they like to say if you are not at the table, you're on the menu. So you don't want to be on the menu. So, you know, I've been going sort of like once a month and Mark has to and just really just kind of trying to explain

Starting point is 01:05:49 our perspective because we feel like the interest of startup like so start most startups don't have the resources to go to DC, right? And of course, big tech companies do and big banks do and all sorts of other big entities do. And so our kind of logic was that we're one of the few entity, you know, kind of organizations that has enough scale to have a government affairs team who represents the interests of startups. And so we go and we say, look, we represent small companies and here's what they're interested in. So for example, they want to have clear guardrails and rules around blockchains.

Starting point is 01:06:21 They want to have open source AI. That's another really important issue to us. Clear rules on AI and copyright. There's a series of things, having a single federal framework and not a 50 state laws on a lot of these things and so forth. And so we go and we advocate for that. We've taken a bipartisan approach from the beginning. We think that's very important. I mean, look, just one is to get, we think the way you really build industries is legislation. If you think back to the internet, that was built on really on the 96th Telecom Act.

Starting point is 01:06:50 If, you know, and had things like section 230, which you know, you may know is now a contentious issue, had section two, I like to say section 230 had been, you know, administrative guidance instead of legislation, it would have been a political football every four years. It was built into legislation. And so you could, section 230 is what enabled marketplaces, social networks, and so forth to build reliably on the internet.

Starting point is 01:07:09 So we've always felt that both for AI and for crypto, we want legislation that provides clear rules, pass for innovation, and really eliminates or mitigates or eliminates all the kind of bad use cases and bad actors. And so that's always been our approach. It's been bipartisan. That's the legislation you need bipartisan, first of all. And secondly, the Democratic Party has, like most people will sort of think Republicans are pro crypto, Democrats are anti.

Starting point is 01:07:32 That's not really true. We just had a last week, a Senate, sort of it was a procedural vote on the stablecoin bill. And I believe there were 17 Democrats who voted for it, which is significant. And I think our view has been we want to kind of shift the Democratic Party back to the values of Obama and Bill Clinton when

Starting point is 01:07:49 they were pro-tech and not the blue sky Democrat thing that happened the last year. The interesting thing about the lobbying is that I looked at the donation dollars that were coming from crypto-aligned people and crypto funds, and it was split almost exactly 50 50 like the entire crypto community really did go super bipartisan with the spend and obviously the Republicans won.

Starting point is 01:08:12 So it feels like a Republican issue like right now, but I it doesn't feel like it's going to remain that way on the issue of government. I'm interested to know maybe stable coins are a good example, but just general crypto adoption. How do you bucket? How do you think about the adoption across government, B2B, or just direct to consumer? Because when I think about stable coins, for example, there's people that want to pay people individually, but there's so many ways that you can just tuck stable coins under some business, like with the AI thing.

Starting point is 01:08:42 If you get Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft using stable coins in an agentic application, the user might never know that I'm paying a fraction of a cent to access a Wall Street Journal article, it just happens and I'm not even aware. So what are the key drivers for the different constituencies and then the different applications and how do they fit together?

Starting point is 01:09:03 No, that's a great question. And like I have a broader kind of framework I like to talk about, which is sort of, I sort of like to distinguish technologies between what I call inside out and outside in. And so inside out of things that sort of start with established institutions like AI to some extent is like that, you know, the iPhone was like this, it came out of Apple, a very established institution, AI came out of, you know, Stanford and so forth. Whereas crypto very much, you know, Bitcoin started at the fringes, right? And sort of like open source software

Starting point is 01:09:26 and there's other kind of tech movements have started at the fringes and it sort of worked its way in. So stable coin started for the main use case was settling crypto trades seven years ago or something. And then over time, you started to see more and more like payment providers in Argentina, for example, and that sort of more kind of moving to the center.

Starting point is 01:09:44 Now Stripe, I think of Stripe is very much probably I think the smartest, a lot of people think the smartest, one of the, if not the smartest, fintech company is all in on it. They did a billion dollar acquisition bridge to ramp up their efforts. I think the main good legating factor, like I speak to a lot of like, like what I would love to see is a world where you have banks and asset management, asset management firms and every payment provider as you described John, like behind the scenes it's just sort of it's the substrate, it's the infrastructure, right? It's like HTTP or SMTP, it's just this thing that exists. A lot of them say we just want like that final you know regulatory clarity piece, right?

Starting point is 01:10:18 Because they want that assurance because they're like they're risk-averse, we just had four years of kind of lawfare against the industry. So that's why I think that's really like honestly like I probably spend more than half my time on that now. Like that's just kind of the key. There's two. And just to say there's two big kind of bills that we're advocating for. There's stablecoins.

Starting point is 01:10:36 There's one called market structure that's just coming forward in the house now, which is also to kind of clarify more broadly on tokens. But I think that's the main thing right now. I think and I put to your point exactly. I don't think most people ultimately will think of even more broadly on tokens. But I think that's the main thing right now. I think tonight, but to your point, exactly. I don't think most people ultimately will think of even the word stable coin. I think there'll be like digital dollars, you know, that like for the for the average person, right? industry term like ERP people, they don't know.

Starting point is 01:10:56 And like, actually, but we'll see like, like, we have a fintech group with the firm that's not crypto. And you know, folks like I think you interviewed a niche and yeah, all those folks. And then, you know, they like I think you interviewed Anish and all those folks. And they like crypto, but they're not like crypto. And they'll tell me now, it's become pretty standard in the FinTech stack that people will use stable points. Yeah, you're like a three person startup and boom, you push a button and you got 190 countries.

Starting point is 01:11:18 That's very different than the old days. I wanna get your point of view on the competitive forces and dynamics right now because we have Startups which there's entire subcategories you have hyper decentralized, you know crypto companies You have sort of hybrid companies like maybe bridge that are kind of sitting in between fintech and And crypto rails and then you now have big institutional players that are coming in Maybe they brought ETFs to market to start.

Starting point is 01:11:46 And then now they're thinking about, you know, stable coin applications as well. How do you look at the market and what kind of advice do you give to portfolio companies that are trying to figure out who they are, whether that's fully decentralized or some type of hybrid or, or, or so on. Yeah. Yeah. I think think that's a great question. I mean, the point is not for decentralization and this new architecture of blockchains for its own sake. The point is they have specific benefits.

Starting point is 01:12:14 So why would one build on a blockchain like Ethereum or Solana as opposed to a traditional AWS, like a traditional architecture? And the answer is, when you build, the way I like to describe it most simply is blockchains allow you to build digital services that remove the intermediaries. So you remove, so for example, stable coins,

Starting point is 01:12:33 you have no intermediaries that are taking fees. You don't have the banks and the payment providers and the payment networks, right, that take all the different layers of fees. So that's an important benefit is you're building these, you could build social networks without fees. You can build games without fees. You can build AI systems without fees, right? Without fees, it's like very low, like sub like couple basis points. I actually have it for

Starting point is 01:12:52 those interested. I wrote a book, read right on, and I have a chapter on take rates where I go through this in detail. But it's essentially going from like 30% in the app store, you know, 100% in Facebook and 50% on YouTube to like five basis points or something, or 2.5% for payments and so forth. So the first question is why would you want to build on them? The other one we mentioned before is programmability. You can do all sorts of cool stuff on top. And so I think it's your question.

Starting point is 01:13:17 I think it depends. Ultimately, I think of startups as you want to work backwards. You want to say, what do you want to do for the world? What kind of service do you want to provide? And then you work backwards and you say, how do you want to build that? Right? In some cases, that means you want to build something on a blockchain, like a peer service, like a protocol, we call it, with a token and so forth.

Starting point is 01:13:31 In other cases, you want to build more traditional software that may be like, for example, like you mentioned, that bridges between a bank and an asset manager and a blockchain system. Right? So I think ultimately we think of it through that lens is kind of now as an investor, I skew towards things I like things with, for example, network effects, because they can be very I've my career, I found that network effects can be very powerful, right? You invest in something, it grows, it kind of has a natural kind of defensibility and kind of gets better as more people use it. So there's just kind of different lenses you can look at it. The last thing I would say is to your listeners, I know you have a broad audience,

Starting point is 01:14:03 I think that the crypto space right now, the real shortage we have is startup talent, in that there's a lot of obvious good ideas where there just aren't many people pursuing. Yeah. So I think it's actually the opposite problem than most, like then you might have an AI right now, where I imagine AI, it's an amazing technology and deservingly people are excited, as they should be excited about it. But you probably for every idea have, I don't know, 50 good startups pursuing it. In crypto, I think we're under competed, like we have under too little competition, honestly. Like, so I would say to your listeners, if you're a smart person thinking about doing a startup, I think there's a lot of white space right now.

Starting point is 01:14:38 If you're in AI, pivot to crypto. We heard it here first. Or we do both. We love AI. It is exciting. Yeah, how are you? I'm sure you're perpetually going to be unsatisfied with the technological progress, because you understand the full potential, right? Where are you at right now?

Starting point is 01:14:56 You know, we had Balaji on earlier. He was very bullish on ZK proofs and what's coming down the pipeline there. Prediction markets a little bit. Yeah, prediction markets feel like. During the election, it was like, wow, this is a completely, no one was talking about this during the Bitcoin white paper. And yet crypto has created something

Starting point is 01:15:13 that everyone gets value out of in one way or another. Yeah. Yeah, I think we are still, I think of these technology things always go in S-curves. We're clearly still at the, somewhere in the bottom of the S-curve. I think there's just a lot more growth. Just like user base, there's something on the order. Most of these applications I'm describing have up to at the highest end probably 50 million

Starting point is 01:15:36 users, which is 1% of the internet. It's still very early. Polymarket is doing incredibly well, but I assume it's still in that kind of sub 1% of the internet. It's not. The internet has, you know, 5 billion people now, right? So we have a long way to go. I think a lot of the kind of core infrastructure is now as of a year and a half ago, kind of good enough.

Starting point is 01:15:54 You know, I think a lot of these technologies have that characteristic where you have kind of, you know, whether like neural networks only got good enough, I don't know, whatever circa let's call it, you know something in the 2010s because of the Moore's law and GPUs, right? And so iPhones, once you had capacitive screens and whatever, processors and so forth, I think blockchains, I think we no longer have infrastructure as an excuse anymore. Like now it's about building applications, about getting regulatory clarity. And I think we're pretty far along there.

Starting point is 01:16:20 I think we have a long way to go fully exploring kind of the idea maze and all the different cool things you can do and and you know and then bringing it to billions of people is the goal. How have you been advising crypto emerging managers? My one of my favorite I'm gonna kind of butcher the stat but apparently like the sort of median crypto fund massively out performed like the median venture fund for most of the last decade. And so I thought that that was this beautiful narrative violation because people,

Starting point is 01:16:51 traditional venture would love to poke fun at crypto VCs, yet they were sort of systemically outperforming the other party. But what kind of general guidance are you giving to somebody that maybe was an active trader and wants to get more into the actual, you know, kind of venture side of the game? I've been so, you know, I've been that so I've been investing in venture funds and crypto funds for a long time, just sort of after I sold my first company. In fact, Mark, Mark and recent I have done it together for a long time long time and have been doing crypto funds since probably 10 years and just consistently. And I'm still very bullish. And to your point, I think that's probably correct, like on the data, like they've just they've done. And I think it's just traditional finance in the sense of you have to, you know,

Starting point is 01:17:38 non-consensus, right? Right. Like, as much as we hear about crypto, it's still very non-consensus. A lot of a lot of a lot a lot of venture funds Just simply maybe they'll have a little bit of Bitcoin, but they'll otherwise they'll rule it out if there's tokens and things You talked to fund to funds They a lot of them will say we have a no crypto rule, you know sovereign wealth funds So all the kind of giant pools of capital that fund the venture world And so it's still kind of this considered this kind of weird sideshow Like obviously the past doesn't predict the future and so forth.

Starting point is 01:18:07 And we don't know how things will play out, but it's still very non-consensus. I think from a, from a financial investing point of view, the broader crypto world. So I, I will look, I believe that's where the opportunities are in, in, in venture investing. Um, obviously you have to also be right. And so time will tell, but it's, I think it's still much more not, it's surprisingly non-consensus in the investing world, I think to this day, despite the performance.

Starting point is 01:18:31 Can you explain a little bit of the dynamic of how venture fits into the life cycle of a new crypto company these days, because there's liquidity available from retail in some cases. Um, there's some companies that are going to be profitable very early because of their you know Insane product. Yeah, we had a lawn from from pump on earlier and that's classic example It's like a very profitable able to be very efficient And I think we've seen on the other side you have companies like hyper liquid that got out and and have a token very early So I'm curious

Starting point is 01:19:05 Yeah, how you think of the capital lifecycle? Yeah Yeah, so we see if I can answer that so like one reason we started separate crypto fund originally like I guess 2018 Was so that we could Before that I was doing like crypto investing Yeah, but it would always get these questions from the LPs and like what is this? It's an equity as a tokens and so create a separate crypto fund with the basic idea was we have maximum flexibility But it would always get these questions from the LPs and like, what is this? Is it equity? Is it tokens? And so create a separate crypto fund with the basic idea that we have maximum flexibility. And we went to the LPs and we said, look, this is going to be different.

Starting point is 01:19:31 And here's the idea. And here's the, and a lot of them opted out. Some of them opted in, but we were very clear upfront what it was. And so what we, what we think of it is we can do everything from, we can buy, we buy Bitcoin or something just directly, which we do. People see our funds and they assume it's all ventures not. We do a lot of just buying tokens that we think have upside. We also do a lot of, we can do equity investments like a Coinbase.

Starting point is 01:19:54 It's just a classic equity investment. We have a bunch of those that the goal would be to someday IPO. They could be cashflow heavy ones that do dividends like the ones you're describing, Jordy, like maybe some of those, or maybe I don't know what their plans are pumped up for. Maybe they IPO, maybe they dividend, maybe they buybacks. If you have cash flows, you have a lot of options. Then the third one, which is actually one of our core ones, is you'll do an equity,

Starting point is 01:20:17 a project will start as an equity investment, but then over time, we'll launch a token. The equity investors get sort of pro rata rights to those tokens. And that actually, that was sort of the new thing that we really wanted to lean into back when we started the crypto fund. That was a new idea. We helped kind of pioneer that, I think. And that was like the warrant structure? Yeah, it's very simple.

Starting point is 01:20:41 It's a term sheet with two extra things. It has essentially token rights. Yeah, it can be a warrant and's a term sheet with two extra things that has essentially token rights. Yeah, and it can be a warrant and there's different ways to structure it. And what's nice about that is it, you know, one of the reasons startups works so well is that they're maxed, like when they work is that the investors and the founders are fully aligned. So before that structure existed, I don't know how deep you guys want to go on this, there were these things called SAFs and like these kinds of things where you do token purchases and the problem is it created all these weird incentives where the founder would try to create a token just to do something Well, we believe very strongly is alignment between the investors and the founders and so there's sort of this this equity structure with token rights

Starting point is 01:21:15 Or token warrants is one where if they decide to they can stay an equity company and they can do you know Just do traditional kind of go for profits and things or they can create a token or they can create two tokens or whatever Is best for that service they're trying to create. And in whatever way that they eventually decide to, whatever business model they pursue, the investor will participate kind of per rata alongside the founders.

Starting point is 01:21:37 What happens to the C Corp in that scenario where they launch a token, the token grows and the community is in like the, the asset is now controlled by the token and the C Corp still exists. Are there roles for foundations and nonprofits and different transitions that can happen? Yeah, it's a great question. A lot of times they'll become, um, they'll just become like kind of one software provider in the network.

Starting point is 01:21:59 Oh, sure. Like, um, you know, they're so, so for example, um, you know, think of the Ethereum Foundation. I don't know if you guys know the relationship between Ethereum Foundation and Ethereum. Ethereum is a network. Ethereum Foundation, they help make a little bit of software. They give some research guidance, but they don't control the network.

Starting point is 01:22:14 They don't, it's like kind of in the same way there's just sort of a foundation that has some kind of a bully pulpit. Sometimes they can have a separate business model. So like Uniswap is a decentralized protocol that we're investors in. Think of it as a decentralized New York Stock Exchange or something that's doing very well, multiple trillions and trillions in volume traded. And they separately, so they spun out this protocol and then they separately have a website

Starting point is 01:22:41 that they operate, which is what the company does. And the website is now, I believe it's sub 5% of the volume on the protocol, but it's still 5%, right? And so they're just one front end to it. And so I think that's probably gonna be one of the best examples of what you're asking, John. That makes a ton of sense, Jordy. Where, what are you expecting to see out of the

Starting point is 01:23:01 kind of real world asset category over the next couple of years, it feels like, this year, at least to me, it's felt like we're days or weeks away from some pretty high profile assets coming on chain. I'm curious how you think about the category broadly. Yeah, I mean, I think of stable coins as sort of the initial real world asset, right?

Starting point is 01:23:24 It's so you have dollars bank account and then the next and then and then the great thing about that the kind of adoption there and hopefully all the regulatory clarity we're getting is that will be a natural stepping stone to You know, you have Robin Hood talking about stocks. You have BlackRock talking about, you know, Treasury bills Wouldn't I think it would be nice if anyone in the world I think it'd be good for the US and I think it'd be good for the world, if anyone in the world could buy 4.5% interest Treasury bill and have it secure and easy and permissionless and low fee. I think it's good for the US, the popularity of the dollar, and I think it would be nice

Starting point is 01:23:58 for somebody who has a volatile currency to have access to those. So stocks, stocks bonds, and then you can imagine all of these sorts of so-called dark pools. So still a large part of finance is people using Bloomberg and calling each other. And a lot of that, like trading bonds and uni bonds and corporate bonds and things like that, there's a lot of interest from the banks to think about ways to use blockchains to create essentially marketplaces there, maybe permissioned marketplaces where only kind of certain participants can participate. For them, the benefit is why haven't they created a network like a marketplace before?

Starting point is 01:24:33 Because they don't trust each other. They don't want like, who's going to create it? Is Goldman going to create it and JP Morgan is going to use it? They don't trust each other. They don't trust startups to do it because then the startup will start taking big fees. They just sort of kept it informal and by phone. And so in a way, a blockchain kind of solves a political problem of getting these 20 entities

Starting point is 01:24:52 or a hundred entities who previously wouldn't kind of coordinate together. I think that's one broader way to think of blockchains is like, if AI is solving all the problems in the world that they need more intelligence, right? Blockchains try to solve the problems in the world that need more intelligence. Blockchains try to solve the problems in the world that need more coordination or more kind of collective action. Blockchains are fundamentally social technologies and it's about getting a bunch of...

Starting point is 01:25:16 That's what money is ultimately social. It's getting a lot of people to agree on a standard and to use the same systems and tools. And so similarly with real world assets like that. And there's other interesting ones to your question. We have one called Story Protocol, a project where investors in that's putting intellectual property on blockchains and letting people do capital formation and licensing and so forth around. So you create a new superhero theme thing and someone wants to make an AI remix of it.

Starting point is 01:25:44 And how do they So we thought about like in an AI world like how well, you know creators get paid how will IP work? How will how will how will money flow on the internet in a world with abundant content, right? And I think we think blockchains have an important role to play in that How would you like to see the industry and kind of the world collectively try to solve social engineering hacks? Feels like Worldcoin is one potential solution there. But I imagine there's a bunch of other sort of businesses

Starting point is 01:26:16 that you could fund and then a whole regulatory piece as well, which is we sort of force these large companies now. Bology described it as like, you know, to basically hold these, you know, honey pots of data and there's probably gotta be a better way. Yeah, a great question. So you mentioned Worldcoin, I'll just say briefly. So what Worldcoin does is what we call proof of humanity.

Starting point is 01:26:39 So it's a way for you to get a cryptographic key that proves you're human and the ideas in a world, you know, as we're moving too quickly with AI bots and deep fakes and so forth, there's useful to be able to say, Hey, I'm truly human. And then, you know, I can get a, imagine a blue check on Twitter that actually literally, you know, cryptographically means you're human and not just that you paid $10. We think that would be useful. It's sort of a missing, you know, kind of building blocks, so to speak, for the, you

Starting point is 01:27:01 know, for the internet that I think we all want. And so one thing we think about is like, what are those missing building blocks? You mentioned zero-knowledge proofs. Zero-knowledge proofs are, I think, a really interesting cryptographic breakthrough that I think people underestimate in the broader world how important they are. What they let you do is essentially prove things. So I can prove, like a bank needs to know I'm a US citizen,'s say or I'm you know have a certain income or certain profile, you know Health data or so forth was your knowledge proofs

Starting point is 01:27:30 Let you do is I can prove that to the system without revealing any of that like my actual you know where I can it can basically send me a Cryptographic kind of a game that says prove that you're a US citizen and I can prove it back without revealing All you know my name and all the other kind of stuff that might that might dox me, right? I mean, I just you know, we just saw like, you know Day after day we see these giant hacks KYC hacks So for like at this point you should just assume all of your information that sadly has been hacked many times I'm not you know having Social Social Security as your unique ID and password

Starting point is 01:28:06 is just like a ridiculous system in this era. And meanwhile, we have these, we care around these supercomputers with biometrics and advanced cryptography, like why aren't we using it? The problem is not the tech, the core tech, the problem is coordination again, like it's how do you get everyone to agree on what the standards are right?

Starting point is 01:28:25 And that's why I think blockchains can be important because it's really the the all the pieces are there But how do you kind of put them all together in a broad kind of you know standard or coordinated system? Amazed that's great. Thank you so much for coming. I love to continue for yeah, we can go way longer We need to have you awesome guys. I appreciate it. It's great to see somebody a Contrarian idea that a tech show that actually likes tech Very bullish on it. So thank you so much Next up we have Kyle coming on yeah You know we're talking to people just because he's the number one guy on the Midas list doesn't mean you can't hit him with

Starting point is 01:29:01 The Ashen Hall. Yeah, you can't hit him with some sound effects. I should have. But we have Kyle Simani coming on. Let's bring him in the studio. How are you doing, Kyle? Welcome to the stream. Welcome. What's up, Jordan? What's up, Jordan?

Starting point is 01:29:13 Pleasure to be here. Great to see you. What's happening? Dude, I'm doing great, guys. I'm actually in Vegas right now. I'm actually looking at the sphere out my window in my hotel. Amazing. Bitcoin Vegas is going on.

Starting point is 01:29:24 It's a fun time in crypto. Is Crypto a company sponsoring the sphere right now or maybe we, TBPN should buy the inventory at this very moment. I think y'all's faces would look really good at 400 feet wide and tall. We should just be live broadcasting this there. That's the real alpha. Anyway. It's great to have you on. I have a bunch of places to start with.

Starting point is 01:29:44 So I don't even have context. What event is happening in Vegas? I think Katie Hahn is there as well. Is that correct? It's a Bitcoin conference. Can you break it down? What are you expecting? What's happening on the ground?

Starting point is 01:29:54 Yeah, it's Bitcoin Vegas is going on, largest crypto conference ever, more than 30,000 people at Venetian Palazzo. Vance, I just spoke or speaking shortly. David Taxx is here. Bo Heinz is here. Ross Ulbricht is here. David Bailey, Michael Saylor, tons and tons of folks are all here. Senators here, Lummis, Haggerty, a whole bunch of other folks. So politics is here. Wall Street is here. Industry is here. Very, very exciting time. And what are the key indications or news items that people are looking for? Are there people still hunting for different companies to establish bitcoin reserves or news

Starting point is 01:30:30 from the government? Like what are the unanswered questions that people are looking for hints as to which way they'll break? I think probably the biggest questions are how is the bitcoin's refutic reserve going to be funded? Senator Lummis has proposed the Bitcoin bill, which proposes open market purchases authorized by Congress. That hasn't made it very far in Congress, but it's at least in the public domain. When the executive order was signed by President Trump a few weeks ago, it said that they can kind of fund the Refugio reserve using revenue neutral mechanisms. And so there's a lot of discussion today about what exactly does

Starting point is 01:31:09 that mean. Folks like Bo Heinz and David Sachs and the administration are certainly working on figuring all that out. They haven't shared anything publicly yet. But there's a lot of discussion about that. There's a lot of discussion around Bitcoin L2s. These are kind of ways to bring DeFi to Bitcoin with like two or three or four asterisks after that end of that statement. But like a lot of people are trying to figure that out. And then obviously the kind of hot subject of

Starting point is 01:31:34 the moment is these Bitcoin treasury companies. The most recent of which I believe is DJT, which I think just announced a two and a half billion dollar offering. Yeah, is that truth social? Yeah, true social. And GameStop announced today as well announced a $2.5 billion offering. Is that Truth Social? Yeah, yeah, Truth Social. And GameStop announced today as well, a large purchase. Yeah, in some ways, all the regulatory stuff happening right now feels like the kid who didn't do his homework until two minutes before the exam or something

Starting point is 01:31:57 and is just cramming. Because crypto has been an important industry for a decade. People have been investing in this category for a long time. But now it's like the government's like, okay, let's figure all this out. Is that just because we've really finally gotten to adoption and breach the technical milestones or, or do we, and I guess the question is like, do you expect us to get through this regulatory kind of crunch period and then go back into build mode. And if so,

Starting point is 01:32:25 like what are the technical milestones that we're that we're trying to build? What what's coming on the horizon after we get through the political arc that we're in right now? Yeah. So, I mean, the reason we're here, where the reason we're kind of in this moment is like a lot of stuff building over the last 10 or 15 years and there's really extenuated by the Biden administration. I don't think our industry would be as politically relevant

Starting point is 01:32:50 and as politically active if it were not for the Biden administration so strongly trying to press on the scales against industry, and industry really mobilized against the Democratic party in a meaningful way. And my sense is that most political strategists probably will tell you that like on the margin,

Starting point is 01:33:08 the thing that moved the election in both Congress and then the presidential in 2024 was the crypto industry in terms of dollars, reach, anger, PR, kind of et cetera. That now is kind of swung from very frustrating administration to extremely accommodating and welcoming administration that we have today. The work that Bill Hines and David Sacks are doing in the executive branch is phenomenal. We're seeing awesome stuff out of DOJ, SEC, and CFTC on an almost daily basis now. And then the other big item is Congress.

Starting point is 01:33:41 There's the Stable, the genius act in the Senate today, and then there's market structure that's coming pretty shortly. All that stuff is happening. So I think the reason we are where we are is like, like the pendulum is like kind of swung from one extreme to the other. I feel pretty good that we're gonna kind of basically get,

Starting point is 01:34:00 industry is gonna get I think most of what it wants in the next few months. And that just then provides the foundation for crypto to really permeate all of software. Crypto systems are the most basic level just systems for moving money around. And they're much more better and efficient and global systems for doing that. And so my hope is that once we get these final things done from Congress and then the executive branch, then you see Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, et cetera, embed crypto into all of their respective operating systems. You have AI agents do trading with crypto, whatever. And now crypto financial rails truly permeate global software. Do you think there'll be a realignment from the left

Starting point is 01:34:42 around crypto? Or do you think think like because it did feel like it was bipartisan for a little bit or at least it was just ambiguous on both sides then it kind of broke right but it's such a big industry that it feels like maybe the Democrats might want to say hey like we're it's a it's a big tent we're also pro crypto yeah I mean there's really a handful of prominent Democrats who have been pro crypto, folks like Richie Torres, Senator Gillibrand. There's some others I'm sure I can't remember

Starting point is 01:35:11 their names off the top of my head. And we've been donor, although we're primarily donors to Republicans, we are selectively donors to some of those folks that I just mentioned. The party as a whole, I would say, has not really realigned and embraced crypto. And I'd say I'm fairly surprised by that.

Starting point is 01:35:27 It just seems kind of like an own goal here. There's a handful of Democrats who like ideologically hate crypto, most notably Senator Warren. But like the vast majority of Democrats in Congress kind of like don't care or like pro crypto. Sure. And so I've been surprised by the lack of warm embrace. Makes sense. Jordy.

Starting point is 01:35:54 Mutual friend, Jared Madfes asked me to ask you, what are you excited about in crypto that no one else is talking about yet or very few people are talking about? about yet or very few people are talking about? I am really excited for Deepin. And this is a category that's been around in crypto for a few years now. And we were very fortunate to help pioneer

Starting point is 01:36:15 some of our early investments like Helium. But the Deepin things are starting to really work. Helium, I believe yesterday or the day before was their first day ever. They had a million customers on the Helium network in one day. Helium, for those who don't know, is a decentralized wireless network. Anyone can stand up a hotspot in their house and provide wireless coverage and other people can use your network and pay you for doing so. We just invested recently in a very high profile deep end project called double zero, which basically is bringing private fiber to anyone who wants to pay for private fiber

Starting point is 01:36:48 per byte of data. And this is gonna go live over the summer. And it's gonna really change low latency trading on public blockchains. There's a handful of other kind of major deep end teams like HiveMap or Pipe Network and a number of others that we're involved in. And I think these are, crypto is fundamentally financial in nature, but like

Starting point is 01:37:07 finance is hard for people to grasp. And what's cool about these deep end use cases is that they are like fairly easy for people to understand. And the first handful of those things are really starting to achieve escape velocity. That's great. How'd you meet the Solana founders? I met Anatoly first. I don't actually don't know who introduced me to Anatoly, but I was in San Francisco in April of 2018. I was at a co-working space and I met Anatoly on a Saturday night

Starting point is 01:37:35 and I was sent he had sent me the white paper for the proof of history and slana consensus white paper I remember I read it was absolute trash And I was like, I have no idea what this does. But someone told me Anatoly was really smart. So I met with him. And after meeting with him, the thing that really stood out to me was of all of the L1, all of the L1 founders were like very academic in background and their pursuit and approach. And Anatoly was the opposite. He was like, I hate academia. I don't ever want to write a fucking paper.

Starting point is 01:38:05 I don't ever want to solve an unsolved problem in computer science. He's like, my only job is to like let other people solve problems. And then I'm just gonna like apply their solutions to making my software go fast. And his whole career at Qualcomm and Dropbox and other places was just doing that. And I was like, I like this guy, this guy does not sound like all of the other L one founders. And so we started the kind of back salon from very early on. I was got, I like this guy. This guy does not sound like all of the other L1 founders. And so we started the kind of back salon from very early on. I was got the meat raw shortly thereafter and the rest is history.

Starting point is 01:38:31 Yeah. So, I mean, was, what was that investment? Did you feel like it was out of your sweet spot? Like, were you stretching in terms of what you're pattern matching against? Or was it like delightfully contrarian in your mind? Um, I mean, like multi-coin was very young. We were six months old at the time. We kind of made that first investment and I don't think we had even a sense of like, what is our strike zone or not? We just kind of were like young and running as fast as we could and same what happened. Um, in hindsight, I would say like, multi-coins generally likes to invest in more blue oceans than red oceans. And investing in an L1

Starting point is 01:39:08 was certainly a red ocean investment. And so when we invest in red oceans, we just wanna be like, have a pretty pointed view on why the player we're betting on is like the standout player. And as I was just saying, like, just at the founder level, totally his background was completely different than the other L1 founders.

Starting point is 01:39:31 There's a number of other things that kind of stood out, but that being the primary one. I would say now with seven or eight years of history looking back, I don't think the salon investment like stood out as being fundamentally like out of strike zone. We knew we hated Ethereum. We knew that like there was problems and we were looking for alternatives.

Starting point is 01:39:50 And lots of people were showing up saying like, look, I have an alternative. And so in that sense, it was like very kind of shot on goal. What's been your success rate of identifying new metas like, you know, before other people. It feels like in crypto, if you're if people that are trading are trying to trade, you know, specific metas and then identify new ones. But as on as a VC, you really need to identify things two, three years, sometimes sometimes even more than that. Otherwise, you're just going to be too late. Right. Once the thing is already big, you don't necessarily want to invest in the fourth or fifth player in a category.

Starting point is 01:40:31 Yeah, I feel very fortunate. We've been involved early in a number of eyes metas, for lack of a better word. First, probably being like high performance blockchains, being Solana. Second, probably being D-PEN, starting with Helium and HiveMapper. More recently, we've been very focused on on-chain privacy.

Starting point is 01:40:50 Most people in crypto have been talking about zero-knowledge proofs for, God, five, seven, eight years now. We've scrapped all that, and we've made big bets in fully homomorphic encryption, which is a totally different cryptographic approach. So those are probably the three, I think, really big ideas where we were pretty early. And there's a number of other areas that are like smaller where I think we've been early.

Starting point is 01:41:11 In terms of where, you know, the Meadows were like focused on today, I'd say it's like, it's pretty obvious stuff, but like getting stablecoins in the hands of people who want stablecoins. We've invested in a number of P2P exchanges that make it possible for people in emerging markets in which have capital controls to get stable coins despite their local governments. And so that's a lot of focus area. And then we've been thinking about what are, as more stable coins come on chain, what are the secondary and tertiary impacts of that? And then we've been going along a lot of those things in both public and private markets

Starting point is 01:41:47 The help helping, you know people with capital controls get on chain is interesting It's kind of like cryptos outlaw roots and a little bit but but very mission-oriented is saying we believe in economic freedom They're you know willing to go in and to certain markets and deliver that so very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for stopping by Yeah, this is great. Hope the conference is great. Come back on the show anytime Enjoyed Jordy John. Thanks for having me awesome be here. You're the man. Cheers Next up we have been pastor neck Founder I met years ago because we were both building in consumer packaged goods. He's gone on to crypto I've gone on to media but excited to get the update from him probably has to be the most viral new

Starting point is 01:42:33 Crypto app. Yeah in yeah at least a year at least six months I'm excited to chat with him. So Ben welcome to the stream. How are you doing? with him so Ben welcome to the stream how are you doing what I don't even something's done believe in bad welcome to show thank you good to see you guys how you guys doing it's good we haven't talked in a few years I'd love to just get the update I should know idea what a tear you've been hungry friend friend of friend of ours Dylan is here at the studio he's gonna do a live interview later and he brought up he brought you up. And John was like, Ben, pastoral.

Starting point is 01:43:08 Yeah, like the we talked a bunch. And then had no idea. He's so he's so locked in on traditional tech that he had no idea what you're up to. And then and then we explained, of course. So yeah, why don't you actually just give me a catch me up to speed on what you're building? Yeah, we'll believe is a platform for belief and people empowerment.

Starting point is 01:43:27 So if you want to contribute something to the world, if you want to build something, if you're gonna create odd, if you're gonna create a song, whatever it is, you can come to believe and raise the capital you need. Okay, break the the how is this different than NFTs? What technologies are we leveraging? It's obviously somewhat crypto related, but then a comp it to a patron for me. Well, so I'll give you some context. Luke Metro, the show, I believe he used, believe this is okay. Got it. Cool. John's familiar. I have to do this. Cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:43:59 It's basically, um, we enable people to launch a coin on slana super easily. Uh, you know, the, The tokenomics itself are pretty straightforward. What we kind of introduced to the space is like a fee that's collected. Yeah, basically a trading fee and creators are able to raise money through that trading fee. And yeah, the product went like super viral this past month. It's only four weeks old because you can launch a coin directly from Twitter. So we're kind of tapping into the existing trend of builders like building something, screen recording it, posting it on X, and they can just tag launch coin to launch a

Starting point is 01:44:34 coin. Yeah, yeah. So you're even removing even more barriers. You don't even have to go to the different website, no wallet or anything. But I assume at some point you can interact with the blockchain at like a lower level through the actual app. But I assume at some point you can interact with the blockchain at like a lower level through the actual app. But the initial kickoff and instantiation happens all on X. Is that correct? Exactly. Yeah. So you launch an X and assuming your coin does well, you can download our app, link your X and claim your fees, edit your project details. And we're also building

Starting point is 01:45:02 kind of like an ecosystem for people to integrate integrate their coin into that product you know engage with different mechanisms and that's all through the app. So what sorry what what is kind of like the optimistic use case here for someone actually using this to fund kind of a new idea or new concept because there are places where you can go and get a grant for something, but increasingly it's harder and harder to get a grant for, for great art, or even raise money for the next movie because of Hollywood and all these other dynamics. So, uh, what, what is a win condition look like for you?

Starting point is 01:45:38 Yeah. I mean, I think it's a different, depending on the industry you're in. You know, tech obviously has venture capital, which is a pretty good system. I think it is evolving just because, I guess the big trend is you're seeing a lot of ARR, MRR and people's bios. And I think thanks to AI, engineers are way more efficient. There's like less of a need to raise

Starting point is 01:45:55 a huge amount of money upfront. So if you can like, I guess bootstrapping is kind of in and this is just a great way to get started. So for tech, I think that's the use case for other industries. There isn't really a great way to fundraise for anything. You could start a GoFundMe, but those generally haven't gone too far, I guess in some cases, but pretty mid-outcome. So this can lead to massive funding for those types of projects. Yeah. Do you think that there should be a link

Starting point is 01:46:26 between the token and the equity in a company that's eventually created? I imagine at four weeks old, you probably haven't figured out that interaction because that's probably the most complex legal menagerie you can imagine, but talk to me about the long-term vision. Yeah, well, so when we shipped them, we thought there'd be purely attention coins and and speculative but that quickly changed because, you know, the first launches that did really

Starting point is 01:46:49 well started integrating their coins into that product, you know, introducing different like burning mechanisms. So I think that the kind of way I view it right now is, you know, they're essentially like utility coins and, you know, depending on how I consider ourselves to be like the stripe for coins. So we give developers the tools to like integrate their coin however they want But at the end of the day, they're really versatile tools and they're gonna come up with all different ways that kind of inspire us Long term, you know, yeah, the regulatory environment is rapidly shifting

Starting point is 01:47:17 So I think that out, you know, we're planting a lot of seeds today and depending on you know, what happens here and it's looking pretty Good so far, you know, you can do a lot more in terms of equity, et cetera. It's very interesting. What's it been like building in crypto, transitioning from, it feels like to me, watching what you built with Simulite from afar, it was always very high profile, always in the news, and more so than I think like a traditional CPG company. So in that sense,

Starting point is 01:47:47 just being good at thinking different and capturing attention and leveraging that probably set you up pretty well for building in crypto. What have been some of the challenges? I imagine you're not sleeping a lot because every time you go to sleep there's something's breaking or someone's yelling at you or something like that, but what's it been like? Yeah, well, it's not my first rodeo to your point. And prior to Simulate, I built a social networking app called Monkey that has tens of millions of users to this day. So I'm familiar building consumer software.

Starting point is 01:48:17 I think to your point, yeah, the crypto stuff is 24-7. So in most spaces, you have kind of room to iterate and make mistakes. In crypto, the market is less forgiving. So it's a tricky balance because you obviously can't be stagnant, but you have to keep evolving and changing things. So yeah, definitely a pressure cooker environment. But the outcomes are really crazy.

Starting point is 01:48:38 And the cool thing I believe is we have dozens, if not hundreds of creators that have raised funding. People have quit their jobs and gone all in on whatever they're building. And it's rare you get to ship something and for it to immediately have a positive outcome for these people in a life-changing way. So for me, that's super energizing. And I hope we can continue to do that at scale. How do you think this evolves? Right now, it feels like Believe is a product for individual creators, entrepreneurs, artists like you're talking about.

Starting point is 01:49:07 Is there a world, but if you guys become, you know, striped for coins or however you phrased it, is there a world where traditional companies in the future would use Believe to get on chain in some capacity? How do you think about that? For sure, yeah. We're already seeing that. So I kind of the biggest case studies, do you which is like a venture backed

Starting point is 01:49:27 company, I can't speak to their exact revenue numbers, but very serious company that has, you know, strong PMF. And they launched a coin, and their coin has like crushed it, it's brought them like a new revenue stream. It's like really activated like this new community for them. And yet, Bobby, the founder of Jeep is just like really leaned into that. So I think that is going to definitely keep happening. And, you know, I guess like some of these individual builders

Starting point is 01:49:53 might like want a project that later evolves into like an actual company. And the coin is like, it could definitely be tied to that. You know, watching things, watching how things unfold. I want to talk about the line between good and bad projects, essentially. There's two narratives. One is, look, it's all a casino, no crying in the casino.

Starting point is 01:50:12 The DGENs love to just do whatever and just like, you know what you're getting into. The flip side of that is like, you know, they're there. I guess the question is like there are a lot of people that have launched stuff and It's gone super well and they built really cool things There's other stuff where it's clearly just been like a rug and a mess and a disaster and it chases them around the internet For a couple months or even years Where where is the line? What would you counsel people to? Where is the line? What would you counsel people to kind of rules of the road

Starting point is 01:50:45 today for getting involved in this and not just frustrating a bunch of people and actually having like a good experience and kind of not just obeying the letter of the law, but like the spirit of the law. Yeah, and on that like decision making around going, you know, doing curation versus just creating a platform and letting people do kind of whatever they want. Totally. Yeah. So, you know, I consider

Starting point is 01:51:10 by the head alone on earlier level on he's great, you know, friendly with him. And you know, so pump is a huge innovator in the space. I consider pump to be kind of like the World Wide Web and what we're doing to be closer to the App Store. Okay, you know, you can't completely curate for reasons that I won't go into. We can't say, hey, this is good, because if we do that, we're going to be wrong some of the time. But it is quite easy to say, hey, this is bad.

Starting point is 01:51:34 And when we identify bad actors as mechanisms, we can integrate to basically disincentivize them from launching with us versus one of these other platforms. I think the biggest thing for us is, you know, founder education. So, you know, I think most Silicon Valley founders, like 99% have like really positive intent with, you know, things they do. And it's our job to kind of like create harmony between the traders and the founders. And we can just do like a way better job at that. Similar to like, you know, if you fundraise with like a safe or even if you do like a prize round,

Starting point is 01:52:06 your first time doing it, there's usually a pretty big education curve. Like a lawyer is explaining to you what these different mechanisms mean. Most people completely make a mess of it, but by their series A, they identified the problems they made. So there is education

Starting point is 01:52:19 with like existing fundraising mechanisms. And I think that for this too, there's an education that we need to make like really easy. Yeah, I'm interested in we've talked to some founders who have been kind of like curious about dipping their toes in the water. And well, I remember it was we had some buddies to talk to people off the ledge. Yeah, after the Trump, you know, coin happened. Why not me? after the Trump, you know, coin happened and why not me? We had some buddies that that were thinking about it. And ultimately at the time, I think they made the right decision not to do something.

Starting point is 01:52:51 But things are changing week by week. And the trick is like, it feels like the the most basic thing would be like, don't rug, don't don't sell what you own or whatever. But there's this other dynamic that I learned about. And this is probably obvious to everyone who's who's native to crypto. But I could I could launch a coin, not sell any, some traders could come in, pump up the coin, right? And then people buy when it's at the high and then it and then those

Starting point is 01:53:17 traders sell and I didn't rug but like it feels like it rugged and people are like, I lost money on your thing and then they're mad at me. And so I guess in terms of the messaging and the risk reward, how do you think the rules of the road? What you're describing is there's a PVP dynamic. Totally. So I'm curious for you at a platform level, do you think that, for example, are there

Starting point is 01:53:45 things you can do at a product level so that if an artist comes on to believe is using the mechanism to raise money, you prevent it from turning into this PVP warfare where people are duking it out on chain at the expense? I feel like we're going to reinvent accredited investor laws because the whole idea is a venture capital firm can lose $100 million on some crazy biotech startup

Starting point is 01:54:06 or some hard tech startup, and it really is no crying in the casino. It's like you guys did your due diligence, you signed the documents, and you gave it a shot and that particular technology didn't work out. And so as long as there's no fraud, you move on and you make money on the next thing.

Starting point is 01:54:20 But for random retail people, sometimes they get caught up and they, and bad outcomes happen. I feel like there's some, there's some vibes in, in, in the ecosystem that can just be enforced loosely. There's also some rules, there's some platform stuff. So I'm interested in kind of how you're, how you're dealing with that. Cause it's obviously going to evolve a ton over the next few years. I mean, you're going to be running this for a long time.

Starting point is 01:54:40 Totally. Yeah. Yeah. To me, it's a, so, so, you know, pumping being the worldwide web, there's like very small mechanisms that you can integrate that I think just make the whole space a lot safer. Sure. And yet, to your point, read the snipers where they like by large, by the dump at the top. There's like a lot of mechanisms like I'm seeing that I think are really interesting, which is basically, you know, having like, you know, extremely high fees for the first, you know, X amount of seconds at trading so that,

Starting point is 01:55:07 you know, the snipers will still get some ownership, but they're the ownership is like greatly reduced on this rate limiting. So there's like a max purchase amount, uh, you know, for the first couple of seconds. So yeah, a lot of these, um, anti sniper mechanisms are just like kind of evolving right now. Um, and I think they're going to lead to a much healthier ecosystem. Um, and in addition, like, like, yeah, I think it's like the kind of few, it's hard to say what is good, but it's much easier to say what is bad. So if we do detect bad actors, it's pretty easy for us to kind of disincentivize future bad actors.

Starting point is 01:55:38 Yeah. How much of the viral growth or the growth of the company right now has been, would you attribute just to the specific kind of like viral growth hack of like being able to launch a coin directly on Twitter or X? Yeah, I'd say maybe like 50%. I think the, you know, the other thing is that, you know, within the so-and-so trenches is, uh, you know, they've been trading these kind of like traditional meme coins, uh, forever. And this, uh, it's a really fun game that everyone enjoys,

Starting point is 01:56:08 but there is hunger for a new game and I think that the vision here has really like energized the whole space so that narrative alone I think has done a lot of damage in a good way the opportunity right yeah yeah yeah anyway anything else very cool we're good this is great I'm sure you have a bunch of new things to work on in the in the 15 minutes that you've been on. So good luck building. Yeah, excited to follow. Yeah, thanks for breaking it down. I actually look at the time.

Starting point is 01:56:32 Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. It's been cool to see everything go up for you guys in a good way. Yeah, yeah, we appreciate it. Thanks a lot. We'll talk to you soon. Great to chat. Cheers.

Starting point is 01:56:41 Fantastic. A round of applause. It's great to see him winning. If you're in CPG, privates of crypto. Yeah. It works. It works. I guess that's the play. Every once in a while. Next up, we have Tom from Dragonfly Capital coming in the studio.

Starting point is 01:56:55 We'll break down some more trends, investments. Yeah, it is interesting to look at companies like Pump, which was only launched something like a year ago, and now is done close to a billion dollars of revenue, then you have Believe, and both these businesses look pretty obvious in hindsight, right? But just required a specific type of founder to unlock it. Really quickly, if you're designing a crypto app,

Starting point is 01:57:22 you gotta be on Vanta, go to vanta.com, think bigger, build faster, Figma helps design a crypto app, you got to be on Vanta. Go to Vanta.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build. You said Vanta instead of Figma. Oh, sorry, Figma. Go to Figma.com. It's a big day. Whoa, whoa.

Starting point is 01:57:36 Yeah, go to Figma.com. It is the background of the show. And if you work at Vanta, use Figma to design Vanta. That's right. We're creating a Koretsu. And if you're at Figma, use Vanta for compliance, for SOC 2 compliance. Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust.

Starting point is 01:57:51 Continuously, Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. That's right. And two ads and one go, let's do it. Nice work, program. That's right. And kill two ads in one go. Let's do it.

Starting point is 01:58:06 Nice work, John. Let's bring in Tom. Let's bring in Tom. How you doing, Tom? There he is. Good. Nice to meet you. Technology brothers.

Starting point is 01:58:13 What's up? Good to see you guys. What's happening? How are you? Not a lot. Doing well. I'm loving the suits. I mean, you guys always bring it, but you look great.

Starting point is 01:58:21 Have you watched the stream at all? Are we asking too normie of questions? Or are we hitting the right topics? No, it's the right blend of norminess. There's a lot of stable coin Conversation that's to be expected, you know people people have the stables. So no, it's been good. It's been great I mean my bear case on stables is I went super long stable coins and my portfolio is completely flat And so I'm looking for alpha, give me some crazy ideas. What are you excited about right now

Starting point is 01:58:47 that's not one year out, but 10 years out, 100 years out? What's the future look like? Break it down. A hundred years out, I think we're all gonna be dead and replaced by a agent. So it's all good. I'm not too concerned about that. You know, on the stable coin thing, I wouldn't sweat it.

Starting point is 01:59:02 I think you're gonna get a little, you know, circle equity airdrop during the Ikea. They're gonna just airdrop some shares to all the USDC holders. We're shelling for the US dollar. We're shelling, we're US dollar shells. Yeah, anytime a company sells like a traditional crypto asset and buys USDC,

Starting point is 01:59:20 they're defending the dollar. They're defending the dollar. Yeah. I agree. I actually, you know, I think you're talking about stablecoin. And when people talk about stablecoins, they talk a lot about flow. They talk about using stablecoins for payments,

Starting point is 01:59:33 B2B payments, P2P payments, whatever. I think the stock thing is actually underrated. And there's a few people in DC who talk about this. I think Paul Ryan was actually talking about basically stablecoins being a way to You know mitigate a lot of the US debt because now you have all these new Treasury holders Tether is like the seventh largest Treasury holder at this point and I'm like this feels like a very pro US Bipartisan topic of yes, we want people to be buying we want more marginal Treasury buyers

Starting point is 02:00:02 stablecoins provide that route. And it's like a little bit of like a, you know, saying the quiet part out loud, but I don't really care. I'm, you know, very pro US and I think like using promoting the digital assets, which people saw as alternatives to the dollar are now some of the greatest defenders. Yeah, kind of dig into it, though, is is like Tethers the seventh largest holder, is that because they displaced like fidelity by taking like all of the treasuries and they just moved them over?

Starting point is 02:00:31 Or are these, can we really think of these as like net new treasuries that are being bought? These are incremental, right? Cause these are people who are offshore, people who are in Argentina or Turkey. Certainly maybe some of it is cannibalistic, but for the most part, from what we've seen from, and actually Rob Haddock, who's one of the GPs with me

Starting point is 02:00:49 at Dragonfly just had a great stable coin research piece come out yesterday talking about who's actually using stable coins. And it's yes, some people in the US, and yes, maybe some people who previously would have purchased treasuries through the broker, but actually it's people who are offshore. And that is actually, I think, kind of the killer app.

Starting point is 02:01:08 What is happening in the Asian crypto markets right now? I know you've spent a ton of time over the years kind of focused in that area. How is the regulatory environment kind of evolving? What does crypto activity look like? How do we get them to rotate entirely into USDC? Yeah. Yeah, that's part two.

Starting point is 02:01:28 Well, they're waiting for the airdrop. No, I mean, Asia and the US have always, I think, would say specialized when it comes to crypto. Like, if you look back the past three, four years, Asia has really been running laps around the US when it comes to anything C-Fi. We're early investors in Bybit and Bitget, which are now two of the largest exchanges, incredible businesses.

Starting point is 02:01:53 I mean, we're talking billions of dollars in revenue. Some of the features and some of the products that they offered, US exchanges are just now sort of catching up to. So I would say as one example, a lot of Asian exchanges offered what we now call C-Defi of offering a totally normal, centralized exchange experience in the front end, but wrapping some sort of defi protocol on the backend

Starting point is 02:02:18 to be able to offer people trading for new assets or to be offer lending and financing opportunities or yield opportunities or whatever is actually available on chain, but without all the complexity and yuckiness of having to manage your own keys, which is kind of what normies want. Coinbase just launched Bitcoin-backed loans using Morpho, which is an on-chain lending protocol, maybe a few months ago. So this is something where the US is now just playing catch up to what's been happening in Asia for many, many years.

Starting point is 02:02:48 I think there's also been this trend of more, I would say, Chinese, previously O2O founders, moving into crypto and, frankly, also moving offshore. Because they see, hey, venture in China is kind of dead. The domestic market is kind of dead. But I'm a really great technologist. I'm a really great builder. Building in crypto is a way to access a global user base

Starting point is 02:03:12 and global capital base, but you know, with sort of the skills that I already have. And so, you know, we're early investors in Kaido, which is sort of this now has been coined InfoFi, which I don't quite love, but I think it's a cool concept of- Sounds cool. Yeah, yeah, basically I don't quite love, but I think it's a cool concept of. Sounds cool. Yeah, yeah, basically scraping Twitter data right now,

Starting point is 02:03:29 ingesting that and then sort of spitting that back out into this sort of gamified cloud system. They also do some really cool stuff with like transcribing all these podcasts and just like giving you sort of like an alpha sense for crypto, but again, that's like a lot of Asian talent now sort of moving into crypto. Interesting.

Starting point is 02:03:46 How are you thinking about the intersection of AI and crypto personally? We've talked with a number of people about the potential of stable coins within agents, but there's a bunch of other potential. How often should you pivot from AI to crypto and back? Is that every three months, every six months, every two years? What are you thinking? No, but in all seriousness, how are you, I mean, I imagine you're a consumer crypto investor. You need to get this bet right.

Starting point is 02:04:11 Totally. Otherwise, you're going to look like a fool in 10 years. Jordy, this is what I have nightmares about. I am. I'm sure you do. No, I think we've been maybe a little bit contrarian when it comes to AI crypto in being more bearish on this category.

Starting point is 02:04:27 I think a lot of what AI crypto has broken down into is people trying to do decentralized inference, this GPU marketplace. This is, again, an old idea in crypto. This was something that Gollum way back in the day was trying to offer for video rendering. Now coming back, there's decentralized training, decentralized data marketplaces. I think for the most part, this is just really tricky to build, right? Like if you think about how you actually train a state of the art model,

Starting point is 02:04:54 you don't use a million consumer grade GPUs all around the world. It's like you want one big co-located A100 cluster. Like that is actually kind of the thing that you want. A decentralized network actually, it doesn't really have the right characteristics of something. The type of compute that you want, compute is not a monolith. The areas where we've been investing in AI meets crypto in there,

Starting point is 02:05:19 that we get really excited about. You mentioned MPC and agent payments. I agree, this just seems like kind of the no brainer where you want deterministic final finality, you want your micro payments, something that just like existing SaaS company existing SaaS payment companies just aren't really set up to provide. Do you want to be able to say, hey, I want like one simple API call for a fraction of a penny,

Starting point is 02:05:45 and then never going to use the service again. That's something where stablecoin payments are uniquely positioned to be able to do this, but it's just not something that you're normally going to see out of traditional payment companies. So we're investors in a company called Gold Sky, which is building in this category. We're also, I mean, kind of on the compute topic, we're investors in EXO, which is sort of borderline crypto. It's, I don't know if you've seen them around Twitter, but basically they allow you to run sort of sharded

Starting point is 02:06:16 inference locally on your own network. So let's say you have, you know, a couple of Mac studios, they're really sort of specializing Apple Silicon right now. It will automatically discover and execute, let's say something like DeepSeq R1 across those different computers on your local network. So you can run really great models on consumer grade hardware,

Starting point is 02:06:37 given sort of the existing shortage of GPUs. And so you can imagine that, hey, if you can sort of distribute and start to compute across your local network, maybe at some point in the future, you can actually do that across a global network. They're building towards that. I don't know if that's exactly the direction that they want to go. But in the interim, you have this really, really useful tool that allows you to actually get access to local edge compute models, which I think ultimately is where that whole industry is going to go, versus, hey, we're all going to be running our own models on someone else's cloud. Back to the venture side, how do you see crypto funds evolving? It seems like there's a number of funds with massive AUM and maybe not enough places to bet on the equity side? Do these funds end up having, you know,

Starting point is 02:07:26 you know, be end up 80% sort of liquid, 20% equity, you know, sort of early stage focused or how do you see that evolving? Especially I was talking with with Ani on your team offline and he was talking about how with AI being so deflationary, we just have companies now that have massive potential but just don't really need capital. So you're sitting in the investor's seat being like, please take my money versus maybe 10 years ago would have been reversed.

Starting point is 02:07:59 Totally. I think that is definitely a trend that we see. I don't think it's even necessarily a crypto venture thing specifically, but I mean, you were talking earlier about people throwing ARR in the bio. And it's like, yeah, that is downstream from just operators having so much leverage now that they didn't have before. Crypto amplifies that where now you can sort of go public. You can access a massive user base. You can be way more sort of revenue positive than you were before.

Starting point is 02:08:25 And so maybe the history of crypto funds just to sort of take a step back. If you think of sort of like 2017 2018, for reference, Dragonfly was started in 2018. Crypto was a monolith. You give some capital to a fund manager and they're going to decide, okay, I'm going to buy some Bitcoin. I'm going to buy some ETH. Am I going to invest in a early stage equity round? Am I going to buy a SAFT? Whatever that sort of blend was, they're going to be managing that for you. And oftentimes that was in a true closed-ended venture structure.

Starting point is 02:08:55 But sometimes it would be in a liquid hedge fund structure with some side pocket. And it was like the whole thing was kind of no one really knew what this asset class was going to look like. And so you give capital to someone else and they figure it out. There was also obviously a byproduct of the fact that even getting access to something like Bitcoin previously was so difficult, right? Like you couldn't buy it through your brokerage, your bank, no ETFs, most just like you need some wacky custodian. But the whole process was very convoluted and so great. You've managed to do a fund. That's something you can underwrite. And they can actually go and determine how much of the Bitcoin exposure that you want. You fast forward several years.

Starting point is 02:09:31 And now, hey, if you're a reasonably sophisticated LP, you can go and choose how much Bitcoin you want to buy yourself. We actually don't buy major liquids in our fund at all. And it's like, I don't need to charge you two and 20 to go buy Bitcoin or E through Sol or whatever it actually is. You can go do that for yourself. And so there's been more specialization in the crypto fund area where now you have true dedicated venture funds like Dragonfly that are kind of doing, let's say, seed through B in addition to, hey, maybe doing some treasury purchases for

Starting point is 02:10:06 some liquid assets that we think have sort of venture upside. And then you have sort of true dedicated liquid funds. Maybe those are delta-neutral funds or credit funds or actually just sort of long-only discretionary funds. But there's sort of this true split. And I would say it's a bit like the sharks and the jets. I think the liquid funds always talk shit about the venture funds and the venture funds. I don't really talk shit about the liquid funds. I think they're great. But it's, you know, there's sort of the specialization in the strategy, maybe to what, you know, Ani was mentioning and what you were mentioning earlier.

Starting point is 02:10:39 Now the trajectory of fundraising goes, hey, we're going to raise a pre-seed, though maybe we'll raise a seed. Maybe we'll do an ATBD. But generally, hey, we're going to raise a pre-seed, though maybe we'll raise a seed. Maybe we'll do an ATBD, but generally, hey, you'll launch a token, token will go public, and then maybe you'll do a treasury sale after the fact if you need more capital. And so if you've raised north of a billion dollars, to your point, where do you actually go and deploy that? Maybe there are some equity-only companies, and certainly we do a number of those where we think hey, there's this company's gonna IPO You know, we don't think there's gonna be a token

Starting point is 02:11:09 It can be just just a pure sort of revenue generating company And I think that's like actually kind of an underrated area of the space But it's sort of unclear where the rest of that capital goes Which is why you certainly see these very wacky rounds where some company raises some insane amount of money and you're like, what is going on here? And I think there's just this lag effect between capital raised by VCs and then capital actually deployed into startups. What keeps you up at night about the industry right now, potential risks?

Starting point is 02:11:40 It feels like the industry broadly, you know, this year has been up up and down but so has every year in crypto to some degree but generally the industry is sort of like riding on a high getting more regulatory clarity there hasn't been you know 20 billion dollar hack in a while but like what what kind of what what kind of risk do you see at a high level that actually were you? Yeah, a million things, honestly. It's an industry that is always changing, and therefore there's always more things to be worried about, but also things to be excited about at the same time. Maybe to your point around regulatory clarity, I'm more worried that we don't get regulatory clarity, and we fail worried that we don't get regulatory clarity

Starting point is 02:12:25 and we fail to get a stablecoin bill passed, we fail to get a market structure bill passed. Both of those are in the short term, not terribly bad. I mean, I would say it's impressive how well stablecoins have grown in spite of being in this sort of regulatory area. In the long term, the question is, can we get a digital version of cash that is,

Starting point is 02:12:48 if they can have privacy for peer-to-peer transactions, or do we get true Panopticon status centralized control? That's something that is gonna be bad on, you know, a 10 to 100 year time horizon, maybe not so short term bad, but we need to lay the foundation for that now so we don't end up in that bad situation. I'm also frankly maybe a little bit worried about a lot of these Bitcoin treasury structured companies. I think there's only so much market demand for these assets and I'm like,

Starting point is 02:13:22 it is great when number go up I'm a little bit worried about what's happening when number goes down. Let's just give it up for when the number goes up. Yeah yeah just stop right there you don't need to talk about when the number go down. Yeah we want to cut you off. That type of thing never happens so let's not worry about that but overall I mean it is a great time in the industry. It feels like, like you were saying, it just never dies. Every time someone thinks it's over, that's actually the time that we're so back.

Starting point is 02:13:52 That is the exact time to be back. And it feels like we're back now in a big way. So yeah, we're really excited about where the future of the industry is going. Well, thank you for hopping on. This is fantastic. Thank you for coming on. Come back on again soon.

Starting point is 02:14:06 I think you might be a generational yapper. You're one of us. You know, we lived a post. We died a post. It's all part of the same lifecycle. So thanks for having me on. All right, thanks for coming on. Good to see you, Tom.

Starting point is 02:14:17 Cheers. In the meantime, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. I'm just going to clap through this drum. For modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. I would bet that every founder that is coming on the show today already uses Linear.

Starting point is 02:14:35 Don't say that. They're all about to convert with our coupon code. We don't have a code. We don't have a code. Linear is going to eventually get to 105% market penetration because certain companies will have two instances running. That's ideal. Yeah, that's our goal.

Starting point is 02:14:49 We're trying to capture 110% of the TAM. We'll go into that more later. Next up, we have Constantine from Blocked Even here. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Hey, guys. How's it going? Great to have you. Thanks so much for joining.

Starting point is 02:15:06 Would you mind kicking off with a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company, just to get us started? Yeah, yeah, no, listen, it's a great question. Blockdemon, you know the word daemon means in computer science and operating system that runs silently in the background, and that's really what Blockdemon is. We connect institutions to blockchain networks and we allow for compliant and secure monetization of the underlying fee and earn structure. Translated, it means we run nodes for institutions.

Starting point is 02:15:35 We're pure B2B play. We run core infrastructure. We run around 250,000 nodes across 40 different data centers around the world, We run around 250,000 nodes across 40 different data centers around the world, enabling basically institutions to purchase and hold assets and their respective consumers. That has been the large activity over the last five years. Right now, we're pivoting more into the DeFi area of things, where the next few years are really all about allowing people to borrow and lend against the assets that they're now able to hold and buy a little more easily. Blockdemon is an enabler. We're really purpose-built to meet enterprise-grade

Starting point is 02:16:16 demand for infrastructure. A couple of things that are special, I guess, is that we are domiciled in the US, for better or worse. And we've been able to attract very institutional capital. And so on our board governance, we have people like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, and Citibank is another large institution with major shareholder status. And so we've got a really unique investor and partner group, I'd say out of the top 500 institutions offering crypto, 70% are customers of our infrastructure. And so we're very foundational to the space.

Starting point is 02:16:56 We've been around for seven and a half years. We raised a bunch of money from said institutions in order to really bring institutions to crypto networks and do it in a way that's as mentioned secure. I'm from Germany, I come from the cell network world and I always describe nodes as cell networks. Who's that Nokia? Yeah, Nokia. Deutsche Telekom actually is my claim to fame. I worked for, uh, back then a young man called Nika Sharoha who, uh, uh, you know,

Starting point is 02:17:28 for a moment was president at Softbank and now runs Palo Alto networks and also was chief business officer at Google. And so there's been a lot of people who started in cell networks and figuring out how to make that data work. One network, one type of network to another. Yeah. Yeah. It's all the same. Well, can you give us a temperature check on the enterprise? Um, One network, one type of network to another. Yeah, yeah. It's all the same. There you go. Well, can you give us a temperature check

Starting point is 02:17:46 on the enterprise? In the last cycle, a lot of the pitches for the enterprise, there was a lot of exploratory budgets, a lot of, oh, maybe we can put our inventory on a blockchain and we'll store the data, you know, and, but now our institutions coming around and are they more up to speed on what crypto can do for them? How are they thinking about plugging in?

Starting point is 02:18:08 And what is what is kind of top of mind for crypto amongst like the Fortune 500 from what you from what you've assessed? Yeah, so I think there's different categories, right? And so first off, obviously, the core financial institutions, the Robinhoods, the Paypal's that enable people to purchase crypto and hold it are now all investigating, how do you earn using these assets? And so I think you have existing fintech players that have offered basic crypto services that are now feel a lot more empowered in what we call staking or DeFi to offer sort of earn adjacent products to their customer base. I think you'll see a big trend there. In the TradFi world,

Starting point is 02:18:53 I think you're going to see a lot more interest in wallets specifically. And so they're really at that stage of figuring out, hey, what technology do we use in order to custody crypto assets in our own infrastructure? And so I think in the past, basically, you didn't really want to touch crypto or if you used a third party that you could point to if anything went wrong. And so now I think in the current iteration,

Starting point is 02:19:19 all these institutions are really figuring out what their own proprietary basic solution setup is in order to custody assets and then also offer adjacent earned potential here. And so we see a lot of that and with the sort of more Sony type of companies in the world, you see a lot of interest in building their own version of a blockchain L2s. You know, I don't know if you remember the good old days when everybody had a totally permissioned little hyperledger thing going. I think we've made some progress there.

Starting point is 02:19:49 It is a funny thing. It's like, we should pay attention to this crypto thing and then, oh, we should just make our own blockchain. That's the way to get involved. It definitely was an era. Yeah, we should start our own Visa network competitor. Yeah, why not? Why not?

Starting point is 02:20:04 It's like, a little trick. That's right. Go for it. Yeah, and then it our own Visa network competitor. Yeah. Yeah, why not? Why not? It's like, a little trick. That's right. Go for it. And then it's changed with the optimism, the ZKZinc, arbitrams, people being able to easily spin up a sort of permission chain on a public network. And so there's been some progress there. And we see quite a bit there.

Starting point is 02:20:24 And then obviously all the ETF stuff and technology that you need in order to basically custody these assets and offer yield over time. What legacy, you know, we've had a bunch of interesting conversations today in different perspectives and it feels like in many, you know, the irony of stable coins is that in many way they actually sort of expand and support the dollar, right? So this crypto being this sort of disruptive force is at the same time propping up this sort of legacy system. What areas of traditional finance do you feel like

Starting point is 02:21:00 are most prone to disruption over the next decade. Yeah, I mean, well. Because the context is like those legacy institutions are coming to you now, or they already have, and they're saying help us not get disrupted. Like we don't want to be Nokia basically. Yeah, yeah, well, I think interestingly enough, everyone is, and thank you for pointing that out.

Starting point is 02:21:23 I feel like I joined Nokia in 2005 on top of the world. I left in 2010 after I ran it into the ground. Hey, at least you can joke about it now. Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, I was obviously a small little figure there, but it was an interesting learning, right? Because ultimately you had an entity that was very, very good in building really complex technology in thousand different versions, was very, very good in building really complex technology in thousand different versions, but very, very bad in streamlining singular software tools across its platform.

Starting point is 02:21:51 And so I think you'll find that financial institutions have a similar risk, right? Like the IT stack of a large stratify is insane. You know, I mean, it's probably akin to what Elon Musk, when he talks about Doge, you'd be surprised about how archaic a lot of these systems actually still are. I mean, if you look at the structure of the Swift network that obviously is one, sorry guys. And then you also, just the ERP systems underneath it

Starting point is 02:22:19 are so complex and JP Morgan has a hundred thousand engineers and they keep on building and doing stuff. And so pivoting away from that archaic infrastructure is really, really difficult. And they're starting to do it. I think, frankly, I think we're all way behind here, even as institutions, because the beauty of AI and blockchain and the opening up of financial systems via Bitcoin is going to accelerate the movability of money and so remittance specifically are sort of areas where I think time's running out for institutions. It's like either you can innovate really, really quickly or people are going to find

Starting point is 02:22:59 other ways to do it and let it be a Coinbase issued stable coin or something like that, that can actually take care of a lot of these things. And so it's going to be really, really interesting how financial institutions hold on to also the custody component, right? And crypto has a self custodial cryptographic sort of component. And if you think about what you pay your bank, first and foremost, you pay them so they hold custody of your assets, right? And so often, custody can be fairly archaic. But with that custody, you also obviously lose a lot of control.

Starting point is 02:23:30 And, you know, you have technology and solutions today that can replicate basically what an institution offers here for zero cost, right? It's really the consumer that is nervous in touching them. And the infrastructure currently is way, way too complex for anyone to use. But you're going to see a lot of improvements there on the user experience front. Also with AI, I heard you guys mention AI and obviously, you know, you got to pivot into AI every three months. But I think one use case that I kind of want to point out that we're working on that I think is really interesting on the wallet layer is using AI to issue very simple commands to crypto networks, right? case that I kind of want to point out that we're working on that I think is really interesting on the wallet layer is using AI to issue very simple commands to crypto networks, right to just say, hey, I just want to send Ethereum to this

Starting point is 02:24:12 address. Yeah, you know, like kind of that can be nice. If you could tell a wallet, you know, an agentic wallet, just make me a 10% return daily, compounded daily, just forever, please don't make mistakes. You know, but basically make mistakes. Just get me a 10 bag, a 10 X this. Right. You know, but basically make the interface that simple, right? Hey, wire securely $100 to France.

Starting point is 02:24:33 You know, I don't know if they need it, but you know, we can, those types of things, I think are gonna be real improvements on how this works. Yeah, Jordy. How, what's happening with emerging markets, we've talked about with other guests today around the risk that certain governments might not want their citizens to be, you know, selling their native currency for something like stables

Starting point is 02:24:58 or other assets. And so how much attention are you paying to the policy decisions in markets outside of the US or is that not a focus for you right now? No, for sure. I mean, the outside of the US is still our largest market because we were in the US and obviously got clobbered by regulators and by basically Operation Chokepoint 2.0. And so we expanded massively into Asia. Asia is a really exciting market for us. You'll see

Starting point is 02:25:27 Asia's lots of things, lots of different technologies and standards. And you have the full spectrum of really, really dogmatic and suppressive systems and very, very open ones, technically. And so yes, we follow this very closely. I think if I may age myself again, it reminds me a little bit back in the day, we were trying to figure out how to distribute music via digital channels and cell networks. And so once you pixelate stuff in ones and zeros, it's just really difficult to contain it. And you're going to see that with currencies on a very basic level as well. It's just like, you can try and do the China and ban Bitcoin and things like that,

Starting point is 02:26:07 but the reality is it's a temporary solution. People are gonna find ways around it. And so I think we've- Yeah, like the piracy, media piracy has not been solved, right? Like at all, not even close, right? It's probably easier than ever to get movies online that that that Without you know paying for them

Starting point is 02:26:29 So the idea that you're gonna sort of regulate crypto out of his existence is is a bit silly last question for me MCP people have been talking about potentially integrating stable coins into that standard where how do you see it evolving? What are you excited about? Or do you think it'll just live side by side with crypto rails? I mean, it's a good question. I mean, I have a preference, right? I think, um, what is your preference? Well, my preference is that it's all integrated in one, right?

Starting point is 02:26:57 Like I really want to, um, uh, ultimately I'm, I'm an old school crypto guy. I want access and, and inclusion via crypto rails for everyone that no single entity can control. And so my job is to bring a substantial amount of volume from hard-coded institutional rails into open source on-chain networks. And so that's my preference. I think it's gonna take a minute with regulators,

Starting point is 02:27:26 even though we have a much better administration that's a lot more open to thinking about how to regulate this and the market structure bill coming that we're working with and trying to ensure that this gets done correctly. I think it's going to take a few iterations. We're going to get something done, some regulation at first, and some of it is going to be good, some of it is not going to be so good.

Starting point is 02:27:49 And then we've got to see how much support the industry can continue to garner across also the aisle, basically. It has to be a bipartisan issue on the regulatory front as well if we want to see real progress. But obviously, we're very optimistic here that we can come up with something that is as open as possible and replace us as many of the legacy rails as possible.

Starting point is 02:28:15 Fantastic, thank you so much for stopping by. Hope you have a great rest of your day. Yeah, really enjoyed the conversation. We'd love to get the update from you as things progress and we get more clarity on the regulatory side too. But thanks so much for stopping by we'll talk to you soon. Cheers Next up I gotta tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance benchmark series benchmark series Yeah, I wonder how sales tax

Starting point is 02:28:42 Well, you know who has to pay sales tax pudgy penguins because they sell real things in the real world Oh, yeah, they do they do and we have Luca from pudgy penguins coming on the stream next talking Just make the next 20 minutes Exactly exactly how you paying sales tax. Let's get to the really important questions Yeah, we don't know what the market people want know. We want to know about your sales tax stack and how numerals fit in. Luca, welcome to the stream. We are, of course, joking.

Starting point is 02:29:12 How are you doing? What's going on? Welcome. Hey, guys, happy to be here. Thanks so much for hopping on. I'd love to start with kind of the, a little bit of the history of Pudgy Penguins because I know that there's been like a series of eras for the

Starting point is 02:29:26 company. And you're obviously taking it in somewhat of a new direction or expansion now. But what's the story that you tell about the genesis of the project, your involvement over time and like where things are going. So the the 60 second version is I was a huge collector of of pudgy penguins when they launched about three and a half years ago They were kind of one of the three golden projects of the NFT bull run. It was really board apes punks and penguins Unfortunately penguins kind of got mismanaged They were founded by a bunch of 18 year olds in their college dorm basement with no operational experience

Starting point is 02:30:02 So at no fault of them, you know board Board Apes ended up being a $4 billion business. Punks became a legacy collection with a multi-billion dollar market cap. And Penguins kind of withered to the wayside. But at that time, while I was collecting the NFTs, I was CMO and co-founder of a company called Gel Blaster, which was North America's fastest growing toy business. No way. I was really involved in just IP. You got to get those for the studio. founder of a company called Gel Blaster, which was North America's fastest growing toy business. I was really involved in just IP and the studio. Yeah, I see those ads all the time. I didn't

Starting point is 02:30:30 really see her behind this. Ben, order some gel blasters right now. Yeah, I'll get you guys sent. I'll send some to the office. But that that I was I was really immersed there. And so when I just closed my eyes and I thought Pudgy Penguins, I just thought this is a multi billion dollar business. And so rather than being like a disgruntled holder who was complaining all day, I decided to step up to the plate. And I bought the project for about two and a half million bucks three years ago, April 4. So we're about three years and three and a half months into this. I think what we want to be today is I think twofold. I think on one side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of crypto. When you think crypto today, I think what we want to be today is I think twofold. I think on one side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of crypto. When you think crypto today, I think crypto is intimidating.

Starting point is 02:31:09 It's taboo. But I think there's no better way to invade the hearts and minds of everyday consumers and with cute pudgy penguins. And I think there's no better representative from a mascot perspective for the industry than the pudgy penguin. You know, the story all encompassing. And on the other side of the spectrum, we want to be the face of penguins around the world when you think penguins I want you to think pudgy penguins, and I just believe that the penguin animal

Starting point is 02:31:31 Do you do you guys give Do you guys like do any charity things for the actual penguins? You know kind of like a royalty a little give back for the we've done a couple activations I think children's to children's health and pengations. I think Children's Health and Penguins, I think are the two places that we donate and we're charitable. Awesome, very cool. You mentioned that the early Pudgey Penguins community

Starting point is 02:31:53 was unhappy with the development of the project. It sounds like that's in contrast to the other NFT projects where people were satisfied. But from my perspective, like a lot of these they the 10k NFTs go out they meant and then I Don't really engage with these projects deeply enough to know like what is the community clamoring for? So what was the community in pudgy penguins clamoring for that? They weren't receiving and then what are you building that actually will satisfy the community or what?

Starting point is 02:32:24 Like what are they asking for and what what are you trying to give them? Yeah, I think I think what every community member and crypto wants is productivity and and pushing the boundaries and forward progress Within you know both the the internal IP and maybe just for the category in and of itself But just to be clear like we bought punchy penguins under the guise that the NFT race and the NFT build out was severely underdeveloped. And there was a bar still yet to be set. And we bought this business to win in this category, and ultimately to win in the broader crypto category. And so I think from our perspective, it's not just winning for our community members within our small niche and within our, you know, within within the Pudgy Penguin universe, it was really winning for the entirety of NFTs because prior to us, NFTs stayed in this digital universe and this, you know, vision that Ready Player One was going to come 20 years earlier than it actually was going to come. And I thought, you know,

Starting point is 02:33:21 if this was the next generation brand and all of these companies were raising billions of dollars under this guys, then as a brand builder for the last eight years, I felt like they just weren't doing all of the obvious things that all these brands have to do to win. Are we going digital? Is everything going to be digital 20 years from now? Sure. But today people need physical interactions. And I think that's a huge reason why we've won and we've been so successful the last couple of years is we really blended The two worlds right we have you know toys and 10,000 retailers every toys tied in with an NFT and crypto experience And and the whole thing really segues you would build this thing the same way You've you know Hasbro or or Mattel or Disney would build it, but it's crypto native. It's internet native, and I think that's the difference How do you balance developing the IP in the way

Starting point is 02:34:09 that you believe will create the most value long-term and kind of the desires or wishes from the community of initial holders, right? Because as a business, you constantly need to be evolving, reinventing yourself. And I imagine there's a bunch of good parts about having this super loyal, dedicated fan base that's heavily invested in the projects, but then there's also some hard decisions to make at different times.

Starting point is 02:34:37 Yeah, I think the community's bought in under this guise that we are creating the internet's Mickey Mouse and that everything that we do is to support that thesis and they're aligned in that vision I think the problem or not the problem But I think the hard part about this business and it's and it's relevant for a lot of crypto founders But I coined this like three years ago Which is we're basically building a publicly traded startup where I have all of the cons of being publicly traded with none of the pros And I'm a startup, right? If I shit the bed, right, and price in crypto is the best marketing

Starting point is 02:35:08 because it's such a hyper-financialized asset class. And I do something great, price goes up, holders are in the money, the more in the money they are, the more they champion, the more they recycle those profits back into the product and the different product lines that we have within the business. But then obviously if you shit the bed, the financialization to me is a hyper form of

Starting point is 02:35:31 alignment and it can be your greatest superpower, which I think we've been able to harness and galvanize over the last couple of years, or it can be your greatest kryptonite. You've seen situations like this with basically 98% of founders in crypto is that ends up biting them in the ass. They make one wrong step. They don't have that relationship. They don't have their report, the community, and the whole thing just kind of backfires. Yeah, do you think if you look back at the NFT category holistically, is our projects, is part of that kryptonite just being over capitalized. How much of a strength have you, you know, I don't know how resource constrained you guys have been exactly, but I imagine it's quite a bit more constrained than many other projects in the space, especially as, you

Starting point is 02:36:22 know, certain projects got marked, you know marked really, really high, a bunch of capital flooded in, and I don't really have a good lens on how that's worked out. Yeah, I think that's just entrepreneurship 101. I mean, crypto in general makes people more money than they're supposed to make. It's kind of like there's an arbitrage that I talk about a lot where, you know, there's a real opportunity for builders in Web2 to come here because the premium on users and success here is probably 10 to 15 to 20X what it would be in the real world. Meaning like the EBITDA of Pudgey Penguins, you know, might be, you know, we might be

Starting point is 02:37:02 a $300, $350 million business today. We've created five plus billion dollars in value over the last couple of years, and our total ecosystem is north of $2 billion. So I think from our perspective, it's really just a matter of, being resource constraint has been one of the biggest things for us and probably

Starting point is 02:37:26 the lens that I'm most proud about. I mean, our next 10 competitors that we've outperformed over the last couple of years have, you know, nine figures in funding, whether it's from venture or community. But that's naturally, every entrepreneur gets into that problem at some point, unless you really fight tooth and nail over the course of a long period of time to earn that capital. But in crypto, you can make a lot of capital

Starting point is 02:37:51 and raise a lot of capital really quickly. And the NFT cohort of 2020, 2021 is exactly that. I mean, guys made 50, 100, a billion dollars within 12 months of being in business. You're not gonna be a superstar organization off of that type of growth, unless you're just a one in a million entrepreneur in group. But that wasn't the case here.

Starting point is 02:38:13 And so I think us being scrappy has been huge for us. We raised nine million our seed round, and we haven't raised anything else for Pudgey since then. And this year we'll do $40, $50 million in revenue. So, so far so good. That's awesome. Can you talk about the decision to surface crypto functionality to the user, to the customer?

Starting point is 02:38:37 The Instagram has 1.8 million followers, never really mentions crypto. There's a world where you're communicating to a non-cryptonative audience. You have a different group of customers that's very crypto-native. How do you balance those things out? Is it all just one on-ramp, one direction

Starting point is 02:38:52 or the other direction? How do you think about that dichotomy? Yeah, so I'm a consumer product guy. And consumer products, conversion's an action. In crypto, and I think with building IP and character and love and affinity, I think conversion is a process, right? And so, I think the idea that, you know, you immediately sell people on something that is still taboo and still intimidating, I think is a mistake. And so, my objective is, how do I create love and affinity around this character, you know, positive impact around this character, positive association around this character over the course of time. And as they become super fans and participate in fandom, they then go and figure out that this is crypto and go down that rabbit hole.

Starting point is 02:39:35 And I think that's a really beautiful story. Now, on one side, that's epic. But I think a lot of people always misinterpreted our strategy, which is like, oh, how do you get the non crypto user to then go buy our assets, whether it's our token or NFTs. And it's actually a misappropriated way of how I think people look at the strategy. It's more impactful if you're a crypto native, let's say you're a crypto whale and your mom or your cousin or your niece or your nephew or your son or your daughter is then participating in a Pudgy Penguin, buys a Pudgy Penguin product at Walmart or shares you with an Instagram piece of Instagram content or a game or something like that. That aha moment for that crypto whale is then like, oh, I've been in crypto for how long? You know, nothing has has transcended into my family the way that this has. This is clearly doing something for the industry that nobody else is doing.

Starting point is 02:40:26 And that's kind of like our edge. It's like, we believe crypto is for everyone. But right now it's not positioned for that, right? It's positioned for the finance bro, for the cool guy. But if we really want crypto to succeed, it's gotta be for the woman. It's gotta be for the child. As silly as it sounds,

Starting point is 02:40:40 those kids are becoming crypto native. And an anecdotal story that I think your audience will love is I started to meet some of the top Solana traders over the last couple of months. These kids are 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 guys who made 20, $30 million in cash, right? Are 16, 17 years old. Couldn't cook a steak medium rare if they wanted. Those are the crypto native, right? And that next generation will actually be native, unlike you or I, who maybe saw the world before crypto. We're crypto adjacent and we're crypto familiar,

Starting point is 02:41:11 but we're not native. This next cohort that's coming in the next five to 10 years will be crypto native, and that's the audience that I really wanna speak to. That's pretty awesome. Talk to me about the decision to trade-offs between the Ethereum blockchain and Solana. Obviously the project originally launched on Ethereum, but the pudgy token is on Solana now.

Starting point is 02:41:30 What are the trade offs? How do you think about those? Is there one power law winner that's running away with the game or is there a world for both? Yeah, I think they they're functionally trying to achieve two different things in my opinion. I think Ethereum's goal and objective and mission is to be a decentralized network state, which I think is really important for the sake of humanity. Right. Like if you if you weigh a bunch of different variables, AI and just everything that might come into the future, like having a decentralized network state is really, really important. And I think it plays its role really well doing that.

Starting point is 02:42:02 I think Solana is the first blockchain that I've really interfaced with from an outside org in that I think is really trying to be an organization that's built to win, right? And they want to capture as much value in winning and building the biggest and best blockchain in the world. And then all the things that come with that, right? Like low latency, really fast, amazing BD,

Starting point is 02:42:27 getting all the top advisors in to come and help, bootstrap and help ecosystem apps. It's really run like a Silicon Valley organization and its function I think is to win, right? But there's two different functions, I think. I think building a centralized network state and building a blockchain to win, right, and to dominate, you know, tech and to, you know,

Starting point is 02:42:47 because blockchains fundamentally are, what are they really, right? A lot of people tell themselves a lot of different stories. To me, they're borderless payments, right, and they're global, and they're global, so global liquidity and global composability, right? Like those are its two functions, and if

Starting point is 02:43:03 you actually understand that as like an entrepreneur building in the web, those solve two really big problems, right? Like those are its two functions. And if you actually understand that as like an entrepreneur building in the web, those solve two really big problems, right? Like, like immense problems, right? Like, like Stripe used to, you know, Stripe and PayPal would take your money and shut you down and do the whole nine, you know, like blockchain will remove that edge. And so I think they're functionally two different organizations. I think from our perspective, we wanted to launch our token because we wanted everyone to have a piece of our main character, this Internet's Mickey Mouse.

Starting point is 02:43:30 We wanted our followers on Instagram and on YouTube and on TikTok to be able to participate, you know, in purchasing that token. And today, it's hard to argue that Solana doesn't have the best experience for that person coming from Instagram to then go in and purchase something quickly, right? Like Ethereum today, even with cheap gas fees, like no one wants to spend a couple bucks, you know, on some gas fees, even when that's relatively low for the ecosystem, you know, they'll want to spend a couple bucks buying the token and that's about it. So it seemed like a good fit.

Starting point is 02:44:00 That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. This is fantastic. Yeah, I really appreciate your perspective. We'd love to have you back on again for a longer interview. Yeah, this is great. And I'm excited for our Gerald Gel Blaster Nerf battle. Yeah, we need to address. It's gonna be pretty obnoxious. The so stay tuned. Okay, great. We'll talk to you soon. Amazing. Good. Really quickly before our next guest, Public. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields.

Starting point is 02:44:29 They're trusted by millions. Of course crypto. And next up, we have an in-person guest in the studio. First in-person guest ever. Welcome to the stream. Do you guys need to swap headphones? I'm just gonna talk to you directly. Okay, cool.

Starting point is 02:44:44 Cool, cool, cool. I should've worn my suit. I know, you should've worn your suit. I mean, it's, it's, it's, uh, he'll so underdressed. Yeah. Uh, well fitting that you're the first guest. You've been a close friend and, uh, advisor to the show here informally. Yeah. Uh, for a long time. Crypto day. Crypto day. It's been, um, it's been very fun. It's, it's such a, uh, it's amazing to get perspectives from so many different parts of the industry. And, uh, I think it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, Crypto day. Crypto day. It's been very fun. It's amazing to get perspectives from so many different parts of the industry, investors, et cetera.

Starting point is 02:45:12 And there's a lot to be optimistic right now. A lot more so than when you started Crypto the Game. Yeah, I feel like we've launched season one kind of in the depths of the bear market. It was early 2024. I was trying to think about what to do next. And I know we had spoken- Well, you had had this idea forever. Years, yeah. I can kind of give you the whole back story, which I know you know, but could

Starting point is 02:45:34 probably be helpful context for listeners. But when I first started working on it, for real, everyone was like, you're crazy to building crypto right now. But in hindsight, it was kind of the best time to launch. Totally. crazy to building crypto right now, but in hindsight, it was kind of the best time to launch. But yeah, I mean, I kind of grew up an obsessive Survivor fan, watch every single season, they just announced the cast for season 50. I was like off camera reading up on that and apply every year never got a call back. But kind of played this like CD rom version of Survivor called Survivor Ultimate with my friends growing up and it was like very very rudimentary you picked your

Starting point is 02:46:08 Tribemate you, you know played tic-tac-toe for immunity and you voted each other off Against the computer. It was like very very early like early 2000s And I don't know just kind of like always envisioned this world where I could play a version of Survivor online with my friends fast forward to my professional life, I worked at HQ Trivia for The Rise and Fall, which if you're listening, you might remember a live interactive game show and started my career in TV, but joined HQ for kind of the grand vision

Starting point is 02:46:44 of a live interactive TV network so in the same way that HQ took a game show and made it live and mobile and Interactive the same could have and should have been said for a shark tank format or a talent competition or a dating show And of course in my mind the Survivor show so actually first pitched the idea for what is now CTG internally at HQ Probably six or seven years ago now, which is crazy. And then, yeah, it's just one of those ideas that kept coming up. I think I pitched it as an idea for a party round drop

Starting point is 02:47:13 and just kind of like, you know, was starting to think about what was next a couple of years ago. Well, it's interesting because it was this, one of the most complex products that you can build, right? This social, interactive, multiplayer, constantly evolving game that's happening on chain.

Starting point is 02:47:32 So watching you build it, I mean, you and Tyler and Brian and the team just did it very quickly and then got to market. And I remember it very quickly took off. And you very quickly were just, you probably didn't sleep the first week? No, not at all. I mean, it kind of ballooned into this 24-7 game show. I mean, I kind of assumed the way that it's set up,

Starting point is 02:47:57 it's a 10-day season. Every day kind of follows the same format of a daily immunity challenge in the morning. Think like classic arcade games or crypto puzzles or digital scavenger hunts. If you win that challenge, you have immunity and you're safe from the vote that night. Everyone else votes people out. Basically last person standing wins the pot. And I kind of assume people would log in in the morning, meet their tribe mates, make

Starting point is 02:48:24 an alliance, register a score of a game, go back to work and then kind of assume people would log in in the morning, meet their tribe mates, make an alliance, register a score of a game, go back to work, and then kind of come back on that night to vote. But it just was so, so, so time consuming for the players. And as a result, it was just 24-7 for us as well. Yeah, I remember. Weren't people basically calling in sick or taking vacation days so that they can just fully walk in?

Starting point is 02:48:45 My most heavily requested question basically from players between seasons is like when's the next season so I can request my PTO? What was that early controversy you guys had? I think you navigated it well obviously because it turned into a second season and then an acquisition by Uniswap but I feel like you quickly ran into the nature of crypto is that you're talking, I forget who we were talking about this, but maybe it was Balaji, but crypto because it's so financialized

Starting point is 02:49:13 is effectively incentivizing constant penetration testing and incentivizing the world to basically try to hack your system. And I forget the guy's name. Anish. Anish. I'm sure you guys are buddies now. I mean, we made up in the DMs for sure. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:49:29 Yeah, so the way that it works is basically you buy your entry for 0.1 ETH. That entry goes towards the prize, and the entire prize pot goes towards the winner at the end. And I was always kind of concerned that there could be some sort of civil attack. Someone would try to buy up 51% of the entries and basically guarantee themselves a victory.

Starting point is 02:49:52 And there were a couple of things we did to try to prevent that. And for season one, we kind of kept entries uncapped so that people couldn't necessarily figure out what the 51% mark would be. But yeah, right before the entries locked and the season began, Anish and his army of bots basically bought up most of the slots.

Starting point is 02:50:16 And wearing my Web 2 HQ trivia hat, I was like, oh, bots are bad. Basically kicked them all out. And was like, this was built are bad. Basically kicked them all out. And was like, this was built for real people and real players. And immediately got the wrath of crypto Twitter, which somehow happens every season to the point where a few friends joke and think that I'll intentionally drum up some CT controversy

Starting point is 02:50:42 so more people talk about CTG. But I immediately realized that bots aren't bad in this world. And so we ended up refunding Anish and making things right. And he was so nice. And we ended on good terms. What was it like bringing Web2 or sort of traditional companies into CTG?

Starting point is 02:51:07 Because I remember you had some pretty high profile partnerships as well. Yeah, Adidas actually sponsored a challenge during season two, which was our season two controversy. Wow. No, it's all good. But yeah, I mean, it was so incredibly humbling and refreshing to see that basically

Starting point is 02:51:24 after the virality of season one, a brand like Adidas kind of saw this little internet experiment and decided to reach out and ask to be a part of it. So, yeah, we had six sponsors for season two, each sponsoring a different challenge, one of which was Adidas. The rest were all kind of like crypto native brands,

Starting point is 02:51:42 one of which being Uniswap and that kind of like to- Do you expect legacy brands to get more involved with crypto? We every once in a while we'll see them dip their toes in whether it's Adidas and CTG or Nike with its artifact, right? Yeah. But but it feels like that's died off a little bit. But at the same time, traditional institutions are getting more involved with crypto than ever. Yeah, I think eventually we'll see it. I still think it's kind of a dirty word

Starting point is 02:52:09 with the big Fortune 500 non-crypto brands. The artifact example didn't go well for Nike. I would say the CTG example probably didn't go well for Adidas, which is a whole other conversation. But I think we as in crypto builders and pretty much everyone that's been on the show today and that you will speak with has seen some sort of like

Starting point is 02:52:30 the wrath of the trenches and the army. And it's not a great feeling. And if you are a large like Fortune 500 brand with like a crisis comms team and you're kind of like seeing all of those replies and you know, folks feel like basically when the crypto Twitter army like goes after brands, I think it's really hard to deal with so having said all of that as you know the experience in the UI and the UX gets better and you know things like privy like improve the login flow and wallet creation and kind of abstract away all of

Starting point is 02:53:03 basically all of the crypto from these experiences. I think like big brands won't necessarily know that they're doing quote unquote crypto integrations. It'll all just feel like the internet. That makes sense. How have you seen crypto, I would put CTG in the category of crypto entertainment or crypto gaming.

Starting point is 02:53:24 It's one of the few games that it feels like crypto, Twitter, crypto acts like really played and got hyper engaged with, even though it was at a small scale. Have you seen any other games really capture people's attention? I know there was a bunch of like open world games that raised massive amounts of money

Starting point is 02:53:43 but then haven't seemingly haven't delivered? Yeah, ironically for a crypto game founder, I'm not much of a gamer myself. I think of CTG as much more of a game show than a video game. But in my mind, the closest example is Yapster, which is also very heavily inspired by HQ Trivia. I don't know if you've played around with Yapster, but it's an interactive game show where you basically can submit memes. The players can

Starting point is 02:54:09 vote on the memes and the winning meme each show is launched as a token. So it has that and it's 100% live and everyone votes in real time. There's a chat functionality. And because of the speculation of the token that basically wins at the end, it has that feeling of a live show. So I would put Yapster in my mind as the only other live interactive game show that's really, really exciting me right now. And how big can something like that get in your mind?

Starting point is 02:54:40 I think huge. I mean, the secret sauce at HQ was that you could win real money. And that is the case for most of these crypto game shows. I think the difference with CTG and Yabster is that there's kind of only one winner each time. Whereas with something like HQ, tons of people could win. But at the same time, because of that,

Starting point is 02:55:03 you had folks basically winning like 25 cents or less than that with HQ because it grew so big. So yeah, I think like, I don't necessarily know that like a live interactive meme coin show is gonna onboard the masses, but there's like tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people on crypto Twitter right now. What are you seeing right now on,

Starting point is 02:55:24 cause I know you'll end up advising or investing in other early stage crypto projects, what are you seeing as far kind of trends in the early stage? You clearly made the decision with CTG not to raise money. And you had every opportunity to. I remember in the early days, you would ping me, and you'd be like, oh, this fun. I remember having conversations about why it would probably

Starting point is 02:55:52 not be good for CTG if you were to raise. But many people, I think, wouldn't have made that same decision. Yeah, no. I think with regards to raising, I think not every single idea has to be a venture scale idea. We've spoken a ton about this offline. But I think CTG was dreamed up as initially a drop,

Starting point is 02:56:13 like a personal drop. I think that it's not like HQ in the sense that we really embrace seasonality and try to be very close to a TV show. And so we technically go off air for like months in between. And I think the players need that because it's so intense and we need that because it's so intense. And yeah, I think if we had raised,

Starting point is 02:56:34 we probably would be on that like hamster wheel of like having to build some sort of scalable platform. So communities and people can kind of like spin up their own versions of the game. And it was just like a very manual process and I felt like it wasn't necessarily the right choice for CTG but I don't know. I'm excited about

Starting point is 02:56:53 Pixie chess which I know, you know our friend Josh has started and for those listening that aren't familiar The way that it's been described to me is is basically like a noun style auction for different On-chain chess pieces that have magical powers So you can imagine a queen that goes invisible or a bishop that can go backwards forward sideways, etc And every single day there's a different auction You essentially acquire these pieces add them to your deck and the funds from those auctions go towards different Grand Slam tournaments that you can basically take your deck with you and play against others. Really excited about that.

Starting point is 02:57:32 I've been playing around with Vertigo, which is a new decentralized exchange on Solana that's anti-sniper. So I know you guys spoke to Ben and Alon, and a lot of these token launchers and tokens kind of have a sniper problem, basically, where someone will buy up most of the supply and instantly dump it, so I think building exchanges

Starting point is 02:57:57 with cleaner token protections and anti-sniping mechanisms is something that's just gonna be net beneficial to everyone, so yeah, those are a couple of things that come to mind. And then the last is probably Tokenworks, which is like the closest thing we have to crypto mischief. They do different like token drops. I think that's how you're pushing about that. Yeah, really excited.

Starting point is 02:58:19 So is Brian Armstrong next? I think so. I think we'll see. Am I getting the boot? Check the calendar. Well, thank you for coming on. You're the first official team. Yeah. I think so. We'll see. We'll check the calendar. Well thank you for coming on. Your first, the first official tune. Oh my god. Thank you so much for having me.

Starting point is 02:58:32 We're not on the set, John. But there you are. Thanks for coming on, Dylan. Thanks for all the help on the show. We got Brian Armstrong next. The gong is still ringing. The real gong rings much longer than. The gong is still ringing. Coming in the studio this morning. The gong, the real gong rings much longer than the fake gong. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:49 Well, we're waiting for Brian. Let's tell you about AdQuick. AdQuick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. It's out of home, built different, John.

Starting point is 02:59:05 It is. It is. And we have Brian Armstrong here. Welcome to the stream, Brian. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys. Great to have you.

Starting point is 02:59:13 Thanks so much. Welcome. I don't even know where to start. I mean, we were kind of in the same YC batch. My first company was in YC summer 12. It's been- It was Soylent? Yeah, Soylent.

Starting point is 02:59:24 It's a weird story because I joined the company shortly after YC and I was in a different YC Summer 12. It's been- It was Soylent? Yeah, Soylent. It's a weird story because I joined the company shortly after YC and I was in a different YC company. So, but that's a story for another day. I give John problems all the time for not, you know, tapping you on the shoulder and, you know, demanding that you take an angel check in that era. But anyways- Well, 2020 hindsight, I can assure you,

Starting point is 02:59:44 we were not like the hottest startup in that YC batch at the time. I mean, it was hard to actually raise our seed round, et cetera. But you know, obviously it worked out. It was not obvious, though. Yeah. What was the incentive for joining Coinbase back during the YC days? Was it a full Bitcoin as a referral fee?

Starting point is 03:00:01 Yeah. I mean, I was kind of stealing a page out of the PayPal book where, you know, everybody would get about, I think you could, yeah, if you invited your friends and they onboarded, they got $10 of Bitcoin and you got $10 of Bitcoin. And at the time that was like about one Bitcoin. So crazy to think about. Yeah, and there was a lot of people,

Starting point is 03:00:17 I went around to like probably a thousand or more people in the Bay Area at that time and anybody I could find, I'd be like, hey, do you want some Bitcoin? Like, I'll send it to you on my phone and I try to get them onboard into the Coinbase app. And yeah, it was when we started out, it was like five or six dollars for a Bitcoin. Yeah. So how do you tell the story of Coinbase now?

Starting point is 03:00:35 I mean, it's such a huge story. Do you think about it in particular eras? Is the going public era a different distinct era or or do you do or do you even map it to like the? The the bulls the bull cycles and the and the bear cycles is that does that have a tangible feel in the coinbase story? Internal to the company. Yeah Yeah, well, I think of it in different so Fred Wilson had this great thing He told me one time he said like companies have multiple founding moments on the way to being a public company. And that was definitely true in our case.

Starting point is 03:01:08 So the first era was Fred Ersam and myself in an apartment just grinding it out 14-hour days, just doing everything ourselves, answering customer support tickets, trying to recruit people, trying to get anybody to join, writing code ourselves. That was the pre-product market fit, how do we try to get something moving? Then you go through hypergrowth, and your problems totally change, which is how do we get a real set of leaders into this company? How do we not get hacked? How do we go raise more money, build a real board?

Starting point is 03:01:43 You go through this period of hypergrowth where we were like, we'd never managed anybody, but suddenly we were managing 25, 50, 100, 500 people. And we were hyperscaling just trying to keep up with all the demand. And then crypto went through ups and downs. Eventually, Fred decided to go found his own company, which was super successful, like Paradigm, and he's doing another company now. So I had to bring in an executive team. That was like its own experience

Starting point is 03:02:08 with a bunch of infighting and blowups and drama. And I finally got a exec team that worked, and then we went public, and you know, Emily Choi is like our president and COO now, so she's like, you know, multiple foundings along the way to get to these eventual outcomes. It takes like 10 years to be an overnight success, quote unquote. Overnight success, we takes like 10 years to be an overnight success, quote unquote.

Starting point is 03:02:25 Overnight success. We love overnight. We love 10-year overnight success. We lost the overnight success button somehow. We have a soundboard, and it plays overnight success. Every time somebody says it took them 10 years to really be successful, we hit that. But what other industries have you

Starting point is 03:02:39 looked to for learnings to kind of build through these boom and bust cycles? Because it feels like, you know, you guys are acclimated to that now, but I know this is, you know, the case, oil and gas is probably a prominent one. Were you able to pick up anything from outside of crypto to help you steer the ship through cycles?

Starting point is 03:03:01 Yeah, a little bit. I mean, every company has different challenges. So I actually don't think ours are that bad, but one of the challenges we had when we were getting ready to go public was our revenue was super unpredictable and volatile. We'd have a trading quarter where we would just blow it out of the water and we'd be printing money, and then it'd be down like 70% the next quarter or something. In the public markets, investors really love you to have these predictable revenue streams. I still don't, to this day, know why they're so fixated on that. And in the public markets, investors really love you to have these predictable revenue streams.

Starting point is 03:03:25 I still don't, to this day, know why they're so fixated on that. It seems like they should be thinking about the growth potential, but they love the predictability of it. And so, yeah, we had to look at oil and gas. There's some energy brokerage. Actually the traditional brokerages like NASDAQ and NYSE, they have the same issue. They can tell you, one of them told me one time, he was like, if you can tell me what the S&P 500 is going to do next quarter, I'll tell you what our revenue is gonna be.

Starting point is 03:03:45 But of course, if you can do that, you got it made in other ways. Whenever I feel like we're having a bad time, I always look at the hard tech companies. The biotech companies in the public markets get beat up way more than we do. They have much less predictable revenue. Their revenue is pushed out way farther.

Starting point is 03:04:07 All my friends who are working on hardware companies, I'm like, wow, they're really doing entrepreneurship. I'm like, they're always calling me up and like, I've got four weeks of cash. We're trying to raise money and I'm like. They'll mail me out. You've been trying to raise money like every month for the last 18 months, just living like one month

Starting point is 03:04:24 to the next month. Those guys have true grit. In software, our margins are high, and it covers up mistakes that we make. We actually had revenue relatively early in our journey, whereas in biotech, you have to invest in it for 10 years to try to get your first dollar revenue sometimes. Yeah. There were a whole bunch of narratives around crypto back in 2012, even before, decentralization, resistance to government control, anonymity, just faster payments, all these different

Starting point is 03:04:53 things. What's the state of the union from your perspective? How would you grade the different executions across the original goals? Some of them have just kind of fallen by the wayside as we found different solutions to those problems But what are you? What do you think we've knocked it out of the park on and what do you think? We still have a lot more work to do on Mm-hmm. Well, the ultimate vision for crypto was always economic freedom in my mind In fact, that's the mission of coinbase is to increase economic freedom in the world So that's like how do we give people more self sovereignty, more control of their money.

Starting point is 03:05:27 It enables them to not only live a freer life and not have things taken away from them, but it also it's better for society because if we have a society with good property rights and sound money and rule of law and these things, you can actually try more things. If people are rewarded with the upside of their labor, they're going to go try more ambitious things in the world. There's actually economists who measure across different countries, like how high is economic freedom? And you see that in high economic freedom countries, there's higher GDP per capita,

Starting point is 03:05:55 but there's also less corruption, there's less war, there's lower infant mortality, all these downstream effects. The ultimate potential of crypto is to get more economic freedom in the world. We've been trying to push on that through a variety of ways. One way we've done it is by getting legislation passed in the US or pushing on that. We had a big influence in this last election. The crypto voters showed up in a massive way. We had 2 million advocates who raised their hand in the US saying they wanted to elect

Starting point is 03:06:23 a pro crypto congress and candidates. We had a couple hundred million dollars in the fair shake super pack. And so we now have the most pro crypto Congress that we've ever seen. And we're on the cusp of getting stablecoin and market structure legislation passed. The other thing is we've been pushing on our products. They have to be easier to use for the average person. The early crypto products, it felt like some computer scientists came from on high down the mountain and they tried to make this successful to mere mortals and that was never gonna work. So the products are slowly getting easier and simpler

Starting point is 03:06:53 for average people to use. And crypto is growing into these areas like payments and tokenizing securities and it's not just trading as a use case, right? So we're getting closer and closer, but ultimately I think crypto is going to update the entire financial system globally and the majority of all payments will run on these crypto rails. They're just faster, cheaper, more global, and that's how we're going to get more economic

Starting point is 03:07:16 freedom in the world. That makes a lot of sense. Do you think the conversation around economic freedom over the next few years will shift away from the US and more towards emerging markets who are adopting digital assets, but may face, you know, push back from from their governments and you know potentially even more aggressive way than we have in the United States over the past four or five years Yeah, it's a great point because I think the unmet need is higher in some of these other countries emerging markets, right? Where people like in Turkey, they're getting like 70% inflation a year or something.

Starting point is 03:07:49 It's devastating to their entire economy. People have very high demand for the dollar and then Bitcoin, same thing in Nigeria, et cetera. Now, some of those markets are going to be very resistant to it, especially if the government is not fully aligned with the people's interests. The government wants to run their fiat currency because then they can print money and abuse it. It's one of these original sins of fiat currency. Some of these markets have capital controls, like in India.

Starting point is 03:08:17 I think the governments will be somewhat reluctant to embrace crypto in some of these places, but the average person will love it. Like, the people are demanding it. They're rushing toward it. The governments are a little hesitant. And so in democratic countries, it'll be allowed because more people will vote for it. But in places like China, they're really cramping down on it. I don't think North Korea is going to add it anytime soon.

Starting point is 03:08:41 So it's a little bit like the internet, right? China has the great firewall of China. North Korea has their own private internet. And so some of these like really corrupt regimes, I think will have, they'll try to crush crypto, but in most places in the world, it'll happen. North Korea even has their own Linux distribution, Red Star Linux.

Starting point is 03:09:00 Did they? I didn't know that. I gave it a cool name. I mean, you got to admit it's a cool name. It is a cool name. I want to talk about base. Obviously, it's powering a lot of consumer crypto use cases right now. How did that come about? What has it been like incubating something like that inside Coinbase?

Starting point is 03:09:15 Yeah, a lot of people have asked me about that because they're always surprised that a relatively big company can still innovate or whatever. But I think the way that it, I can't take too much credit for it by the way. The biggest thing that I did was, we have a very entrepreneurial culture, different people we've brought in. And Jesse Pollock came to me at one point, he was like, hey, I wanna work on a new chain.

Starting point is 03:09:38 And I was like, cool, take a small team, go run at it, two pizza team or whatever, five people. And I had no idea if it was going to work. But the biggest thing, he deserves all the credit to be honest. The only thing I did was I kind of shielded it from the rest of the organization a little bit and just gave them time to cook. And he went through like five or six iterations and I saw a couple of these along the way and I was like, honestly, I have no idea if this is going to work.

Starting point is 03:10:01 And it turned out to actually really hit. And so if there is like a secret to this, which I don't know if it's a secret, but you have to allocate some percentage of your budget to these venture bets and make them small bets because you want to have two, three, four people working on it, kind of like a YC company. Don't put 100 people on it or something. It's going to be a big bureaucratic thing. As long as they're small bets, you can tolerate 75% of them not working out, and once in a while something hits and it pays for all the rest of the bets.

Starting point is 03:10:32 It's like having a venture capital internal at the company. We actually set up this thing called, we call it Next Bets, and twice a year, anybody in the company can come pitch. It's a group of people, we call it like internal venture capital. And they're basically the people who run different product groups, but there's also some really kind of like smart young engineers, etc. Basically, if any one of them raised their hands and said, I want to fund that out of their budget, then you're greenlit to go do it. You don't have to get a unanimous yes, you just need one

Starting point is 03:11:00 person to say yes. And there's, there's actually pretty big, like USDC, I will tell you, I actually voted no on USDC, which was a terrible hit. Now it's like almost a billion dollars of revenue or something for us. And I voted no because I was like a little skeptical. I didn't think it was like decentralized enough or something, but luckily somebody else on our team voted yes, so it got funded and it turned out

Starting point is 03:11:24 to be a massive thing. So it shows you how much I know That's incredible. I want to talk about putting stocks on chain You go back to that original like Peter teal lecture in the 90s talking about maybe we could have a digital dollar That's not backed by gold or the Treasury, but actually backed by stocks Is there a world where that happens what needs to happen? Is there a world where coinbase shares are? securitized on chain and I know you probably can't give like forward guidance around that but like Walk me through the the the changes that would need to be made and is that even a good idea in your mind?

Starting point is 03:11:58 Yeah, well just starting first with that PayPal Point that you made I mean There's a great book. I think it's called PayPal Wars. I believe it's about the founding of PayPal. And you know, it really, there was a lot of like that libertarian ideology of like economic freedom was in the origin, the founding team, as you can imagine, they went on to do many other things. And I think, like in many ways, crypto is fulfilling the vision that the early PayPal

Starting point is 03:12:23 team started with around economic freedom. The main reason I can think of for that, there's a lot of reasons. They got acquired by eBay, et cetera. The team changed in some of the motivations. At the end of the day, nobody wanted a US company to run the global financial system. If you were the Indian government or random person in some country, you didn't, do I really want to put all my money in some US company. But if it was a decentralized protocol that nobody controlled, like the internet, it's

Starting point is 03:12:50 like, OK, we'll all kind of integrate with that. And so Bitcoin was the key innovation, I think, that unlocked that opportunity. You also asked about tokenizing securities. And I do think that's an exciting area. We're pretty interested in that as well. The trading of stocks is just one more area of financial services that could be improved by crypto. I mean, as an example, there's a lot of people around the world who want access to US securities,

Starting point is 03:13:16 but they don't have a simple way to open a brokerage account and track that. So it's like the international access would be better. You could get perpetual futures markets spun up for these stocks, which would give traders more leverage. You could do 24-7 trading, you could do fractional shares. So I actually think most traditional securities are gonna get tokenized on chain in the next five years. We've been working a little bit with the SEC task force on this and trying to find the right path to do it.

Starting point is 03:13:41 So it's something we're interested in, but yeah, obviously nothing to announce today. Where are you getting the most leverage from AI internally? I can think of a bunch of different potential applications, but I haven't seen you do online virtue signaling about it yet, like other certain CEOs have. But I'm curious what you're excited about. Yeah, OK, well, so I think we're doing

Starting point is 03:14:04 a lot of the current best practices that most people are doing with well-run companies. Then there are a couple of areas on the horizon that are more crypto-specific that I'll tell you too. The basic ones you probably know. We onboarded all of our engineers to copilot and cursor and everything like that. We got 100% of them onboard and that was good. Our customer support, I think maybe 60% of inquiries are being answered by AI now, which is really good

Starting point is 03:14:29 We also for a long time been building AI models around fraud prevention and like detecting risky transactions So but you could yeah, obviously like any process within the company that has a clearly defined input and output you can train a model on and like Generating compliance reports like there's so we're trying to integrate it everywhere company that has a clearly defined input and output, you can train a model on and generating compliance reports. So we're trying to integrate it everywhere. The ones that are a little more on the frontier or crypto specific for us, so one is that I guess people are calling it agentic commerce, which is like your agent is increasingly kind of like your assistant and it might need to book you a ticket to go somewhere,

Starting point is 03:15:07 or it might need to get through a paywall or something. If you're like, hey, go read all the research papers from Nature on this topic and give me a report, like, okay, those cost money to ingest it. And so AI agents are going to need to have a wallet to go pay for stuff. We think that crypto will be the backbone of that. USDC on base is starting to be adopted by some of the... We actually released this open source thing called AgentKit, which makes it easy for any LLM to have a wallet. We're working on a couple of checkout type solutions with other players that we'll announce soon where the AI agent can actually get through the checkout flow in many of these e-commerce

Starting point is 03:15:44 sites and pay with USDC on base. I think agent at commerce will be a big one. I think it's also we're going to get AI agents that can be like your RIA, your registered investment advisor, or almost like your trading bot. Imagine you're in the Coinbase app and you tell them, hey, I want to put $1,000 or $10,000 or something into this account. You're talking to a trading bot and you're like, just go make me money. I don't know.

Starting point is 03:16:12 You might ask you- Don't make mistakes. I joked about this before, 10% compounded return daily. Don't make mistakes. Don't make mistakes. Yeah. It may have some questions for you or it may make and like there's a lot of details to figure out But I think having a trading bot like do a lot of that for you And it's like hey Mitch like if I if it goes up a lot lock in some gains

Starting point is 03:16:35 You know it so I don't regret it later Well, you can give it kind of abstract concepts like that and it'll go it knows how to make the limit orders for you or whatever Yeah, how do you think that? How do you think that, how do you imagine that type of capability really being dispersed? Because I imagine, I mean, obviously there's people with trading bots today and they're actually,

Starting point is 03:16:53 I imagine some of them are so effective that they just say, well, we don't actually wanna release this because we should just use it ourselves. But it sort of could potentially tie into this dynamic between closed source AI and open source AI. And is that, do you think part of Coinbase's opportunity is to make sure these types of tools are available to as many people as possible

Starting point is 03:17:17 versus just a handful of traders? Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, so we're not doing prop trading on our own balance sheet. So we're not like trying to be a own balance sheet, so we're not trying to be a hedge funder or something with a proprietary algorithm. So our goal would be to make this available to as many consumers as possible. And yeah, it's adjacent to financial literacy. Many people might come in and be like, yeah, I want to make crazy returns, and this thing

Starting point is 03:17:40 can tell you, well, OK, that's pretty high risk. Why don't you dollar cost average into this diversified portfolio over time? And that might be more in line with your risk appetite. But if you want to take 10% of it and try something more high risk, so it can teach people about these concepts. And while also doing what they ultimately want to do, what they would have done anyway in the app, but it's just making it easier for them. Totally. Can you talk about the ext, but it's just making it easier for them. Totally.

Starting point is 03:18:05 Can you talk about the extortion attack, how you handled it? And I'm particularly interested in going forward, there's a lot of tools in your toolkit. You can throw more money, more people, more technology at the problem. What's the next few years look like in terms of beefing up security? Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, we've had a really good track record on security at Coinbase over the last 12 years. And even in this attack, you know, we didn't see any private keys or funds accessed directly by the attacker. So what they, unfortunately they were able to do is they were

Starting point is 03:18:35 able to bribe some of our customer support agents and to share with them like personal information on, on customers, like name, address, et cetera. And they want this information. Attackers want this information because they want to text people, call people, try to socially engineer them and to get them to send their money. And so unfortunately, they were able to successfully do that with a handful of customers, which we've reimbursed 100% at this point. And then they sent us this demand. Once they realized they'd been found out and customers were kind of getting educated about

Starting point is 03:19:04 this, they sent us this demand for $20 million, or we're going to release all this information. And it was an interesting moment. We came together and thought about it. And on the one hand, we could have paid them the money, but we talked to a bunch of security researchers and people, and they were like, what typically happens in these cases is if you pay the extortion, they're just going to come back in three months and extort you again. It's like, do we really want to be in this situation where we're funding their next attack

Starting point is 03:19:34 and rewarding this kind of behavior or do we want to try to create a deterrent to this kind of behavior? We decided to flip it and as you probably saw, we put out a $20 million bounty for any information leading to their it and as you probably saw we put out a 20 million dollar bounty for any information leading to their arrest and Conviction and that's been kind of a crazy experience I mean just as one data point for comparison after 9-eleven the US government put out a 25 million dollar bounty on Osama bin Laden And we put out a 20 million dollar back so

Starting point is 03:19:59 We had like maybe five thousand like tips or inquiries like come into the Email that we put out there most of it was junk and we kind of whittled it down There's about like 70 or so credible leads. I would say and we always have to be a little careful because some you know, some of these could be like the Threat actor themselves sort of trying to throw us off the trail or run down some wild goose chase Some of the other people sending in tips or leads are like other threat actors who kind of have beef

Starting point is 03:20:29 with these guys or like they're kind of like no honor amongst thieves, right? Yeah. And so, you know, which is fine with me, but it's- No, I really enjoyed the, you know, I saw the video that you put out and I enjoyed imagining the dynamic of the thieves, you know, sitting around a table, realizing that, you know, I saw the video that you put out and I enjoyed imagining the dynamic of the thieves really, you know, sitting around a table, realizing that, you know, that the

Starting point is 03:20:49 sort of game theory of who's going to turn in who, you know, it was a, it was a nice, it was a nice visual. Yeah. Yeah. So that's exactly what we wanted to create was a real deterrent here. It was like, if you're, if you're going to attack our customers, you know, you need to look over your shoulder and always wonder who's going to turn me in or who did I interact with in my entire life who might have known about this, who's going to turn me in. So anyway, I can't say too much more. We're working closely with law enforcement, but we're going to run down those leads and hopefully I get a good result. I mean, you asked about beefing up security

Starting point is 03:21:21 too, I think. Yeah. Just kind of going forward, you can imagine, let's hire more people, better people. Let's throw a technology at this. Let's monitor comms and where data is flowing. Is this more of a technology issue or a talent issue or an oversight issue or policies? Like, how do you see investing in the next round of security?

Starting point is 03:21:41 The thing that popped into my mind, the way that you're already leveraging AI is there's a world in the future where of security. The thing that popped into my mind, the way that you're already leveraging AI, is there's a world in the future where a more secure CX function would be entirely code. Right? And it'd be much, you know, you could create an environment for it.

Starting point is 03:21:56 Or at least AI oversight of everything, of every interaction. But yes, I'm interested to hear what your take is. Yeah, well, it's a great point. I mean, the 60% of inquiries being answered by AI now, I mean, they're not going to get bribed. I mean, there are other threat actors with AI too, right? Because people are always trying to jailbreak these agents and things.

Starting point is 03:22:14 So there's not a perfect solution, and I don't think we're gonna have, we're still gonna have like human in the loop on a lot of things for a long time. But yeah, never let a good crisis go to waste. Like this was definitely a good moment for us to go implement a bunch of changes. We mobilized a team of about 300 or 400 people right away that just went into overdrive trying to lock down a lot of these systems.

Starting point is 03:22:35 A lot of it was not just our own systems. There's vendors that we work with that we needed to push them to hit a higher bar as well. We did relocate some of our customer support operations. The ones that got targeted the most were these overseas contractors and things like that. And you can imagine some of the money being offered as bribes would have been pretty impactful

Starting point is 03:23:00 even in the United States if people were there. We need to have 24-7 coverage, et cetera. So it's not perfect solution to like just move it all in the US and pay people more. Like it doesn't 100% solve it, but we are relocating some of those support operations and then essentially just hardening our systems. Like luckily we had, we had some good controls already, which limited the scope of it, but we obviously didn't do enough. And so we've got to keep investing in that. But we obviously didn't do enough. And so we've got to keep investing in that.

Starting point is 03:23:24 Do you have any advice for younger builders, maybe the younger version of yourself? We had Chris Dixon on the show earlier today. And he said that one of crypto's biggest problems now is just a lack of talent. There is talent here. But it probably could have 10 times more to create a lot of great outcomes.

Starting point is 03:23:47 I'm curious if you feel the same way around talent in the industry today. Yeah. Well, I think we've never had it easier actually recruiting great people into Coinbase. I think there is a great, and probably that's due to our scale, right? Startups have to really fight for talent. But I think if you look at like the top five most exciting tech trends in the world right now, like my five would probably be AI crypto for increasing economic freedom and all that. Brain machine interfaces, fusion energy and longevity, I think is also in no

Starting point is 03:24:20 particular order, by the way, like long, you know, there's a biotech company I co-founded called New Limit, which is working on epigenetic reprogramming, which is really cool. It's an, it's a longevity company. We talked to the founder. We were blown away. We came away extremely excited by that conversation. Nice. Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, so I think to me it's like, how do we accelerate progress? Sure. And I think the smartest people from a talent point of view, like the smartest kids up and coming, you know, people, whatever,

Starting point is 03:24:46 they all want to work in things that are going to change the world. So those are the top five. And I think there's actually a pretty incredible amount of talent in crypto. You've just got to go try. You got to go try ambitious bets and be OK with some of them not working. I think sometimes people think that, well, Coinbase started and now it's big, and so they're just a success. And it's like, no, that's not true.

Starting point is 03:25:07 We're trying these venture bets all the time. I got told you about USDC and base. There's others that didn't work. We launched Coinbase NFT and it was pretty much a flop. We launched Coinbase in Japan. We invested all this money and time. Didn't work for a bunch of reasons. I can tell you if you want.

Starting point is 03:25:22 We shut that down. And so we're constantly like, stay hungry, stay foolish. We're trying new ideas a lot. And you have to be OK with two out of three or three out of four just not working. What about the Super Bowl ad? Was that a similar one person green lights it? And who green lit it? And what was the story with the QR code?

Starting point is 03:25:41 Yeah. Well, as usual, success has many fathers and mothers. But it partially came out of a rushed, like a short time, constrained speed creativity, right? So we actually didn't, I think by the time we bought the ad, we didn't have enough time to go film something for months and months. And so the team just got really creative.

Starting point is 03:26:02 And I don't even remember who it was in the meeting. Like our CMO, and there was an agency Involved and it was a collaborative effort where someone was like, you know, what if we did kind of like a direct Direct marketing type campaign where we want people just install the app But you can never measure the result of most of these brand ads, right? You're always like, I don't know Did it drive revenue or not? Nobody really knows. So we're like, well, we could actually measure how many people just like scan it and sign up if we just put a QR code on the screen.

Starting point is 03:26:30 So I don't remember who said it actually in the room, but obviously it worked. It was cool. Yeah, and you tracked the ROI and it was positive? Okay, so that's actually a very complicated, we looked at it for you with the exact details, but long story short, so our site actually crashed because we got about 20 or 30 million visits in 20 seconds. We knew there was going to be a big surge, and so we had I think the first page loaded and

Starting point is 03:27:02 it was heavily cached, but then 20 million people started going through the signup flow and everything shut down. So we had to email a bunch of them later to actually come back and finish it. Long story short, so we lost probably about a third of the value in just overwhelming demand that we unfortunately couldn't scale to, but it would have been very profitable.

Starting point is 03:27:25 It was still profitable depending how you count it. The fact that we're talking about the ad today means something. Very memorable. Yeah. The brand value alone maybe paid for itself even with none of the direct revenue. I have one last question that we'll let you get out of here. Feel free to just take it as like meta commentary on the nature of the question, but who is Satoshi Nakamoto? So the official answer is it doesn't really matter because like the idea stands on its own

Starting point is 03:27:54 And so if anybody ever comes out and we find out who it is like in their their will or you know Whatever I but but the the unofficial answer I think is it's probably some combination of like Hal Finney and Nick Szabo and maybe one other person. But that's my guess is that it was a collaboration between those people. But ultimately it doesn't matter. Hal Finney is frozen at Alcor but he's no longer living. But maybe if Alcor actually works, which is a big if, in the future we could bring him back to life,

Starting point is 03:28:29 we'll find out. Yeah, that'd be amazing. We'll have him on the show then. Yeah, we'll have him on the show. We'll have him on the show. That'd be fantastic. Jordy, any other questions? No, this was great.

Starting point is 03:28:38 This was fantastic. Thank you so much. You're our first public company Fortune 500 CEO. Yeah, that's right. So thanks for doing this. This is a big milestone for us. We really appreciate it. Well, I love that you guys are championing tech.

Starting point is 03:28:50 And it's, yeah, the enthusiasm is palpable. So I get to see your clips all over. Enthusiasm? What are you talking about? Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm. We're going to need a bigger gong. We're going to need a bigger gong.

Starting point is 03:29:04 We're going to need a bigger gong. Thank you going to need a bigger gong. We're going to need a bigger gong. Thank you for stopping by. It's great having you on, Brian. Yup. And thank you for the work that you do. We'll talk to you soon. See you guys soon. Bye. Bye.

Starting point is 03:29:12 Cheers. I love your gong. Great hit, John. Great, great hit. The gong is, it's working wonders. Next up, we have Suna from Volt Capital coming in. Is it Volt Capital? I'm going to take one minute.

Starting point is 03:29:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be right back. I'll talk to Suna. Let me tell you really quickly about what we're going to be doing. We're going to be doing a lot of stuff. We're going to be doing a lot of stuff. We're going to be doing a lot of I'm gonna take one minute. I'll be right back. I'll talk to Suna Let me tell you really quickly about Wander I gotta sing the song alone find your happy place Find your find your happy place find your happy place book of Wander with inspiring views 50 million dollar series beat today

Starting point is 03:29:43 today Congratulations hit the gong one more time. I mean on your way out with inspiring views. Hotel Great Amenities. $50 million Series B today. Oh yeah, today. Congratulations. Hit the gong one more time. I mean. Jordy, on your way out. Go size Wanderer, $50 million Series B. Congratulations to the team. Congratulations to John Andrew, Kyle, the whole team.

Starting point is 03:29:56 Fantastic. You guys are crushing it. Book of Wanderer with inspiring views, Hotel Great Amenities, Dreamy Beds, Top Tier Cleaning, and 24-7 Concierge Service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And John Andrew is coming on the show tomorrow Very excited about that. Fantastic, but amazing milestone. Well stay locked in we got four more guests. Our next guest is Suna

Starting point is 03:30:15 hopefully we can bring her in and and Keep the conversation going. How you doing? and keep the conversation going. How you doing? Hey. Sorry. It's been a big stream, been a big day, but glad to have you here.

Starting point is 03:30:30 Would you mind kicking us off with- Oh, stop the list, I was so happy about it. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It was great puzzling everyone together, getting everyone. It's also hard because I'm not, as it's very clear from this stream, I am not crypto native at all. And so the first time we tried to schedule this, As it's very clear from this stream, I am not crypto native at all.

Starting point is 03:30:45 And so the first time we tried to schedule this, we tried to schedule you was during that big crypto conference in Dubai. And everyone was like, what are you thinking? Everyone who matters in crypto is going to be busy and they're going to be 12 hours off your time zone. And then we wound up scheduling it today and there's this massive Bitcoin conference Unfortunately, some people, you know, we're able to hop on the stream But it's but it's a great community

Starting point is 03:31:10 And so everyone's been able to break it down and explain it like we're five because we effectively are but would you mind kicking us? off with an introduction on yourself and And yeah, what you what you're excited about? Yeah, sure thing. So I am at Volt Capital. What we focus on is pre-seed and seed crypto companies. And I mean, the reason we even started Volt Capital is if you look at the landscape of crypto funds, there aren't really that many that have a senior partnership

Starting point is 03:31:40 that have all founded companies before or built a team from the ground up. And that really is the DNA of the fund. And so what we do is we focus on founder first philosophy in terms of how we index on investments and then also we've all been founders ourselves as well. And we're focused in terms of like on a barbell strategy in terms of the thesis. One, there's established markets, and by the way, this isn't live, right? It is. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 03:32:14 So there's established markets like payments, DeFi, and I think the camera is, okay. There's established markets like DeFi, payments, stable coins that are taking on these tens of trillions of dollars markets. But then also, I mean, right now the rest of the world is waking up to stable coin potential. Stable coin started about five, seven years ago.

Starting point is 03:32:37 So if you look at what the net new narrative is right now, it's largely around real world case applications for crypto. And what we focus on is largely crypto AI intersection. And then that oftentimes look like crypto and robotics or like crypto and strictly crypto and AI or also D-PEN. And Jordy, I know like you and I had collaborated on that essay a while back where we go through the different verticals and potentials.

Starting point is 03:33:02 That's cool. Yeah, what is the state of real world assets on chain? I remember during the last cycle Sam Altman or Sam Lesson was on the Logan Bartlett show talking about maybe your mortgage will be on chain, maybe physical real estate will be on chain at some point and there was a whole bunch of legal and technical and financial issues to work through to actually make that happen. Are people optimistic about that narrative in real world assets or has it moved to a completely different trajectory? Yeah, no, we're absolutely excited about that.

Starting point is 03:33:33 I think for a few reasons. One is institutional demand is here. Secondly, a lot of the tech has been figured out, but the tech wasn't really the tough part. The tech was probably an iota of it. If you look at the distribution of teams, it's like, all right, you have an engineering team of like 20 or 30, but then you have like hundreds of people focusing on recourse. And the ratio was pretty disproportionate in terms of what they were focused on.

Starting point is 03:33:54 And with regulatory language being cleared up and getting more approval from the administration and I guess more legitimacy for the space, it's really paved the way. But what we're focused on when we talk about real-world applications, in addition to that, we're seeing companies at the intersection of crypto and robotics that are finding innovative ways to collect

Starting point is 03:34:17 and check for quality assurance of data in massive global ways that you aren't able to do with existing rails, particularly for robotics, because there isn't really a common crawl equivalent for robotics, like there isn't a way we train web two, or like internet LLMs. And then also like space and crypto. We're seeing companies build at the intersection there,

Starting point is 03:34:38 like out of study research, so like really domain experts in space that are finding really interesting ways to create data marketplaces at the intersection of crypto and space. One thing that we've seen and great great to see you by the way one one thing that we've seen from I think a number of the different conversations today is it feels like consensus that agents will use tokens or that the agentic web will be leveraging tokens. As an investor what are are the different layers of the stack that you're looking at, whether it's the agent layer,

Starting point is 03:35:11 infrastructure, the actual tokens themselves, how are you thinking about investing into that trend broadly? So I'm gonna say something contrarian around banking agents. And I don't think from a venture standpoint, it's, it makes sense to, to, to invest like via private equity, particularly cause a lot of that value capture is going to be done through enterprises. We already saw Coinbase rollout X four Oh two, which allows agent to agent

Starting point is 03:35:37 payments and they already have massive distribution channels. So you are already starting off with a massive disadvantage as a startup. And instead what we're looking at in terms of crypto AI, there's a lot to be done on synthetic data generation. There's a ton to be done on the federated learning side in terms of like how do you train models when you're dealing with sensitive data around health or finance.

Starting point is 03:36:01 So there are way bigger markets to go after that I think are more appropriate for startups versus companies that can be rolled out, as we've already seen from these larger incumbents. Yeah, we're talking to the founder of Prime Intellect, kind of similar idea of distributed computing, wiring it all together with crypto, makes a ton of sense to kind of use those latent resources.

Starting point is 03:36:23 But you're saying that the same thing can exist for data markets. Is the, is the gig, is the goal there? Is it, is it like, with regard to like robotics data, uh, you would think that if this, if this, uh, evolves the same way that like the LLM RLHF market evolved, you know, it's like scale AI is just gonna go in centralized it all and then sell access to that. Um, is there some sort of underpinning fundamental difference with robotics training data that would make it more native to an on chain environment?

Starting point is 03:36:56 Yes. So a few things. So one is, um, up until recently at large way that we would train these robots is through physical sensors and actually having to run physical simulations and What DeepMind came up with was a paper last year where they show that you can train robots purely on ego centric vision data And ego centric vision data is point of view data. It's like a GoPro video so they train robots to play soccer using ego-centered vision data or this video. And there isn't a common crawl equivalent or just like these massive data sets where you have footage at the right angle or right height to then feed to these robots to be able to train them.

Starting point is 03:37:38 And the problem is not everyone has like the balance sheet of like a Tesla or like the ability to go and then collect that. And so the best way to do that is in a distributed way. And so there are companies that are working on, on one hand, compensating users for uploading video data that specific companies need. And then on the other hand, and this is where more of the scaly eye piece comes in, is you can disincentivize or slash users,

Starting point is 03:38:04 essentially like a built-in penalty for uploading poor quality data that's pixelated or at the wrong height or angle and streamline that all in the protocol level. And so that unlocks a massive amount of potential in terms of the economics of these marketplaces, in terms of the amount of data that you can collect and the diversity of the set of data.

Starting point is 03:38:22 It's interesting to flip around because we've been talking about VO3 and Google's massive advantage there with the YouTube data set. I've produced, I mean through the show we produced hundreds of hours of video content. It goes on to a few platforms. It doesn't go on to every platform. Now we're on most of them so most of the hyperscalers could effectively train on our data. But if you're a YouTuber and you're just releasing

Starting point is 03:38:46 on YouTube, vending that data to another training platform is something that's not really accessible. Because obviously YouTube's not just going to go license all that data to another company to train. Very interesting. The problem is for robotics, right? Yes.

Starting point is 03:39:04 Because you have to have specific footage. Very interesting. That's right. The problem is for robotics, right? Yes. Because you have to have specific footage. What is the state of the crypto seed market today? Is it collaborative, sharp elbows? Also, I mean, the dynamic I'm interested in is like, it seems like it's easier than ever to just like spin up a coin in two seconds with one of these new pump coins and then that's your seed round, but it feels like that's still not a perfect substitute

Starting point is 03:39:31 for traditional venture capital, but is that competitive with what you do these days? Like there's so many alternative sources for funding in crypto. In many ways, you could also make the argument that companies are going, you know, creating tokens so fast that it's potentially good for seed because maybe you need a seed round,

Starting point is 03:39:48 but you don't need the series A or the series B. And maybe limit dilution, but I'm curious what you're seeing. Maybe don't get squeezed as much. Yeah, so every cycle, we see this meme where it's like, will crypto kill VC? And every single cycle, it doesn't work. And the reason is because the quality of capital matters. And what founders, like what first time founders

Starting point is 03:40:11 or founders or people that aren't even founders, what they don't realize is that when you have, and you guys, it's like when you have a venture fund on the cap table, it's not just getting the capital. Capital is now commodity more than ever. It's the support you're getting from that particular fund and the legacy or brand name that they're going to give your company to help you risk it, which helps you recruit better, be on news outlets otherwise, wouldn't really listen to you because you don't have a brand name

Starting point is 03:40:39 around you and it's just your startup. Those intangibles matter more than the capital you're taking on and that's the lesson that you And so those intangibles matter more than the capital you're taking on, and that's the lesson that you see these founders learn over and over again, when they think they can just launch a meme coin and then call that their financing for the rest of their lives. Yeah, what are the other value adds that VCs are pushing right now?

Starting point is 03:40:58 In defense tech, we're seeing VCs effectively set up like lobbying firms in DC to help with that go to market with the Department of Defense. I imagine that at least staying ahead of regulatory changes in crypto makes a lot of sense, but what are the other vectors other than, hey, we might refer a couple engineers, we might get you a couple press pieces. What are the outside the box value adds that a VC can bring to the table? Yeah, on the defense note, I've also heard of some funds purchasing the American flags

Starting point is 03:41:27 that they all have. Really? Because there's actually like a division of the government that provides them for a typical American flag, you're not getting it from any retail stores. But in terms, and that's, I guess, out of the box in defense. But in terms of out of the box value add and crypto, there are the universals, like you said,

Starting point is 03:41:44 like recruiting and helping put together the roadmap and helping like next rounds of financing. But one thing that we're doing at Volt that I think is pretty unique is we're actually building a simulation engine for deep in protocols where you can input different parameters for the network that you're building out and see based on average inflows and outflows, how you can expect that network to perform in

Starting point is 03:42:09 different environments over time. And you can update number of nodes, number of like what you anticipate and number of end users being. And so getting really sophisticated around technical value ads that help the team move the bottom line in terms of revenue generation I think is the the real thing that Crypto venture funds to be focusing on beyond introductions to people they can recruit or make others and things like that What do you think the the first truly break out deep in?

Starting point is 03:42:40 Product will be is it is is world coin classified as as deep in or is that not the right framework I know there's there's the cell company there's hot spots but but what do you what kind of categories broadly are you most excited about yeah there's this joke where if you squint hard enough almost everything's deep and like even Bitcoin is technically deep in because there's a little harder component, but WorldCoin absolutely has broken through mainstream. I mean, they were just on the time magazine cover. The things that we're more broadly interested in are in deep in are like I said, the crypto robotics

Starting point is 03:43:15 angle, but then also the crypto space angle. So there are teams that are building out, I don't know if you've seen that chart from our world and data where you can see the number of objects we've launched into space And it is just I mean, it's not even hockey stick growth. It's like a vertical line almost and these are like CubeSats probes landers like whatever our crew landers and others and And that that's gonna be a problem real fast, right? Like we need better anti-collision software when you're able to track like silent satellites, which are almost like second strike defense capabilities,

Starting point is 03:43:50 but in the sky. And one way to do that is by booking out commercial grade telescopes and being able to have eyes on the sky data that way, but usually they're booked out days in advance and you have stale data when you get access to that. The other way is to just crowdsource it. Like a lot of people have electronic telescopes

Starting point is 03:44:05 to use anyway around the world that are hobbyists or taking imaging in the sky 24 seven, and you can compensate them. And then on the demand side, charge companies to access that data. And so we're seeing a lot of interesting plays around orchestration and data marketplaces that are tackling very unique,

Starting point is 03:44:25 dynamic, up to the minute data that we don't have in traditional Rails. Very cool. Very cool. I think the broader- I don't want to make too much of a joke, but I do think we should let the aliens access pump, you know, pump fun.

Starting point is 03:44:38 For sure. They should be able to- 100%. Extraterrestrials should be able to launch- That's the first thing they should do when they arrive. It's kind of a gateway to crypto. Kind of welcome to America. Yeah, welcome to humanity No, but I I believe we should put crypto in space. I agree excited crypto everywhere. Thank you so much for stopping by

Starting point is 03:44:54 This is a lot of fun. Yeah, we'll talk to you for helping us understand all these different. Yeah, this is great. Very cool We'll talk to you. Have a good one. Tune in. Cheers Next up we have Mert Mumtaz from Helios coming in the studio We Will get a little intro from him We got to talk to you about bezel first your bezel concierge is available now to source through any watch on the planet Seriously any watch Bitcoin at a hundred and ten ish. You got a nautilus in the nautilus is

Starting point is 03:45:23 Welcome to the stream Mert. How you doing? Good, sir. How you doing? I'm great. Would you mind taking us through a little introduction of yourself and your company, just to kick us off? Sure, of course. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:45:34 My name is Mert. I work on Helios, which is not Helium. I know Kyle was on. He was talking about his investment in Helium, which we get confused a lot. And Helios does infrastructure,, infrastructure, high performance infrastructure for Solana. Um, and I also shitpost a lot on the twitter.com. That's great. Let's give it up for all of that.

Starting point is 03:45:59 What does infrastructure mean in this context? Are you building, uh, data centers? Are you just managing them? Are you just deploying nodes? Are you writing software? What's the shape of the team look like? Yeah, I mean, the short answer is yes. And what I mean by that is we do some combination of all of those. Probably the least worst way to think about it

Starting point is 03:46:19 is like some combination of CloudFlare, AWS, and maybe Stripe. And so in this context, we basically help developers combination of CloudFlare, AWS, and maybe Stripe. And so in this context, we basically help developers or traders or whoever wants the data to get data from Solana super fast in a structured way and also write data to it super fast. Got it. What are the different trade-offs? You mentioned CloudFlare. Like is geolocation important as you build out infrastructure like this?

Starting point is 03:46:45 Yeah, so it depends on the blockchain, but Solana has a lot of pretty advanced trading activity. Now, the assets that they're trading are a little funny because you might get like, not Citadel, but like let's say similar types of players really co-locating their servers to a like Far coin or something. But like the co location and like these latency games do play a pretty big role. Yeah, how how are how advanced are the high frequency trading operations? What are they using? I know Jane Street writes everything in OCaml. Are we seeing like low level programming languages being used to trade these meme coins now? low level programming languages being used to trade these meme coins now?

Starting point is 03:47:26 Oh yeah, definitely. Um, like you, you have people, I mean, I don't know if the audience here would consider like C and Russ that low level, but like everything from C and Russ to some people will get extremely degenerate and start going into assembly for certain parts of the stack or like raw networking code. That's so yeah, it's, it's quite a serious game played with very interesting assets. A lot of fun. What kind of players exist that don't

Starting point is 03:47:53 like to talk about what they're doing and aren't allowed that maybe aren't doing anything that's morally wrong or anything like that, but are just sort of? Under the radar. the radar under the radar just don't want to talk about their alpha because they don't want to bring about your competition Though the question is what kinds of people like that exist? Yeah, like are they? Scale these are they are they coming from other Is it is it a new desk and an existing hedge fund or are these completely new operations that have just scaled up from like an individual trader? Yeah, that's a good question. I think it's pretty unique in that you have the existing

Starting point is 03:48:36 types of like quants from Chicago or New York who will have some sort of operation, not all of them, but like probably the ones that you know of already from TradFi, a good amount of them are already kind of playing this game. And then they'll compete with like a set of interesting actors. Some of those actors might be like some of the props reading shops from like Tokyo

Starting point is 03:48:58 or just other parts of Asia. But then they'll be like competing with like this random 17 year old kid from like Estonia in his basement. And like that kid actually tends to compete and it's not just like a specific kid here, but like persona. And so crypto is interesting because you now have all these guys kind of on the same, roughly the same playing field. And it's interesting because it's also kind of why Solana was started by Anatoly, which is he basically wanted, um, he had this vision that I think he

Starting point is 03:49:28 got a front run like once or something on, on one of these things. And he got so mad. He's like, okay, you know what? I'm just going to build a, this decentralized NASAC where everybody can compete. That's amazing. Uh, what is, uh, in your mind, what's the most important elements of the Solana roadmap going forward from here? It feels like a lot's been built out. There's a very healthy ecosystem, but jobs not finished. What's, what, what, what in your mind is like the most exciting

Starting point is 03:49:58 upcoming improvements? Yeah. So we have a very detailed roadmap that I wrote about on solanarodemap.com and when you go to that site, basically you'll see four words and it just says increase bandwidth, reduce latency, nothing else to it. And basically everything is centered around making the thing go faster. And like there's, I think Kyle was talking about double zero as well, which is like a new fiber layer where you can do some more advanced like network level filtering.

Starting point is 03:50:29 We have like Jump, for example, building a new client in C which is meant to be much more performance. But everything, roughly speaking on the tech side is always centered around how do we just make the thing go from point A to point B faster. And from a, let's say a cultural or socioeconomic lens, it's very much about what we call the FAT thesis, which is Founder's Apps tokens.

Starting point is 03:50:57 So really just how do we attract, how do we form this association in somebody's mind if they're like a product builder? How do they think about, or why would they think about Solana first right so that when you have been passed her an actual Lucas of the world or Alon why should they pick Solana and that's because like people like me but also everybody from Solana Foundation and and like investors and whatnot how do we set up like the best friendly friendliestliest founder infrastructure? So it's kind of like, you know, the Y Combinator of crypto in a sense.

Starting point is 03:51:29 What is the state of the UAE crypto scene? And how much do you actually feel inclined to travel outside of the UAE versus just waiting for people to come to you? Oh, that's a good question. Well, I am in the UAE like 360 days out of the year. But then now I'm in Montana where it's like UAE has no nature and then Montana has all the nature. So it's like this barbell strategy. But like, so I moved to the UAE from Canada, Toronto specifically,

Starting point is 03:52:07 So I moved to the UAE from Canada, Toronto specifically, where it is illegal to hold over or trade over 30,000 CAD, which is really like $8 USD worth of any coins except for Bitcoin, Ethereum, which fair enough, and then Litecoin and then Bitcoin cash. Okay. So like vintage and leverage trading is illegal. So just to give you an idea of leverage, band leverage. That's so unamerican. I'm unsurprised. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. Okay, so I think I think it's because like one of the pension funds was like an investor in FGX or something. Oh, yeah, that's right. Which, you know, interesting. But like in the UAE, in terms of crypto, specifically, for example, I can

Starting point is 03:52:45 pay my phone bill in USDC. And I have, which is pretty crazy. And the government actually is like quite interested in like getting you, you know, on the phone and really trying to work out how do we actually like support the builders here as opposed to some other jurisdictions. But like the UAE, I like referring to it as kind of like the hotel for crypto where like it's kind of just in the middle. So whenever you're flying anywhere, people just stop by. I remember the last time you wanted to host this crypto day, there was like a massive conference there.

Starting point is 03:53:21 It was a terrible one. I know, I know. It really shows you how native I am to crypto. I'm completely out of the loop. In fact, it ties to my next question. During the last cycle, I was really captured by the story of Solana. I thought the founders had a fascinating story, obviously still kind of coming from the outsider perspective, but I appreciated the technology they were building. There was that meme of like sequel Lana. It's not as decentralized as it should be it's not it's not as pure of a technology as other as other chains talk

Starting point is 03:53:52 to me give me an update on that has that have the problems that people were surfacing have those problems been solved or were they never problems to begin with is it all just memes and it doesn't really matter because it's just about the perception? Obviously, the perception of Bitcoin has changed a ton. It was originally like, oh, it's going to be completely privacy based and it's very traceable. There's been an evolution of the Bitcoin narrative. Has the Solana narrative evolved and kind of take me through the last couple of years? Right. So with Twitter, most of the debates or discussions, let's say, happen on crypto Twitter,

Starting point is 03:54:29 which is an amazing place for intellectual sparring, let's say. Linger. Definitely nothing gets straw manned or taken out of context. Yeah, yeah. And so like SQL on it, for example, was a jab from somebody from Ethereum who obviously

Starting point is 03:54:45 is not a very big fan. Yep. But that's okay. And it was basically trying to draw the parallel that Solana is actually like this centralized database. Yep. And basically I made somewhat of a career out of saying that's wrong aggressively on the internet.

Starting point is 03:55:02 And it's of course wrong because fundamentally Solana is a blockchain where you have thousands of different nodes and really what a blockchain does is it's a bunch of different nodes functioning as one node, right? So that you shouldn't be able to actually tell. There was some certainly quite valid criticisms and there are still today. One of those was that like Solana would go down at like very high activity, right? So in 2022, there was this whole NFT craze where people would like really try to mint pictures of like these stones, pixelated apes on the internet. And it started on Ethereum, but then Ethereum fees obviously went up and so they came to Solana.

Starting point is 03:55:48 But Solana was not expecting people to be that passionate about certain pictures. And so that exposed a lot of interesting engineering problems in the core architecture. And we basically took those learnings and then we iterated a few better designs for the blockchain. And so what that allowed for is now when the next cycle came, which was with meme coins and the president of the United States launching Trump coin and then his wife following right after that, when that actually happened, this time the chain was actually ready to handle it. And that's why Solana has been basically like the main venue for most of these.

Starting point is 03:56:28 Where were you when you opened X and saw the president posting a meme coin? Do you remember where you were? Were you sleeping? Oh man, this is that. OK, so I had just bought 8 Sleep. OK, it was it had just came to the US UAE It's literally the last ad we have to do Five-year warranty 30 night risk-free trial free returns code TB TB free shipping

Starting point is 03:56:59 Continue so you're in a deep slumber. You're like not you got 90 minutes of deep sleep, you get somebody shake you awake, what happened? Yeah, so I'm like, extremely pumped. I'm like, Oh, God, this is like the first time I'm gonna get a great sleep tonight. And at like, I don't remember quite the time, but I remember just getting all these calls. And like, I slept through most of them because of how good the like was a new future on it. And then so one of them finally broke through and I opened my phone and I was like, oh shit, Solana has gone down. I'm going to kill myself. Everybody's going to troll me on the internet. And then I look at my company Slack because we power like a lot or most of the infrastructure on Solana. And then

Starting point is 03:57:41 I'm like, dude, how come I'm getting paid so much? And then my co-founder was like, oh yeah, like Trump launched a shit coin. And I was like, what? And I was like, is this real? I was like, Chad, is this real? But then like, it was handled so well by like the existing infrastructure and the team that like nothing was actually happening except for just a lot of like

Starting point is 03:58:05 shenanigans on the internet. So that was that was the story of Trump. And it was a very chaotic day. And then so at the end of the day, I was like, Oh, finally, let me just crack open a beer and, you know, watch like an episode of Mad Men or something. And so I sit down, and I shit you not. The second I cracked it open, I get another call and it's like dude Melania just launched a coin and it was like that George Bush meme yeah it's like just pick her second shit coin is in the blockchain and I was like oh no oh my god and then that's when things started going really haywire because you could not tell if it was a hack or like it was legit and and so those were a very fascinating it was very hard to describe to my dad what was happening and what I do for a living

Starting point is 03:58:53 that's hilarious hey well hopefully he understands what fantastic war stories yeah thanks thanks for taking us through those those were really fun it was great talking to you we got to have you on again. This is fantastic. We'll talk to you later. Have a great time. Cheers, Mert. Have a good one. Enjoy Montana. Get a nice round of sleep. Well, next up we have Dan from Farcaster coming in the studio. And big news, you can watch TBPN on Farcaster. Someone built a Farcaster mini app and which is a very cool novel you have sort of experience that you have on far caster yep people can create kind of sub apps with the app and they live in the feed yeah let's bring dan in i think it's uh

Starting point is 03:59:35 jamie how you doing who built this for us good to see you guys dan what's going on are you talking about the pirate uh feed of tbpn yeah Authorized reproduction on Farcaster? No, no. It's authorized. As long as it has our ads on there, we're happy. It's authorized. You guys are like the Grateful Dead.

Starting point is 03:59:51 Anyone can record the episode as long as the ads are on there. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. It is fascinating, because I remember, I mean, when Farcaster dropped, it was very much like it looked a lot like Twitter back then. But you look at the trajectory of the two platforms and now like you think about like oh you can build a mini app that like

Starting point is 04:00:11 Repurposes TBPN and like that is something that's completely on not on anyone else's roadmap and the products evolved in a very very interesting way So I mean anyway, can you just give us kind of the update on like how things are going? What? Just give us kind of the update on how things are going. What is the current pitch for Farcaster? Where do you see it going? And kind of take us through a little bit of the industry. I have to say, Dan and I were neighbors. Oh, really? We lived on the same street.

Starting point is 04:00:34 No way. Very cool. And it's just been amazing to watch you build Farcaster in such an intentional way from the very beginning. I think you kind of had, I don't know if you had a master plan, but you guys seemed to have this pace of building, but also like patience and just like long-term thinking

Starting point is 04:00:52 the entire time. So it's been awesome to see. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. I wanted to point out that I am the almost last person in the group chat that started the MOZ podcast back in the day that's been on your show. Antonio has not been on your show yet. We got to get him on.

Starting point is 04:01:08 We missed Antonio today. That was a miss by us. I'm just going to say, I'm so happy I'm on this show before Antonio. Yeah, bragging rights forever. Yeah, exactly. Open invite to Antonio. Yeah, so Farcaster, five years in this year,

Starting point is 04:01:23 we started decentralized social pretty contrarian. I think Elon changed the dynamic a bit in the sense that all of a sudden people got interested in building alternative versions of Twitter. I think we've tacked more into crypto over time. And so I think where we are today is we're decentralized social network, but it's targeted for crypto native folks, right. So there's a built in wallet and many apps as you point out. And so it just, if you want to do fun things in crypto, you use Farcaster. And we're increasingly making that

Starting point is 04:01:54 happen in the sense that we support a bunch of different chains. So you can use Ethereum, you can use base, you can use Solana. I think we're going to add other ecosystems over time. So if you can kind of think of like, if you've ever had to do something in crypto or your friends tell you, you got to get into this, you got to mint this or do whatever thing that you're trying to say, you could just get on Farcaster and it's like two taps away. And then there's no complexity around switching chains and bridging and gas and all this other kind of stuff that if you talk to the average web two founder, it's like the UX that's acceptable in crypto is crazy.

Starting point is 04:02:26 And so 2025, we finally actually have the infrastructure to be able to build decent consumer experiences. And so that's what we're trying to do. Do you think you ever loop back around and go back into crypto non-native folks and tuck some of the crypto features under kind of like a stable coin wrapper or something that like abstracts it away over time because you've gotten that like core fire going and then you need to turn into like a raging fire and people I guess the meta question is like in 10 or 20 years does the average

Starting point is 04:03:00 consumer just in America are they are they do they does everyone become crypto native or does crypto native cease to be a Cease to be a concept because everyone just I think it's probably more cease to be a concept in the sense that I think stable Coins are working so we do all of our weekly rewards So we pay out $25,000 a week and our version of X payouts. Yeah It's a little bit broader base and you can be a much smaller account get it we do that stable coins So we do that every week works perfectly fine and you can be a much smaller account and get it. We do that with stablecoins.

Starting point is 04:03:23 So we do that every week, works perfectly fine. We didn't have to integrate any other FinTech provider or there's no, just every user has a wallet, we're able to stream stablecoins to them for a ridiculously cheap amount. That's amazing. In terms of like fees, you know, so there's no middleman. So that's for sure working.

Starting point is 04:03:39 I think, so we originally tried to do this whole thing where we were using crypto under the hood, but the whole point is like we're using it as a technology, not the forefront. And I think that the reality is 2022 left crypto with a pretty big black eye with like FTX and a bunch of that other stuff. So I think there are a bunch of people that I think otherwise are pretty intelligent and I would say reasonably open-minded, but when you talk to them about crypto, they froth at the mouth in terms of it's all scams and griffs.

Starting point is 04:04:11 And look, there are plenty of scams and griffs. It's a reputation that it's earned over time, but I actually think there's plenty of good stuff being built in increasingly. And so I think stablecoins is probably the thing to highlight in the sense that that's just been chugging along. Where did stablecoins start? Tether was a scam and a grift that for 10 years, everyone kept saying it's on the verge of exploding.

Starting point is 04:04:33 It's now the most profitable business in the world. I think they make like $80 million per employee. Stablecoins have taken a while to bake. The infrastructure is finally there where it's like now Stripes in it. So it's like Ramp, one of your sponsors. So I think like stable coins are just gonna make crypto way easier. And then I think there's this concept of embedded wallets,

Starting point is 04:04:54 which you may have heard of, but like there are a bunch of providers, we use a company called Privy. And basically, I think over the next three or four years, like every app, whether it's a fintech app or consumer app, will have built-in wallets. They probably will use stable coins. Now whether you can buy like Fartcoin or whatever meme coin in your Bank of America account,

Starting point is 04:05:18 probably not. But I do think everything will get crypto enabled to the degree that you're using a more crypto forward product like a Coinbase or a Robinhood or like a completely crypto native product like Farcaster, I think it's just like more of a personal preference. It's top of mind for me, yesterday you launched Farcaster Pro, a subscription. You brought the 10K NFT collection back.

Starting point is 04:05:47 Talk through the whole process there. Why use kind of that mechanism? And it's sold out. So it sounds like a cause for celebration. Yeah, Coby would say, job's not finished. So I think good progress. I mean, we sold $10,120 subscriptions with stablecoins in a little less than 6 hours. The 100% of the revenue we're generating, so this is kind of like for the protocol,

Starting point is 04:06:15 is going back into creator reward. So effectively, we've doubled the amount of, like, weekly payouts we're going to do for the next year. And I think you had Chris on earlier, but this idea of like a zero take rate network, I think it's pretty powerful. And going back to your question, John, of like, how do you actually get out of the crypto native and move towards a broader base?

Starting point is 04:06:35 It's just like most social networks who use today, what percentage of the value are they capturing? Like, you know, Metta's market cap is pretty high, like they're capturing a lot of that value. I think that the way for protocol based social networks value are they capturing? crypto social network, one, you're decentralized social network. You actually own your audience. You can't get your like links nerfed. Like you guys are building a, like an amazing media brand. If you lost your ability to do streaming on a couple of the major platforms tomorrow, that would be your growth.

Starting point is 04:07:15 And so the idea of like actually having a social network that you can be guaranteed to have direct access to your audience. I think that's built different. We would, we, we would just mail everyone a DVD every day. Easy daily problem solved. Daily DVDs with stable coin payments. Yeah. I want to know about some of the economic incentives on a social network. It's been like the micro payments thing has been floated around. Is there a world where with AI slop, we need to be charging people to post or can just?

Starting point is 04:07:47 Algorithmic feeds kind of sort out the wheat from the chaff Does any of that make sense? Are there any new trends and kind of like the design of a healthy social network that has high? I guess not just high retention and our poo But also maybe high NPS because the classic thing with a social network is like it's printing money, but everyone says they hate it Yeah, so I think that's a stated reveal preference where exactly people are Totally I completely agree. So yeah You bring up a great point and we are for sure at the forefront of this because if you know anything about crypto and people

Starting point is 04:08:21 Think there's an economic incentive you you bring a lot of coin operated users, right? Yep. I think that any version of pay money as a solely a mechanism for like, oh, there's some version of quality or non bot like behavior, not going to work. I think any version of I prove that you're a human. Well, you're proving a human, but I could go use chat GPT to write the responses. So like, I think this is an extremely hard problem. If you actually go look at like Metas 10 case, like they specifically say that like, they're the biggest and best in the world.

Starting point is 04:08:53 This is still an extremely hard problem for them to solve. They estimate something like 10% of like all users are potentially like spam or wow, is it still, you know, but I think it'll be kind of a Variety of tools, right? So I think economic activity is really hard to fake Like one thing we had yesterday's bunch of accounts paid 120 dollars to a protocol no refunds, right? Like, you know stable coins nice thing is like you can't charge that back Whether they're a bot or not that money is now going to an algorithm, and this is where I'm actually a big fan of algorithms.

Starting point is 04:09:28 Now maybe algorithm is the choice we could talk about, but the algorithm, if you design it right, is going to reward the interesting posters, the best posters, and you're extracting revenue from the bots. So I do think charging is actually a good idea. And then I think algorithms are the way to actually, as you point out, wheat from the shaft, so to speak. How do you see crypto long term as a funding mechanism for creators, artists?

Starting point is 04:09:55 I mean, we had Ben Pasternak on earlier today to talk about his vision for believe. And it's, yeah, people are using it to create meme coins, are also using it as a funding mechanism for different projects. And I bring it up because we've talked about, we had Chris Best from Substack on maybe a week or so ago. And there's this idea that like people subscribe to

Starting point is 04:10:26 Substack to get value in the form of content, but it's also a mechanism to just support somebody to just do interesting things in the world and be able to spend all their time, you know, thinking about a specific area or sector, and it feels like there could be some element, some, I could imagine a world in the future where Farcaster is powering that type of activity. Is that correct, incorrect? Is that a problem space that you think about?

Starting point is 04:10:57 Yeah, although to Substack's credit, I think they're doing better than the vast majority of Web2 in the sense that I think what they take 10% and yeah Like YouTube, I think what is the 730 70 30 cut in terms of I think they take 70% and you get 30 Yeah, right. So so so like we're improving in the web to specify I think what crypto does and a world where the UX is good and it's pervasive I think these are like embedded wallets with stable coins You just start competing things down to zero.

Starting point is 04:11:25 The ability for the platform to take a cut of payments, I think, drops pretty significantly. And what the platforms that do take a cut, they are going to say, hey, I'm getting you distribution. If you go to an app like Substack, a lot of when you talk to Substack newsletter writers, they're getting a lot of their subscribers these days from the Substack app. So that's value that Substack is providing. I think where crypto is interesting is that basic payments are like you're talking like 10% improvement, like marginal improvement. And I think where you're looking for is like 10x improvements. I say you're pretty aware of the space and believe is a great example. This is like,

Starting point is 04:12:06 I think capital formation, fundraising with big quotes around that because obviously that's a pretty loaded word. But the ability to kind of like internet flash mob money into a certain thing, whether that's a meme coin or like a GoFundMe equivalent or a Kickstarter. Actually, someone built a mini app with stable coins called Crowdfund on Farcaster. Basically, it's a kickstart. You use a smart contract. You put your USDC stablecoin in. And if it hits the funding threshold, it's unlocked.

Starting point is 04:12:33 So that makes so much sense as a venture back company 10 years ago. Now it's someone VOD coded over three days. Yeah, it makes so much sense as a mini app, because in many ways, people would just go to GoFundMe, create this thing, and then take it to social to promote it. And why doesn't it just exist natively in the product?

Starting point is 04:12:51 Yeah, and I think the other thing that you have is the liquidity in the sense that I'm not fragmenting. I don't fund my GoFundMe wallet over here, or I have to connect this payment method for the seventh time. And again, any time you're using a card-based payment method, Visa and MasterCard, and the banks are getting their 3%, right?

Starting point is 04:13:07 So I think it will be slow in many cases. But this stuff will just become increasingly pervasive. And people will choose it if the platforms or creators are giving an incentive, right? If I can not have to pay 3% to a card network by having used a stablecoin, I'm going to make that the default payment often. And maybe I give you a 2% cash back,

Starting point is 04:13:27 or you get some loyalty points or an NFT, or whatever reason to get you to switch your payment method. Yeah. What are you seeing? How do you think about international long term? I know the Farcaster network is default international, because crypto is default, sort of borderless and international but I feel like the the conversation in in

Starting point is 04:13:52 the the beginning of the 2020s really around sort of social media censorship and then you know we had biology on the show earlier and he's talked about this moment with X where created this kind of fragmentation and You know censorship on on X potentially being solved. But then there's plenty of countries globally that have even bigger issues than we have today around censorship. And so how do you think about enabling free speech through Farcast over the long run.

Starting point is 04:14:25 Yeah, so we're a US-based company, so I'm a big believer in the Constitution and US laws. Farcaster basically is exporting that as like our social networks policy. So if I get a local jurisdiction somewhere in the world and says, please remove these activists from Farcaster to quote Elon, they can shake their fists at the sky. We're beamed in over the internet. If you want to block our app or the network, go for it.

Starting point is 04:14:51 But I think by not- But then in theory, a dissident could build up, spin up a new iteration of the app on the far caster network theoretically, and it would be out of your control, right? In addition, that that person could be directly posting like via the command line or something, and having it go out of your control, right? In addition, that person could be directly posting via the command line or something and having it go out to a global audience.

Starting point is 04:15:09 And so I think that the network design of Farcaster looks a lot more like a blockchain under the hood. And one of the reasons is it actually provides really strong censorship resistance, whereas something that's a bit more federated, so if you kind of look at like Macedon or Blue Sky, there are instances where they're already complying with local law of like, okay, well, we won't be able

Starting point is 04:15:27 to serve our other users in this country because they will just shut down the whole site. So I think, again, it's not like a primary consideration, but should we be successful in continuing to scale the network? I'm confident that if you think that the US free speech laws are like a good baseline global policy, that's basically what farcasters going to fall in terms of our app. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:15:50 Amazing stuff. Thank you so much. We'd love to have you back. Yeah, come back on again soon. Thanks for having me. I think you have some of the best, I'll put it on the record, some of the best taste in crypto. Yeah. I put it out there. It shows up in the app and everywhere. And yeah, it's great to finally have you on. Come back on again soon.

Starting point is 04:16:10 I love the new studio. Thank you. Yeah, come by. Do your next appearance in person. Yeah, yeah, that'd be great. It's only three hours away from the West side. Sure, I understand. Have a good one.

Starting point is 04:16:22 Next up, we have the CEO of Lava, Shazan, coming in the studio. We've been talking about with Bitcoin, it's at 107. You can lend against that, you can borrow against that and buy a Patek Philippe. Yes. No brainer. Yes. No brainer. Use leverage to buy a luxury watch.

Starting point is 04:16:41 Anyway, welcome to the studio, Shazan. Hopefully he is here. How you doing? Hey, can you hear me? There he is. Yes, we can welcome Take us off with an introduction to lava and then I definitely want to know about the announcement that just went down So lava is the most secure way to borrow against Bitcoin So a lot of Bitcoin is they believe that Bitcoin is the greatest appreciating asset of all time, which historically it has been. And if you can avoid selling your Bitcoin, why wouldn't you? And historically, if you wanted to borrow against your Bitcoin, you had to use a custodial platform.

Starting point is 04:17:18 So give full ownership of your Bitcoin to someone else and kind of trust them with it. And we all know kind of what happened with these custodial platforms like FTX or BlockFi or Celsius or Voyager. They took your Bitcoin, they'd start trading it or re-hypothecating it. And ultimately over the last few years, these custodial platforms have lost around a hundred billion dollars in customer funds. That's so much money. We don't like losing money. Not good.

Starting point is 04:17:49 Not good at all. So what's the solution? So Lava, what we've done is we've embedded the logic for a loan into a Bitcoin smart contract, which basically means that when you borrow against your Bitcoin on Lava, you can verify on chain. Like you can go to a block explorer, for example, and see that your Bitcoin is safe and secure, that it's not being rehypotocated. And you have cryptographic guarantees, not just legal or reputational assurances from lava, that your collateral is safe. So that's why it's

Starting point is 04:18:19 the most secure way to borrow against your Bitcoin. And not only that, Lava has the lowest rates on the market, even lower than custodial platforms by 20 to 30%. And we can fund loans of any size. You said Bitcoin smart contract. I thought that was an Ethereum thing. How is this working? This is new technology. Is this something that wasn't possible previously? Because the basic pitch seems like we should have been doing this all along so what had what needed to happen to get us to today you know it's kind of surprising to me because they couldn't always had like scripting like it would be a bit coins always had like programmability it's not just like moving money from one address to the other

Starting point is 04:19:00 lava's kind of leverage certain like core Bitcoin primitives to kind of take that and use what primitives Bitcoin has available and create this like loan contract. Does that make sense? Bitcoin is not like Turing complete. What you can't do is like, you can't do all sorts of things that you would want to, that you could do in Ethereum on Bitcoin, but you can do certain very important things. And one of those is non-c custodial borrowing. And honestly, if you look at the rest of crypto, I think the majority of like the main use case of DeFi really is, in my opinion, being able to borrow against an asset and see that it's safe and secure. Now, I imagine that it's pretty expensive. That's the whole narrative. Maybe that's not

Starting point is 04:19:40 true, but it feels like if I want to borrow 50 cents against my Bitcoin probably not gonna have a good a good time Is that roughly correct? Like what where does it start to make sense? You know taking out a hundred thousand dollar loan the gas might be or whatever the equivalent is might be a little bit more reasonable Is that is that roughly correct? Oh the gas fees on Bitcoin are extremely Like the Bitcoin is like really inexpensive right now, like less than a dollar. But what you could do is you could lock a bunch of collateral up and over time take out more and more in loans. So we have a product in beta right now where you basically can lock your Bitcoin up and

Starting point is 04:20:17 get a card. And as you swipe the card, more and more gets borrowed. It's kind of like a line of credit. Yeah. And then what was the announcement today? So today we actually like fully officially announced lava loans like out of beta alpha. We announced that we can fund loans of any size from a hundred dollars to a billion dollars just based on the capital. And we've already done, we've already made loans, like millions of dollars and like single loans that have been worth like $5 million already, which is pretty interesting. And we announced that our rates are like 20 to 30% lower than the next best rate on the

Starting point is 04:20:57 market. And then walk me through all the different counterparties, who's getting paid. Obviously as a consumer, I have a Bitcoin, I want to take a loan against it. At some point I'm probably getting stable coins out, but then who's on the other side of that contract or how much money are they making? How much money are you making? So there's a bunch of different lenders on the other side that lava works with to facilitate these loans. So as a borrower, the way it works is you go to you download lava, you put your Bitcoin on there. It's all self

Starting point is 04:21:30 custodial. Do you say, okay, I want to borrow $10,000 for one year. And then your Bitcoin gets moved from one address to this like smart contract address. And when that happens, you get stable coins directly to your lava app. That's all abstracted away from you for us and lava, we leverage stable coins because they enable us to do instant dispersal of loan capital. But it's just seen as dollars, like you just see, like dollars coming into your lava app. And you can even use lava to withdraw those dollars to your bank account. Sure. Within lava, you also have global, free

Starting point is 04:22:03 instant dollar payments. So kind of like what cash app when most style payments you have that within the app for free as well. You don't have to worry about any of like the blockchain complexity. We abstract away all the blockchain stuff, the gas fee stuff, the stable coin stuff. And you can even use a card that we could issue to you to start spending those dollars that you've borrowed. It's cool. And then what drives the interest rate? Is that just driven by Bitcoin volatility or is there some sort of like underwriting of the individual?

Starting point is 04:22:30 Cause I imagine it doesn't necessarily need to know anything about me other than the fact that like the Bitcoin is in the wallet and that's it. Yep, exactly. There's no like underwriting of the individual. So everyone gets the same interest rate. Yeah, yeah. Wow. Exactly. And how are the interest rates calculated? Where are they sitting right now?

Starting point is 04:22:47 Where they've been historically and, and, and how, how do the lenders like think about that risk? But today if you borrow, you can get a loan from 5% for a one month loan up to 9.99% for a 12 month loan. And that's really like the sweet spot in duration that people want. People can like refinance, like extend their loans later if they want to. And Lava earns a little bit of a spread and the rest is sent to the lender, essentially, the rest of the interest payments.

Starting point is 04:23:14 Historically, I think over time, the rates will just come down. They're always going to be somewhat variable to whatever the treasury rates are, right? Because you're going to want some premium over that. But I think long-term, the rate for a Bitcoin-backed loan should trend towards the rate for a bar against equities. And in fact, lending against Bitcoin is a lot less risky than lending against equities because it trades 24-7. So it's way more liquid. It will over time, it is already more liquid than most like stocks, like individual stocks, right? And as the market cap grows, it will become the most liquid asset in the world. So I think you could not even argue today it is that

Starting point is 04:23:56 because it trades 24 seven. And is there some sort of like reserve ratio where if you have 10 Bitcoin, you can borrow X amount against that or yeah how does volatility work here because I imagine if you borrow if you bargains all of your at some point they're gonna take your Bitcoin right like but but but what triggers that so when you borrow there's like an LTV right so kind of like if you bargains your equities you can maybe get 50% against value that you collateralized which is similar to how lava works and there's flexible TV so maybe if you bargain against your equities, you can maybe get 50% against the value that you collateralize, which is similar to how Lava works.

Starting point is 04:24:27 And there's flexible LTV. So maybe if you want to be very conservative, you might only want to borrow 20% against the collateral that you put up. And then every loan has a like a price, a liquidation price, where if Bitcoin gets there and you haven't repaid your loan or added more collateral, there will be a liquidation. But you can kind of verify that Lava sends you notifications all the time to make sure you're aware if you're getting close to that liquidation price. Yep. That makes sense. Jordy, any other questions? No, very cool. This

Starting point is 04:24:55 is fantastic. A lot of our listeners are going to go lever up and use it to buy, find Swiss watches. I guess my last question is there's there's there's this weird dynamic in crypto right now where there are some seriously scaled founder mode companies in the space that have huge distribution advantages that can they can offer competitive products. And then there's the kind of this history of when something's working, it gets forked and open sourced and there's a lot of competition there. How are you thinking about the competitive landscape as it evolves over the next couple of years, if you're really successful?

Starting point is 04:25:29 Maxfields...It's interesting. I actually think there's no company in crypto today. I very much view Bitcoin as being very distinct from crypto. I think a lot of the companies in crypto today are serving this trading speculation use case, whereas Lava is really serving this Bitcoin savory use case. There's these Bitcoiners out there, they don't touch any asset in crypto other than Bitcoin. They just want to save in it.

Starting point is 04:25:53 And what we're really building are like North Star is whatever Fidelity kind of offers equity asset holders, we want to offer Bitcoin asset holders. There's people out there that we're serving that have basically replaced their savings portfolio that's, you know, with equities or real estate, which is Bitcoin. And they don't really have a trusted brand that they can go to that they feel is secure, that they can rely on to borrow against your Bitcoin to start spending dollars to buy more Bitcoin. And that's really where lava is headed to. Is that a common use case? People take a lava loan and just buy more Bitcoin. So it's not like the most common use case.

Starting point is 04:26:28 We've had people bargain to buy a coin to buy houses, which is pretty interesting. Buy cars, pay their taxes, like fund like vacations. But there are some people who will borrow to buy more Bitcoin. But what's like more interesting is a lot of people come to lava,

Starting point is 04:26:41 they bargain to Bitcoin, but then they like stay to do the other things that they were already doing like do like dollar payments or when they do want to buy more Bitcoin later they can actually do use that use lava to do that as well. That makes sense. Well good luck. Thank you so much for hopping on. This is great. We'll talk to you soon. Congrats on the launch. Cheers. Bye. Next up we have a last minute ad. Brandon, is that right? Last minute surprise guest.

Starting point is 04:27:06 Surprise guest. Brandon, co-founder and CEO of Phantom. Phantom. One of- What's the line on that? Wallet. Yeah. I don't know how many billions they're worth now.

Starting point is 04:27:17 Brandon, welcome to the show. How you doing? Hey, what's up guys? Thanks for having me. The wallet king. The wallet king. The wallet king. The second greatest wallet salesman in the world one of our

Starting point is 04:27:27 two Sean Frank the CEO of Ridge wallet direct competitor to you direct competitor both whole phantom wallet Ridge wallet You can only have one collaboration. We got him on the bulls-eye in the office. Yeah Sean you're on notice. Yeah, what's happening? Where are you right now? Are you are you in Vegas like a lot of our other guests or In San Francisco in the trenches so to speak I don't think fandom needs a ton of introduction, but because our audience is not typically, you know, super crypto native, it'd be great to give a quick kind of backstory

Starting point is 04:28:12 on your history and then the company and then and then we can kind of talk about a number of other things. It'd be great. Yeah, totally. Well, yeah, thanks again for having me on guys. And you know, you guys have been on quite the crypto marathon How long you guys been going at it like I think I finally understand it's like it's like electronic money is what I'm getting from people

Starting point is 04:28:37 It's money, but digital digital money. That's that's my take. It's the big takeaway from today Well, yeah, I can I can give a brief overview myself Phantom You know got my start working in Silicon Valley back in 2013 at Twitter Pre IPO sort of that's where I cut my teeth on building mobile apps You know Working on tech that reaches millions of users. Around 2017 was bitten by the crypto bug, that's the white paper ICO era. I did a tour of duty

Starting point is 04:29:17 there from 2017 to 2021 at this early stage DeFi startup called ZeroX, which is still very much around active. It's where I met my two other co-founders. That's basically where we decided, hey, at that time, most used while it was MetaMask. We had this very unique perspective, not only being power users of MetaMask, but also developers in the ecosystem as

Starting point is 04:29:47 well. And basically recognize that the number one problem holding crypto back today still back then today still is usability and the wallet is essentially the key to unlocking the ecosystem and supercharging everything that everyone had been working on. And so yeah, that's when we decided to start Phantom. And yeah, four years later, Phantom is now Vegas wallet and ecosystem. What went into the decision making to choose Solana when you guys came out with Phantom? I know now you support a bunch of different chains, but I'm sure that was somewhat contrarian at the time, or at least, you know, very early to kind of make a bet.

Starting point is 04:30:30 Totally. Yeah, I mean, I think I mean, I think the initial insight was focus on like build a wallet that focuses on it because of some on it because that was not a theory on, you know, we have spent, you know, four years in the Ethereum space and I think had a number of pretty interesting insights. One, Metamask continued to be this monopoly monopolistic product. Despite a number of different attempts, everyone understood and it's not great UX. Obviously, we should try to attack them by solving that problem. But despite that,

Starting point is 04:31:08 it was very difficult for people to break through. And then I think the second thing was after spending a while in Ethereum, we kind of actually just got a little bit, I think jaded by the culture being very dogmatic versus pragmatic and not really emphasizing user experience, cost, efficiency. And so I think those two kinds of insights combined

Starting point is 04:31:36 decided, hey, how about we essentially create our own home turf on an up and coming ecosystem. That ended up, that choice ended up being Solana. And that was all being contemplated like late 2020. So that was pretty early on. Yeah. A lot of people have flagged that dogma today. What is the shape of the Ethereum dogma right now? Like what are they dogmatic about specifically? Yeah. Well, it's definitely, it's definitely ebbed and flowed. I mean, I think from the very beginning it was all about decentralization at all costs

Starting point is 04:32:10 which and decentralization as this meme which was attracted a number of different folks for a number of different reasons. People who were more anti-disestablishment, people who felt like the centralization was a method of security and all of that. And I think that it ended up it obviously the spirit of decision by committee nature that that kind of bread ended up basically fast forward

Starting point is 04:32:51 into the state of Ethereum today, or it's like there's no really cohesive strategy, I guess. There's no, there's a lot of different competing L2s and different technologies and that the end stage it's very confusing and quite frankly just dangerous for like an end user to use. Yeah, that makes sense. Have you, I'm sure you guys have been hit up by a bunch of your investors, you know,

Starting point is 04:33:17 sending you tweets about pumps, you know, revenue being like, Hey, have you guys thought about, you know about doing this? And from what I can see, you guys haven't built a launch pad to date. Talk about kind of how you view Phantom's sort of interaction with some of these new, you know, we've had both the founder of Pump and Believe on today, which, you know, are getting quite a lot of attention. But I'm curious to get your point of view on how you think of that market or category evolving

Starting point is 04:33:50 and how you see Phantom interacting with it. Yeah, totally. I mean, really at the end of the day, it's all about tokens, essentially. Tokens being this common sort of protocol and format that is emerging from the ecosystem. And then all of these apps sort of in this open and permissionless way coming out and creating different mechanisms for

Starting point is 04:34:15 creating tokens. And so I think what we're trying to do is just ensure that users can navigate this new trend and meta like in the safest way possible. And that's something that we've done a number of times before, whether that's with the NFT wave, or whether that's for emerging stablecoins and real world assets trends. And so, yeah, I think we're just kind of trying to promote the folks to sort of easily discover and use these things. And yeah, kind of see how all the trends shake out, but yeah.

Starting point is 04:34:57 Can you talk to me about Apple's role in this ecosystem? I remember I first onboarded to Phantom as a Chrome plugin. I believe there is an app but Apple has not been historically the most receptive to crypto native apps interfacing with all the different UI elements all over the phone. Coinbase was kicked out of the App Store for a while. They came back. And so what has it been historically? And then are there any-

Starting point is 04:35:31 I love thinking about the Apple execs being like, wait, Coinbase does billions of dollars in volume and we're not taking 30% on that? What are we doing? I know, yeah. But it feels like from the other stories that are going on in Apple world that there's a little bit more pressure right now Then in years past to open up whether that's the Siri button for other AI

Starting point is 04:35:54 Apps or the app store with what's happening with fortnight and epic Give me like the state of the union on how easy it is to implement Crypto wallet features on Apple and where you see it going over the next few years Yeah, so Yeah, interestingly enough like when we started like you called out when we started fancy We actually started Chrome extension first that was actually a pretty contrarian thing to do I think it was kind of a mixture of a couple of different reasons. One, the predominant use case of crypto at that time, or on-chain crypto being DeFi, and that being sort

Starting point is 04:36:33 of more of a power user thing that people like to do on desktop anyway. And I think also the prevalence of sort of Ethereum as the main L1 that people are using. Ethereum is just not really compatible with mobile as a technology. In terms of people who want to use things on mobile, they want things to feel fast, cheap, instantaneous, fleeting, all of that. And so nowadays, because you're seeing the protocol layer

Starting point is 04:37:06 of crypto, infrastructure layer get a lot more mature. Now we're seeing a lot more prevalence of crypto on mobile. So I think in the next couple of years, mobile is gonna be a huge story for crypto. And yeah, I think generally, personally, we've had a great relationship with Apple. We've never had any big scuffles or had the app taken down or anything like that.

Starting point is 04:37:31 Like you said, I believe that as an ecosystem, as a general tech player, they become more open and are facing down a lot of competitive pressures in different areas like the Epic case and all that. So yeah, I mean, I do expect them just very similarly to all other, a lot of other tech players like big fintechs, et cetera. I do expect them to be embracing crypto more and more often,

Starting point is 04:37:57 or sorry, more deeper and yeah, yeah, and making it easier for folks to deploy apps. Last question on my side, what is the state of SF's crypto scene today? It's certainly not getting nearly the attention that AI is, but is it alive and well, or are you traveling a lot and hiring outside of the city quite a bit?

Starting point is 04:38:24 No, yeah, so all three co-founders are based out here in SF, been living here for 12 years now or so. And yeah, Cryptocine is definitely, it's definitely not AI, but it's alive and well of us, folks like Paradigm, Alchemy, some of the A16Z folks, et cetera. So yeah, definitely alive and well.

Starting point is 04:38:48 New York is definitely another huge scene, but I think places like Miami, they kind of turned over a bit during COVID. I love Miami. I love Miami. We're in the Miami of California. We're in Los Angeles. We are. I love Miami. I love Miami. We're in the Miami of California. We're in Los Angeles.

Starting point is 04:39:08 We are. What's not to like? This has been fantastic. Thank you for joining and capping off the first crypto day. Thank you so much. The first inaugural crypto day. First of many.

Starting point is 04:39:16 Yeah, thank you. Maybe we should make it weekly. Weekly crypto day. That sounds like a lot. A lot. But maybe quarterly. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us.

Starting point is 04:39:26 Yeah, thanks for popping on. And good luck. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Bye. This entire stream has not been financial advice. I was thinking we should ask the guests, hey, just why don't you close that with some financial advice

Starting point is 04:39:38 for us? How much everyone would hate that. We never give financial advice. Massive success. We're just a couple of golden retrievers. Yeah, yeah, we're just having fun out here talking. You ever? Pushing five hours on the stream,

Starting point is 04:39:50 pushing 42,000 viewers. Thank you everyone who tuned in. I think this is officially our biggest stream ever. Until tomorrow. Thank you. Until tomorrow. Two. When we got Ashley Vance on the show. It's gonna be 100. We got some heavy hitters. We do have some hitters tomorrow and there's some big news coming and our first first

Starting point is 04:40:09 Fortune 500 huge huge milestone for us too many first of many huge milestone Anyways, thank you folks for tuning in. Thank you for sponsors. Hey, but it was a great day There's a great our lovely sponsors. We will see you tomorrow Goodbye

Your Ad Here

TBPN Live - Crypto Day | Brian Armstrong, Balaji, Chris Dixon, Katie Haun & More

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.